As I become more and more internationally minded I find some interesting insights emerge. For example, I have determined that Countries are very much like dairy farms, The cows are the citizenry. Some counties squeeze the cows harder than others, some farmers make the cows feel better than others. Citizens are owned and branded by their countries. Good cows give more milk (money) and there will always be dry cows. How the farmers treat their livestock is a matter of principle not always profits. The parallels go on and on, have some fun with these thoughts.
Central Asia
We are back from our most recent crazy trip. This time it was Central Asia and the "five stans" - Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. We made all of our objectives. And we have now been to 104 countries. Angie has 95 and I have 94 countries. Together it is 104. These five countries were packed into 12 days, 7 flights, 2 high speed trains, 1 cable car ride, 1 horse ride, and lots of hours in car trips. They are all Muslim countries, but they are better characterized as former Soviet countries. Russian langauge is a strong second language in all of these countries. There isn't much English spoken in any of them. Angie being fluent in Russian made all the difference and did intrepreting for me as well as a couple of British backpackers we met in Turkmenistan. Tajikistan is the Country with the distinct langauage being a derivitive of Persian with the others being Turkic. Ethnically, Southern Uzbecs are Tajik. Interesting, the spelling of many...
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