1. Traveling by land from Tbilisi, Georgia to Astana, Kazakhstan is simple. All it takes is an overnight train to Baku, Azerbaijan, a couple liminal days in the coastal city trying to nail down a ferry, a good thirty hours on a cargo ship crossing the Caspian Sea, a minor taxi debacle in Aktau, and a forty-eight hour train ride to the middle of nowhere capital of the largest landlocked country in the world.
2. That said, when purchasing your ticket for an overnight train across Central Asia, I’ll recommend splurging on the bottom bunk. Enough space to sit up straight is a real luxury by day two, and you’re going to want to be as far away from the cabin lights as possible in a train car where the windows are bolted shut.
3. Calendars are specific to culture. We celebrated two Easters and our third New Years this month.
4. In Kazakhstan, horse meat is traditionally served with a heaping pile of thin homemade noodles. It’s called beshparmak. The people of Central Asia are very hospitable, which is typically lovely… until you’re really trying to avoid eating the horse meat.
5. As a rule, stay away from the fermented mare’s milk if you’re not especially confident in your poker face.
6. A two-year-old Kazakh boy with a handful of four-wheeled toys, will quickly learn to shout “car” at the top of his lungs with even the most casual English language instruction.
7. The Alzhir Memorial, built over the “Akmolinsky internment camp for the wives and betrayers of the homeland,” is one of two Soviet gulag museums left in Kazakhstan. Most of the prisoners of Alzhir were innocent. Go in the winter. Only a couple miles outside Astana, the museum itself isn’t much, but the freezing winds and barren planes surrounding the site will leave an impact.
8. When visiting Kazakhstan, invest in proper footwear. Otherwise, you might receive a deluge of unsolicited medical advice from the locals equating thin rubber-soled shoes to future reproductive troubles.
9. Borscht (Russian Beets Soup): Combine three finely chopped beets, sliced cabbage, carrots, potatoes, a couple tablespoons of tomato paste, and a pinch of salt in a large pot of broth. Simmer. The added horse meat is optional.
10. When you’re at the bazaar shopping with some Kazakh locals, it’s apparently very strange to insist you don’t actually need any dates. Don’t bother. Even after all that effort, you’ll probably still go home with the dried fruit anyway.
11. “But do not overlook this one fact, beloved, that with the Lord one day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day.” – 2 Peter 3:8
