Transcript for Bektour in America

Bektour in America

Hello my name is Bektour Iskender. I am from Kyrgyzstan.

There are really many buses going around

because we are in what is probably one of the busiest parts of Istanbul, in Turkey.

Another bus. But I'm not going to talk about Turkey today.

I am going to talk about the USA.

The country in the western hemisphere

in North America

to the north of Jamaica, which I visited this year

and where I spent three weeks as part of the journalism program organized by the Department of State.

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The first impression was about meeting Bob Woodward.

Because he is like one of my heroes.

For quite a long time he's been my real hero.

And suddenly I found out that he actually exists.

He's not a fairy tale person.

And I met him in Washington DC. And for the first time in my life I was behaving like a teenager

who came to a rock concert. Because before then

I had already met several famous people.

But I usually didn't ask for any autographs. I thought that it would

be ridiculous to behave like this.

It would show that I'm lower than them in some parameters.

That would show something that I really didn't want to show about myself.

But, suddenly this time, it was a person who I admire a lot.

And I got really crazy.

He came into the auditorium where we had a meeting with him

and I started taking dozens of pictures.

From the same angle maybe.

And maybe it was not justified, but I just couldn't stop doing it.

I was shocked that I was seeing Bob Woodward live.

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Milwaukee was a mystery for me before I was going there

because I really didn't know anything about this city.

I thought that we would come to a typical American city

which would mean that it would be just skyscrapers of steel and glass

and things like this. And then suddenly I came to Milwaukee and found out that it's actually a very interesting city

built by Germans in the 19th century mostly.

And it has many old churches, which is just amazing.

And I took pictures of them. Many, many pictures of them.

But my mistake was to go and take pictures of Milwaukee when it was Sunday.

And that's where the real America was

because in America you have downtown and then you have residential areas.

Which means that on Sunday you basically have no people [downtown].

So I have all these beautiful pictures of Milwaukee

with old German-style buildings, but no people around.

So Milwaukee in my pictures looks like really a ghost town.

Like Chernobyl probably.

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I like taking pictures of birds, but we don't have that many big birds in my country -

we are too far from the sea probably.

And, when we came to the pacific ocean in San Diego,

I suddenly saw many many sea gulls at once place

I really wanted to take pictures of them because sea gulls are something really exotic for me.

But then I found out that they are moving too fast and are not willing to be photographed by me.

And I was thinking, how would it be better to make it in such a way that they would fly.

And at the same time I would make really good and sharp pictures of them.

One idea was to kill them so that they would not move.

But I thought that animal rights activists would be against that.

Then I found out that the wind was blowing from the ocean and it was quite strong

so I started running like crazy on the beach

and frightening these poor little birds

so they would start flying, but they would start flying in the direction against the wind.

And then they would just hang in the air

trying to move, but they were basically not moving because the wind was strong.

And that's how I managed to take several pictures where they are sharp, and I think those pictures are quite good.

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