Almaty: 1 Day in the City
After visiting my travel bucket list lakes, I had a half day to spend in the city before heading back to Bishkek. I hate museums, and I don’t like going out to drink in foreign places alone. So I always had to make do.
One thing I could have done that I did not do was visit the ice skating rink called Medeo near Big Almaty Lake. You can easily find buses that go all the way over there!
Instead, I just relaxed and ate.
This Venetian cafe was highly rated on Tripadvisor or some tourist-overrun site, so being a tourist, I thought, hell yeah let me get that. So I got here early for lunch, and I guess Kazakh time is similar to Kyrgyz time because no one else was there. But this menu also did give me a solid good laugh, because it was directly from Google Translate, I’m sure, so it had things that just made no sense.
So I ordered two of the famous Kazakh dishes: Kazy and Beshbarmak.
Kazy is horse sausages made with meat stuffed in intestines, smoked, and then steamed usually. It was a little dry, but good.
Beshbarmak is translated to “five fingers” because you are supposed to use your hands to eat it instead. I didn’t realize my beshbarmak would have kazy in it, so I ended up with just way too much meat. But the dish is considered to be the ‘main’ kazakh dish. It’s a bland pasta topped with all different cuts and types of meats. I found that the whole dish was a little too dry and meat heavy, but it was an interesting one to try.
To burn off all those calories from eating anything here, take a walk in their Central Park — which looks more like an amusement park with no admission fees — and around Zenkov’s Cathedral. This area is filled with trees and beautiful walkways.
For some quick shopping, stop by the Zelenyy Bazaar just a block away from Zenkov’s cathedral. It’s got a lot of souvenirs, food, and random outdoor market stuff like knock off goods that you’d find elsewhere. I only saw a handful of tourists, which was awesome.
Inside the main market, you can get all sorts of spices, dried fruits, nuts, veggies, prepared foods (including the Korean Kimbap for some reason) and also meats organized by the animal.
Almost as important as meat is the candy display that I’ve seen everywhere around Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. Rakhat is a large chain that sells candy by the weight. You’ll see long lines of locals getting bags and bags of their favorite types of candy to put on their dining tables. You get in line, you say how many kilos of what you want, and the servers will bag them up for you. Quite cheap prices!
A fun thing I tried was the Kazakh spa. It’s similar to Russian, Turkish, and Korean public bath/spa systems where you go in to sweat, exfoliate, get massages, and take baths. Except all these spas have their own rules about what to do and what not to do. Everything being in a foreign language, I was stumbling all around. In Korean spas you get an outfit to sweat into and free towels. Here you need to pay a fee to rent a wrap around towel, towel to use to dry, shoes, and a hair cover if you want to go in the cold baths. The fee to rent all of these things was way more than the entrance fee, so bring your own towels! But you pay an hourly fee and given a key for a locker. There you can go into an Eastern type of shower room, a Western type shower room, a Russian sweat room, Swedish sweat room, or a Turkish sweat room. There are bars and snack options, a salon, massage options, and you can even buy the bush thing to whack yourself with in the Russian spa room. I did not do that because I had no idea what it was so I stuck to what I knew lel. So it wasn’t particularly different here than the Korean spas that I have been but it was surely a great way to really wash off all the grime from having been on the road for the past two weeks.
I stayed at the Wanderlust hostel, which was excellent in terms of location, cleanliness, and most of all, staff. Everyone was SO nice and SO friendly and SO chill. They also have a plenty of common room space and a convenience shop right next door. 10/10 would stay again.
