Mountain Tour

Sunday August 13, 2006
Today Tatyana and Igor picked us up at the flat at 11 AM. We then went to the Hotel Kazakhstan to pick up another client, Karen from Boston. She is single and is here by herself, so I think it was a relief to her to have Americans for company. The area in which her hotel is located is more modern than our area. However she did confirm that she did not have any AC either in her room and her quarters were extremely small.

We went to the mountains, which was about a half hour drive from the hotel. It was very picturesque and it seems that a lot of the locals come here on the weekends to swim/ bathe in the river, do mountain climbing, hike, etc. After taking pictures Tayana treated us to a traditional Kazakh meal in a yurt which is a portable tent. Ethnic Kazakhs were a nomadic people, living in tribes and migrating with the seasons to locate pastures for their herds. Thus, their traditional housing was very portable and easy to assemble and disassemble.

The meal consisted of the Kazakh national dish, besparmak which consisted of chunks of lamb and horsemeat sausage served over noodles, lamb kebabs, lamb broth, and camel’s milk (which tasted like buttermilk). The word means besparmak means “five fingers” in Kazakh and symbolizes the manner in which people traditionally eat the dish-with their fingers. After lunch, we went to the National Museum to look at rugs which we found to be very expensive.