Archive sections: ‘For the Record’
I’m off to Naryn for my regular monthly visit to the guesthouse. The main road from Bishkek to Naryn offers a wide variety of landscapes, and although I know the route well, travelling it about 150 times, (at least once a month over the last twelve and a half years), I never tire of the [...]
In the post about Izhkak Razzakov, I mentioned that after his death in 1979, his body was buried in the Kuntsevskom Cemetery in Moscow, but that in 2000 his remains were returned to his native Kyrgyzstan and interred in the Ala Archa cemetery in Bishkek. Somebody wrote me an email saying that they were confused – as [...]
I was coming home from a meeting in the Hyatt tonight and it was bitterly cold, (-6 degrees Celsius, but with a wind chill factor that made it feel like -10), and slippery underfoot, so I decided that even though it wasn’t far, I would take a precaution and get a taxi. As we drove [...]
There are no Lords, Ladies, Knights, Barons or Earls in Kyrgyzstan, and the Order of Lenin is no longer issued, but the country does have a system for honouring its citizens (and foreigners) and recognizing their contributions to society and the development of various aspects of the social, economic, intellectual and cultural life of the [...]
Yesterday. December 11th, was International Mountain Day. If that caught you by surprise, don’t worry about it … it seems to have gone almost unnoticed, even here in Kyrgyzstan where something like 94% of the country is classified as mountainous and the demarcation of December 11th as International Mountain Day is actually the result of [...]
An ombudsman is an official charged with representing the interests of the public by investigating and addressing complaints reported by individual citizens. The word comes originally from the Old Swedish “umbudsmann” meaning representative, and the first official use of the term seems to date from a 1241 Danish Law. The modern use of the term began in Sweden, with the [...]
For the record – here is the text of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights:
Wednesday morning I had a meeting in the offices of KATO, (the Kyrgyz Association of Tour Operators). Just down the corridor from their office is that of the company that prints the stamps for the Kyrgyz office. A short while the executive Director of KATO took me into their office and we spent about 30 [...]
For several years now, some of the CBT, (Community Based Tourism), groups around the country have organized during the height of the Summer season, (July and August), small festivals in their own neighbourhoods. They have proved to be popular with tourists and locals alike, but are rarely crowded events so there is a good chance for people to get [...]
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 [...]
