Celebrating Irish spirit in Kazakhstan

ALMATY, Kazakhstan - As a Penn State student, I’ve come to associate March with one thing: State Patty’s. Back in Happy Valley, St. Patrick’s Day weekend is full of green shirts, crowded bars, and artificially colored beer. It’s a tradition so notorious that the university and local police make every effort to keep it under control, yet students still flood downtown to keep it alive.

This March, my experience at Harat’s Irish Pub in Almaty, Kazakhstan was unlike any State College bar experience. Even though it was a weeknight, I was surprised to see so few people in the pub.

The bar had all the right elements–dim lighting, dark wooden furniture, a stage for live music and neon Guinness signs on the walls. But instead of a packed bar with people celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, just a handful of people were throughout the place. The stage stood empty as faint music could be heard from the speakers.

“Outside of Russia, the Harat’s Pubs are better. In Moscow, [the pubs] are more of what Americans call a ‘dive bar,’ but here, [the pub] is like downtown in the center of the city and it’s large,” said Mikhail Baraboshin, a Russian man who works for Boeing. “It’s a place the whole city probably goes to if they want to get a pint of Guinness.”

My friends and I sat down with Mikhail and had a beer with him. We tried local Kazakh lagers, while Mikhail drank a pint of Guinness. He was not spending much time in Almaty as he was passing through for work, so he was surprised to see a group of Americans at an Irish pub.

Harat’s Irish Pub is located on a pedestrian street near the opera house in Almaty’s bustling downtown. It’s part of a large franchise with more than 110 pubs in 12 countries across the world. It is the largest chain of Irish pubs in the world.

“Even in Dubai, where I am living right now–it sounds like an Arabic Muslim country–there are a lot of Irish people so the Irish pubs are gonna be packed on St. Patty’s Day,” Baraboshin said. “There are quite a few Irish pubs, even in a place like Dubai.”

As I finished my drink and walked to the hotel, I found myself appreciating both sides of the coin: the chaos of State Patty’s and the calm, nearly empty pub in Almaty, Kazakhstan. Celebrating the same holiday more than 6,000 miles apart taught me that a quiet night at an Irish pub can be just as enjoyable as a packed bar with hundreds of college students.