A high school friend was on a business trip in, yes, Kazakhstan. The women there are pretty, he adds. Where are the women not pretty, right? Another high school classmate puns (in Tamil) that the country should then be called Azhaghastan (Azhagu = beauty)
I wrote to them that he guy's alibi in going there is that he is checking out the apples :)
Why apples, you ask, to which I reply: it is the geographic home for all the apples of the world.
Well, until yesterday, as Johnny Carson often said, "I did not know that!"
Even in blogging, the only note I have had on Kazakhstan was on a completely different topic!
I was diving back home and listening to The World, when the show's host, Lisa Mullins, posed the geoquiz about the origin of apples.
I would never have thought that apples originated from the mountains of Central Asia.
Even more hilariously educational was the hypothesis on how perhaps the fruit spread: animals ate the best of the fruits, and then the seeds passed through their guts, which then led to new plants in new places.
And, of course, the roles of the Silk Road, the Roman Empire, the wanderers ... and then eventually to the US, and now we associate Washington with apples. Who woulda thunk it was a story out of Central Asia!
I will add this to my repertoire of fun stories for my classes.
This blog entry by itself will be a convincing answer to the student, "J," who asked me yesterday what I do for fun :)
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