Archive: November, 2010
I keep getting questions about the Celestial Mountains Logo. Some people like it – “it’s simple and easily recognizable” … others don’t – “it’s too complicated” they say. It is has been suggested to me that a plain white stripe would be better than the more complicated design that we have at the moment. Well, [...]
Ilya Fyodotovich Terentev served as the first elected mayor of the city, between 1895 and 1900, although – for some reason – he doesn’t appear on all of the lists enumerating the Mayors of the city.
As a nomadic people, travelling from place and erecting yurts wherever there was pasture for their livestock … the Kyrgyz don’t have a wide heritage in terms of architecture. Indeed, some people say that the closest they came to architecture was in erecting mausoleums for people after they had died. Of course, the Kyrgyz were not [...]
Let me start this week with an apology and a correction. Last week I said that there were going to be two public holidays this week, which meant a “three day working week”. Well, I got it wrong … the Muslim holiday, Kurman Ait, falls next week, not on Friday the 12th. Those of you [...]
There is a lot of truth in the old saying: “There are two sides to every story”. It’s something I learned very early on as a young, novice, schoolteacher. A fight in the playground, and “Sir” descends to break it up … “So, what’s all this about?”, “He started it!”, “No, he did!”, and so [...]
One aspect of Kyrgyz Culture which has come to the attention of the West is the practice of Ala Kachuu – or “Bride Stealing”. It appears that this tradition stems from the times of nomadic culture and lifestyle of the past where people were constantly on the move from one pasture (jailoo) to another. (It [...]
There’s a story about Oscar Wilde, that he was at a dinner party when somebody made a clever, witty, remark and he is supposed to have commented, “I wish I had said that!”, to which Whistler, one of the dinner guests replied: “You will, Oscar. You will.” Well, I felt like Oscar Wilde one day [...]
Irkeshtam is approached from Osh, the second city of Kyrgyzstan, in the South of the country. The road travels south along the valley of the Taldyk and Gulcho river gorges to the village of Sary Tash (“Yellow Stone” in Kyrgyz), which sits on a cross roads. To the West lies the road to Dushanbe in [...]
The working day in the office, technically, runs from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m., but it rarely works out like that. In fact, my working day usually starts at six a.m. when I come downstairs to the office from my apartment which is literally “just over the office”. I rarely finish work early, however, and [...]
Sometimes we surprise people around us by the things that we say and do – and just sometimes we even manage to surprise ourselves. I am amazed, for example, that I have this website. You see, I am not a great believer in “vox pop“. It seems to me that there are too many people, [...]
