KZBlog

From Chris Merriman, a British expat also suffering through bad customer service in Astana, a clip from an episode of The West Wing, the American show about the Presidency:

It starts snowing in Astana…

EDIT: Transcript of the episode this is from. The Kazakhstan scenario is that the President has been assasinated, there’s an election that some claim was rigged, protests break out and China and Russia send in peace-keeping troops (though some doubt their intentions) and the US has to consider the possibility of sending in its own troops to keep the peace–similair to scenarios that serious geopoliticists have raised.

Incidentally, having some experience of the Kazakhstan government and the stories of my friends with much cooler jobs than mine, I would love to see someday down the road, the television serial Ak Orda. Obviously you need a couple more decades, so that there are more presidents, and no one takes it personally, but I would love to see a (albeit fictionalized and sometimes idealized) glimpse of what goes on. And it may not be a bad move politically; I would vote for Martin Sheen for President in a second.