Moving house in Astana — again! 

In May I received the unwelcome news that my landlord was kicking me out. Not because I was a bad tenant or didn’t pay the rent, simply because the value of the flat had gone up and he wanted to sell it. 

Kazakh rentals don’t have any of the procedures that British ones do. There was no need to end a lease or give a notice period. Since I’d paid my rent the week before, I had just three weeks to find a new place. 

I was devastated by the news that I was going to lose the flat, and would have to start moving house in Astana again. Over the past eight months it had become my haven.

Countdown to moving house in Astana

Now, I was aware of the intense time pressure I was under to find a new place to live. Moving house in Astana started with searching the listings on Krisha again, and a friend put me in touch with an estate agent she had used recently. 

As I started looking, I realised how lucky I had been to find my current flat so quickly. 

Despite my friend saying her agent had been very active in finding her perfect flat, he only took me to one apartment. It was in an oldish block on the right bank, and right next door to the landlady’s flat. 

This was an immediate no – far too close for comfort, she would most likely be popping in all the time to show off her foreign tenant to friends and relatives, and check I was keeping the flat clean.

Further nos were the highly polished furniture covered in small ornaments and the display of plastic swords in the entrance hall. 

Still under construction

After I turned that flat down, the agent disappeared and I went back to Krisha. Berik, the next agent I met through the site, took me to two flats in a huge new monolithic development on the right bank. They both cost more than my current flat and were less nice. 

Astana was growing incredibly quickly and like many buildings in the new part of town, this one was not completed – getting to the flat on the 24th floor required me to exit the lift, clamber over a pile of rubble and along a concrete walkway that hugged the side of the building. 

The next flat he took me to was again in a new development, with people living in the completed buildings but a roar of drilling and a stench of hot tarmac from the surrounding buildings which were still being put up. 

I also met Ivana, a chic, expensively dressed Russian woman with long manicured nails. I had almost drooled when I saw the pictures of the apartment she had posted on Krisha in one of the Samal Towers, a set of shiny blue glass buildings overlooking the Esil. It was on the 20th floor of a 40 storey block. 

Too much brown

Unfortunately, however, when I got up there it turned out the picture was of another apartment altogether — a clean, minimal, light, airy apartment. The owners of the actual apartment had a thing for fake wood that clashed miserably with their ultra-modern apartment. 

The hall was papered in wood effect wallpaper, the kitchen units were covered in wood-effect plastic, and the fridge was covered in a startling fascia that made it look a bit like a plastic tree trunk. 

“Do you have anything less brown?” I asked Ivana. 

She looked perplexed. “What colour do you want?” 

“Maybe white? Just not like that apartment.” 

She gave me one of those ‘you crazy foreigners’ looks but promised to do her best. 

Dead zebras or a magic eye?

That wasn’t the worst flat I saw. There was the one whose landlady apparently wanted to create a land where zebras went to die – there were even faux fur zebra print rugs pinned to the walls. The worst was the one which looked like the owners had bought those magic eye pictures popular in the early 90s, copied them hundreds of time and pasted them all over their walls. I felt dizzy just looking into their sitting room. 

By this time I had just 10 days in my old flat and was getting panicky. This time, moving house in Astana was not proving easy.

The flat I eventually found was on the left bank, almost at the edge of the city. I had been to the area a few months earlier, to a concert by a friend’s choir in the Kobys Palace, a small concert hall. 

Houses had been built only on the north side of the road, with the south side open to the steppe. I had walked through driving snow to the concert hall fearing I might stray off the path, break my leg and die of exposure. 

A gloomy new development

By May, the snow had gone and the side of the road that had been steppe was full of new building sites. The apartment was in the Olimp Palace, a giant brand new development that took up an entire block. Entry was up a ramp and through a security gate manned by a guard in a small kiosk. This led into a large quad – dvor in Russian – surrounded by dark grey-green buildings. 

It was particularly gloomy because most of the quad was taken up by a big windowless structure, a bit like a huge concrete bunker. On top was a basketball court, and underneath parking spaces and the heating system for the complex, according to the agent. 

The flat was on the fifth floor, which was quite a nice height, high enough to have a view but low enough to feel close to things — had there been any view or things to be close to. In fact, it looked out onto an empty four lane road and the building sites opposite. 

I’ll take it!

On the other hand, despite the lack of view and the gloominess of the complex, the flat was nice. It was newly built (only one tenant had lived there before me) and had lovely wooden floors including in the spacious hallway that ran all along one side of the space. There was a sitting room, a bedroom and a small kitchen. The kitchen wasn’t nearly as nice as the one in my old flat — it was very brown and had a microwave taking up almost all the counter space. Still, the rest was fine, and it was within my budget (just) and I was getting desperate.  

I took it, and moved in the next week.