Archive: December, 2010
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 [...]
Yesterday I had from Aizada. She’s the Director of one of the city’s Music Schools – The Children’s Musical School Number 7. I am not sure why the schools here are given numbers rather than names, but that’s the system here. They name virtually everything else in honour of some notable character or other. The [...]
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 [...]
I have been asked some questions about the “Baseball Kids”, so I thought I had better spend a little time explaining the situation. I have known them for about four years now … Although they live on the outskirts of town, some of them used to hang around the city center, (around Beta Stores, the [...]
“Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat”, goes the old seasonal children’s rhyme. Well, Christmas is definitely coming … and Goose was the traditional fayre for Christmas dinner in Victorian England – whilst, at the same time, it was a rare treat. In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens wrote that in the poor [...]
The International Business Council, (IBC), publishes a journal called “Investment Now, which is subtitled “In for the long haul”. This can be understood in several ways, some of which are positive, but others are negative.
The day began with music blaring out of my computer from a CD in the Drive. This doesn’t happen very often, but is an annual event on December 16th, as is the “birthday cake” which arrived later in the day. Now, the people of Kyrgyzstan enjoy a celebration and they take every opportunity to join [...]
I have just got back from an invigorating afternoon – a pleasant excursion out of the office. I had been invited to act as a judge, (a sort of “external assessor”), for a business class at one of the local Universities. As part of their course in “Business Administration” they have to form teams and then prepare [...]
In the west it is commonly said that if you look at the moon you can see the face of the “Man in the Moon”. The Kyrgyz know, however, that this is a mistake – it is really the face of the “Girl in the Moon”. I was reminded of the legend this afternoon as [...]
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 [...]
