Postcard from Bishkek

The “postcards” is what the website ianbek.kg is all about – why it was set up as a personal website some years ago, before the days of blogs and social networking sites like Facebook.

At that time I had already set up a couple of sites about Kyrgyzstan and our hotel, (The Silk Road Lodge), for our tour company.   The idea behind this site was going to be different … it wasn’t going to be commercial, trying to attract customers and sell tours but would be a place for me to present personal reminiscences, observations and comments.

Why did I think that anyone would be interested in what I have to say? … A good question.  All I can say in reply is that people had told me that they were.  I had been writing messages to family and friends, former colleagues and clients for many years, keeping them up-to-date with what I was doing.  Sometimes they were personal message – but as I was writing the same thing to a lot of people I would simply write one general “newsletter” which I called “A Postcard from Bishkek” and then I would “top and tail” it with personal greetings and specific personal questions and points.  Apparently these messages were sometimes passed around between friends, people I didn’t know … and I even received occasional messages from someone asking to be “put on the mailing list”.  Honest.

The “postcards”, themselves cover a range of topics
… about my life and experiences as an ex-pat
… reflections about education and training
… tourism in Kyrgyzstan, and
… my experiences trying to run a business here in Kyrgyzstan
… some thoughts about some of the troubled times (or “interesting times”) in the history of Kyrgyzstan.

Some of the postcards were written specifically for the site but others contain articles that I have been asked to write for newspapers or magazines.  Some of them are quite short, (like on a postcard), but in some of them I do tend to go on a bit … I can be pretty verbose.