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Culture
The Bakpakhic people descend from a long line of smiting nomadic tribes. A few years ago, however, their itinerant lifestyles were severely curtailed, partly because some guy named Boris finally asked, 'Whose bloody stupid idea was it to keep packing up, moving on, packing up, moving on, when we could just stay in one place and relax with a schlitvini schnapps or two?' Problems caused by soaring inflation and environmentally hazardous runoff from rug-making factories also began to hinder their wandering ways.
The government stepped in and resettled the population in vast conurbations that had to be built from the ground up. Bakpakhistan is now a legitimate Perestroika-induced former-Soviet bloc nation with its own gulag-style mausoleums without electricity or running water that are regularly defaced by obscene graffiti denouncing the government, and especially the unpopular Slotcar Nascar. The network of communities in Hikinboot have lots of schlitvini schnapps shops, which is difficult to say in English but is probably quite lyrical in Bakpashti.
Bakpakhistan is renowned for its ethnic arts & crafts and folk music (Paul Simon is rumoured to be making an album based on the Bakpakhici art of clicking fingers and tongues while simultaneously slapping a raw cod on the side of a leather boot), but other artefacts include small colourful hats made from hankies and papier-mâché representations of their country's hero, Snagult Ufqunt, fashioned from dried lentil beans and old copies of Lonely Planet phrasebooks. But by far the most important cultural artefact is Bakpakhic rugs: small rugs, large rugs, woven rugs, killims, horsehair mats, Oriental carpets, pig-bristle 'Welcome To My Home' mats, carpets crocheted from regurgitated cats' fur balls and even a few horse-hair toupees and a rare coconut-fibre merkin or two - all of which can be found in Bakpahistan. These genuine cultural artefacts are ripe for a bit of cultural appropriation, and yuppies and bo-bos around the world can simultaneously ethnicise their living rooms and suffer the voguish angst of post-colonial guilt. It doesn't hurt that the merchandise is also very cheap and very plentiful - they can be bought in any of the Bakpakhistani markets at a special-special, cheapie-cheapie, ya-wouldn't-get-it-for-that-at-home price (VAT not included).
To say that Bakpakhistan has a cuisine would be to stretch a point beyond its reasonable limits - a typical Bakpakhici meal is a mushy stew of something that can't quite be pinned down. A variety of ill-defined foods and ingredients are stewed in an iron pot till the mixture reaches the desired amoebic texture and indeterminate colour, then it's served at a tepid temperature and doused in schlitvini schnapps. Bakpakhanis call it 'vlassplosspissinskaya', which loosely translates as a helpless shrug of the shoulders. The single variant in Bakpakhici cuisine is the traditional chyme, made from goat extract.
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