First, despite all the pro-Uzbek input and my own original desires, I have decided to visit Sunzhou, China. This is not because of any burning preference for China over the the Uzbeks, but because I have a childhood friend who lives there. A New York Jew with a Japanese wife who lives in China -- go figure.
However, my roommate got back from Uzbekistan last week and brought me a hat. She says Tashkent and Samarkand are both very touristy with souvenir shops on every corner.
Secondly, having recently bought a computer for the first time in my life (I know, I know), I have gone hog-wild buying computer games. Dennis, take note! While in the software store being attended to be horribly oppressed salespeople suffering under the Putin Regime (TM), I noticed how many of the games on offer were by former USSR programmers made by former USSR companies, a lot of them former USSR-themed. I knew about STALKER and Cossacks, of course, but there was also Vivisector (a Dr. Moreau-based first-person shooter), You Are Empty (another FPS set in the Stalin era in which an experiment to create Soviet Man has gone awry, creating mutants -- it's kind of cool since there are pictures of Stalin everywhere and part of the action is set in a collective farm), and lots of games based on WWII and various fictional exploits by elite FSB commandos. Ooh, and a driving simulator set in Moscow.
I also got Sherlok Holmz i Sekret Ktulkhu (Sherlock Holmes and the Secret of Cthulhu, which in English I think is called SH: The Awakened). What a great premise for a game, marrying Doyle and Lovecraft, and how fucking frustrating to play. Only Holmes himself could solve some of those puzzles.
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