WTKTGCITW
WTKTGCITW
The other day I came across a travel blog posting with the intriguing title of WTKTGCITW. OK – I know what WTF means … but what on earth does WTKTGCITW mean? Now, there’s a puzzle.
I happen to like puzzles – I always have and, probably always will. I find them a challenge. One of the nice things about them is that they tend to encourage lateral thinking; “thinking out of the box”, (which, according to the BBC, is apparently one of the most common phrases used in business these days!); encouraging us to look further and not just thinking of the obvious things.
The problem with puzzles, of course, is that you may spend ages thinking about them, worrying and fretting over the, constantly drawing a blank – but once you know the solution, the answer seems so obvious that you end up “kicking yourself”, (metaphorically, at least), and asking yourself how you could have been so stupid as to not be able to solve the puzzle instantly.
As it happens the opening sentences of this postcard gives you a clue about how to solve this particular puzzle.
It’s not like the sort of puzzle which asks, what comes next in the sequence: JFMAMJJA…?, or the sequence OTTFFSS…?, or 3,3,4,5,3,5,5,4, …? well, you probably get the point.
WTKTGCITW, (just like WTF, TGIF – and it’s partner OGIM, SWALK, TTFN, OTT, WYSIWYG and so on …), is an acronym; a word created from the first letters of each word in a series of words. Now, I like acronyms, they are very, for example, for creating passwords. You have to know the phrase, but it is easy to remember the phrase. Something like TIMPFG – This Is My Password For Gmail, for example (… by the way, it isn’t). So, back at school I once used ONYDRUO – Oh No You Don’t Restricted Users Only.
So what on earth could WTKTGCITW stand for?
If you click on the picture it will take you to the blog entry which started this whole puzzle – and the answer. It’s by an Australian traveller, a journalist, who calls himself “Wolfpackofone” and the blog is imaginatively called Wolfpackofone’s Greatest Adventure. According to his profile on the site, he’s doing the OTIWTDBID – the “One thing I want to do before I die”. I presume he means this journey that he is describing – one year on the road to countries that he has never been to, where life is full of uncertainties, where English may not be spoken, and he doesn’t speak the local language … .
So far, he’s flown from Australia to Beijing in China, travelled across China and then crossed the Torugart Pass into Kyrgyzstan. It was from Naryn that he wrote this fateful entry; WTKTGCITW.
He begins the post with the words of greeting uttered by the six foot six Russian who I take to have been his driver, (he has a more graphic turn of phrase to describe him), who had been laughing at him as he crossed the border; yes, that’s right WTKTGCITW – OK, I can’t keep you in suspense any longer – ”Welcome to Kyrgyzstan, the greatest country in the world!”
He’s not sure what to make of this greeting … especially when it is followed by what he takes to be a sarcastic question; “Are you cold?” This may well have happened in mid August, in the height of summer, but Torugart is quite high, (3752 m above sea level), and snow has been known to fall up there even in August. In fact, one group of tourists we took across the Torugart Pass wrote to me from Kashgar to tell me that it had snowed on them when they crossed just a week before this.
Never mind, a shot of vodka will solve that problem, he is told, and apparently it does.
Maybe it was the vodka, but judging from the photographs and comments in his posts from Kyrgyzstan, Wolfpackofone seems to have some sympathy with this Russian’s greeting. At least, he does seem to like the place. ”I absolutely loved this town,” he says about Naryn … which means that he might well be the only foreigner that I have come across that has the same sort of affection for the town that I do – hey, he might even like the place better than I do!
And then he ends the post with “I have fallen in love with Kyrgyzstan and when I finally get around to writing about my time (future tense to this blog) in the mountains, I can guarantee, you will be in love with it to!” I said it before, and I’ll say it again … “There is something special about Kyrgyzstan”, it tends to do this to people.
On the other hand, there are some people who are less enamoured with the country given their experiences … the drivers who seem to think they are competing in “Death Race 2000″, the “take or leave it” service in some of the cafés, the glare of the policeman as you pass them by, the dust in summer and the mud in winter, or the amount of fat in the diet, (these are not my comments – but that have been said to me over the years). And, let’s be fair … it was Wolfpackofone’s first post from Kyrgyzstan – and he hadn’t been here long.
Indeed, the next post doesn’t begin very positively, describing an incident which arouses a natural emotion in strange situations: fear. But given a little time for reflection and he gets over the unease that he felt and once more begins to see the charm of the place and ends the post with the observation, “I have tackled a ignorance based fear and turned it into an experience of a lifetime!”
Kyrgyzstan tends to do that to people.
I am looking forward to the next post, but in the meantime: WTKTGCITW – Welcome to Kyrgyzstan, the greatest country in the world!
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For the record: According to the BBC, the 10 most common business jargon phrases are: thinking outside the box, touch base, going forward, blue sky thinking, downsizing, ducks in a row, thought shower, 360º thinking, park that idea and direction of travel.
For the record: the answers to the three sequences are:
- S and then OND – it’s the first letters of the months of the year, (in English!) – and yes, it’s another acronym;
- E and then NTE – it’s the first letters, (in English!), of the words for: 1 – one, 2 – two, 3 – three, … – and yes, it’s another acronym;
- 3, and then 6, 6, 8, 8, 7, 7, – it’s the number of letters, (in English!), in the words for: 1 – one, 2 – two, 3 – three, … - and no, this one’s not an acronym.
Bishkek