Archive sections: ‘Life In Kyrgyzstan’
One morning in October 1987, I woke up at six o’clock as usual, had a bite of breakfast and got into my car to drive to school. As I emerged from the garage, I got a bit of a shock – there was absolute chaos everywhere I looked, high winds, branches of trees all over [...]
Zamira, who runs the tour department, got married on Saturday. After the official registration ceremony, the “molodyosh” – “young people” – went on the traditional walkabout to several different spots around the city, parks, war memorial, etc., to promenade and be seen. In the meantime the parents and other guests rushed to the restaurant where [...]
I am sometimes embarrassed by the fact that, although I have lived here for some fifteen years, I still can’t speak Kyrgyz. My excuse is that I don’t get the practice … I live in Bishkek, in the North of the country, where everyone speaks Russian, or they want practice speaking in English. That’s not [...]
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 [...]
I have a friend whose favourite phrase seems to be: “It’s simple!” My response is normally, “No it’s not. Nothing in life is simple.”
Isn’t it annoying when you get a tune in your head and you can’t get rid of it. When it happens to me I find that it is usually just a short phrase, maybe a line or two, from a song heard long, long ago. It goes round and round in my mind, repeating over [...]
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, [...]
During the Second World War, the battles raged in several different “theaters” around the world. Despite the fact that the United States entered the conflict after being caught “off-guard” by a surprise Japanese attack in the Pacific, for various reasons the war in the European Theater was given priority. That’s not to say that the [...]
