There is an interesting post up on the Russian NewEurasian Kazakhstan blog about how government workers stretch those meager salaries. For those who don’t ready Russian, basically, a German company was celebrating with a big lunch in a hotel. An entourage was waiting for them at the bar, including both police and civilians. After they paid up, some government officials came out of a backroom and one of the entourage that had been waiting spoke to the restaurant manager and sped out of the bar with the government officials.

A waiter come over to the Germans and say, “Sorry, you need to pay for your friends at the bar.”

Of course, the Germans didn’t know these people but by the time someone got to the street to call the freeriders back, they were all speeding away in government cars.

As the author noted, it’s a little hard to see how this will encourage foreign investment in Kazakhstan or spread the word that Kazakhs are so hospitable. Borat himself couldn’t have thought of anything worse.

Music in Kazakhstan is a blog that just came to my attention (Thanks to News from the Caravan). It has some very interesting articles on Kazakh traditional music and also discusses pop music in Kazakhstan, even the not well-known hip-hop scene here. Definitely worth a read!

Hopefully I’ll learn something about playing the dombro there.

The other day I got hungry, it was hot in Astana, and I thought an ice cream bar was just the thing. And then I saw it in the freezer at Gros and had to buy the USSR Ice Cream bar. It wasn’t anything fancy, just vanilla ice cream with a chocolate coating. Perhaps it was an attempt to pick up the popularity of that song that was popular a while back, “Я сделан в СССР” (I was made in the USSR). I could make endless jokes about how the chocolate coating was cracked into little bits, or how cheap it was, but I won’t bother.

Then the other day, I noticed an unusual new series of chips from SMAK, a Kazakhstan based snack food maker. Including horsemeat-flavored (the package says kazi-flavored) as illustrated on the left. They also had pickle-flavored, fish-flavored, onion and fish-flavored, and caviar-flavored. At first I thought this was a bit silly but then I realized that most Kazakhstany buy chips or snacks to accompany drinking beer or vodka. And kazi, pickles, fish and onions are all popular accompaniments for drinking. So go SMAK for trying to be a bit innovative and give the customer and interesting experience. Also, Kazakhstan surely will be the world leader in horsemeat flavored snacks. For the record, they weren’t bad. They tasted much like any other fake meat flavored snack, but there was a hint there of something kazi-like. I still prefer the real thing, to imitation but if one must have faux-horsemeat, these are the way to go!