Archive: April, 2009
I am often asked if I worked in Tourism back in the UK, and when I say no … that I was a teacher, of computing … then the question becomes: how did I manage to get into Tourism? That’s a good question – especially as there have been several attempts to limit the management [...]
It is said that the British have one subject of conversation: The Weather. I have turned into a joke and when the conversation slows and a silence develops, one of the techniques I use to break the silence is to comment: “What a lot of weather we have been having …”. I’m not sure where [...]
The Kyrgyz economy is basically a cash based economy. There is a banking system … as you might expect in a country that is sometimes called “The Switzerland of Central Asia” and although it is still fairly basic and nearly all transactions in the country are cash based, it is developing rapidly, and this situation [...]
When I first came to Kyrgyzstan back in the 1990′s I was taken to see Lake Issyk Kul by one of my acquaintances, a lawyer. As we drove along the tree lined avenues between the mountains rising to the left and the lake itself stretching out on our right, he pointed out some fields and [...]
As a youngster, I could be quite a philistine at times. Now there’s a pejorative term that gives away part of my background … the term is used to mean someone who is uninterested in intellectual pursuits, someone who is smug and ignorant, indifferent or hostile to artistic and cultural values.
Back in the 1960′s there was a film starring Michael Caine called “Alfie”, based on a book by Bill Naughton, in which he played a cockney “lad about town” who decides to change his way of life and settle down. It was quite a ground-breaking film in many ways approaching a moral theme in a [...]
One of my memories of life back in the United Kingdom when I was growing up in the 1960′s revolves around the fact that the Sunday newspapers started issuing “colour supplements”. (These were attractive magazines, printed in colour – hence the name – and distributed free of charge with the newspaper.)
