Archive sections: ‘Kyrgyzstan’
The kids went off to the cinema on Monday to watch the latest Harry Potter film. I seem to have missed out almost entirely on the Harry Potter Craze, but it has taken off here just as much as in the West. The books are on sale, (in Russian, so I give them a miss), [...]
A few years ago, we had an enquiry from a tourist who wanted to come to Kyrgyzstan “to see the apples”. This caught me by surprise. Although I was aware that we grow a lot of apples here in Kyrgyzstan, I was intrigued as to why someone would want to travel all this way to [...]
The GAI (pronounced guy-EE) are the State Automobile Inspection – basically, Kyrgyzstan’s Traffic police. The GAI have a mixed reputation in the country, possibly because the main contact between members of the public and officers of the service is when they stop vehicles at one of their roadside checks to inspect documentation, or because of an [...]
For those of us involved in tourism, we used to understand the acronym as World Tourism Organization – a UN agency which brought together the members of the United Nations to consider issues relating to one of the World’s major industries … but a few years ago we had to get used to a new [...]
At the moment I am trying to read ‘News from Tatary‘ by Peter Fleming, originally published in 1936 and telling the story of his 3500 mile journey from Peking through the, then, mysterious province of Sinkiang to India with the Swiss journalist Ella Maillart. Apparently she also wrote an account of the journey, ‘Forbidden Journey’ [...]
Prospect Chui is the one of the main thoroughfares of the city. It stretches along the entire length of the city from East to West. Entering the city from the West it carries the main road from Tashkent (Uzbekistan), Taraz (formerly Djambul in Kazakhstan) and Kara Balta (Kyrgyzstan – and hence the main road from Osh). After [...]
Bishkek does not have regular organised city tours – although as a capital city it does have it’s fair share of interesting, important government building, museums, theatres, shops, monuments etc. The city centre is quite small and can easily be walked. A walk around the city centre along the following itinerary covers most of the [...]
I came across an interesting article recently which proclaimed that “the best way to explore a city is on foot.” I thought to myself, “how true”, although I was a bit surprised by some of the editor’s selections for ten of the best cities for walking in, (Florence, Dubrovnik, Paris, New York, Vancouver, Munich, Edinburgh, [...]
Kuman Ait is also known as Eid al-Adha (or the “Feast of Sacrifice”) and is the most important feast of the Muslim calendar. (Eid is an Arabic word derived from the Arabic word, “aada” that means a recurring event – one that returns. In Islam it it is used to denote a festival.)
As a nomadic people, travelling from place and erecting yurts wherever there was pasture for their livestock … the Kyrgyz don’t have a wide heritage in terms of architecture. Indeed, some people say that the closest they came to architecture was in erecting mausoleums for people after they had died. Of course, the Kyrgyz were not [...]
