Kazakhstan - a nation popularized by a movie character devised by a British man, with scenes filmed in Romania. While Borat was a pretty funny movie, most of the "facts" given were false, and fortunately Kazakhstan is a better place than Sacha Baron Cohen made it out to be.

As the 9th largest country in the world, Kazakhstan has more land than Western Europe. The nation is ethnically and culturally diverse due to Stalin's deportations of various ethnic groups from elsewhere in the Soviet Union. Due to its vast fossil fuel reserves, Kazakhstan's economy has been doing incredibly, especially when compared to its fellow Central Asia post-Soviet nations.

Kazakhstan is also home to the Baikonur space station, the world's oldest operational space launch facility. The first man-made satellite, Sputnik 1 in 1957, the first manned orbital flight, by Yuri Gagarin in 1961, and the flight of the first woman in space, Valentina Tereshkova in 1963, were all launched from Baikonur.

Image courtesy of the CIA World Factbook; image of Borat courtesy of Gizmodo.com.