Archive: April, 2011
The last Sunday in April is Statisticians Day. It’s another one of those “professional holidays” that seem to be so common here in Kyrgyzstan. This one seems to be particularly appropriate because it often seems that here in Kyrgyzstan, statistics are given the sort of reverence normally reserved for holy writ. The word itself comes [...]
Easter is here. The date of Easter is calculated according to a complex formula based on the lunar cycle and the timing of the Equinox, and changes each year. This year it is occurring very late, the latest date when it can occur, according to the formula, is on April 25th. Usually, the festival falls [...]
April 22nd marks the birthday of one of the major historical figures of the Twentieth Century … and one that had a considerable influence on Kyrgyzstan, even though he never set foot in the country: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Every now and again I happen to say something which causes my staff to stop what they are doing and look at me with a quizzical look as if I am star of Stephen Spielberg’s classic film, E.T. Most of them speak English well, and are used to my strange accent and turn of phrase. [...]
Bearing in mind that there are differences between the various versions of the epic … it is the world’s longest epic with over half a million lines … it is said to take three months, four hours a day, to recite the whole epic from start to finish … it took several years for the [...]
One of the advantages of the internet is that I can now scour lots of different sources of news from around the world. Back in the UK, I rarely had the opportunity to read newspapers on weekdays because I used to leave home well before the newspaper boy would have delivered them, but I did [...]
Running a tour company, you can imagine how many visitors to Kyrgyzstan I get to meet each year. Many, of course, are clients, either on an organized tour or else guests at one of our hotels in Bishkek and Naryn. Not all of them, however. Every now and again we come across travellers who [...]
On Sunday I wrote a postcard about the Aigul flower. The reasoning behind the postcard was not just that this is the time of year when the flower blooms, but also because there is festival due to beheld in the Batken oblast, and the neighbouring oblast in Tajikistan, dedicated to two local flowers: The Aigul [...]
There is a legend which tells of Urbo-Khan, a noble and respected Khan who lived at a place where caravans of the Silk Road crossed paths. He had an only daughter, Aigul, and she was as beautiful as a swan. Her fiancée, a very strong man called Kozulan, was famous for his fearlessness and was in charge of [...]
This week has seen a number of notable anniversaries: the fall of Masada to the Romans, the adoption of the Union Jack as the British flag, the start of the American Civil War, the assignation of Abrham Lincoln at the end of the war, the sinking of the Titanic, the founding of the International Labour [...]
