Spam filters – friend or foe?

I have to admit that, although I understand why they were developed and people use them, I hate spam filters.

Please, don’t misunderstand me – I hate Spam!, but I probably hate spam filters even more!  They are like computers and technology in general … they offer so much and when they work they appear to be wonderful and really useful … the trouble is that they don’t always work – or, at least don’t work well, and do what they are intended to do.

Not long ago, for example, we received a booking at the hotel … by email … and responded with a confirmation.  Then we received a message asking for a response to the earlier message.  We didn’t understand – we had responded and replied accordingly with another copy of the confirmation.  A little while later, our first message was returned to us – it had been rejected by the receiver’s server which “thought” it was spam.  So we sent it again with a cover note from a different address … this one apparently got through because the client replied – apologetically – thanking us for the reply but saying that, as he hadn’t heard from us he had since booked with another hotel.

If it had been “snail mail” the postman wouldn’t have filtered the communication, he would have delivered the message and it would then be for me to decide what to do with it … read it, act on it, reply to it or file it – for example in the waste bin.  It would only be “returned to sender”, (as Elvis Presley put it), if the address proved to be wrong or for some reason it was rejected by the recipient (although that might involve a special “return fee”).

There is of course, a difference between the postal service and email.  The customer who posts a letter pays for the service – he concludes a contract with the postal service who have an obligation to deliver it to the address they have been given.  In the case of email, the situation is not so clear cut … but it seems to me that, in principle, it’s the same … the internet providers have an obligation to deliver the message if at all possible.

In this particular case the recipient – or his Internet Service Provider – had installed a filter which not only marked a message as “suspected spam”, but actually rejected it.  The one good thing about the filter used in this particular case is that it bothered to tell the sender, (that is, us), that it had been unable to deliver the message … so that we could, at least, try to do something about it.

Now, my email engine comes with an automatic spam filter … and I can’t turn it off … but, at least it receives the messages and siphons them off to a special folder.  That means I can then, at least, look at the messages and decide what I want to do with them … and, to be fair, most of the time – that is more than 50% or the time – the messages can indeed be considered spam … BUT … a number of them are not.  In my opinion a substantial number … OK, in my opinion, even one message is substantial … in the example above it actually cost us business.  Depending on the content of the message – it could be even worse.

As I said … I hate spam … and I get a lot of spam – but, to be fair, it’s not as much as 90%.

For the record: it is said that the first email spam, was an advert for a presentation by Digital Equipment Corporation and was sent out to all users on ARPANET (several hundred users) on 3rd May, 1978.  It wasn’t until the 1990s that the use of the internet for mass advertising really took off … and it’s estimated that nowadays something in excess of 90% of email messages constitute spam.  It is also said that most spam is received in America and Europe – which isn’t all that surprising … but we get our fair share of it here in Central Asia as well.

I go through the messages in my spam box and look at each one … and, although as I said, some of the messages are not in fact spam, most of them are … and are duly ignored or deleted.

Amongst the spam messages … there are a number which are particularly galling.  Not the adverts that are trying to attract my attention … they are unsolicited emails so in one way count as spam but because sometimes – just sometimes – they contain interesting or useful information – so they don’t really qualify under the definition as being “unwanted” emails.

The ones I am thinking of are the “scams“.

I recently came across an interesting feature article: Internet Scams That Still Fool People.  They weren’t all email scams, but the vast majority were … and I have received, (and ignored), examples of most of them.  Included among them were:

The so-called “Nigerian” scam:

This is one of the most common all Internet scams and the name refers to the fact that it first came to prominence in messages claiming to come from Nigeria.  The scam apparently has a history that long predates the internet … by maybe a hundred or so.   

It is often claimed that the author is something like a “rich Nigerian prince”, who want to share some of his fortune for philanthropic purposes, or as an investment; or maybe it’s a banker who gain access to a large sum of money in a frozen account, … or well, you have probably received several of these so I don’t need to enumerate the various versions that I have see.  The catch is that, in order to receive your share of the money that he is offering, you have to cover various fees – for example, in order to transfer it into a new account.

In the days before the internet, of course, such messages were delivered by post … and apparently, some people are still using the post.  Some time ago now, I received a visit in the office from an acquaintance, a lady of some age and experience, intelligent and well connected – by no means a simple person – who was in charge of a small charity which had only recently opened and been registered.  She was in a somewhat “excited state”.

After we had completed all the customary pleasantries without which a meeting cannot start, she reached into her bag and pulled out an envelope … and somewhat breathlessly handed it to me read.  I was somewhat taken aback … it was in English, which is why she had brought it to me … although she had tried reading it, the only thing that she had seemed to have registered she really understood was the mention of “1,400,000 dollars”.  It seems that one of her relatives knew a little English and had said something about the sender wanting to share it with her charity.   What, she asked me, did she have to do to get the money?

I have absolutely no idea how the sender had got the name and address of the charity – as I said, it had only just started work and been registered.  I felt really sorry for her as I explained that it was 99.999999999…% certain to be an aphorism - a con trick or scam …  showing her copies on my computer of similar letters that we had received by email.   Even faced with this evidence and agreeing with me about the dubious nature of the missive, I could see in her face the reluctance to accept, after all – as they say here: Nadezhda oomeraiyet posledniye  – “Hope is the last to die”.

Incidentally – I have also seen a similar letter in Russian…

Similar to this are the “inheritence” scams … someone I have I have never heard of has died and left me lots of money … yeah?, really?  Is that likely?

Some of the scams are honest enough to admit that, no … the legacy is not for you, but they want you (or me) to pretend to be a long lost relative and claim the inheritance.  I suppose that if someone agrees to go along with this and participate in such a scheme it makes it more difficult to back out (having already made themselves a potential hostage to blackmail) or complain to the authorities when somebody starts asking for payments to pay “fees” and make the necessary arrangements.

The “Congratulations – Your a Winner!” scam

A congratulatory email will land in your inbox stating that you’ve won a prize … maybe a large jackpot in a foreign lottery, and inviting you to claim your prize.  

The catch is that all you need to do is pay a “processing fee” …

For the record: Lottery holders are pretty clear about who is eligible to win the lottery and how they have to win it. Usually, foreigners cannot win national lotteries, and Lottery organizers would not contact winners via email – even if they knew the address – to inform them that they have won.  

I first came to Kyrgyzstan I had a UK lottery ticket which was still valid after I had left the country … so I left it with a friend, (trusting, of course, to his honesty and fairness), because, if it did win – I wouldn’t be able to claim the prize.

You may never have bought a ticket … but that doesn’t matter because, perhaps,  it’s you’re email address that has won, having been selected at random … and, I suppose, that helps to explain how they got your email. 

Similar to that is the:

“You’ve won an award” scam

This is sent to businesses … and they’ve obviously got the address from a business directory somewhere.

We often get, for example, letters that we have won an award as “Gold Star” hotel … perhaps based on reports, nominations and recommendations from previous guests.  It’s all free – there is no charge … no administration fees … but we have to go and attend the ceremony in some far flung place … well, it is for us … the costs of transport, accommodation, meals and the various events at the function do mount up – and are presumably inflated by hidden fees and commissions..

It’s not exactly an internet scam, but here there has been a spate of SMS telephone scams … and another acquaintance told me how they had received a call saying that such and such a company is running a promotional campaign … a lottery competition in which their number has been drawn as a winner …  but to receive the prize they had to pay “the tax” which they could do by paying it into a special account and when they  had done that, then their telephone account would be credited with the “prize”.

There was always the added pressure that the campaign was about to close … so they had to do everything that day … yes … right … and the “tax” account would be cleared out before anyone realized that their phone account hadn’t been credited with the prize money.

As I often tell the kids, as a general rule – and not just for the Internet – anything that claims you’ve won, when you never entered in the first place, is a scam.

As the saying goes: If it seems too good to be true – it probably is!

The Lucrative Job Offer:

Apparently many scammers are using popular job sites to find potential scam victims – but it seems that they’ll also send out messages to anyone on a list on the off chance.  They send a message claiming they have an unbeatable job offer … for you … but the catch is that in order to be considered for it, you’ll need to give money up front and provide your personal information for “tax purposes”.

Yeah!  Right! that sounds likely doesn’t it.

Phishing expeditions

Phishing is a common form of scam that uses fake websites and credentials to try and trick someone into providing personal information – like account numbers and passwords.  These mimic messages from real websites or firms … banks, ebay, on-line stores and so on.  They look exactly like the “real thing”, using all the logos, graphics, layout and so on … except that the links you are invited to click on take you to a phoney site where, once again, everything looks real … but the information that the user types in goes straight to the scammers, (who then use it to change the password on the real site, empty the account and steal the person’s identity to use elsewhere).

I really hate getting these pretending to be ebay or some other site that I don’t use … it’s so obvious that it’s a scam.

Once I did get one from someone pretending to be a bank that I do use … but it seemed so strange that they would use email to contact me like this by email, (especially as they have an extremely convoluted security system for their internet banking service), and so the first thing I did was to check the links … and sure enough, they were fake … so I sent the bank a message along the lines of, “I thought you would like to know that I received this …”, together with a with a copy of the email.  I am not sure what surprised me most about this incident, that a phishing expedition would be mounted on customers of a Kyrgyz bank here in Bishkek – or that the bank never even acknowledged the email – yet alone, as far as I am aware did anything about it.

The plant:

The article also mentioned the fake virus scan that, instead of identifying and eliminating viruses on your hard drive,  actually installs a virus on your machine … perhaps an example of Ransomware  which threatens to trash your datafiles if you don’t cough up the dough … I understand that there are sites that manage to do this by getting the surfer to click on particular links that then download and run the programme.  Although that’s not strictly on topic as it’s an on-line scam … we do seem to get a lot of strange files sent as attachments … and many of them are more than just a bit suspect.

I once received a notice to appear in court in the United States, purporting to come from a firm of lawyers who were acting as the “clerk to the court” with the warning that if I didn’t turn up then the judge would decide the case in my absence … the relevant paperwork about the case was in the “attached file”.  If I had any questions I could “get in touch” and was given an address to contact.

As I sat wondering what on earth it was talking about … a court case? … in Texas? … and ignoring the temptation to open the file I moved down the inbox to read the rest of the mail.  By the end of the list I had two more similar emails … from the same email address … but with different cases being heard on different days … and “signed” by different people.

Unlike the ordinary Phishing attacks, the email address and the links quoted in the message all looked fine … until I did a Google search on the firm … and discovered that it was a good, well established, reputable, large firm – with an office in the appropriate city – the web address for the home page of the site was correct, but the signatories were all probably phony in that they weren’t listed on the site and there was still something wrong with the email address …   and then, when I got the hotel, I found two more similar, but slightly different, messages waiting for me …

I decided that I was being shouted at … loud and clear … SCAM! SCAM! SCAM! (… “and what I say three times is true”!!!)

… but, the interesting thing about ths incident (an the reson I am writing about as a plant and not a phishing attack), was that one of the messages on one of the three computers which received the messages … was picked up by one of the virus scanners installed as “infected” … oddly enough the other messages all passed the malware scans – even when tested with the same scanner.

I write to the law firm because I thought they would like to know that their name was being used in this way … and someone apparently found a way to attach a fake email address to their server … interestingly enough they was no response – not even an acknowledgement.  And this is a firm where a former President of the United States apparently used to work as a student intern.

The article went on to list a number of other scams, but as they basically operated on line and didn’t involve emails, I’ll pass over them here.

I think, however, that they missed some  … perhaps one of them was supposed to be number 15 on their list, (it said there were 15, but there were only 14 – I checked … several times).  One is what I call the:

Help me! scam

You receive an email apparently from someone you know who claims to be somewhere away from home and have been robbed, maybe they are in hospital, and they are totally devoid of funds, credit cards and any other visible means of support.  Can they borrow some money which they will repay you when they get back home.  Please send them by Western Union or some other service $x.  If you reply then they provide you with some tidbits of personal information to prove that they are who they say they are … but it’s not true … maybe their wallet has been stolen … maybe an on-line account has been hacked … and maybe they know enough to know that you cannot contact them in any other way (maybe the person is away from home, traveling).

Then there is what I call the:

Credit card order:

This is something that we get two or three times a day … a booking or request for services … usually quite a valuable order … and to make it more attractive the “client” offers to pay in full … by credit card.  The trouble is that if you take the booking then either:

1.) they’ll cancel and ask for a refund – but ask for it to be sent to a different bank account – maybe their is a problem with the credit card they used originally and the account has been closed …  or …

2) can we do them a favour and pay a bill for them – add the cost to our bill and add a commission to pay ourselves for the trouble – and … or …

Well, you get the idea … they’ll want you to do something … so that they can get their hands on the money which is presumably coming from a stolen credit card.

Fortunately, the banking rules here are quite strict … although exceptions can be made, the banks basically want the card holder present during the transaction, whilst the card is swiped through the terminal and to sign the slip … and they tell us that refunds can only be made to the same source … and payments to third parties abroad attract a stinging “non-residents” tax (unless you have the relevant paperwork … which, of course, is not available) … so even if we manage to get past the initial stage of the correspondence … we’ve got a fairly easy let-out … without actually having to tell someone that we think they are a crook.

I say, “if we get past the initial stage” … it is actually getting harder to spot some of these scams early on … as the perpetrators are getting cleverer and cleverer.  It used to be, for example, that:

• when a message was typed in UPPER CASE LETTERS that was a sure give away that something was amiss … but nowadays they seem to have found the caps lock key,
• they used to refer to “your country” or “your place”, or order tickets for a flight between Johannesburg to New York via London – and back (… why on earth they would they want to order those tickets for that itinerary from a travel agent in Central Asia????), but nowadays they actually customize the messages to refer in some way to Kyrgyzstan …
• they used to have email addresses from a generic free provider like gmail or yahoo, but now thy use other addresses which are either not so obviously from such a general third party server, but they even manage to hijack addresses off real servers …
• they used to tell you up front the whole story – “we’ll pay in full in advance by credit card” … but now they may not say anything about payment in the first email … but wait for a reply and then confirm “Yes, that’s fine … please charge my credit card … here are the details …”

… and so on …

These days I am even getting these messages in Russian … but not yet in Kyrgyz  although I suppose that this is probably just a question of time.

Although a lot of these scam messages are detected by the spam filters … unfortunately not all of them are … a fair number get through to the regular inbox … and then I still have to go through the spam box to see if any messages have been wrongly identified … to I can’t escape these scams altogether anyway …  so, perhaps you’ll understand why I say that I hate spam filters as much as, if not more than the spam itself.

The Google search engine warning email creates “a sequence of emotions … panic, fear, confusion, relief, irritation, then back to confusion.”

I was surprised the other day to receive an email from a firm based in the UK offering professional translation services … it said:

We had a message from Google about unnatural links pointing to our site, and we are currently in the process of cleaning our link profile. We believe the link from your site may be potentially harming our website rankings as we believe it appears unnatural. You may have been requested to put it there by our old SEO company.

Our website domain is www.xxx.xx.xx

As we will be sending Google a list of web addresses we believe to be adversely affecting our site, I wanted to give you the opportunity to remove our link so I can remove you from our list. I don’t want Google to look at your site negatively because it was on our list, so I wanted to give you a chance to remove the link.

Please let me know when you have done it so I can remove you from the list.

Many thanks for your time, it’s really appreciated.

It certainly created in me “a sequence of emotions” which went something like: “panic, fear, confusion, relief, irritation, then back to confusion.”

• “What on earth,” I thought to myself, “is an ‘unnatural link’”?
• “Who on earth are xxx.xx.xx? – I don’t remember linking to their site?”
• What’s in this implied threat of submitting a list to Google which might cause them “to look at my site negatively”?

In answer to the first question, apparently the phrase “unnatural links” refers to:

artificial links mainly intended to manipulate a page’s ranking. These can include purchased links or links created by scrapers and spammers that attach themselves to your site under the radar and potentially link your site to another in a bad neighborhood of the internet.” … whatever “scrapers” and “bad neighborhood of the internet” means.

And also, For the record, a “scraper” is “a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites using web scraping. The purpose of creating such a site can be to collect advertising revenue or to manipulate search engine rankings by linking to other sites to improve their search engine ranking.”

This surprised me somewhat because I don’t include links, and I have certainly never been paid to provide a link – even though I have received some such offers by email.  I tend to include a link either to show my source or to a site where there is a lot of additional information (and I want to save myself a lot of typing).

So, having done a quick Google search and discovered this … I turned my attention to the second question.  As I said, I didn’t remember creating any link to this site so I had to go looking through all 1500 or so posts to see if I could find it.  Fortunately my blogging software found it fairly quickly.

The offending link was in a postcard from 2011 about making toasts at a dinner party, or other similar event.  It opened with a reference to The Loyal Toast and went on to consider other traditional forms.  I went onto to consider ways of saying “Cheers!” in different languages and provided links to five websites which had lists of such phrases – the ‘offending’ link being one of them.

Obviously, at the time, I thought this was appropriate … and I still do.  So, why is it considered “unnatural”.  It seems to me that the accusation comes from someone (at Google or the translation service) who hasn’t looked at the link in context.

Still, when I clicked on the link in the postcard … it didn’t work but took me to the front page of the translation service’s website – maybe the page I was referring to has since been removed … so that made the decision about how to react to the request easier … I deleted the link … after all, it was superfluous as it no loner did what I had intended it to do.

Turning to the third question … I admit that spammers and scrapers are an annoying nuisance … but is this the right way to deal with them?

More or less everyday ianbek receives between 20 and 30 comments on posts … many with links back to other sites that have little or nothing to do with the content of the post – and they get dumped. The system I use is set up so that I have to approve comments before they get published and so I look at all of them in turn and just occasionally I find one that is relevant and so is published – but most of them are simply deleted as SPAM.

Occasionally, however, there is something in the comment and I find a useful link to another site, which I think might be interesting to visitors to ianbek … so it gets approved and posted.  Everything else is ignored or trashed.  It takes time and effort but it seems to “go with the territory” … it’s all “part and parcel” of running a ‘blog’.

Actually, it is actually quite pleasant to get receive a link back from someone who has found a postcard interesting and wants to share it with others.

The fact that it is supposed to help my page ranking in Search Engines such as Google is a bonus … but I suspect it the effect it has in my particular case is marginal. I do appreciate, however, that for some people it is “big business” … HOWEVER … It seems odd for sites, (such as that of the translation service) to be penalized – or even be “threatened” of being penalized – by Google based on the “quality” of individual links … after all, owners of websites have virtually no control over who links back to them.

By all means, search out the “scrapers” and “spammers” and do what is possible to limit their effect … but the efforts should surely be to limit their activities rather than this “blunderbuss” approach.

To add insult to injury, the daily “alerts” that I receive from Google – based on terms such as Kyrgyzstan or Tourism will still, sometimes, include links to such sites.

The Front Page of Wikipedia in Kyrgyz

Love it or hate it … “Wikipedia has drastically affected how we access and share information on the internet” … so says Justin Franco in his brief History of Wikipedia (in two and a half minutes”) on youtube.

Wikipedia was launched on 15th January , 2001, although it was based on a concept and technology of a “wiki” pioneered in 1994 by Ward Cunningham.  (The idea of an on-line encyclopedia was first suggested a little earlier than that, but the main feature of Wikipedia, (that it should be “open source” – that is, it is available to the general public for use and/or modification from its original design  ), was first proposed in 1999.

Currently it hosts over 24 million articles written in 285 languages with contributions from from over 28 million registered users.   The first version was in English, (which now stands at over four million articles), but French, German, Catalan, Swedish, and Italian editions – began within months; between March and May.  It is now one of the top five websites accounting for almost an eighth of all internet traffic.

One of the more recent languages is Kyrgyz, with over 20,000 pages and more than six and a half thousand registered users – although only about a hundred of them seem to regularly active in terms of making edits.

Half way through 2011 there were less than 2000 … at the start of 2012 there were just 4500 … now there are over 20,000.  That’s seems pretty impressive … although it is true that some other languages are larger and have shown faster growth.

• The Tajik version has just over 10,500 articles;
• the Uzbek version, which also saw rapid growth in 2012 but has also been blocked by the government from time to time,  has just over 70,000;
• the Kazakh version of Wikipedia saw the number of articles double in 2012 and now has just over 200,000.  It is unique in that ti features three different scripts, Cyrillic, Latin and Arabic;
• the Russian Wikipedia has almost 950,000 and saw over 100,000 articles added last year.  It is the 10th largest of the Wikipedia family

The growth spurt was triggered, at least in part, by a campaign here in Kyrgyzstan – including Wiki Week, held in May last year and sponsored by, amongst others, the Soros Foundation, which aimed to get groups to post articles on the encyclopedia.

This move was welcomed by  the Commission on the State Language … although apparently it needs to review the information it already has to comply with the internal standards set by Wikipedia.  That comment struck me as interesting because one of the criticisms that is often levied at the project is it can be moderated by ordinary internet users.  The authors of articles in most encyclopedias tend to experts in their own field, specially commissioned to submit entries.  This difference in approach has led some people to question the validity of the data presented in its pages, although some studies of the larger English and German language versions suggest that it is pretty reliable and “can be trusted”.

All that is well and good … but the Kyrgyz language version presents me (and I presume others) with a problem in that I don’t know Kyrgyz.  Some of the articles are of specific relevance to Kyrgyzstan, (for example about Kyrgyz history and historical characters), and however interesting they might be … they are unintelligible to me … I have to get someone to translate them.

They are obviously more detailed, (that is they are longer and seem to contain more information), than their counterparts in the English and Russian versions, where they exist …  I can at least scan the Russian version and where I have difficulty then Google Translate can come to my aid and I only need to resort to a human translator about certain convoluted passages.

I look forward to the time when Google Translate comes out with and supports the Kyrgyz language.  There has been talk about it for some time and I believe a Beta version is undergoing trials … President Atambaev is keen on the project and I hope that means it will soon be widely available.

The fact that Google are possibly looking to place their Central Asia headquarters here in Kyrgyzstan must, I hope, be a positive sign indicating that this won’t be long in coming.

Meanwhile Here is Justin Franco’s video clip from youtube about the History of Wikipedia … in about two and a half minutes:

Finding Chok Tal on peakery.com (*)

During the week I had an interesting lesson in the power of the internet.  One of my friends on Facebook posted the following status on their wall:

It’s international book week. The rules: Grab the closest book to you, turn to page 52, post the 5th sentence as your status. Don’t mention the title. Copy the rules as part of your status:

In 1955, the English linguist J.L. Austin, who had been a cryptographer in World War II, delivered a series of lectures at Harvard under the title _How to Do Things with Words_. 

Two other people had responded with:

Can they, as soldiers who attempted to assassinate their leader, be recalled as patriots?

and

Even his red-haired / beggar girl possessed / my breasts.

Anyway, I had seen a similar post last year and  taken part so I thought, OK.  Although I was tempted to go and look for something exotic, on my desk was a copy of Mountains of Kyrgyzstan which I had been using to look up something about the Toktogul Reservoir.  OK … it said “Grab the closest book to you …”, so I did – turned to page 52 and counted down 5 sentences … and this is what I found … and posted:

Its highest point is 4770m.

I also  added a brief comment about how “sometimes you get something interesting, but sometimes …”

To my amazement, I received a message in reply from a former colleague; someone that I seen for almost twenty years and who, at least as far as I am aware, has never set foot in the Kyrgyz Republic:

Something to do with Peak Chok Tal.

Now that took me aback … to be honest, I didn’t know if that was correct, or not. Hey!, it was after all  the result of an arbitrary algorithm – post the 5th line on page 52 – not necessarily something like: chose and post a meaningful, memorable or  inspiring sentence.

As it happens, the name Chok Tal is very specific and  typically Kyrgyz, so I went and checked … and discovered that, sure enough, the sentence was in the middle of a paragraph describing the mountain ranges that ring Lake Issyk Kul: the Kungey Ala Too to the North andTerskey Ala Too to the South.  This particular sentence was part of the description of the Kungey Ala Too, the highest point of which is indeed Chok Tal – the 18th highest mountain in Kyrgyzstan.

As I said, as far as I am aware my friend has never been to Kyrgyzstan and I am certain he is not a mountaineer … so how could he possibly have come up with that titbit of information – and so quickly.  The answer, of course, is obvious … “Google it” …  three of the ten entries refer directly yo Chok Tal – the others mountains it returns are in Bolivia, Peru, Tibet and Nepal.

For the record: he also added the comment: “Can tell you were a maths teacher not an english one – it’s?? ” … Well, he was also a Maths teacher … but I think I would have to give him top marks for that subject “Library Skills” – I wonder if they still teach that?.

Now, to be honest, I can’t say that I have ever particularly noticed or singled out the peak Chok Tal on my various visits to Issyk Kul, (but I will now make a special effort to do so in future), and I don’t have any photographs of it.  I went looking on the internet and found precious few, but there are a few interesting ones, taken by the user Strootz, posted on Panoramio.

(*) For the record: On peakery.com, they quote the height as 4466m

Links.kg

I am sometimes asked about my “sources” for these postcards – including being asked by the author of one of the standard guidebooks to the country … the answer is simple: I have been here for sixteen years with so much more access to information than people have back home: books, TV, newspapers, websites … people.  Much of this is in Russian – which I can read – or Kyrgyz – which I can’t read, but I can get help with.

I also read a wide variety of blogs about life here in Kyrgyzstan … especially one that are written by other ex-pats.  There are a lot of news services or sites offering analysis on current events and a whole host of blogs, (available in Russian and Kyrgyz), that are written by locals … and I scan quite a few of those virtually every day as well.  That’s not to mention a variety of blogs written by travellers outlining their experiences here.

That’s one of the great advantages that the internet brings to us in this modern world – instant access to huge amounts of information!  On the other hand, there is so much information available that, to be honest, I  sometimes feel that I am suffering from information overload.

In a way, that’s one of the reasons we created the portal website www.links.kg, to collect together the many different resources provided by visitors to Kyrgyzstan.

Some of the resources that I have available to me are quite specific, concentrating on News and Current Events, or on History, or on ecological issues.  Some of the most interesting, however, are the blogs written by individuals with personal accounts of their experiences, and their take or interpretation of the stories.

In response to one particular enquiry, I thought I would take the time to pay tribute to my fellow inhabitants of the Kyrgyzstan blogosphere and list just some of the myriad of different ones that from time to time I dip in and out of.

Some of them are written by people who have now left Kyrgyzstan, but I have included them as I found their posts written about their time here both interesting and informative.

(Disclaimer: Simply because I have listed a site – it doesn’t mean that I endorse everything that you’ll find there … but I think that they are all interesting and worth a look!)

.

Alec in Bishkek

alecinbishkek | Just another WordPress.com site

Hopefully, through this blog, you’ll be able to get a flavour of what life is like – warts and all – in Bishkek and Kyrgyzstan. If it doesn’t inspire you to come out here, perhaps you can enjoy it vicariously!

http://alecinbishkek.wordpress.com/

.

.

.

 ..

Bishkek Blog

Bishkek blog: life in the Kyrgyzstan capital

Blog about spending eight months in Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan teaching English and learning Russian.

http://bishkekblog.wordpress.com/

..

.

The Golden Road to Samarquand

The Golden Road to Samarqand

Written by Amira Lace.  This blog’s been around since the end of 2004 and has followed her around the US and the world.  She is currently living in Tokmok where she and her family “are learning languages researching dispute resolution and Dungan food.”  There’s a bit about homeschooling, a lot about books, and even more about Central Asia.  She also has posts about Central Asian food and games.

http://amiralace.blogspot.com/

…

Ivory Pomegranite

Ivory Pomegranate

I’m Kirstin. I’m currently living in Bishkek, Krygzystan, attempting to transform this website from a baking blog to a travel/expat blog (among other things, of course)

http://ivorypomegranate.com/

..

.

Jane's Daily Blah

 Jane’s daily blah

My name is Jane. I’m a traveler, photographer, animal lover, and teacher of English as a second language. I’ve lived in Russia and Kyrgyzstan, and I’m currently living and working in South Korea. The last time I was in the US, I helped my mom set up a cat rescue called Brierpatch Cats, located in Waycross, GA.

http://janesdailyblah.blogspot.com

.…

A jaunt in the Kyrgyz Republic

A jaunt in the Kyrgyz Republic

The misadventures of a teacher of English as a Foreign Language, here in “the Switzerland of Central Asia.”

http://kyrgyzjaunt.blogspot.com/

.

.

.

Keen on Kyrgyzstan

Keen on Kyrgyzstan

Dennis Keen was a Fulbright scholar here in Central Asia to research Eagle Hunters, but he has entries on a number of other topics as well.

http://keenonkyrgyzstan.com/

 .

.

.

Kurt in K-Stan

Kurt in K-Stan

Kurt was in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, on a Fulbright fellowship, learning Russian and studying the nation’s language policies and how they affect its education system.

http://kurtinkstan.wordpress.com/

.

.

For those who read Russian, then this site is also  worth a visit:

Kloop

kloop.kg

The Kloop Internet portal was launched in June 2007 with financial support from Holland and  consists of two main segments: journalism (citizen journalism, where individuals can write and port stories) and a blogging platform.  The blogs are in Russian and Kyrgyz.

http://kloop.kg/blogs/

The other day IO was talking to someone and we exchanged email addresses.  Mine, for example,  is ianclaytor@gmail.com and so I duly dictated it to him, in Russian: “ian claytor, (all one word), sobachka, gmail dotchka com”.

He asked me, “How do you say in English, ‘sobatchka’?”  I answered, matter of factly, “at”.  He smiled.

Although it may not be surprising that “dotchka” and “dot” are equivalents, after all, the words are very similar … but “sobatchka” is not so easy to understand – as, in Russian it means “little dog”.

Anyway, that smile brought out the former teacher in me.  I sat and explained how nobody really knows where the symbol came from.  There are lots of theories.  Some scholars think that it comes from scribes in the 6th or 7th century trying to find a shorthand way to write the Latin word “ad” which means something like ‘at’, ‘to’ or ‘toward’, and so created a ligature – a sort of special character combining two others together.

It seems that the symbol was also used by merchants in the 16th century to stand for a unit of measure, the ‘amphora’ – which was a terrocotta jar used since ancient times for transporting wine or grain around the Mediterranean, and held about a thirtieth of a barrel.  It’s been found in Florentine accounts dating from 1536 and also, (with a slightly different meaning),  in Spanish and Portuguese texts.

It later came to take on the special meaning of “at” … as in “3 @ 1.5 = 4.5″, (3 at 1.5 which totals 4.5).  This proved to be so useful that the symbol appeared on the keyboard of some of the early typewriters towards the end of the nineteenth century, although by no means all of the designers of these new fangled devices saw fit to incorporate it.

Its modern day use in email addresses dates back to the very first email messages ever sent.  It was back in 1972 when a computer engineer called Ray Tomlinson was working on the ARPANet project, (which was precursor to what we now know and love – or hate – as the Internet).  He was writing protocol for sending messages between computers connected to network; what we would come to know as e-mail programs.  At first, it was easy to send messages to another computer in the immediate neighbourhood, with a direct connection, by simply referring to the computer name but, when they were some distance on the distributed network, then as well as the computer name it was necessary to say where it was located.  So, Tomlinson says,  he needed a symbol to separate the name and the location, and it needed to be one that wouldn’t be contained as part of a name.  Given its meaning of “at”, the “@” symbol seemed an obvious choice.

Although we tend to call it simply, “at”, the symbol has several different names – even in English: technically it is still known as the “amphora” but is more commonly referred to as “commercial at”  or simply the “at-sign“.  It ios also sometimes known in certain specific contexts as “whirlpool“, “fetch“, “snail” and “snabel“.  The last two are, in fact, borrowed from other languages, (snabel is Danish and basically means a letter ‘a’ with an elephant’s trunk).  It might be relatively easy to see where whirlpool and snail come from.

In a few cases, the name has retained an earlier historical association, (such as amphora in English, arrova in Catalan andarroba in Spain and Portugal).   In French it is sometimes called arobase, but no-one seems to know where this came from.

Many languages simply use the English word `at’, (possibly with some modification in pronunciation), when referring to the @ symbol.  In some cases, the name used is a direct translation of English “at”, for example in Arabic, (fi), Greek (sto), Icelandic (hjá) and Romanian (la).  The Japanese call it atto maaku (“at mark”).

In some languages, the name refers to the letter ‘a’ (or alpha): in Basque where it is called bildua (wrapped a), in Chinese quan A  (circled a), in Danish alfa-tegn and alpha-sign, in Dutch een a met een slinger (an ‘a’ with a swing), in French a enroule (coiled a), in Greenlandic aajusaq  (something like an a), in  Norwegian Krollalfa (Curly a), in Turkish there atre several similar versions: güzel a (beautiful a), özel a (special a), kuyruklu a (a with a tail), çengelli a (a with hook) and in Vietnamese a còng (bent a) and a móc (hooked a).  In Bosnian, Croatian and Serbian it is called ludo a, (“Crazy a”)

In many languages, the name of the symbol reflects some sort of imagery summoned up by the appearance of the character, often by associating it with some animal or object.

In many, for example, it is associated with a monkey, and in Kyrgyz it is known as maimylchka (monkey), although you are more likely to come across sobachka or et.   There are several other languages where the word for monkey is used, such as in Polish (malpa), Serbian (majmun) and Friesian (aapke, little monkey) and in German (affenschwanz).  Sometimes the name refers to a monkey swinging or hanging as in Dutch, (slingeraap, Swinging Monkey) and in German (klammeraffe, hanging monkey).

The snail seems to be a common image summoned up by the symbol. In French it is sometimes referred to as escargot , in Hebrew shablul, in Italian chiocciola and Korean, dalphaengi which all translate as “snail”.

It sometimes seems to be associated with a worm, for example, in Hungarian kukac and in Thai it is called ai tua yiukyiu, which means “the wiggling worm-like character”

If In Russian the @ symbol is called sobachka (Little dog), then Russian is not alone in this association.  In Armenian it is called shnik  which means little puppy.

In Poland the name kotek means little cat and the Swedes sometimes call the “@” symbol, Kattfot (cat-foot) or The Finns, on the other hand, use a variety of names connected with cats, such as miukumauku, (the sign of the meow)

Some images conjured up include a mouse, for example, in Mandarin Chinese, xiao lao-shu means little mouse and lao shu-hao means mouse sign.

In a few languages, it is associated with a bird, In Greek it is called papaki (duck) and in chaika (seagull)

Often the names may refer to a part of the body of an animal, such as the tail – for example, in Afrikaans and Dutch, (aapstert), Finnish (apinanhanta), Friesian (apesturtsje) the names all refer to monkeys’ tails.  In Finnish, hiirenhanta likens the symbol to a mouse’s tail; in Norwegian, grisehale  means “pig’s tail” and in Sweden, kattsvans, a cat’s tail.

Indeed, in Turkish the word tail (Ogon) is sometimes used without specifying which animal it belongs to.

It’s quite often to see an ear in the symbol.  In Swedish, for example, the name Elefantora  means Elephant’s ear, while the Poles refer to it as a pig’s ear (ucho s’wini)  More generic names are to be found in Arabic (Uthun), German (Ohr) and Turkish (Kulak).

In Dutch, there is even name which associates the symbol with a monkey’s testicles (!), (apeklootje).

Not all the images are based on animals.  In Danish zavinac  translates as Rollmop and some people say that it refers to pickled herrings.  The Turkish name gul refers to a rose and there are several that refer to cakes: Shtrudel  in Israel, Pljushka (a Russian pastry) in Russia, kanelbulle (a cinnamon bun) and a kringla (a pretzel) in Sweden.

Perhaps one of the hardest associations to understand is the Slovenian afna which refers to “a woman who overdresses, applies too much make-up, etc.”

The Indonesians, on the other hand simply call it uh.

.

As it happens, however, the name for the symbol that is used in Russian sobachka is not necessarily derived from imagery.  It just so happens that it dates from one of the early computer games which involved guiding a dog trough a maze, rather like a version of PacMan.  It was in the days before elaborate computer graphics and all the elements ion the game had to be portrayed using straight forward ASCII characters.

It just so happens that the symbol chosen to represent the little dog as he wandered around the maze was  … you’ve guessed it … @.

They use their search engine to monitor new pages posted on the internet and send an email when they find new results, (such as web pages, newspaper articles, or blog entries), that match the search term.

For general queries like “Kyrgyzstan”, the email is a summary of the new results which have appeared every day.  For specific topics, like “Silk Road Lodge”, there might not be an email every day, but whenever something new and relevant is published.

I have subscribed for a number of alerts to be sent to me.   Some keep me up to date with breaking news stories, (for example: about Kyrgyzstan” or “Kyrgyzstan Tourism”), whilst others are more specific, (for example: about “Celestial Mountains” or “Silk Road Lodge”), which helps alert me to what might be being said about us on the internet.

Most of the entries are pretty predictable but, just occasionally, I get a surprise.  For example, here’s one that I received the other day:

Intrigued, I clicked on the link and found that someone had posted a short clip about the hotel on youtube.   The clip lasts for just over a minute and consists of a slideshow of photos with a soundtrack of jazz music.  The place under the clip where the poster to place some commentary stated: “no description available“.  The clip finishes with the caption “Waiting for you in our comfortable hotel“.

That took me by surprise … as no-one connected with the hotel seemed to know anything about it.  I wondered, Who had posted the clip?  The user name for the person who posted the clip on the site was: nastena65.  I have no idea who nastena65 is … but a little bit of investigation suggests that it was a piece of coursework undertaken by a student on an information technology course.   Nastena65 has posted 3 clips so far, including this one.  One of the other two feature a couple of students speaking to the camera, in Russian, about a course that they are on; expressing their hopes and aspirations for what they hope to gain from the course.  The other shows another young girl speaking to camera, but this time in English.

This looks to me like the result of an exercise where the student would have to prepare a short clip which could advertise a business, (such as a shop, or hotel).   I remember that, as a teacher of Information Technology, we would often set students similar such tasks using such skills and IT tools that we had explored in previous lessons..

Usually, however, they stayed within the classroom.   We would consider the work and then assign a grade which would be duly recorded in the markbook and may well count towards a final course grade.  In this case, however, they have gone one step further and actually posted it onto the internet.

I don’t want to “rain of their parade”, but it might have a good idea if they had consulted us first.  Although I was happy to see this clip, I would have been happy to give a comment – that always went down well when I was marking such exercises.  For example, I might have noted that I am not sure where they got the photos they used and that although some of them are recent, others are clearly a few years old.  I would have been happy to provide some others, and then some comment would be possible about the ones they had chosen to include, and the ones they had chosen to leave out.

____________________

For the record, here is the clip:

.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1NhVUrLDarg.

When it came time for him to leave, we stood and shook hands.  He looked around a little bemused and asked “Gdye moi klootchiy?” – “Where are my keys?”.  I smiled to myself.  It is a question that I often ask myself … but, more often than not, it’s a different version of the question that I ask myself: “gdye moi atchkiy?” – “where are my glasses?”

I smile because these are two of the first phrases that I ever learned in Russian.

I had just agreed to come out here for a year and thought I had better try to get, at least, a few basic words and phrases of “the local language” under my belt, so I bought an introductory “teach yourself” course with cassette tapes to listen to with ”repeat after me” exercises.

That was OK, but it was still hard going.  The different alphabet was difficult to get used to, and then there seemed to be words and phrases that seemed so alien – well, of course they would … they were(!).  Although it was a well structured course and I was enjoying myself, progress was slow, simply because there were so many other distractions that took my time and my attention away from sitting down and concentrating.  I had no-one to share my language learning and I had no feedback on whether I pronouncing the words correctly as I dutifully listened and repeated them.

So, when I saw a “weekend” school organized by some Russian Club somewhere in Kent, I took the plunge and signed up. There I sat in a the “beginners class” and started learning the alphabet all over again.  There were classes on how to write in Cyrillic script, which was good as some of the letters took some getting used to.  At the time, however, I felt it was a bit haphazard.  The teacher introduced us to odd words which seemed to have little or no connection.  I was beginning to despair and then as we approached the end of the second day, she stopped and said: “Look, you are looking everyday phrases that you will use over and over again, such as: ‘Where are my keys?’, ‘Where are my glasses?’”

I wasn’t convinced, (at that time I didn’t wear glasses and my big bunch of keys hung on a hook from a belt loop on my trousers), but I could see the logic of what she was saying and what she was trying to teach us.

It was, however, a good and valuable experience, especially by virtue of  being in a concentrated atmosphere where it was possible to  share experiences and feelings with others. getting constant feedback about progress, (or lack of it!).  I can’t say that we were “immersed” in the language as a lot of communication still took place in English, but it was so much, (so much!), better than sitting at home trying to cope with strange looking symbols and short exercises, not knowing if I was really making progress or just “kidding myself”.

.

This wasn’t the first time I had tried learning a language.  At school I studied French.  Please note that I don’t say the I “learned” French.  Like most Englishmen, I cannot claim to be fluent beyond the very basic level of “schoolboy French”.  For example, I understand enough to get the gist of passages which I read, (such as in letters or newspaper articles), or to understand someone who speaks slowly and clearly, using simple vocabulary.  On the other hand, I would never attempt to write in French and whenever I attempt to say anything in French, it comes out extremely garbled … a mix of English and Russian, dressed up in accent reminiscent of  the TV comedy show, “‘Allo, ‘Allo”.

There was a notable occasion when I was accompanying a school trip to France when the French teacher in charge of the group could not control herself any more and burst into hysterics at my attempt to express myself.  Apparently I ended almost every sentence I said with a question: “comprenez vous?”, “do you understand?”.  When I asked what was so funny, if I had said something wrong, I was told that it wasn’t what I had said but, rather, the way that I had said it. Apparently, when asking a question the voice rises at the end of the sentence, but instead I tended to drop my voice … which turned it into a command.  So, I wasn’t asking “Do you understand?”; I was commanding them, “You WILL understand!”

No wonder I used to get some funny looks.

I even spent six weeks struggling with New Testament Greek for my degree … but I struggled, having trouble with the alphabet, so I gave that up as soon as I felt I felt that I could recognize the words when they were quoted in a footnote of some learned article.

.

As a result I have a high regard for people who seem to be fluent in a number of languages.  I am often amazed at how European businessmen and consultants can converse with me in fluent English, only to switch to a conversation with the person standing next to me in German, or French, or Spanish … or Russian, or Kyrgyz.

I find myself lost in admiration and, (I admit it), envy.

That’s nothing, however, compared to the incredulity that I felt when I heard about Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti, an Italian cardinal who is said to have been fluent in some 39 different languages, ranging from European languages such as French and English to Oriental languages such as Chinese, Hindustani and Gujerati and even Algonquin, (the language of native Americans of Quebec and Ontario), not to mention several languages of the classical world, (Greek, Latin and Hebrew, Coptic and Chaldean).  One source suggests that with dialectic peculiarities, he may have been conversant with “some fifty or sixty languages of the most widely separated families …  besides having a less perfect acquaintance with many others”(!)

Then there’s William James Siddis, an American child prodigy who, it is said, could read The New York Times when he was just 18 months old.  By the time he was eight had taught himself eight different languages and when he died in 1944, is said to have known over 40 languages.  It is said that he could learn a new language in just one week.  How I envy him if it was true!

Harold Williams,  a New Zealand journalist, who served as foreign editor of The Times, who is  said to have known over 58 languages and other related dialects.  This figure equals that claimed by Ziad Fazah of Lebanon, who as far as I am aware is still alive and currently lives in Brazil, and which was featured in the Guinness Book of Records, (at least up until 1998).  There are, however,  some questions about this figure as he apparently made some elementary errors in a TV programme.  On the other hand, he does admit that it is difficult trying to keep up and stop becoming “rusty” in the languages that he already knows, which has in turn resulted in him slowing down when it comes to learning new ones.

The record, however, must go to Uku Masing, a Lithuanian philosopher, theologian, ethnologist, poet and linguist, who apparently knew some 65 different languages, and translated produced translations from twenty.  Born in 1909, he lived through two world wars and died in 1985.

.

I sometimes wish it was a skill that I shared.  Still, my gift for languages being what it is, I’m just grateful for Google Chrome which at the click of a mouse button gives me an idea, (however imperfect), of what a web page says.  All I need now is for them to add Kyrgyz to their list of featured languages.

.

It has been announced that the week from from March 28 to April 1 will be Wikipedia Week here in Kyrgyzstan.

It is an initiative by the Soros Foundation – Kyrgyzstan, (SFK), which is an international, non-government, private foundation that was set up by the Open Society Institute in 1993, headed by George Soros, the financier and philanthropist.  It is part of an international network, working in a total of 58 countries around the world.  

The Foundation aims to create conditions in the Kyrgyz Republic for an open society by supporting the development of public institutions and initiatives in all spheres of public life.  (According to their website, “An open society means: freedom and diversity of opinion in all spheres of life, the development of the rule of law and the opportunity for all members of society to participate equally in development.”)

To achieve these aims, the Foundation supports civic initiatives in various areas such as legal, educational and economic reforms, support for the media, NGOs and academia as well as promoting initiatives in the area of public policy, health and culture.

As part of their Information Program, they have organized a competition, a training course, a round-table discussion, a “bloggers forum”.

The idea behind “Wiki- Week in Kyrgyzstan“, (to give the initiative it’s proper title) is to advance and to promote the on-line encyclopaedia in Kyrgyzstan through support for youth and scientific initiatives and groups that post articles on Wikipedia, and also for web–developers working on the development and improvement of information technology in the .kg space.

A spokesman for the foundation pointed out that there are currently about 1400 articles about Kyrgyzstan in the encyclopaedia.  ”This means,” he said, “that Kyrgyzstan is lagging behind all its neighbors, despite the fact that we have the highest Internet penetration per capita.”  For comparison, he pointed out that there are about 9500 articles about Tajikistan and 8500 about Kazakhstan.  Another spokesman added, ”To enhance the contribution of Kyrgyzstan in the development of knowledge about our country, we decided to start this initiative. In the long term, the project could serve as an impetus to improve the attractiveness of the country and business interests to our country.”

Now, I use Wikipedia and find it a valuable resource.  I find it particularly valuable as my access to reference books and encyclopaedias in English, here in Kyrgyzstan, is particularly limited.  I do have a few reference books that I brought with me in my early years, but some of them are clearly out of date now.  Wikipedia is often a first port of call when I want to look something up.  Apparently I am not alone in this.  According to a BBC documentary on the tenth anniversary of Wikipedia, a lot of journalists also resort to it as a initial source when they researching the background for a story on an unfamiliar topic.  I have also seen a lot of comment in the educational columns of different media outlets where teachers complain that students use it heavily.

However, I am also well aware of Wikipedia’s limitations.  For example, it is user generated, and there are integrity issues concerning the information included in articles.  The Wikipedia Foundation, of course, have put in several safeguards in the process of peer review to address these.   I have noticed more and more warning notices on different articles, such as:

particularly where the topics are controversial and opinions can be stated as fact.  I have noticed how notes such as [citation needed] have increased in frequency in order to ensure that authors back up their assertions.

The system is not infallible however, and sometimes erroneous information does creep into the text.  Perhaps one of the most outrageous examples of this happening was when a pair of British comedians who challenged listeners to their podcast to update the entry for the podcast with the most outrageous lies about them.  To be fair, the system did “work” in that the editors eventually suspended the entry, but not until after a huge number of erroneous statements had been added.  Fortunately that was an “open and above board prank”, but it illustrates the vulnerability of the information.

Although Wikipedia is widely quoted, (for example on Facebook pages), I understand that some teachers and lecturers are scathing about students who cite it as one of their sources.  When I was a student I would not usually cite an encyclopaedia entry as a source in one of my essays, but it seems that many students find it too tempting to: (a) to simply copy and paste an entry into an essay and (b) rely on Wikipedia as a source without questioning the content or searching out corroboration.

. .

Competitors were required the submit of an essay, “What I know about Wikipedia and how can I use it?”, (in English, Russian or Kyrgyz), accompanied by the applicant’s CV.

Selected participants will also take part in trainings with an international expert in new media and Wikipedia from Prague.

On March 30th there will be a round table discussion on “The Development of the Kyrgyz language Internet: Realities and Prospects.”   On the same day there will also be a meeting with bloggers in one of the capital’s cafes.

Subscribers are able to send short messages, no more than 140 characters long, which are relayed via the Twitter servers in the US to other users who “follow” the subscriber wherever they may be around the world.  The character limit is sometimes a hurdle to be overcome and so people develop codes and abbreviations to use in their messages.  Some overcome this limit by splitting what they want to say into five or six short sentences which are transmitted in quick succession.

At first, many people thought the content as “mundane musings on ordinary events” but it moved on a long way from its benign origins.  It’s become a real example of “Pandora’s box”.  Today, with more than 200 million users sharing something like 140 million tweets a day, it seems to have become a real force which people around the world are using for a variety of purposes: to keep friends and relatives informed about what one is doing, to garner support for a cause, to market goods or services, to pass comment on events, whilst all the maintaining a personal connection.

If the press reports are to be believed, political activists in various countries have apparently used it, and other examples of social media, to organize protests and even revolutions.

Amongst the people that I “follow” are a number of travel writers, and they have started an experiment, #ttot – Travel Talk on Twitter.  Each week they decide on a theme and then pose a series of questions on that theme inviting others to submit answers and hold an on-line conversation in real time.  Actually, in many ways it is more like “brainstorming” as the comments flood in, without comment but providing food for thought.

Today, for example, the theme was “non-tourist travel”.  How, I wondered to myself when it was announced, are we supposed to understand that topic?  I thought that we were probably in for the old semantic debate about the difference between a “tourist” and a “traveler”.  I was afraid that we would get a lot of comments which derided the concept of “tourist” whilst expounding the virtues of being a “traveler”.

I was right.  There were certainly questions and answers which “looked down” on the tourist, for example: Q.: What defines Non-tourist travel?, A.: Definitely not hopping on a tourist bus or taking a guided tour! or Q.: Describe your most shameless (or embarrassing) touristy moment, A.: stayed in a package hotel for complete 7 days in Egypt! (First & last time!)

Many of the comments espoused the virtues of mingling with the locals, being treated like one of them, being treated as one of them.  Being asked for directions, for example, and being able to answer.

Now, I know that I run a tour company, so I must be biased, but there are several aspects of this discussion that I found worrying or disturbing.  It wasn’t just the arrogance of some of the comments, (but by no means all of them, indeed there was a lot of valuable food for thought contained in many of the over 500 offerings, even in those that I found made me feel uncomfortable).

One of the first things that I noticed, (maybe because, as I said, I was expecting it if not actually looking for it), was the belittling of the “tourist experience”.

I agree that many people, if not most, would benefit and gain much more from their trip if they had the opportunity to “get off the beaten track” and “mingle with the locals” but there are “horses for courses”.  Not everyone wants to be, has the inclination to be, or the possibility to be a “traveler” and not everyone wants to be taken for a “local”.

It seemed to me that many people overlooked, forgot or simply ignored the fact that we are all tourists, even those people who prefer to be called “travelers”, when they travel away from home.  The standard legal definition of a tourist, for example, has nothing to do with being on an organized tour, either in their home country or abroad.  Rather, it is someone who spends time, (at least one night), away from home.

.

For anyone who is interested, TTOT takes place every Tuesday at 9:30am and 9:30pm GMT.