If anyone else comes to Kazakhstan and wants to see "the real country", I'd humbly suggest looking outside the two largest cities because they're the only places that have seen any development over the past three decades. My city hasn't changed at all since the end of the 1980s, you look at the photographs from that era and the only difference you see are significantly increased numbers of cars. That's pretty typical.
If you ever wonder why some people have a nostalgia for the Soviet Union — that's why, all significant infrastructure was built back then and hasn't been touched since. The Chinese have been pouring some money into infrastructure for the past few years (mostly power plants and railroads), but the volume is incomparable with ye olde days since they are doing it across the globe and don't have infinite money.
Some of our "patriots" become aggressive when you mention this, so you might want to keep it in mind.
A commenter down below called us "a third-world country", and while that's silly (pretty much only because we're "second world" by definition), it's only fair.