Archive sections: ‘Life In Kyrgyzstan’
The other day I had give a statement to the police, (nothing serious, I was a witness … see An attempted robbery), and I had to fill in a form. Fortunately, a young policewoman was delegated to help me. She asked me questions, I answered, and she typed the information onto the form. I also [...]
Charles Dodgson was a Mathematics Don at Christchurch College in Oxford, but he is better known by his alter ego, Lewis Carroll and for the Alice stories (Alice in Wonderland and Alice Through the Looking Glass) which he made up to while away the hours on Summer afternoons and entertain the young Alice Liddell as [...]
You can imagine my surprise when, one day in 1999, I sat at my computer and downloaded the latest episode of Alistair Cooke’s letter from America and read the opening sentence: “The name Bishkek does not come trippingly off the tongue … “
Alistair Cooke, my hero, was keen on two particular sports, and almost every year he would feature these in one, (but just one each year), of his “Letter from America” broadcasts. These two sports were: Tennis and Golf. Although I am not aficionado of either sport, I knew enough to make sense of whatever he [...]
Today is Friday and the acronym TGIF comes to mind – Thank God It’s Friday! There’s a corollary that often goes with it: OGIM – Oh God, It’s Monday. The idea, of course, is that the weekend starts on Friday evening … tomorrow is Saturday: a day of rest and relaxation, sport and parties … [...]
It is one of the curious features of Bishkek’s cultural life that there are lots of things are going on – but it’s almost impossible to know about them before it’s too late. “Mouth-to-mouth” propaganda seems to be the most widely used channel of announcing events and often it’s only sometime after an event has [...]
The other day I was talking to an English speaking Russian and she wanted to impress me with how well she spoke English and started telling me jokes in English. Now humour and poetry are two of the hardest things to translate. Poetry, because you have to worry about so many different things:, rhyme and [...]
Food is a question of taste – as the saying goes: “One man’s meat is another man’s poison”. Don’t expect the food in Kyrgyzstan to be the highlight of your trip – but that does not mean that you have landed up in a culinary wasteland!
Audrey Hepburn may have enjoyed Breakfast at Tiffany’s but recently I have started enjoying “Breakfast at Begemot”. Breakfast is the first meal of the day and, in English, the word is a composite bringing together the two words “break” and “fast” and accurately so it describes the meal that “breaks the fast” since the previous [...]
The sports columns of the popular newspaper Vecherniye Bishkek, (“Evening Bishkek”), once carried the headline “The Incomprehensible Game” – Rugby Football. It may well be that the game with it’s complex and complicated system of laws, scoring, scrums, lineouts, tries, penalties and the host of technicalities, (such having to pass the ball backwards while trying to run [...]
