The steppes of Kazakhstan’s Almaty region are not the most inviting place, especially in winter time, but one unusual phenomenon has been attracting a lot of tourists there lately.

Located between the villages of Kegen and Shyrganak in the middle of a snow-covered plateau is a 14-meter-high ice tower that continuously spouts water which turns to ice almost instantly. The unique structure looks like a miniature volcano, only instead of hot lava, it spouts water. The sight has become popular both among locals, but also Instagram fans and influencers looking for special backgrounds for their social media posts.

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A 29-year-old woman in Kazakhstan stunned doctors after she gave birth to her twin babies no less than 11 weeks apart, an extremely rare abnormality with one in 50 million odds of occurring.

When Liliya Konovalova, from the town of Uralsk in northern Kazakhstan, walked into the maternity clinic to see the doctors about her second pregnancy, they already knew that she suffered from a rare condition known as uterus didelphys, which basically means she has a double uterus. Doctors had noticed this seven years ago, during her first pregnancy, which had gone smoothly and resulted in the birth of a healthy daughter. This time around the pregnancy was more difficult as she had twins, each of which developed in separate wombs.

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Katya, a 36-year-old brown bear, is the only prisoner at the UK-161/2 penal colony in Kostanay, Kazakhstan, to be serving a life sentence. Ironically, even killers imprisoned here have sentences of no longer than 25 years.

So what could a bear do to end up in prison? Well, Ekaterina, or Katya as most of the 730 inmates at UK-161/2 call her, was put behind bars in 2004, after injuring two humans. Like a lot of her fellow inmates, the brown bear had a troubled life. Katya was abandoned by circus performers visiting Kostanay when she was still just a cub, and then locked in a cage near a popular camping site, as a tourist attraction. It was at the Belaya Yurta campsite that she committed the “crimes” that landed her in the strict regime prison, 15 years ago.

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Aigali Supugaliev, a 63-year-old man from Kazakhstan, almost gave his relatives a heart attack when he returned home two months after they had buried his body. And while stories of people showing up after being presumed dead by their families have made news headlines before, Aigali’s one is particularly bizarre because his death had been confirmed by a DNA test.

It all started on July 9, when Aigali Supugaliev’s relatives reported him missing from his village of Tomarly, in Kazakhstan. They had no idea that the unmarried man had been offered a four-month job on a distant farm, as he had not bothered to inform them about it, so when a decomposed body was discovered near his house, everyone feared the worse. The corpse was reportedly in such a bad state that Aigali’s family couldn’t identify it by physical traits, so a DNA test was commissioned. Believe it or not, the test showed that there was a 99.29% probability (the highest this kind of test can give) that the discovered body was that of Supugaliev, so an official death certificate was issued, and the man’s brother organized a funeral.

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Arina Aliyeva, one of the finalists of the 2018 Miss Virtual Kazakhstan beauty contest, recently shocked the nation after announcing that she was actually a 22-year-old man who had signed up for the national contest to prove an important point.

It all started with an argument Eli Diaghilev, a young Kazakh male model, had with his friends about female beauty. He argued that in the old days women valued qualities like individuality and charisma, while most young women nowadays just follow the most popular trends – be they in fashion, makeup or hairstyle – thinking it makes them beautiful. Eli added that thanks to all the available cosmetics, digital editing tools like Photoshop and the general falseness in the beauty industry, even a man could pass as a beautiful woman. Diaghilev’s friends apparently didn’t agree, so he decided to prove his point by signing up for the Miss Virtual Kazakhstan beauty contest.

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A lovestruck 20-year-old recently made headlines after he was caught sneaking into an examination hall dressed like a girl. When questioned, Ayan Zhademov confessed that he was trying to take the exam on behalf of his 17-year-old girlfriend!

Ayan revealed that his lady friend was totally stressed over the Unified National Testing, an exam used for college admissions in Kazakhstan. He tried to calm her down and encourage her, but positive talk didn’t work. So he decided to impersonate her and take the exam in her place.

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Who needs guard dogs when you have wolves, right? That’s probably what Kazakh villagers in the Almaty region thought when they decided to replace their canines with the fierce forest-dwelling beasts. According to local news reports, taming wolves is now the latest trend and a sort of hobby among rural Kazakhs.

“You can buy a wolf cub for just $500, they say, and hunters are adamant that if treated well, the wild animal can be tamed,” the KTK television channel reported. Nurseit Zhylkyshybay, a farmer from the south-eastern Almaty region, told reporters that he purchased a wolf cub from hunters three years ago, and the animal is now perfectly domesticated.

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While some men struggle to grow beards, here’s a 65-year-old woman who managed to sprout one that’s a whopping eight inches long. Her unusual facial hair has made Mukhtabor Toraeva a celebrity in her hometown of Turbat , in southern Kazakhstan. But what’s really bizarre is that she says the beard is the secret to her successful 42-year marriage.

“My husband married me when my beard had already started to grow,” she explained with pride. “He loves it and we now have a son, a daughter, and six grandchildren. Although beards run on my side of the family, my daughter does not have one and although both my mother and grandmother have them, they are not as fine as mine. Theirs reached only six inches.”

Mukhtabor said that she started growing her beard when she was 25 years old, and that people have always admired her for it. Her friends and relatives appreciate her, as do the strangers she meets when she travels to the neighboring Uzbekistan.

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