Kyrgyzstan

We arrived here in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan (actually The Kyrgyz Republic) really early yesterday morning. Lena's sister and brother-in-law met us at the airport and took us back to their place, where we promptly crashed for a few hours.

Last night was family reunion time with Lena's parents and her kids. They are all great people and are making me feel right at home. All of the conversation is in Russian, so I don't get much of it, but I catch a little and Lena and her daughter Gilana translate for me if it's something important. And I'm learning more words and phrases every day. I should be fluent in 10 or 15 years.

The city is framed by gorgeous snow-capped mountains (think Colorado) and today we went for a day trip up to a National Park. Very pretty... but not exactly Yellowstone. Still it was fun to be out in the natural world after seeing so many cities.

Back to Bishkek for the evening. There's some kind of Summit Meeting going on here... the leaders of Russia, China and a bunch of the "stans", so there are cops everywhere, helicopters flying overhead, and as Lena's sister said... they cleaned up the city and it looks great.

I'm not sure what we're up tp tomorrow. I haven't been able to get on-line with my laptop since St. Petersburg, so it's hard to post pictures, but I'll give a shot later.