Postcard from Bishkek

This was part of the initial draft for the page  Nothing in life is simple.  In the end, I decided to edit most of it out … but thought I would include as a “subpage” … just in case anyone is interested.

More…

I have a friend whose favourite phrase seems to be: “It’s simple!”

My response is normally, “No it’s not.  Nothing in life is simple.” More…

There are six basic questions that sum up any story: Who?, Where?, When?, What?, How? and Why?

When I knew that I was coming out to Kyrgyzstan, I signed up for a weekend Russian language course which was being held in a village in Kent.  It was run by a voluntary organization, not a college or educational institution, but the teachers were native Russian speakers who had an enthusiasm and interest that was probably more useful than had they been conducting the course as a commercial activity.  They also claimed to run three levels of classes, which included one for absolute beginners – like me.

I was surprised at how much we actually covered in just two days.  After an introduction to the alphabet and how the letters sound, we turned to some to some simple everyday words and phrases.  In the end, I went home knowing these six basic questions: Kto?, Gde?, Kogda?, Shto?, Kak? and Pochemy? … although not all of the complications like Kuda? – Where to? and Ot kuda? – Where from?  I had also learnt such useful phrases as “where are my keys?”, “when is breakfast?” or “what is this?” – but whether I could understand the answers was a different matter.  However it made me feel just a little more confident when I actually boarded the plane at Heathrow on that July morning some fifteen years ago. More…

Isn’t it annoying when you get a tune in your head and you can’t get rid of it.

When it happens to me I find that it is usually just a short phrase, maybe a line or two, from a song heard long, long ago.  It goes round and round in my mind, repeating over and over and I just can’t get rid of it.

This happened to me on Monday evening … the phrase that I kept humming to myself were the opening lines from a song recorded back in the 1960′s by the English singer and comedian, Max Bygraves, sung in a heavy East End London, working class, accent:

“They changed our local Palais into a bowling alley
and fings ain’t what they used t’ be …” More…

Apart from being the tenth day of the tenth month in the tenth year of the century, an auspicious date in Chinese astrology, Sunday was a day of special significance here in Kyrgyzstan.  It was Election Day. More…

The days before the election proved to be quite busy for me.  Each day I came to the office intending to tidy my desk and catch up on some of the backlog of work that has been steadily building up as I have had my attention distracted onto other matters – but it seems that each day I have left the office with my the piles on my desk untouched or, worse, growing and the backlog barely dented. More…

Dickens’s classic novel of the French Revolution, “The Tale of Two Cities”, has probably the best opening line and closing lines in all of British literature.  It is an extremely well crafted list of eight opposites that compliment each other almost like poetry:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way – in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.” More…

As I walked out of the office one morning last week, I was struck by the sight that greeted me.

In the yard we seemed to have acquired a new mountain.  Well, that is, of course, an example of hyperbole … it wasn’t exactly a “mountain” … here, the term is used to refer to a landscape which rises above 1500 meters above sea level – and the yard is too small to support such a structure.  Yes, I was exaggerating – as the old saying has it, I was, sort of, “making a mountain of a molehill”, except that the structure I saw, at over a meter high and about two meters wide, was actually several times bigger than a molehill. More…

During the Second World War, the battles raged in several different “theaters” around the world.  Despite the fact that the United States entered the conflict after being caught “off-guard” by a surprise Japanese attack in the Pacific, for various reasons the war in the European Theater was given priority.  That’s not to say that the troops in the Pacific Theater were forgotten or overlooked, and the might of American industry and war effort channeled men and machinery in two directions at once.  British troops were also engaged in multiple “theaters” around the world, and one army, fighting the Japanese in Jungles of Burma, stylized itself as “The Forgotten Army”.

My mind turned to those soldiers when I read the opening paragraph of an article: “In early summer, the world was shocked by pogroms in Kyrgyzstan. Then came the usual: The country has been forgotten.” More…

The term, “Aksakal Courts” literally translates as “White Beard Courts”, and is used for a court, or council, of elders which is authorized to consider certain types of legal cases. Traditionally, these local community “courts” consisted of the oldest men in the village, who make decisions as if an elected town council.  Today, they are regulated by the terms of the constitution, decrees of the President issued in 1995 and 1997, and a law promulgated by the Jogorku Kenesh, (Parliament), in 2002. More…