The MPI Hiking Adventure

Today we met the US-couple, who I met over this blog and who moved to Bishkek 2 days ago. It was like a blind-date, so I was excited. They turned out to be really nice people (I have to write this, because they're reading my blog regularly! *g*). But they still seemed kinda "high" from all the impressions and events in the past couple of weeks (if you read their blog, you'll know what I mean). Anyway, I can see us having some fun times together here! They took a picture of the 4 of us, so I suppose it will appear on their blog shortly. (yup, it appeared here) ;)

Right, the headline - The MPI Hiking Adventure - didn't indicate this story. But I also wanted to share our hiking experience at Lake Issyk-Kul with you. Like those who know us know that we are not into hiking (neither do we look like hikers, check out the pictures). However, I really like the view from the top of mountains. So we have a problem there! But fortunately Sophie (one of Philipp's MPI-colleagues) really wanted to go into the mountains the day before the conference started. So we took a taxi, which was supposed to bring us as high up as possible and we planned to walk a little from there. Unfortunately the taxi turned out to be a VW-Passat (meaning "not a Jeep") so due to the road conditions (actually I wouldn't call it road) "high up" wasn't quite that high. But we ended up walking up even higher for a while. Of course Sophie and Nathan, both sharing a love for hiking, went on further, while we just enjoyed the view and went back down to play Durak with the taxi driver while waiting for them.

(Most of the pictures were actually taken by Sophie. Hope you don't mind and thanks!)