KYRGYZSTAN: Bishkek

Parliament, stormed in the 2005 "Tulip Revolution".

After three lazy days in Cholpon Ata we made it to Bishkek, the final destination of the Central Asian trip. Within the first hour of getting there I witnessed the most shocking thing I've ever seen. The cab dropped us off near our homestay hotel and we noticed a middle aged Russian man lying on the road and then rising up. He looked derranged and we kept our distance as he staggered on the right side of the road. Then as a new black Jaguar (the nicest car I've seen since Turkey) approached, he let out an inhuman wail and sprinted in front of the car, which smacked him full speed with a sickening cracking sound, sending him spinning like a rag doll two or three times through the air and into a pile near the sidewalk. We stood there shocked, not twenty feet away, with our packs on, as the smart-looking driver emerged fromt the car with a ticked off expression, walked ahead to retrieve the broken jaguar statuette and calmly called the police, without paying any heed to the crazy man, who was lying there grasping his shattered leg, but otherwise fine. We really don't quite understand what happened but it was a gruesome scene for sure.

A guest at our homestay

Other than that Bishkek has actually been a surprisingly nice and modern city with good restaurants, decent parks and shops. We even rode an escalator! The main sights, appart from the very imposing capitol building are the museums, one in honor of Mikhail Frunze, a Bishkek native who reconquered his native land on behalf of the Bolsheviks and the National History Museum, which was more interesting for what it was rather than the artifacts it displayed. The main floor of the museum was entirely dedicated to Lenin and the Soviet history/mythology, displaying huge bronze reliefs of the storming of the Winter Palace, Soviet Industrialization leaps, and pictures of men who all seemed to have died in 1938 (hmm...). Every display case has a photo of Lenin, with his name and the date he lived as if someone had managed to miss that information along the way. The cielings have very silly Soviet murals including one where a group of Americans was protesting imperialism and Ronald Reagan was riding a Pershing Missile like a rodeo bull. Downstairs there was a display of various gifts that the other SSRs had presented the Kyrgyz SSR, including a carpet with a depiction of Stalin, all of which mixed seemlessly with state gifts from the modern era and pictures of current President Bakiev meeting with the other regional dictators at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization meetings. The museum was archaic, but not as irrelevant as the Frunze Museum, since it was fairly crowded with Kyrgyz visitors.

Mural of Reagan riding a missle and Americans protesting imperialism and agression. I wonder what the artist thinks of the American Air Force Base in Bishkek.

Changing of the guard

Old You-Know-Who