Some things I really like about Bishkek

Shipping container market, Lagman, Circus, and Gordo Vasiley

(My apologies for the delay in this piece. I’ve been dealing with the flu, jet lag, and the gummed up logistics from the holidays. Part one is here: Walking Bishkek)

Bishkek was not an easy city to walk in or spend three weeks in. It didn’t help that I caught the flu going around, which was pretty much inevitable given the smog, the cold, and how crowded the buses were.

Those extraordinarily crowded and slow¹ buses, including the marshrutkas, made Bishkek feel larger than it is, requiring me to walk a few miles every time I went out for food. It didn’t help that there isn’t a ton of options. As I wrote before, Bishkek is not a town jammed with hip restaurants and bars. They exist, but scattered across the town, rather than clustered together in one easy to find and navigate neighborhood.

Bishkek also doesn’t have a lot of traditional tourist attractions, which didn’t necessarily bother me since I don’t do traditional tourist things, but it did make being there as an outsider feel more isolating. You’re constantly reminded that you’re not of the place.

Together it made Bishkek feel much larger, sparser, and more isolating than it is. Like a cold suburb rather than the smallish dense city it is.

Yet as the weeks went on, as I got more in tune with the city, as that sense of isolation gave way under the barrage of people breaking through the language barrier to welcome me, I saw that Bishkek is a perfectly functional and warm place because as I’ve written ad nauseum, cities are far more about the residents than the bricks or mortar things, and Bishkek-ians, like all people, make the best of their situation. They crowd onto absurdly packed buses, without too many complaints, because that’s just what you do. They walk for miles along ice covered broken sidewalks because that’s just what you do.

As usual, by the end of my stay, I’d fallen into a daily routine: A standard coffee place, a few restaurants I rotated between, a regular bar, and two regular long walks that took me to my favorite parts of the city.

A routine that while not exactly the routine of a Bishkek-ian, had a definite Bishkek feel that I won’t forget.

So here are some of my favorite things about Bishkek. In no particular order.

Hopefully in aggregate they give you a sense of Bishkek.

Shipping container Market

The shipping container market, a two square mile market/bazaar built out of stacked cargo ship containers ten miles north of downtown Bishkek is perhaps my favorite place I’ve been in the last year. It is cool to look at and also embodies Bishkek’s wild-west anything-goes entrepreneurial ethos.

Surreal is over-used, but I’m at a loss for how else to simply describe the shipping container market. Slapped down in the middle of an otherwise bland neighborhood of mud roads and single homes is Central Asia’s largest marketplace. A complex of stores inside freight containers selling anything and everything you want: Toys, TVs, Jeans, Bras, Bikes, Spices, Trinkets, X-mas decorations, Tools, Gas Masks, Hijabs, Watches, Wall clocks, Slippers, Shampoo, Stuffed Animals, and on and on. All of it imported from China, Russia, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, South Korea, India, Iran, etc. Carrying on, in a very modern way, Kyrgyzstan’s Silk Road tradition.

It’s all self made, unplanned, growing from a spot where people went to buy stuff from parked semi’s after the Soviet collapse had broken apart the old system. A simple market that’s grown and grown and grown.