Bishkek is gearing up for the October 30 presidential election, the first since April 2010 protests ousted President Kurmanbek Bakiyev. The hotels are filling up with Europeans who've arrived to monitor the election. The streets are crowded in by gigantic billboards featuring a half dozen faces of presidential candidates, with their websites (and, occasionally, their twitter feeds) listed underneath.

The city is a remarkable blend of stereotype-breaking images. Kyrgyzstan is 80 percent Muslim, but the girls wear skinny jeans and absolutely vicious heels. One American here told me that she was amazed, even after nearly two years in the country, at how some Kyrgyz women walk on top of wintry, ice-packed streets in four-inch stilettos. Forty percent of the country may be under the poverty line, but in downtown Bishkek the streets swarm with smartly dressed young people jabbering on their smart phones. There's even an authorized Apple reseller pitching iMacs, iPhones, and MacBooks to the locals.

Bishkek is in many ways a very modern place, even if the architectural legacy of the Soviet Union overshadows much of the skyline. The city's infrastructure can feel like a competition between the monumentalist old Soviet planners and the new Kyrgyz politicians: big, empty squares filled with statues to official cultural heroes, workers, and peasants, strung with wide streets teeming with cars. Many of the cafes, restaurants, clubs, and other hang-outs offer free wifi; there are Persian, Lebanese, Italian, and even Mexican restaurants. Friends here tell me they are mostly new, and quality varies considerably.

Surprisingly, though China is one of Kyrgyzstan's biggest trading partners, there is very little Chinese influence in the city. China's few companies here are run much like those it has in Africa and Latin America: from top-to-bottom by Chinese, with little spillover into local society. Turkish companies, on the other hand, are everywhere. In department stores, washing machines and stoves are advertised, in English, as being "Made in Turkey," and the biggest bank in town is Turkish-owned DemirBank.

A local friend joked to me that this is normal behavior for Turks. "If we ever land on Mars," he said, "we'll probably find the Turks have already set up a shopping mall." They're renowned here for their business sense. They also build and operate schools, including the largest university.

For nearly two decades, Turkey has been trying to exert a soft power of some sort over Central Asia. Their thinking seems to be that, because most of the countries in Central Asia speak distant cousins of Turkish (the whole family of languages that include Uighur, Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, Turkmen, and Turkish are called "Turkic Languages," while Tajiks speak a variant of Persian), perhaps Turkey can guide their cousins into the bright prosperous future.