I'd hardly call Lukashenko the last dictator in the world. That's the negative PR doled out by the EU and the US governments (and press). To be sure, there's little press freedom in Belarus and the opposition in oppressed, and he certainly runs the country in a Soviet time warp, but he's also got a lot of domestic support (especially among pensioners, who are getting decent pensions in comparison to some of their counterparts elsewhere in the former USSR). I'm not saying he's good (I personally think he's psychotic and has to go) but there are far worse dictators around.
And I hear Minsk is alright... still a bit Soviet, of course.
Probably the weirdet places I've been to are:
- Amguema, Chukotka - a reindeer herding village of 600, just above the artic circle in the Russian far east. I'm pretty confident I was the first black person most people there had seen live.
- Shunja, Kazakhstan - a town on the Kazakhstani-Chinese border, dominated by the Uigur ethnic group whose brethern across the border in China were rudely suppressed by the Han Chinese a la Tibet.
- Bukhara, Uzbekistan - an ancient Silk Road city in Central Asia with a big 4th century fort. The old city is still a living city.
- Los Angeles, California - very very strange place
I really want to make it down to Nepal, Cambodia, Viet Nam. I've heard great things about all three.
