Archive: April, 2011
For someone interested in history, I find it interesting how some dates in the year seem to attract important anniversaries whilst others seem to be bereft of them. Take April 15th, for example, which is not only the anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, (which struck an iceberg the night before), and the death [...]
At 11:40pm on April 14th, 1912, the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg in the waters of the North Atlantic, whilst on her maiden voyage from Southampton to New York. Two hours and forty minutes later, she sank and 1517 people lost their lives. Less than a third of the people on board, (706 out of [...]
One of the cities in Kyrgyzstan which is which is often visited by tourists is Karakol, at the Eastern end of Lake Issyk Kul. It is the largest town and the administration centre of the Issyk Kul oblast. The town was founded by Russian settlers in the 1869, and the name translates as “black hand”. In [...]
April 12th is not only the day that Yuri Gagarin undertook the first Manned flight into space … it’s also the birthday of the great Russian explorer Nikolay Mikhailovich Prezhevalsky. The town of Karakol lies at the eastern end of Lake Issyk Kul. Its name in Kyrgyz means “Black Hand” – and although that [...]
Last week one of our staff walked into my office and told me that I had a visitor from the Tatar Choir “Berdemlek”. I said that it was OK, I knew who it was and what it was about. Sure enough, it was one of the members of the choir who had brought me an [...]
Kyrgyzstan is a secular state, although the majority of the Kyrgyz would classify themselves as Muslim. Over the centuries, however, Kyrgyzstan’s position on the Great Silk Road meant that it was exposed to a wide variety of religious ideas and traditions. Indeed, at least one author has claimed that the Great Silk Road could just [...]
A photograph uploaded to my Facebook page brought me an intrigued email … “was that a Research Machines 380Z?” For those who don’t know – the 380Z was one of the early microcomputers designed specifically for the educational market in the UK. It was a little bigger than a desktop computer is these days, but [...]
So, April 7th has come and gone. An important date, an important anniversary, in the history of Kyrgyzstan. I did think about writing a postcard yesterday to mark the anniversary but, instead, I chose to write on a neutral topic and see how the day developed. In the last few weeks, since before the 24th [...]
About two weeks ago, I wrote a postcard about ski orienteering, and the Kyrgyz team attending the sport’s World Championships in Sweden. In the recent Asian Games in Almaty, they did much better, the men’s relay team taking 4th place. Unfortunately, the team didn’t do so well, in Sweden but they did manage to gain [...]
One of the few songs that I can sing all the way through is a folk song which was popular in my youth, ”Where have all the flowers gone?” It helps that the words are repetitive and like a round, so they are easy to remember.
