Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

The little town of Gori an hour outside the Georgian capital of Tbilisi is mostly known for one thing today.  It is the birthplace of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin.  To most outsiders today, Stalin is known mostly for his unpredictable political purges and disastrous collectivization efforts, leaving hundreds of senior Soviet leaders and millions of its citizens dead.  But in his hometown, Stalin is still celebrated, not least for his contribution to defeating Nazism and turning the USSR into an industrial power within a generation.

Just a few days ago, the author found himself discussing how to increase number of tourists in Azerbaijan with a few locals in an underground bar in Baku.  The economy was in dire straits as the GDP dropped along with oil prices.  The government's supposed diversification to non-oil sectors involved little beyond investing in infrastructure to increase exports of natural gas.  Tourism, for a city as beautiful as Baku, deserves to be one of the main sources of income in a diversified economy.

The restaurant does not look like much from the street level.  With a little "restaurant" sign pointing at a dimly lit set of stairs leading down to a basement of a otherwise commercial building filled with fashion shops.  But as soon as the set of glass doors dividing the stairs from the streets were opened, the loud sounds from down below were inescapable.  Simultaneously, almost disco-like lights from the basement give off the impression that one is entering a nightclub rather than a restaurant.

At the airport in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital city, the author found himself briefly unable to enter the country due to misunderstanding of the country's visa-on-arrival rules.  The immigration staff not only helped him step by step through the process, he also did so with smiles, jokes, and even free chocolate to help him get over the three hour wait at 11pm.  In the subsequent taxi ride from the airport to city center, the taxi driver got lost but remained good natured, joking about how streets shouldn't have same names.

Astana, the capital city of Kazakhstan, is in many ways the city of its president, Nursultan Nazarbayev.  Having came up with the idea of creating a brand new city to replace Almaty, the economic hub of more than a million people, as capital of the country, he certainly did not hesitate to put his own imprints on the city itself.  The city's new airport, university, several other institutions are unabashedly named after him, while the main museums all have sections exclusively dedicated to his life and politics.

The Mongolian names for dumplings ( buuz ) and restaurants ( guanz ) sounds conspicuously like their northern Chinese equivalents 包子 ( baozi ) and 館子 ( guanzi ).  Simultaneously the southern Chinese name for the same dumplings 饅頭 ( mantou ) made to both Korea as mandu and Central Asia as manty .  The favorite pulled noodles of Lanzhou 拉麵 ( lamian ) found itself to Central Asia as laghman just as it went to Korea as ramyeon and Japan as ramen .

The center piece of the central park of Bishkek, the capital city of Kyrgyzstan, is a gigantic statue of Lenin, flanked by memorials to Soviet soldiers crowned with the classic hammer and the sickle.  Various government buildings in the city, leftover from their prior usage as regional administrative offices for the Soviet Union, are still marked with obvious Soviet insignias despite obvious attempts by the current Kyrgyz state to hide them under contemporary national symbols like the country's flag.