If you're in the new downtown, near Beiterek Tower, then you're sure to see a really tall Chinese building. This building is called the Beijing Palace and is home to a hotel and a few restaurants.
My friend from Semey was visiting Astana for a teachers' conference, and she was staying directly across from the Beijing Palace, so she suggested that we meet up for dinner there. So after school one evening, Sophia and I took a taxi to the Beijing Palace. My Kazakh friend and her daughter joined us as well.
The inside is quite grand, and we had to go through a metal detector and put our bags through an X-ray, although we all set it off and no one cared. Then we checked our coats and took the elevator to the 3rd floor. However, the restaurant there was full, due to a banquet, and they suggested that we go to the top, the 23rd floor, to the revolving restaurant. I'd heard it was expensive, but they assured us that the prices were the same.
So up we went. The restaurant is a big circle, and kinda like a doughnut--the dining area (the revolving part) is the doughnut, with the servers' stations, elevator area, and bathrooms being the hole in the middle. (I know, bad analogy...)
The outer walls were mostly windows, so we could see outside. At first, we saw the President's Palace and, beyond that, the Pyramid. Then we started revolving.
I was a bit nervous about the fact that we'd be moving while eating (wouldn't I get motion-sick?) But we moved so slowly that I didn't notice that we were moving. Just that every now and then we'd notice the view had changed. When the girls went to the bathroom, as soon as we arrived, they had to go around to the other side. Later on, my friend went to use the bathroom, she walked away from us--and ended up finding it just on the other side of us; she'd walked all around the restaurant. (And we'd moved so that we were no longer far from the bathroom.)
The menu shocked us at first with some of the prices--duck for 12000 Tenge ($81) but my Kazakh friend asked and was told that the duck could feed all of us. Some menu items were strange and unusual--bird's nest soup for 14800 (around $100) and "Deer soup for man's health" that included a certain male part from a deer. (My friend said that the Russian translation used a more technical term for this part, while the English translation was rather blunt.)
We each ordered a dish (between $10 and $20 each dish), and I ordered some plain noodles for 400 Tenge for Sophia. The food came out and they put it on a turntable in the middle so we all could share. This was great and we got to sample each other's food. When we were full, we noticed that we had only eaten about half the food! So in the end, not an expensive restaurant!
The view was very nice, Astana at nighttime from up high, and the girls were somewhat behaved. They enjoyed running around the restaurant circle, and had to be reprimanded.
It was definitely a nice experience, and hopefully we'll get to do it again.
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