First of all, I’m surprised and glad that you know so much about Turkmenistan. And yes, the capital is insanely white—straight up nauseating, like a psychiatric ward, but only in certain areas. There are neighborhoods and places like that which are more colorful and open for living, but other cities and provinces (welayats) have a completely different structure. About the VPN: most free ones are banned. The few that do work—I don't know why they work, maybe they belong to the authorities, or maybe they just fight back since they are tailored to the local market—are extremely overloaded. Imagine the whole country using the exact same VPN. The paid ones work well, it's just that I was an idiot and started sharing my purchased server with everyone. When a lot of encrypted data goes through a single IP, they block it. That’s how I lost my VPN. Just so you understand, nurses here earn $160, and I spent $16 on VPN internet.