What to do in Bishkek?

There is really not a lot to do in Bishkek! There are not really any old monuments or anything to visit, the museums and art galleries are written up in our guide book as dusty, lacking in light (there is no electricity in Bishkek for six hours a day) and bizarre rather than interesting. And we were feeling a bit exhausted to be honest, so had a slow start to our day in this place. 

It took us over an hour to change money, failing at several ATMs only to then find that our trusty RBS had not failed us, once again blocking our account for removing cash in Central Asia.It is becoming a tedious fact of life here that getting hold of cash is a nightmare. 

We had decided to go and explore the largest of Bishkek's bazaars for a couple of hours, a place called Doldoi market. It is 7kms from the centre of the town, and is a huge pile of shipping containers (like Baraholka market in Almaty) which have been made into shops. Actually, once we got inside, we were all feeling like mooching around and had a good few hours buying winter boots for the kids, eating meat pies called Samsa and trying on a variety of fur hats. 

The hotel had warned us that this place was run by mafia and extremely dangerous which was of course a load of absolute nonsense. It is obviously where everyone in Bishkek goes to buy pretty much everything, and was completely fine. We saw some amazing things for sale: tall felt hats, piles of wool, huge central asian women with their heads wrapped in brightly-coloured scarves, gold-teeth ad infinitum and managed to survive without being mugged, robbed or kidnapped!