Category: Uncategorized

I’ve promised to take my new Italian colleague to Osh Bazaar, the food market where most people in Bishkek go for their weekly shop. My neighbour Lara came home yesterday laden with carrier bags of tomatoes that she’s planning to bottle for the winter. We meet outside Tsum and take the bus to the opposite…

One morning in October I slung some clothes into my rucksack and crept down the stairs outside into the courtyard, careful not to wake my neighbours to meet my Italian colleague, our local friend and his friend outside TSUM for a trip to Lake Issyk-Kul.  Issyk-Kul is a high mountain lake up in the Tian-Shan…

Being a tourist in Kyrgyzstan is difficult. Things are done differently here. I spent days searching for a tourist office that might have some information about what to see and how to get there, before eventually giving up. Even the attractions listed in the guidebook are for the most part un-marked so I often found…

One day I got an unscheduled morning off and decided to visit Manas Village, a newly built tribute to Kyrgyzstan’s national hero, the epic warrior Manas.  That wasn’t the original plan. I was on my way to the Issyk-Kul Hotel in the outskirts of Bishkek where was expecting to attend a round table on drugs…

The street names in Bishkek are full of significance. After independence, a lot of the street names in Bishkek were changed. Lenin Square and Lenin Prospect became Ala-Too Square and Chui Prospect, after the Ala-Too mountains and Chui Valle. My street, the street once named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of Lenin’s secret police, was renamed…

“Mo-lo-ko! Sme-ta-na!” This is the wakeup call I hear shortly before my alarm goes off every morning, the dairywoman doing the rounds in the cool early morning with metal pails of fresh milk and sour cream.  The other part of the wakeup call and morning soundtrack is the “Khhhwk-pppht-sppppleugh!” of men walking along Erkindik Prospect,…

Independence Day is a particularly big deal this year because it’s also (according to the government) the anniversary of “2,200 years of Kyrgyz statehood”. National anniversaries like this one are popular among Central Asia’s nation builders, trying to create a sense of unity and national identity among ethnically diverse populations. President Askar Akayev has already…