Crossing borders

Here are some photos from the second (and last) of my field trips with the photojournalism students from the University of Nebraska. This time we met up at 8am to go stand in the freezing cold at the Kyrgyzstan-Kazakhstan border. The students were interested in documenting residents of Kyrgyzstan who get paid to carry goods …

on assignment in Tuz

Recently, a group of photojournalism students from the University of Nebraska come to Kyrgyzstan for three weeks for what must be the coolest class assignment ever. Through my connections at AUCA, I was put in touch with them and was invited to accompany them as they traveled around and took photos for some of the …

How to survive a Bishkek winter power-outage

Temperatures have dropped again in Bishkek, another sign that winter is most definitely sticking around, despite certain predictions that Kyrgyzstan wouldn’t get a winter this year. With decreasing temperatures, Bishkek residents race to turn up their space heaters, straining the crumbling electrical infrastructure. This means more power outages and rolling black-outs. Here are my tips …

Candy Christmas

(the title is shamelessly stolen from an email written by a good friend about her envy-inducing Southeast Asian Adventure.) These are facts about Kirstin: – She loves to cook and bake and eat – She doesn’t particularly enjoy shopping – She has a growing scrooge-ness toward owning too many things that she projects onto other …

2012 resolutions

I think I did a decent job keeping up with my resolutions. All things considered, I’m achieving many things that weren’t on the list. For example, I’m earning a salary from the business and we’ve earned enough to repay ourselves for all of the start-up costs. We even treated ourselves to health insurance, which I …

Celebrating the New Year in Bishkek

Happy New Year! For the second time, I celebrated in Bishkek, surrounded by friends, food, and my wonderful husband. Just like my Christmas trip to Chon-Kemin, I was really happy to spend this time of year with a smaller group of friends than the usual gigantic expat extravaganzas. (Although, it was probably because all the …