Postcard from Bishkek

Sometimes, when I write a postcard, it strikes me that some of things I refer to might be surprising, or cause confusion, or warrant further explanation.

For example, one of the early postcards, (A word of advice …), is about mobile telephones and I thought it might be useful to explain the phenomenal market penetration that mobile phone operators have managed to achieve in what is basically a relatively poor country.

In another, (Sorry, but we don’t want your money), I refer to the problems of trying to buy goods on the internet … and as one of the things I wanted to buy was a Kyrgyz National team Rugby shirt, it might be a surprise to the reader to hear that there is a Kyrgyz national rugby team …so I thought it might be a good idea to explain about Rugby in the republic.

Similarly, when I wrote about visits to the Botanical Gardens, The Gold Fund in the Historical Museum, a trip to the local Golf Club or one of the nearby Ski bases, I thought it might be useful to add some information about these topics.

Including some additional information in the postcard itself, however, not only makes the pages even longer than they already are, it is also difficult to decide where and how to add it without distracting the reader’s attention and breaking up the flow of the main page .

In a way this additional information resemble footnotes in a book … they carry supplementary information, (perhaps a lengthy explanation about a particular point, or a citation referring to the source of the quotation or detailed point …), which is not essential to main text.  Although it would be possible to add the information at the bottom of the page, as in a footnote, but it still makes the page quite long, however, in some of the postcards, (especially in the earlier ones, or where it is just a small aside which I could fit easily into the text), I put it into “boxes”.