Insight into Bishkek

The advantage of taking an interest in some of the more weird and wonderful parts of the world is that, every so often, someone else comes across you and thinks (rightly or wrongly) that you must be an expert. It's a huge compliment, if occasionally a little worrying, but you do your best to answer their questions and say something vaguely intelligible.
Having stomped around the remoter parts of Central Asia for protracted periods since 2008, Max and I are now considered sufficiently expert to talk and write about most of the 'Stans, and the questions come thick and fast on subjects as diverse as gold mining, felt production and the new Great Game. Of all the subjects presented to us, the one we've become most comfortable with is tourism.
We arrived in Bishkek for the first time in November 2008.The snow had come down unexpectedly early and the temperature had plummeted to a gnawing 25 below freezing, orries had jack-knifed on the roads and the country seemed poised to hibernate through the long, harsh months ahead.
Three years on the Kyrgyz winter is no less frightful but we've learned to manage the cold.  Thick furs, a moral dilemma on the streets of London or New York, are as essential as a bobble hat and shoes: fashion has little to do with it. Springtime thaw brings with it new life as the parks burst into emerald green, but freed from the focus on surviving through the nights, politics, greed and ambition take the chance to rear their ugly heads.
Putting Kyrgyzstan's troubles for once to one side, we worked last night on the first words of a new travel guide for Insight / Berlitz. Thanks to Bradt we're no stranger to the travel guide format, but it was a strange and unexpectedly positive experience to look again in detail at a place we not only know intimately but love and hate in equal measure.
The first challenge, as is often the case, was how to squeeze the essence of a dynamic, if occasionally psychotic, city and its 3/4million inhabitants into 250 words or so. Whatever is written cannot hope to do justice to a fraction of the city, but something must still be put on paper to give readers a microscopic taste of what might be in store.
Introduction complete, we turned our attention to the city's sites: if you were simply passing trough Bishkek for a day or so, unlikely to ever return, which few things best explain the place, its past and its people? I chose, after much deliberation, the opera and ballet theatre with its elegant facade and enthusiastically performed programme of Russian favourites; two Soviet-era museums replete with Lenin memorabilia, stuffed animals and life-sized yurts; and the White House.
Unlke its more famouse namesake, the seven concrete storeys of Bishkek's presidential adminitration share more in common with an NCP carpark than a seat of national power. Iron railings keep the populace at bay and all too recently those who crosed this unholy threshold have been met with snipers' bullets. Informal emorials to the fallen continue to cling to he ironwork, holding on somewhat longer than those whose lives they recall.