A roman camp and the fort in the above picture both look rectilinear, but that's about all the resemblance I see. Instead of rows of barracks the inside appears to be a courtyard lined with rooms. The website mentioned by Brooks Moses at #8 handily has a floorplan which shows only one gate and rooms that aren't terribly symmetrical, making it look about as un-Roman to me as you can get without abandoning all use of both planning and quadrilaterals.
While it's in Tuva and that technically is part of Siberia, it's so far south that it would be more useful to think of it as being part of Mongolia, the nation it directly borders.
While pork wasn't outright forbidden, pigs weren't exactly big with the ancient Israelite's neighbors given the Babylonian maxim:
"The pig is not clean: it dirties everything behind it,
It dirties the streets, it fouls houses."
The book I got that from is Jean Bottero's The Oldest Cuisine in the World, which is a very interesting discussion of the recipes in the Yale Culinary Tablets and cooking in ancient Babylonia.
In LA there's Mashti Malone's Ice Cream. The storefront sign is in English and Farsi, and naturally also has a shamrock. Their Persian ice cream is damn good too; I particularly like the rosewater saffron with pistachios.
I fixed the crooked horizon and tweaked the exposure:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/heckblazer/3374254476/
Hope you don't mind.
"'You can get away with being gay as long as you're completely closeted' isn't exactly a ringing endorsement for a place's gay-friendliness."
Curiously, that does seem to describe Saudi Arabia, which reportedly has what we would call a thriving gay underground. The Atlantic had an interesting article on the phenomenon last May:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200705/gay-saudi-arabia
"'You can be cruised anywhere in Saudi Arabia, any time of the day,' said Radwan, a 42-year-old gay Saudi American who grew up in various Western cities and now lives in Jeddah. 'They’re quite shameless about it.' Talal, a Syrian who moved to Riyadh in 2000, calls the Saudi capital a 'gay heaven.'"
Linkmeister @ #56: I'm reminded of a Vietnam-era Mad Magazine feature which portrayed a kid's view of headlines (might have been Don Martin drawings). One of them was a mock newspaper with 24-pt type shouting about something happening on the Plain of Jars in Laos, and the kid's vision had a sea of Mason jars stretching as far as his eye could see.
That image is actually kinda close to the truth. The "Jars" in Plain of Jars isn't a Lao word, it refers to the fact that the plain in question is littered with giant stone jars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Poj_site3.jpg
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