Biskek and all that.

So I am back from my trip to Biskek and it all went very well. I met the American friend in the very nice American/New Zealand Cafe, called Sierra for my ham and eggs and waffles, which was great.  I had to get them to explain what drip coffee was when I went in yesterday just to check it out and have a tuna sandwich. (Fish yippee) and this morning though I was one of the first people in soon in filled up with American locals, local locals, Indian locals etc and it has a very nice vibe. After that I was shown me a very nice felt shop and we wondered into a totally Western style mall, with huge supermarket and more felt shops, so that will be useful next time I come and then we just found this street festival. A relatively new phenomenon in Biskek, it turned out that it was in aid of road safety, which is vital in Kyrgyzstan, as even with traffic lights crossing the road is a challenge, but  you could not really tell that as there were lots of nice face painting stalls and even someone blasting out a good rendition of Adele.

 Biskek is very green, in parts it almost looks like the greenery is taking over as the city cannot afford to maintain some of the buildings, whereas in other parts it looks like the small homes are being knocked down for more flats, but at both ends of the town there is a sort of green thorough fare, with nice trees, ice creams, playgrounds etc.  There are irrigation channels running round the whole of town, which I guess fill up with ice melt at times.  So parts of it are very pleasant.  So, having said farewell to my friend, I walked through one of these areas and towards the university where to my surprise they were also having a special event, there were loads of cars and blokes, being blokish about them, and girls in high heels. It reminded me a bit of the scenes on Formula One, but instead of big cars they were racing go karts and although the track was cordoned off just as I arrived one car went straight into the audience, which was rather ironic given the message of the other street event. Luckily just the kart got damaged, but it could have been serious.  I then realised it was getting a bit late as although I was only guessing that there would be a one o clock bus back I wanted to get to the bus station for then. So I hoped on one of the trams and to my delight it got me to the bus garage and there was a 309 waiting.  I realised that the bus driver was a bit surprised by this "tourist" getting on and a beautiful young woman was sent to enquire as to whether I really wanted the bus so imagine how superior I felt being able to say actually I live in Shabdan.  She it turned out was accompanied by another Westerner and I heard her explaining that there was a very good school in Shabdan, so I fessed up to being the English teaching there and she surprised me by saying my school is getting very famous!   I suspect that is a bit of an exaggeration especially as the local big wig did not even really know of it before his visit, but it did make me feel very special, but what was even nicer, was the 70 year old woman who sat next to me turned out to have quite good English so we had a nice chat on the way back.(It takes just over two hours).

Two interesting things re Biskek, I noticed official street cleaners, which made me realise it is cleaner than our little village.  I also noticed unofficial street cleaners (no yellow vest) and I am guessing they were looking for stuff with resale value, but also just as there is all over Shabdan, there was also evidence that people just try and burn their rubbish on the streets. Near my village there are fairly deep mining pits, so whether they would be suitable for land fill I do not know. And while I know landfill is not brilliant it has to be better than heaps of half burnt out plastic dotted across the countryside.

The other thing. To my amazement there was a very well written local magazine in the hostel last night, all in English and one of the stories was about the stray dogs.  Stray dogs are definitely an issue here, they are everywhere.  Most friendly and walk on by, but definitely an issue (they have rabies here) so I wondered if Kyrgyzstan had a strategy like they do in Bhutan of trying to spay or neuter dogs, but no Kyrgystan has a Shooting Service instead and apparently over 12000 dogs were shot last year in Bishkek alone.  And each shooter receives 300 some about £3.80 for each dog killed.   Apparently here dogs fleeces are popular with street traders as they are very warm, but some people are very opposed to the policy. Whereas in Britain of course, when we have a problem with animals we are much more humane, we oh yes, we shoot them too.