Archive: May, 2011
I had a meeting with a representative of a a local business who had asked me to check some translations into English that he had done with the help of Google. Needless to say, although it was possible to understand what the text was trying to convey, there was a certain amount of revision needed. [...]
Back in March, I wrote a postcard about the UK based charity Healthprom which had held an international conference on “intellectual disability” here in Bishkek. Shortly after posting it, I was surprised to receive an email from a client who had worked on a project with them in the past, who thanked me for the [...]
Last week I went to a meeting in the Hyatt. The hotel is opposite the Museum of Fine Arts and when I left I crossed the road to get a taxi from outside the museum. As usual, the Museum displayed a large banner above the entrance. This one was different, however, as it wasn’t [...]
It was rush hour as we made our way from my office to the Ministry of Education for the first meeting of the Advisory Council of the new European School. Traffic was heavy. At first, I thought that the traffic lights didn’t seem to be working at the crossroads as the traffic was blocked by [...]
Last week I posted an entry about the Alabama Steak House in Bishkek and although I said that I might post some more postcards in the future about places to dine out, I wasn’t expecting to write another one featuring a different eatery quite so soon. This postcard, however, was prompted by an article on Eurasianet, (Kyrgyzstan: Banking [...]
About eight kilometres East of the city of Kant in Northern Kyrgyzstan lies the modern village of Krasnaya Rechka, (“Red River”). This is the site of the ancient towns of Suyab and Nevkat (“New City”), a Silk Road city that flourished between the 6th and 12th centuries. The identification is based on manuscripts found at the [...]
In the Orthodox Cathedral of the Resurrection, here in Bishkek, there are, as you would expect, quite a number of icons representing various saints or scenes from the Bible. In one of the chapels there is a fresco depicting the Last Supper painted over the screen before the Sanctuary. It’s a modern work of course [...]
The little three year old girl in the photograph which appeared on the front of Time Magazine in April, 1929, passed a milestone yesterday. She was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor, who on 6th February, 1952, succeeded her father, (King George VI), to the throne as Queen Elizabeth the Second of the United Kingdom of Great [...]
They say that “there is no point in arguing about taste” and that “one man’s meat is another man’s poison“. Different people like different things. In Bishkek we are quite fortunate in that we have a wide selection of restaurants offering cuisines to choose between. Last week I had a “business lunch” with a publisher [...]
In the weekly postcard last Saturday, (Oh, the humanity), I mentioned that I had met up with Hugh Coulter and his wife Jean, (who run fund raising efforts for an orphanage and two Microcredit funds in Karakol), and that they promised to distribute the regular quarterly update on their various activities. Well, the report has [...]
