A Visit to Aqtóbe

I visited Aqtóbe, Kazakhstan’s fifth largest city, from November 23-26, where I served as the pronouncer for the third annual Kazakhstan Spelling Bee. Besides the massive number of participants (73), one of the most notable moments of the day was the background music that accompanied the Bee: across the street, the first McDonald’s in Western Kazakhstan was hosting its grand opening celebration, and uproarious music blasted up and down the entire city block for the whole day.

As many in the U.S., especially in my generation, grow increasingly critical of American influence abroad, it’s interesting to witness forces on all levels of Kazakhstani society embracing closer ties with the U.S. These range from people’s personal desires to visit or permanently move to the U.S., to national policy calling for trilingualism in Kazakh, Russian, and English (a policy that, as one acquaintance told me, doesn’t make any sense, since “I know all three languages, and I can tell you the more I study English, the more I forget my Russian and Kazakh… it’s not possible for someone to speak all three languages as well as they could speak one or two of them”), to the much-lauded opening of McDonald’s in the nation’s cities (Kazakhstan is the 120th country to host McDonalds restaurants; there are now 12 locations nationwide).

Aqtóbe is an industrial city fast on the rise, growing from 371,546 inhabitants in January 2013 to 417,471 in 2017. In 2008, the Nur-Gasyr mosque and the St. Nikolas orthodox cathedral opened within half a kilometer of each other in the city's central park. Plaques stand outside both beautiful buildings, each bearing the names of Kazakhstani president Nursultan Nazarbayev and then-Russian president Dmitry Medvedev. A gorgeous new concert hall stands on one side of Nur-Gasyr, illustrating an effort to making Aqtobe not just an industrial center, but a cultural and religious one as well. On the other side of the mosque is the new McDonald’s.

St. Nikolas Cathedral at night

Nur-Gasyr Mosque

When you look at it from the right angle, the McDonald’s arch could almost be mistaken for a fifth minaret.