Archive sections: ‘From an Expat’
It’s always nice to be asked for an opinion. It’s a good idea to ask people for their opinion – it says that you value them and their advice, you don’t have to agree them but it is always reassuring if they happen agree with what you already thought, and it is always possible that [...]
On Saturday, I was invited to a birthday party … not just any old birthday party, a Tushoo Kyrgkuu, a party to celebrate a child’s first birthday. Amongst the Kyrgyz this is a an important rite of passage for a child growing up, and I felt very honoured and privileged to have been invited to [...]
The unusual combination of letters in “Kyrgyzstan” often draws jokes and remarks featuring “Alphabet Soup” and a potential high score in Scrabble, (a basic 30 without any bonus for using a double or triple letter, or word, squares - needing a well placed opening, the only K, the Z and both the Y tiles – not to mention the additional bonus [...]
If you travel along the road from Bishkek to Issyk Kul, as you leave behind the roadside yurt encampment of Holodniya Voda (Cold Water) and enter Boom Gorge there is a monument on the right hand side of the road – where a series of whitewashed stones display the date 1916, which commemorates Urkun – an important event in [...]
Today, I learned something new. That’s not unusual, as Tom Jones used to sing … In fact, a piece of “homespun advice” that one of my schoolteachers gave us when I was young, was that we shouldn’t think of education as a process that finished the day we left school. It is a lifelong, on-going [...]
Everyone kept telling me to “Come on in, the water is lovely and warm!” I wasn’t convinced, especially after I had walked over to the water’s edge and dipped my toes into the lapping waves … The name of the lake, Issyk Kul, might mean Warm Lake in Kyrgyz, but that doesn’t really relate to [...]
At the end of last week there were reports of an Unidentified Flying Object, (UFO), sighted over central Bishkek. This raised quite a bit of interest … but in fact it is not the first such incident in recent years. Strange lights in the sky, flying torpedoes on Lake Issyk Kul … and, perhaps the [...]
I was faced with an interesting dilemma this week … I received a Skype message from a colleague, the director of another tour company based here in Bishkek. He wanted to swap links between our websites.
To people of my generation the word “spam” has several different meanings. It was, (and still is), for example, the brand name for a tinned, cooked, luncheon meat, first launched as long ago as 1937. The name SPAM, (it should be in capital letters), could be derived from “spiced ham” or “spiced pork and ham“, [...]
My black tie has been getting an awful lot of use this year. I suppose that my particular annus horribilis, (the Brits, and anyone with a Classical education, will get the reference and understand), started in January when a close friend, Roma, died suddenly. I was sitting at my computer in my office when I [...]
