Tashkent - capital of Uzbekistan ... yet everybody speaks Russian. Okay, so it makes sense, since Uzbekistan was a Russian state until the break up of the USSR - but that was 15 years ago. Yet today, people still continue to speak Russian in Tashkent, and most people (to our untrained eyes) definitely don't look or dress like what we thought an Uzbek would dress like - which goes to show just how silly we are. Because, you see, today, to be an Uzbek, means that you have some kind of Russianness in you. The interesting thing about Uzbekistan is that its a hybrid of Soviet and Turkic culture. The people have feature sets that combine facets of Russian, Turkic and Chinese, and have all combinations/permutations of these. It leads to a particularly interesting spectrum
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