Day 16 – Hobbling round Bishkek...

After last night’s beer and pain I didn’t plan on doing much today. A couple of times during the week, Ulan had asked me what I was doing for food. Pasta, I explained. Sometime with chopped Kyrgyz salami, sometimes with tomato sauce, and sometimes with olive oil. He didn’t like the sound of this, but I explained that my priority during lunch breaks was to fill my stomach as quickly as possible and to go to sleep. Unlike most Kyrgyz men, I don’t have a wife at home cooking and cleaning for me.
Keen for me to eat well and to enjoy Kyrgyz food, Ulan said something about feeding me at the weekend, and we arranged to meet at 2pm. I assumed that would mean eating together, sometime in the later afternoon or evening. I was partially correct.

Of course, he didn’t come to my flat at 2pm. I phoned the school to see where he was (see? It’s good to have a phone.) The secretary, who speaks only a little English, told me that he was “absent” and would be back in “one hour”. An hour later I got exactly the same answer – well, I didn’t expect anything else. What to do? With my ankle swelling up like a balloon, there wasn’t much I could do. With the time difference it was too early to go to the pub to watch English football. Bored, I set of to hobble slowly around town. Most of the photos of Bishkek next few posts are from this morning.

Progress around town was slow; my ankle hurt and I should probably have been resting it, and the sun was hot. But it was good to actually do something, to get out of my flat and away from the school, out into daylight.
Picture: walking along the flat streets, it's easy to forget you're in mountain country.

Bishkek is not a beautiful city. It’s pleasant enough with its tree-lined avenues and parks. Once in the past there was an effort to make it ‘the marble city’ and several public buildings and squares are paved with slabs of marble. But the man in Moscow with the idea moved on, the money dried up, and the dream died. And with Bishkek’s air quality, the marble isn’t as pleasing to the eye as it could be. And away from the marble, much of the architecture is Communist: old, grey, crumbling concrete. The Soviets liked their buildings grey on the outside and brown on the inside.

Bishkek seemed surprisingly quiet for a Saturday. I expected to find people enjoying the weekend, but not even the fountains were working. Walking along a rather empty park, I was reflecting how flat Bishkek is; for a country which is more than 85% mountain, it must occupy one of the only flat parts in the country. Turning back to look at where I’d just come from, I was stunned to see mountains towering over the building I’d just photographed. I hadn’t realised they were so close!
Picture: Get far enough away from the buildings to see over them and you see that Kyrgyzstan is not so flat.
Later I went to the Metro pub to see if there would be any football showing. As I walked in, they were just finishing filming for a Kyrgyz pop video. The landlord, from east London, was quite dismissive of the whole thing: he respected Kyrgyz pop even less than British pop. I wondered why he’d settled in Kyrgyzstan: apparently he’d just got tired of being a nomadic IT consultant in Central Asia and decided to settle in Bishkek. Later I spotted him with a rather attractive Kyrgyz girl half his age and wondered if she was the reason why he’d chosen Bishkek or if she was just one of the perks of being a reasonably wealthy foreigner in a developing country. Certainly there are opportunities here if you’re foreign and can offer a girl a short-cut to a wealthier life.