In Bishkek

Despite the sunny-appearing picture below, Bishkek is dreary, dark, and overgrown – not much in the way of municipal services. And it gets very very hot. This is the main government square on a Tuesday afternoon — their version of the DC mall…

The city is green this time of year; and there is potential romance in those streets — just needs some weeding and patching, and a lot of cleaning up, mostly of bad oppressive Soviet block architecture. Maybe clean-up isn’t the right word…perhaps the word is “demolition”. There is little that’s welcoming or warm about most of the architecture in the city — except for all the green growing things coming up through all the cracks, perhaps sending the subliminal message that life persists and continues.

The Grand Bazaar in Bishkek is a rabbit-like maze of shops and stalls, layered on top of each other. Can smell interesting from time to time, too, but like so many other places, if there’s one thing you can count on, it’s that there’s ice cream being sold from a cart somewhere, and it was good.

From a typical apartment building with a view like the one below, you can walk to the park, and play a little ping pong or maybe some chess. There are lots of folks, getting married and taking wedding photos, hanging around with friends, and playing with their kids, at the park.  Bride-knapping is supposedly still not uncommon in the KY; the brides we saw (3 of them), in the park at Bishkek, seemed to be very happy to nuptialize, whatever the conditions of their engagement might have been.  When we asked some of the young women whether they felt that men and women were treated equally in the KY, and had equal opportunities, they joked that yes, they felt they were — except that if they kidnapped their groom, they weren’t allowed to keep him.

~ by mimi on July 28, 2008.