The city has a beautiful new plaza near city hall and a river walk along the Syr-Darya. The train station is noted by Lonely Planet as the best in Central Asia and worth a look in its own right. One city park has gathered all the old Lenin statues in a single spot -- a peculiar open-air museum of Soviet nostalgia. On the road to the airport, between the river and the Petro-Kazakhstan oil worker residences, look for the old Soviet murals on abandoned factory walls.