To summarize the first three days (two days travel and one day in Astana (Nursultan)), I have done a lot of walking. A three hour delay in Kansas City and a tenish hour layover in New York, let me log 5.6 miles. The second day included a forced march through the world’s largest airport (Istanbul) — 6.6 miles. And today — my one full day in Astana, let’s do it all — boom, boom, bang it out! 13.5 miles and I still need to run out and get dinner.
Astana is about what I expected. I only devoted about one and a half days to it. As a city, it did exist prior to it being named the capital about 20 years ago. It had a different name (can’t remember) and about 275,000. When it was decided that it would be Kazakhstan’s new capital, a ton of money was spent, and is stilling being spent on infrastructure and buildings —everything from government buildings to arenas to a circus to the largest mosque in central Asia. Driving in from the airport, it was fairly indistinguishable from Overland Park, Kansas with convenience stores and a Hampton Inn.
The national mall was arranged with the Presidential palace at one end and Khan Shatyr (a shopping mall in the world’s largest tent) at the other. The mall is enclosed by buildings on either side. This strikes me as a throwback to Soviet planning as I have seen it in other Soviet cities.
Before I came, I had heard that in the past few years Astana had gone from nothing to do to being a town with great food. And great food should be interpreted as a wide selection of ethnic — everything but Kazakh. One of the main things that I travel for is food, so when I broke down and went to a gastropub for lunch, I was disappointed when the ‘Beef prepared in the Mongolian Style’ was strikingly similar to generic Mongolian Beef in any Chinese restaurant in the US. One restaurant does not indict an entire city — and when you get further away from the ‘new center’, the city does become more Kazakh.
Having said that, I would like to come back to Astana in about ten years and see how it’s changed. In every direction is a construction crane. New concrete and steel structures are going up constantly. Trees are growing and filling in. On the way back to the airport, corporate campuses were springing up at every intersection. Astana is also building light rail. It remains to be seen whether Astana is the city of the future or just another indulgence of unchecked power.