Googling Kazakhstan
When I get free time, I google Kazakhstan, or search for it in Technorati.com. And occasionally fun things come up. Like a toothpaste collector’s website, showing off his Kazakh toothpaste:
This is some good toothpaste, though it makes your teeth feel like they’re coated in plastic. One wonders if this is actually helpful or is just one of these things that makes you feel like your teeth are protected, but does absolutely nothing. Mind, this isn’t sold in normal stores; this is the good stuff dentists stock.
And then there was this one:
Kazakhstan is redoing its money. The new bills, many agree, look awful. To me, they look more like Euros and not bad at all (OK, the hand is a little weird on the front!).
However, the head of the National Bank was practically crucified and threatened with being fired for the horrid bills. The funniest moment in the presenatation of the new bills to Parliament was apparently when they discovered the error–the bills read in Kazakh: БанҚ (using the Kazakh hard K, which has a little tail to distinguish it from K). The problem is, there is no such word in Kazakh. Bank in Kazakh is spelled like it is in Russian, with a К. The Director of the Bank became quite disturbed apparently and claimed it wasn’t a mistake, just it looked that way from here, in combination with the other patterns, if you hold it to the light, and so on…
These images, taken from the National Bank website, appear to have the mistake corrected but they’re such small images it’s a little hard to tell.
[…] the story about the misprinted tenge got picked up by Reuters, then MSNBC, and now every blog has a story about the silly Kazakhs who […]
[…] test, scrapped out of fear it would isolate non-Kazakhs. There was also the recent scandal over the new tenge, on which the word Bank was misspelled in Kazakh, which led many to wonder, “Who are these […]
[…] As it turns out, what really happened is that the National Bank has issued a commemorative 1000-tenge bill in honor of Kazakhstan’s 2010 chairmanship of the OSCE. So stop panicking, there won’t be any replacements. This is just a special issue. 10 million bills will be printed and I got my first one today. It’s very pretty. Looks nothing like the usual 1000 tenge bill. […]