Postcard from Bishkek

  Photo credit: Mrs Magic / Foter / CC BY-NC-SA Chocolate Chunk Cookies   I am not sure how many emails I receive every day – I have never sat down and counted … but there are an awful lot of them.   They can be classified into different groups … in no particular order: […]

Last week I wrote a postcard about the UNESCO’s List of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity … This had been prompted by the news broke that, the ninth session of UNESCO’s Intergovernmental Committee for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage had made a decision to inscribe the Kazakh and Kyrgyz yurts into the list that they […]

During the week, one of the local news agencies published an interesting article about a survey they had conducted. They had decided to ask visitors to Kyrgyzstan to sum up their impressions in just three words and the article listed some of most “striking” responses. Some of them were supplemented by quotations in which the […]

I recently faced a moral dilemma connected with a website that we run, links.kg. The site is designed to act as a portal to sites with reviews about visits to Kyrgyzstan – travelers’ tales showcasing their stories, accounts of people’s impressions and experiences … .  the reason was quite simple … we already had a number […]

The catchphrase of British entertainer Max Bygraves is supposed to have been “I wanna tell you a story …“, but like so many other “quotes” it is actually a misquote. The phrase was probably the product of the impressionist Mike Harwood who was responsible for “creating” other catchphrases, (such as “Silly Billy” – associated with […]

I have a confession to make … I have missed an anniversary … it was on 26th July, 1995 that I arrived in Bishkek, originally for just one year to help set up an office for a friend of mine … but things never seem to go according to plan and that year has now […]

I was once involved in the selection panel for appointing an Executive Director to one of the Voluntary Associations to which we belong. One of the candidates was quite young but had a good CV and was favoured by some of those on the panel. As a result, his name went onto the long list for interview. In […]

There is an old saying the The camera never lies … but I am not so sure … In the “good old days”, photographs were taken on film, (which was a precious commodity), and time was required to develop the negatives and print the final product.  To get a succesful photograph one had to take […]

The other day I came across an interesting article, (in Russian), entitled Stereotypes about Tourism in Kyrgyzstan … but I think the headline writer got it wrong. The problem with the headline, in my opinion, was the word “stereotypes” … in that this word usually refers to people … but the article was not about the […]

I have a friend who “loves” maps … he’ll spend hours pouring over them, studying them in minute detail, saying the place names over and over to himself … whereas most of us would only occasionally use one as a reference work, to him – an atlas is a “good read”. I once joked with […]