KZBlog

Toktali is a blog written by a Kyrgyzstani who is currently living in Austria. It’s an interesting and nice looking blog with most posts in both German and English. It also has a post on one of the stories I neglected to post on here: Tourists Buy Nuclear Waste as a Souvenir! As Toktali writes:

Three Chinese tourists have bought a 274-kg piece of depleted uranium and brought it home from Kyrgyzstan as a souvenir, the China Daily newspaper reported. The three tourists bought “the glittering treasure” for $2,000 at a flea market in Kyrgyzstan, hoping to make money by reselling it in China. Not knowing what they had actually bought, the tourists sliced off a piece of the stone and took it to experts from Beijing’s University. After identifying the souvenir as a piece of depleted uranium, the scientists called the police.

I’ve heard of people sneaking dinosaur bones out of Mongolia, valuable art out of Russia, and artifacts out of Kazakhstan, but depleted uranium is a new one!