Kazakhstan: Throat singing, organic vodka & vegan horse sausage — a Kazoutstanding adventure!
When not armchair travelling, I am trying to real-life-travel to every country in Europe, which will hopefully at some point include, to many people’s surprise, the last Republic to leave the USSR — Kazakhstan! I long to cross Atyrau’s bridge between Europe and Asia, and live in hope that the nation’s tourist office will see this blog, be wowed by the word “kazoutstanding” and offer to blow their budget on taking me and the family there! We promise to be great company on any tour, and far more entertaining than this week’s book, Paulo Coelho’s “The Zahir.”
Zahir is, you see, so bad, that I would advise the Kazakh tourist office to translate a few Kazakh novels and get them onto Good Reads. At the moment, the Kazakh section is populated with “my Kazakh adventures travelogues” and Coelho’s tedious rant about his failings as a human. Not quite the self-exploration of Kazakh culture I had hoped for. Indeed the book uses Kazakhstan as nothing but a side character, an exoticism in the shape of a mystic who may or may not be sleeping with the narrator’s wife. I had to endure page after page of faux-philosophical rants that always seemed to end with the promise that perhaps, soon, the author may end up going to Kazakhstan. He does finally make it but first has to hang out in Paris with “young people”, giving Coelho the opportunity to write some embarrassing cult-like anti-society nonsense, in the type of cringe-inducing passages I haven’t read in years. It is true, of course, that digesting Coelho’s trash is also a bit of a pleasure, as it is bad enough to laugh at and well-written enough to keep the pages turning. But be warned you will know less about Kazakhstan at the end than you did at the beginning!
So leave the book behind and indulge yourself instead in State-sponsored Kazakh tunes! Try, for example, the Kazakh State string orchestra, a group who bring together some fine string artistry with gentle Mongolianesque throat singing. Exquisite. My very quick top 10 is available here.
You could also leave the book behind and spend an hour or two watching this week’s film Tulpan — a gorgeously cinematographic marvel about an ex-Russian-navy, yurt-dwelling, sheep herder trying desperately to woo the only eligible bachelorette on the Steppe. It slowly unveils their lives, the wind, the animals, the children… and like many similar films, to try to explain it to you, would be to kind of miss the point! The plot is life, the people are real, the views are untamed, surely you can spare two hours to walk a mile in their dusty shoes.
I was not, initially, hopeful about Kazakh vegetarian food, especially as the first recipe I found was for Shuzhuk which starts: “Once a delicacy limited to the wealthy, smoked horse meat sausage is now a centerpiece at many Kazakh feasts.” As determined as I was to have a Kazakh feast, I forewent shuzhuk and plumped instead for Shelpek — a delicious and relatively simple flat-bread alongside mushroom Beshbamak and thick flat noodles. How thick, I hear you ask? Well the recipe suggested simply cooking lasagne sheets and then tearing them into strips. This sadly turned out to be far harder than it sounds as the lasagne stuck together in unappetising clumps. Luckily I salvaged a few and the whole thing was a triumph.
Far be it for me to challenge the extent to which I am meeting the criteria I set out for this blog, but according to slower pulse, there seems to be a problem with Kazakh Vodka Snow Queen, the wheat is harvested in the EU; the water is sourced in the Pyrenees; it is bottled in France and owned by UK company Ellustria. None-the-less, it claims to be Kazakh and it’s delicious and I can’t go about buying more than one bottle of vodka a week and so it will have to do for now as I am off to Kenya!
