Our family vacation in Borovoe, a resort town in northern Kazakhstan, has begun. We made the trip by train from Kostanay.
We left the apartment just after midnight — half an hour early, because my son wanted to spend some time at the railway station (he'd never been to one before, and had never ridden a train). That's actually why I picked the train for this trip — so he could ride one for the first time in his life. We got to the station at 12:30 a.m. Unfortunately, the platform was under repair: sand and construction debris instead of tile or asphalt, so I had to carry the heavy suitcase by hand instead of rolling it. The train left at 1:04 a.m.
On the train, just like in the Viktor Tsoi song, the attendant handed us our bedding and tea. We ate the sausage we'd bought ahead of time and watched out the window. Olezhka saw the blinking red warning lights on wind turbines for the first time — whole fields of red lights. Then we went to sleep.
We woke up still on the train and looked out at the Kazakh steppe — another first for Olezhka. We had some tea. He made himself instant mashed potatoes and went back to sleep.
I woke Olezhka before the stop in Kokshetau. We stepped out at the station — repairs there too, and the train had stopped a bit past the platform. I had a smoke, and we rolled on. Olezhka went back to sleep again.
We woke him just before the final stop — Kurort Borovoe station. We arrived at 10:14.
Once we got to Shchuchinsk, it turned out Yandex Taxi doesn't work there. We had to go with one of the station cab drivers. For 5,000 tenge he drove us to the hotel.
We got to the hotel early, around 11, but check-in didn't start until one. We went to the hotel next door for lunch — a solid meal, the bill came to 20,000 tenge.
Back at our hotel, check-in still hadn't started. We took the stairs down to the beach, and Olezhka and I swam in the lake for about twenty minutes.
After the swim we finally checked in. My wife went to sleep, while Olezhka and I figured out that cab drivers in Shchuchinsk mostly work through the InDriver app. We made a trip into town: 1,300 tenge there, 1,300 back — 2,600 total. The goals: buy an inflatable swim ring and get Olezhka's iPad set up on Tele2 with a month of unlimited internet (5,800 tenge).
After a second swim, tired and happy, we went to bed.