The splendour falls an apartment walls and Soviet concrete old in story

We have an image of the Soviet city as an unremittingly dull, social wasteland of stained concrete and cheerless vistas but this is further from reality than you might imagine, certainly in Central Asia. For a start they often have far more trees than many European capitals and once the green of spring has arrived they do a lot to mask those architectural sins that do exist. The West was hardly short on post-war, faceless concrete monstrosities, so it would…

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Soul of the city: Astana, Kazakhstan

Anyone who employs an internationally acclaimed architect to design an iconic building for a brand new capital city, with a brief to combine state of the art design, whilst paying reference to the country’s cultural heritage and then goes and sticks a shopping centre in it, is clearly someone who does not know the meaning of the word soul and will never know the meaning of the word soul. Whether or not it was Kazakhstan’s strong man of politics (regional…

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China vs Tajikistan: the toilet design challenge

Few competitions can be as eagerly awaited as this, so wisely, the start had been rescheduled so as not to clash with that only marginally less popular international fixture: the Football World Cup. How would the plucky newcomers, tiny Tajikistan, whose performance I laid out recently in Top 10 toilets of Tajikistan – http://insideotherplaces.com/2014/06/19/top-ten-toilets-of-tajikistan/, fare against the might of imperial China. Would this be a foregone conclusion or an epic battle of David vs Goliath. Lets view the evidence from…

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The signs of China

No doubt anyone visiting China could rustle up a selection of amusing manglings of the English language on signs and shop fronts, so I make no grand claim to originality here but just wish to celebrate the country’s touching faith in translation software and piss poor, old dictionaries someone found at a garage sale. People may concentrate on obvious errors but often they just have a special charm in expressing something in a way that a native English speaker never…

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Xinjiang, museums and the Big Lie

IMPORTANT NOTE – in the many years since writing this piece my understanding of the situation has evolved. I hope to resolve my misunderstandings with a future visit to the region but until then I am content to leave this here to receive any constructive comments With free entrance, quality exhibits, largely comprehensible English information and staff out numbering visitors, the museums in Xinjiang offer, at first glance, a quality experience outstripping the majority of that of  their Central Asian…

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