Favorite -stan country?

considering that the vast majority of Astana has been built in the last twenty years mostly on the whims of President Nazarbayev, then you'd expect to be all fancy like. I studied the region when I was at uni and the guy running the course spends a fair bit of time in the region (as you'd expect, really), apparently Astana is meant to be incredibly boring while Almaty (the old capital, one of the oldest cities in Central Asia, plus its the one where the metro is which means the it must be better) is much more interesting to visit. Although Almaty is apparently not built in a great place for expansion and they get a fair few earthquakes, so maybe moving somewhere a little safer makes sense...

The entire region (excluding Pakistan here since they aren't in Central Asia; Afghanistan is questionable but I'll count it) has a really interesting history; especially in the few years after the rise of the Soviet Union when they tried to take an ideology that relies on a modern industrial economy to work and spread it in a place where the majority of the population were still Nomadic - it didn't quite work... Quite frankly its amazing that the region has actually remained stable, considering that the border lines bear little resemblance to anything that existed historically and created significant numbers of national minority groups (which were defined rather arbitrarily anyway), which wasn't an issue when the Soviet Union existed since there weren't any borders, but as soon as independence happened and borders went up it posed a bit of an issue.

Turkmenistan is the most interesting simply because Niyazov was so crazy: we've already had some of his hits but that only scratched the surface: he banned lip-syncing on TV and the playing of recorded music on television on state holidays; and at all public celebrations including weddings; he banned dogs from the capital because he didn't like their smell, he banned the opera and the circus for being "un-Turkmenlike", he banned TV news reporters from wearing makeup since it made it too hard to tell men and women anchors apart, and he banned gold teeth and suggested that instead Turkmenistani people should chew on bones to strengthen their teeth. He also broadcast all of his cabinet meetings on television and they resembled some really odd reality TV show: basically he'd spent most of the time reprimanding his ministers if they did something wrong, and I'm sure that he may have sacked a fair few on TV - which is something that I could see Trump doing if he won the election... The current President (President Berdimuhamedow, I'm not ashamed to say that I had to look that up) was Niyazov's dentist and is slightly less crazy although still a dictator; he abolished the changes that Niyazov made to the language (renaming bread after his mother and such things), he moved the statue that always rotated to face the sun to somewhere else in Ashgabat and now it stays still although he's now building a cult around himself; he's a big horse lover and conveniently won the biggest horse race in Turkmenistan twice in a row, and he also apparently also ordered everyone to go out and buy a bike so they could take part in a national cycling day. Basically its the most over the top dictatorship in the world which means that its full of lots of repression and bad things; but that shouldn't stop us from laughing at the really dumb stuff.

Naturally, the only correct answer to this poll is Afghanistan, because they play Cricket there and that automatically makes them best. Well, Pakistan do as well but the Afghan team is so much more interesting...

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