“Uzbekistan is said to be easier!
One of my brothers, decades ago, invested vast sums of other folks’ money in Kazakhstan. When he arrived to check that the business was being set up, he was met by a bunch of KGB type officials in giant bulky oversized black coats and grim hats, who pointed back to a plane being boarded, pushing him a boarding pass for that flight out in 30 minutes!
“We heard jealous people arranged misfortune. So we’re sent to get home, you, very safely”
“What about all that money?” My brother boldly asked!
A finger smashed vertically across my brothers lips, “Shssh!”
Simultaneously, my brothers shaking hand was pulled to the dead-cold stock of an assault rifle,
“Be thankful there’s a way to walk out of here alive! Good luck and don’t look back!
......and forget Kazakhstan. You were never here!”
Of course, my brother had a super-relaxed flight home, with sequential “Chivas Regal on the rocks”!
Now they were lost in the thick clouds, his seat-mate, in that row turned his head from the window. Firstv he stared at my brothers kippah woven with the “Star of David” secured to his red hair with a steel clip. Then his eyes were transfixed to his face. He stared open-eyed smiling to my brother, obviously wondering how come this fellow was so strangely happy, even before the drinks were poured?
“Did you win the lottery or something?”
“Yes,” my brother replied, swirling another Chivas around the cubes of ice in his glass.
My brother paused to stare past the stranger to infinity and then returned to closely ponder the glass in his hand and how the overhead spotlight vaults its way through the melted ice and whisky,
.....,“or something, as far as I can figure!!”