Türkmenistan

There’s nothing like a nice cup of tea when playing one’s dutar in the sunshine. This official Postcrossing card has one of the highly-prized low numbers (TM-38) and comes to me from Zulfina in Ashkabat. It arrived in an envelope with the Turkish/Turkmen words kimden and kime (“from whom” and “to whom”) pre-printed in the appropriate areas, so imagine my surprise when I found a message inside in Russian! Turns out Russian is the language used for “inter-ethnic communication” — that is, communication with Russians who call Turkmenistan home, thanks to its previous history as the Turkmen Soviet Socialist Republic.