Nudity Craze Grips Kazakhstan

[NudieDaniel]

Members of the public in Kazakhstan have taken to stripping off and hitting the streets for bets and laughs — and to take showers.

The craze was sparked by a man who walked naked through the city of Oskemen in north-eastern Kazakhstan earlier this month for a bet.

The unidentified young man won the bet with a casual stroll down a main street in the city on November 11 — but ended up in jail for his pains, all for a pair of boots.

"My boots were torn, and I needed some new ones," he explained to the YK-local news website on November 13, speaking under the pseudonym Adil.

"I was chatting to some friends, and we were talking about shoes. And we had a bet. The conditions were that if I walked naked through the street, they would buy me some boots. If I chickened out, I would have to do something worse."

He refused to elaborate on what that was, as it was "a secret."

Adil won a pair of $60 boots from the bet, but the police were not amused.

He was arrested and jailed for 15 days on hooliganism charges on November 17.

His nude stroll occurred on the same day a young woman in the same city got into a fracas with police during which she tore off some of her clothes and bared her behind and breasts at officers during a fight in which one law-enforcer had his tooth broken, according to another YK-news report. She received a longer prison term of two years, on charges of assaulting police officers.

Adil's naked antics sparked an apparent copycat act in the central city of Zhezkazgan in the early hours of November 19, Tengri News reported, in which a nude man carrying a suitcase strolled through the dark city streets. There were no reports of his arrest.

These stunts follow a bizarre incident last month during which a middle-aged woman stripped off and took a shower with a metal bucket on a busy road in the southern city of Shymkent.

http://www.eurasianet.org/node/76161