Archive: November, 2010
Today has been a busy day. About half way through, the phone rang, and Lisa transferred it to me saying, “It’s a Mr. ****”. Now, the name meant nothing to me. It was obviously an Anglophile name - so it wasn’t the police, (they had already called in connection with the bomb blast earlier this [...]
Today has been a busy day. Before it had really go underway, I got a phone call from the hotel asking if I had heard, or felt, the explosion. “Uhhh, No – what explosion?”
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 [...]
Today has been a busy day. It began with a minor crisis – no internet. It’s at times like this that I realize how reliant we have become on the internet for our everyday operations: especially for communications and news. Anyway, having arrived in the office, as usual, at six, I was able to spend [...]
During 2010, Kyrgyzstan has seen a drastic reduction in the number of tourists that have visited the country as a direct result of events that have taken place in the country throughout the year. There were tourists, but many less than in previous years. This has led to a reduction of income for those working [...]
I was invited on Friday to attend a business class at one of the local Universities to give a presentation about Doing Business in the Kyrgyz Republic. The brief I received was that it should be about “doing business in KG, problems, issues, what’s it like to be a businessperson, what are the necessary characteristics [...]
The kids went off to the cinema on Monday to watch the latest Harry Potter film. I seem to have missed out almost entirely on the Harry Potter Craze, but it has taken off here just as much as in the West. The books are on sale, (in Russian, so I give them a miss), [...]
A few years ago, we had an enquiry from a tourist who wanted to come to Kyrgyzstan “to see the apples”. This caught me by surprise. Although I was aware that we grow a lot of apples here in Kyrgyzstan, I was intrigued as to why someone would want to travel all this way to [...]
Those of you who have visited the site before will notice that something is new … very new!
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 [...]
