Archive sections: ‘Kyrgyzstan’
Jesse, Svetlana’s globetrotting friend from the States (who wiped the floor with me at ten-pin bowling), is on his way back home. Typically, he’s chosen a route which is far from direct – taking in nine more countries, (if you count the airport transfers), and visiting the Baltic States and Finland en route. He seems [...]
Theodore Hertzen was born in 1935 in the village of Ak Dobo in Leninopole, (currently known as Bakai Ata) of Talas oblast, where there is a small museum dedicated to his life and work. He was educated at both the Bishkek and Moscow Institutes of Art and he has been granted many awards such as [...]
To help preserve the priceless, pristine, virgin, natural resources that it possesses, Kyrgyzstan has a total of 83 Specially Protected Natural Territories, (SPNT), with a total area of about 800,000 hectares, which is 4% of Kyrgyzstan’s total land area. Perhaps, the most famous of these specially protected regions is Ala Archa – just outside Bishkek. [...]
There is an old maxim in Real Estate … the only thing that really counts is “location, location, location”. It is such an overriding principle that in 2001 it was used for the title for a TV programme on Britain’s Channel 4. The mantra basically encapsulates the idea that identical homes can increase or decrease [...]
I am not particularly good at sports, although I am willing to try my hand at most. Apart from needing a certain level of skill, most, if not all, sports also require a certain amount of dedication and a level of fitness. It won’t come as a surprise, therefore, if I say that I am [...]
There are six basic questions that sum up any story: Who?, Where?, When?, What?, How? and Why? When I knew that I was coming out to Kyrgyzstan, I signed up for a weekend Russian language course which was being held in a village in Kent. It was run by a voluntary organization, not a college [...]
Apart from being the tenth day of the tenth month in the tenth year of the century, an auspicious date in Chinese astrology, Sunday was a day of special significance here in Kyrgyzstan. It was Election Day.
The days before the election proved to be quite busy for me. Each day I came to the office intending to tidy my desk and catch up on some of the backlog of work that has been steadily building up as I have had my attention distracted onto other matters – but it seems that [...]
Dickens’s classic novel of the French Revolution, “The Tale of Two Cities”, has probably the best opening line and closing lines in all of British literature. It is an extremely well crafted list of eight opposites that compliment each other almost like poetry: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, [...]
As I walked out of the office one morning last week, I was struck by the sight that greeted me. In the yard we seemed to have acquired a new mountain. Well, that is, of course, an example of hyperbole … it wasn’t exactly a “mountain” … here, the term is used to refer to [...]
