Back in the U.S.S.R.: Photos 21 to 33

In an effort to avoid my normal boring titles, I was going to title my blog “Kazakhstan is nice”, and then after a few days I was going to title it “Kazakhstan has a veneer of niceness”, but I was already sick of people making the Borat references, so I decided not to reference that film at all and instead go with the title from the Beatles song which got stuck in my head. In his book “In Search of Kazakhstan”, which I mention here in my attempt to sound more literate than I actually am, Christopher Robbins talks about how in conversation with one of his friends he made the politically correct point that Sacha Baron Cohen (“Borat”) would probably never have even felt that it was OK to pretend to be from Germany or France or suchlike. “Of course not”, replied Robbins’ friend “That’s why he invented a country”. That’s the way it goes - despite having the area of Western Australia (or, if you prefer, it’s the size of Greenland - larger than Western Europe), the world’s ninth largest nation in area and the place where apples came from, most people don’t seem to know anything about Kazakhstan.

Full Text Entry: Back in the U.S.S.R.