We can dance, we can read
And I never once saw (in Turkmenistan) anyone carrying or reading a newspaper.
- wrote in his blog Joshua Kucera - a freelance journalist based in Washington, D.C. From April through September 2007 he is traveling through the Caucasus and Central Asia to write a serial travelogue for EurasiaNet.org. He is in Turkmenistan from 12 of July.
The musical masterpiese posted by Peter is also an indeterminable evidence of the fact that you can see people, well, at least one man, in Turkmenistan reading a newspaper.
In general Joshua’s blog is worth reading, it is very interesting to see our country through the eyes of intellegent representative of a different culture.
Enjoy it!
on July 22nd, 2007 at 3:35 pm
We dont read papers on the streets… we do that at home or in the office… We dont spend hours waiting for a bus or a metro, we just take a taxi, pretty fast
on July 23rd, 2007 at 2:16 am
There is also a serious lack of decent reading materials in Turkmen. The government controls everything that is published there and prints stuff that is boring, irrelevant and mostly “propagandaish.” Russian papers and books are available, but the selection is rather small and many (and a rapidly increasing proportion) children don’t know Russian well enough to enjoy a book in that language.
on July 23rd, 2007 at 8:27 am
The guy is reading newspaper “Turkmenistan”. Which I am pretty sure that full of praises like “Merhemetli”, “Beýik” and etc. Do you think people need to read this praise to one man. I studied journalism and I never read a news written with “inverted pyramid” style on Turkmen papers. Do you think “Merhemetli” or “Beýik” is most important thing for people? And how long are we going to continue to read/watch materials in foreign language to get decent information?
on July 23rd, 2007 at 3:00 pm
This is exactly the problem–they don’t publish anything without mention of Beyik Serdarymyz, altyn asyr (golden age) or other, overused and meaningless phrases. But where else can people that are really only fluent in Turkmen get real information than word of mouth and the govt television/papers? They’re not improving the quality and breadth of local reporting and stifling Russian language education and materials. English is supposedly the next language that all Turkmen should know, but they are a long way from that.