Closed, and Open-Sourced: Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

“Don’t go to Bishkek, there is nothing to do there.” “I only stayed in Bishkek one day and that was plenty.” “The only city worse is Tashkent!” These were some of the nicer comments we heard about the Kyrgyz capital. We could have skipped this city of one million people if we had wanted to, as there was a route we could’ve taken from Naryn to Osh via Kazarman that, while long and over rough roads, is doable in the summer. Despite what we heard, though, we still wanted to see it for ourselves—so we boarded a marshrutka from Naryn and headed for the big city.

Bishkek is a Russian creation from the mid-1800s, which may explain its less-than-stellar reputation among visitors. There is not much history to see or speak of other than what used to be there; what the Mongols didn’t destroy, the Bolsheviks finished off. No old mosques or churches stood to tell their tales. From an urban planning perspective, it is very orderly: gridded streets with wide avenues. In practice, though, it does not translate to much character; a block goes on forever and the massive boulevards take forever to cross. The architecture may be interesting to those with an appreciation of Soviet history, including the expanse of Ala-Too Square and the gleaming State History Museum with a stately statue of Kyrgyz’s Manas in front of it. But the Orwellian-imposing government edifices passed down to the Kyrgyz in 1991 have likely not helped their leaders relinquish command easily. There have been a handful of revolutions in the republic’s short 30-year stint at independence (in fact, we were told that just two months ago, the current president arrested the former president, who was the only one to step down after his term ended in 2017). In short, the city’s main attractions come across as quite serious—beautiful but daunting structures looming over large, empty public squares.

Against this backdrop, then, it was quite humorous to see some folks running around the city with a zombie teddy bear costume, scaring fellow park-goers and posting videos to their YouTube channel (millennials!).

All places and people hold pleasant secrets when you look beyond the surface, and Bishkek was no different. Despite what we heard, we ultimately ended up really liking the city, spending more time there than expected. It is very close to a beautiful national park (Ala-Archa), and when the smog isn’t bad (all those old Ladas aren’t helping carbon emissions), there are great views of snowcapped mountains in the distance. There is a surprisingly large fancy café scene; each block had at least a few coffee shops, all of which were very busy (and some great names to go with them, like Corleone Coffee). And the Soviet planners did have their positive moments, as there are many lovely parks and green spaces throughout the city to get lost in.

It was in Oak Park where we stumbled upon a group of high schoolers dressed as French painters from the Renaissance era. In addition to actually painting canvases (some of which were quite good), many of them were also docents for what happened to be “Kyrgyz Heritage Day” that day! A few of them spoke decent-enough English and were eager to take us around on the “Heritage Trail” that their group had laid out for the celebration, so we went along with them for several hours. This is how we went from following around a bloody teddy bear to taking in some of the city’s sites that we otherwise would have never visited.

The girls first took us to some rich guy’s house. It was built around the early 1900s, so it constitutes as old. After some research later, we learned that this was the house of Ilya Terentyev, the first mayor of Bishkek who built the city’s first hospital, first pharmacy, first notion of a bank, and proactively supported education. Ilya Terentyev was Russian.

The girls then took us to the Frunze Museum. Mikhail Frunze was a Nathaniel Greene of sorts for the Russian Revolutionary Red Army. The Lenin crony orchestrated a very successful campaign to capture Turkestan (the old name for Islamic Central Asia) for the Soviets and killed many Basmachi (Islamic freedom fighters, which included many Kyrgyz), who were trying to create an independent Turkestan as the revolutionaries were overthrowing Imperial Russia. When he died, Lenin renamed Bishkek (which was actually named Pishpek at the time) “Frunze” in his honor; it reverted back to Bishkek only in 1991. So if you ever fly into Bishkek, you now know why the airport code is FRU. Mikhail Frunze was born in Bishkek, but was of Russian descent.

Finally, when we left the museum, we passed a massive Lenin statue. It was so giant, even the zombie bear was afraid. Lenin freed the Kyrgyz from the Tsar and promised self-determination, but then proceeded to send in the Red Army that crushed the Central Asian independence movement, which, in turn, killed many thousands (see Frunze, Mikhail, above). Almost every city in Kyrgyzstan has a similar giant Lenin statue. V.I. Lenin, Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, in case you were wondering, was Russian.

As you can see, there was a lot of Soviet history on display, and some of it not very positive if you are Kyrgyz. They may have good relations with Russia at this point, but just because the U.S. likes England now doesn’t mean we have statues of King George on the National Mall. We asked the Renaissance girls how they felt about the Soviet presence, but they only responded by saying that they didn’t like history (they liked translating languages). We also asked Sanira the same question (you will meet her below), who responded similarly and said that she didn’t really like history. It left us wondering how the Kyrgyz actually feel about all this. Maybe people don’t like history when it’s bad? More likely, as with all history, it is incredibly complex and there is no easy “like” or “dislike.”

For a little taste of democracy, we then headed to the Obama Bar and Grill for lunch. That’s right, the Obama Bar and Grill in Kyrgyzstan. We just had to go. Which leads us to a quick side note. We are often asked by people in the States, “What do people think about America?” The answer is, they love us here. When we say we are from America, their faces light up. When we say we are from California, there's an even better response. “Los Angeles!” “Tom Cruise!” said another. “Sacramento!” said one waiter randomly, with his thumbs up. Sacramento?

But there is often also a subtle sadness behind this excitement, as many would like to move to the States to live the American Dream. “Take me with you,” said the woman working at Megacom when we got our SIM cards. They’ve told us that even the visa just to visit is difficult and very expensive, so it will likely always remain a dream. It is humbling to be reminded that the American Dream still exists and continues to be true for so many, as it’s easy to lose sight of the opportunities we have sometimes.

Back at lunch, the Obama administration faced its biggest problem since the 2008 recession: a hamburger bun shortage. You have five pages of hamburgers on the menu; how can you not have hamburger buns?! Anyway, in honor of the U.S. being a multicultural society, and inspired by the burritos a few pages back, we got a hamburger wrapped in a tortilla. It was actually quite good. Thanks, Obama.

It was around this time that Sanira arrived, a Couchsurfing connection who kindly offered to show us around her city. Sanira is not your everyday tour guide or Couchsurfer meet-up. She is a 23-year-old entrepreneur/activist who is both the CEO/founder of a coding school for aspiring Kyrgyz programmers, and the community manager for High Tech Park, a government-sponsored tech incubator supporting Kyrgyzstan’s nascent tech scene. We would spend the next two days benefiting from her deep kindness and quiet determination.

In tow with her was Alex, a data scientist from Dayton, Ohio, who was spending a month in Bishkek teaching folks about AI and helping the startups at High Tech Park incorporate machine learning into their products and businesses (we’d tell you more about this, but we don’t get it). He may be a Fulbright Scholar, but his real honor was being the first American we met in Central Asia.

After taking in some natural sights just outside the city, we went to a bar named the No Name Bar. Here, we learned more about High Tech Park from Altynbek. At just 31, Altynbek had already founded a hardware startup years ago and is now the director of High Tech Park, orchestrating educational workshops such as Alex’s lectures and helping connect ideas and talent across the 50-something startups around Central Asia and even around the globe. We also met Sergei, one of the High Tech Park entrepreneurs-in-residence and a 20-something former medical doctor whose startup is a good example of the types of businesses being supported: they use technology to analyze the body language of government officials in media to see if they are lying, with the aim to help root out corruption throughout the country. These kids of High Tech Park aren’t kidding around with their new businesses, and they have the brains and ambitions to match it. It was great to hear about these positive companies, and incredibly interesting to learn about the world of tech through a non-San Francisco lens (even an Ohio lens was refreshing).

High Tech Park itself is an initiative and group, not a physical location, but it did get us thinking about what to call this growing tech hub of Central Asia. There’s Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley (NYC), Silicon Beach (Los Angeles), etc… What about Silicon Steppe? Silicon Road (playing off the Silk Road)? Silk-icon Valley? Sili-stan? As you can see, we are not yet ready to market the brand, so if you have any ideas, please add in the comments!

Talking about machine learning over some cold Balticas while looking around the trendy bar in Bishkek with lots of young people having a good time, was 1) really not what we expected to do in Bishkek, and 2) really drove home the changing dividing lines in this world. We are less divided these days by country, or race, or religion. Rather, it is young versus old, rural versus urban. We would argue that our lives in San Francisco are closer to the lives of young Bishkekens than they are to older folks just a drive away in Bakersfield, California, just as these Kyrgyz entrepreneurs have more in common with us than they do to the nomadic shepherds at Song-Köl. We may have a hard time understanding Kyrgyzstan’s colonial past or appreciating their architecture, but we had no problems falling into an easy discussion with our new friends about how AI will change our lives in the next ten years, or who our favorite characters from Game of Thrones are. We felt both far away and close to home at the same time.

Karen and Michael

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, September 27-29, 2019