So, I haven't been able to write one more blog post, and now it's too late. I'm heading out for the rest of Central Asia tomorrow (the 29th), and so you probably won't hear much from me here for a while. I can't promise anything, but hopefully I'll be able to pop on every now and then and give a quick update. I uploaded some pictures of our trip to Naryn on flickr the other day, so if you haven't seen those yet go check them out. So, see you when I see you!
-Austin
3/28/08
3/17/08
мы будем ходить босиком
Ok, I’m long overdue again for another posterino. Right now it’s March 16th, and I have only two weeks left in Bishkek before hitting the road and seeing the rest of Central Asia (part of the rest, anyways). I’m actually starting to get bummed out that I don’t have much more time in Bishkek. Now that the weather is getting nice and I feel comfortable with the city and the people and everything, it would be nice to have more time to stay. I feel like there are still a lot of things I haven’t done or parts of town I haven’t explored, and it doesn’t really look like I’ll be able to do that now. I always feel this way when I get close to leaving a place, so I know I’ll get over it. I’m definitely looking forward to traveling, though. Anyway, I’ll pick up where I left off last time. Last Wednesday (the 5th) I spent mostly scrounging for ideas for Women’s Day gifts. Well, first I had some lunch somewhere (I can’t remember where) used the internet café, and had a beer at Fatboy’s (usually I don’t like going there, but I had to use their bathroom so I figured I should order something), then I wondered around the in the vicinity of TsUM to find some good ideas. I checked in TsUM itself, but it didn’t have anything in the way of presents, and I also looked in another nearby shopping center for the first time called Dordoi Plaza (same name as the market I wrote about last time, except everything is simply brought from the market to these much classier and more convenient digs so they can charge a lot more for it), but they didn’t really have anything either. I found some good stuff along Chui Prospekt near TsUM where all the vendors lined up. I bought some nice cards for my host mom, my supervisor, and my Kyrgyz teacher, and a bunch of fun silly little Women’s Day cards for my female students. I sat outside a while, enjoying the warmish weather, and also bought a delicious peach ice cream come in the pedestrian underpass below the intersection of Sovietskaya and Chui. I took a marshrutka home, stopping at Narodny on the way to buy some chocolates for the same three Women I got cards for, and some small chocolates to give to my students along with their cards. Oh wait! Before I go on, I have to write about something that really creeped me out. On before heading out to do all this said shopping, I had been hanging around the apartment a bit, and at one point when I came out of my room to use the bathroom I saw someone lying perfectly still on the couch like they were dead, with their legs crossed, their hands held up in the air in some sort of yoga-like position, and what looked like a hideously burned and scared face. After a few seconds of shock and horror I realized that it was my host mom, but she was wearing some kind of robe that I had never seen her wear before, so I didn’t immediately recognized it as her. I looked closely at her face and figured out that she had on some sort of facial mask made of oatmeal or something, like it was some kind of skin treatment, but it was pretty much the exact same color as her skin, so it looked like it was actually part of her face. She still didn’t move the whole time I was trying to figure this out, so she must have been trying some sort of relaxation-skin therapy. I also remembered that I had seen a little book in the kitchen a few days before called “beauty in 20 minutes,” so it must have been something from that. For those few seconds, though, I was totally freaked out, and my heart kept racing for a few minutes afterwards. But anyways, that following Thursday I still had more Women’s Day shopping to do, so at the grocery store in the shopping center near the school I bought a bunch of medium-sized chocolate bars to hand out to the office staff, and left them hidden in my classroom to give out the next day.
Friday was actually the day before Women’s day, but it was the day people are expected to give gifts to their colleagues and other people they won’t see on the weekend, so this was the day I had to give everyone their presents. I got to the school early so I could buy some flowers at the flower shop down the street. I got a small bouquet each for my supervisor (Kenje) and my Kyrgyz teacher (Rayhan), and tried to sneak everything into the school without any other women seeing. My host mom had explained that it’s best to give all women the same-sized gift, but that if you give more you should do it in private so that others don’t see and get jealous. I wanted to do more for my supervisor and my teacher, so I had their stuff in my room until I could give it to them. I had Kyrgyz lessons first thing, so I gave the flowers, chocolates, and card to Rayhan then. Nick had found out that I was going all-out for Women’s Day, and so in order to not look bad he ran out and bought some flowers for Rayhan as well before class started. Later on I brought Kenje up to my classroom and gave her everything as well. She was really surprised and almost refused to take all of it at first, but then graciously accepted. I then handed out chocolate to all the office, library, cleaning, and cafeteria staff (which consists entirely of women), and they were all very surprised as well, because I don’t think they were expecting anything from the teachers. I even have some chocolate leftover to give to Jess, Katy, and Jane. The girls in my classes were all happy to get their cards and chocolate as well. I think I did pretty well over all for Women’s Day. That night I went with Jane, Jess, and Nick to that new Turkish place we like, and were disappointed to learn that the really good cheese dishes we all wanted were not ready, so we all settled for something else that also turned out to be good. We were going to meet up with Katy and Alison at Sweet 60’s but we were all kind of tired, so instead we went to Nick and Jess’s place and watched a couple episodes of that British show called Peep Show that Nick introduced me to. Before heading home I stopped at a flower shop (they stay open really late the night before Women’s Day), and bought a bouquet for my host mom. I took a taxi home and crept into the apartment trying not to make a lot of noise with the bouquet.
The next morning I presented my host mom with her Women’s Day presents (flowers, chocolate, and a card), and she seemed very touched that I had gotten so much for her. She said that she and Adik were going to the nearby market (Orto-Sai) for a few things, and wanted to know if I would come with them. I figured I should spend some time with her on Women’s day, so I tagged along. I had been told that it is possible to find records at this market, so on the way over I asked Zainap and Adik if they knew where to find them. They thought it was a strange question, but said that it was in fact possible to find them at the market, and that they would show me where to look. On the south side of the market there is a dirt road / parking lot area where some people line up on the weekend and try to sell their junk, including, sometimes, records. We quickly found a guy who had a couple piles of records alongside his other knick-knacks, and I anxiously dove in. Oh my god, I can’t explain how excited I was to find some of the things I found. I got a few records by Vladimir Vysotsky (a great Russian folk singer), some records by some Russian rock bands I’ve heard of but don’t really know anything about (Mashina Vremeny [“Time Machine’] and Piknik), a record by a Russian rockabilly band named “Mister Tvister,” two Soviet-issue Rolling Stones records (though sadly not a copy of the Soviet release of “Sticky Fingers” like I stupidly passed up in St. Petersburg), a Soviet-issue Credence record, and, inexplicably, a copy of my favorite Billy Bragg album released in the UK. But my best find by far was something of a Holy Grail for me: a copy of my favorite Kino album, “Noch” (“Night”)! I would have been ecstatic to find any Kino on vinyl, but this was the one I had been dreaming of finding even back in Russia. I had seen a picture of this record on the internet before, and it has a completely different cover than the CD version, so I had always thought how it would be awesome to find a copy like that, and here it was for about 70 cents! The sleeve was a little beat up, but the vinyl itself seemed to be in perfect condition (all the records were in great shape, actually). I was pretty overjoyed, and walked around the market for a while with a bit of a post-awesome-record-find high (the last time I had one of those was when I finally found my own copy of the Buzz of Delight record in Santa Cruz last spring break). My host mom showed me another part of the market where even more people line up on the weekend to sell junk, and said that on Sunday it would be even bigger. Adik went off for a while and we couldn’t find him, so Zainap called him on my cell-phone and as we waited around I got to try some of this stuff called Shoro (that’s actually the brand name). I had seen it in bottles in stores before, but now that the weather is nice they sell it on the street all over the city. It’s a drink that comes in a few different varieties, but the two main varieties are “Maksim” (with a red label) and Chalap (with a blue label). There was a vendor at the market, so I thought I’d try a small cup. Some of my students had said I should try the red kind, so I decided to give it a shot. It’s a non-alcoholic barley drink, and it basically tastes like drinking rye bread. I don’t mind rye bread, but drinking it is another story. I couldn’t finish my 0.2 liter cup, and gave the rest to my host mom. A few days later I would try the blue kind of Shoro, and it was much better than the red kind. It’s milk-based, and tastes like a runny, tart yogurt that’s a little bit salty and a little bit fizzy. It’s not something I could go crazy for, but it certainly isn’t bad.
Anyways, we finally met back up with Adik and headed back to the apartment. Adik had bought a card to give to his girlfriend for Women’s Day (until this point I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend), and seemed really proud of it, like he had gotten her a really good gift. On the way out of the market we passed a guy who was selling some books, including a road atlas of the USSR that I was kind of interested in, though I didn’t have enough money left on me to pay for it. He asked for 100 som, which was reasonable, but I just didn’t have that much on me, so Zainap and I politely turned him down. He really aggressively tried to get us to buy it, and thumbed through the pages and explained to us that “all of the Soviet Union is here!”, as if that was our main concern and had turned him down because we didn’t think it covered the whole thing. Back at the apartment I admired my new records for a bit, then headed over to the school/apartments to help out in Operation Paint Jane’s Apartment. The weekend before Jane had bought some peach-colored paint to do a couple walls in her living room/kitchen, and so we had been planning a Women’s Day paint party. Nick and Jess had painted their apartment before, and were anxious to help Jane do hers. I wasn’t to enthusiastic about painting since I didn’t have any close to paint in and was worried about getting paint all over myself, but they needed me to reach the tops of the walls. I tried showing up a little late to let them get most of it done before I got there, but everyone had gotten a slow start and I got there before anybody else did. Eventually the others came and we taped of the corners, mixed the paint, and ate some cookies. There wasn’t really enough room for everyone to paint at the same time, so I kind of hung around until they needed the upper reaches of the walls painted. I wore some shorts and my most dispensable shirt, but I actually did a really god job of keeping the paint off of myself. It turned out really well, and we decided we didn’t have to bother with a second layer. Once we finished we all had a celebratory beer, and then headed across the street to Nooruz for some delicious lagman and shaslyk. We were worried that no matter where we would go for dinner it would be really packed because of the holiday, but since Nooruz isn’t really a classy place it was as empty as it usually is (meaning that about half the tables were open). We stopped by Ramstor afterwards to get some drinks, then headed back to the apartments to watch a movie. We got some vodka and Pomegranate (a good combo, I found), and Jonathan bought a bottle of kymys. Is made from fermented mare’s milk, and is basically the national drink of Kyrgyzstan/Central Asia. Usually it’s only available in the summer, but you can buy it bottled year round, and I was anxious to try it out. It smelled pretty awful, which then made me a bit reluctant to try, but I took a sip anyways and it turned out to be not as bad as I thought. It tasted kind of like that blue Shoro stuff I described, but a lot tarter and with a strong parmesan-ish, almost bleu cheese taste thrown in. That probably doesn’t sound too appetizing, and it isn’t really, but after all the hype I had heard about it it turned out to be not as bad as I expected. We watched my copy of Juno on Jess’s computer (I was relieved to learn that it worked on someone else’s computer), and then Jonathan and I shared a taxi home.
For Sunday, Nick and Jonathan both wanted to go to Orto-Sai, and I wanted to see if I could find some more records, so we all met up and went to the market again around noon. Nick was interested in getting some records, so I showed him where I had bought mine. The vendor seemed excited that I was back and that I had brought someone else, cause these were probably the first records he’d sold in a long time. Nick just bought copies of Soviet-issued Doors and Led Zeppelin albums. We wandered along the street where lots of people were selling their junk. I bought one more records called “For you, Women,” only for the fact that it was on clear yellow vinyl. I also bought a cookbook for Kyrgyz cuisine written in Russian, so hopefully I’ll be able to make some lagman back home! We also checked out this cool little book shop along the road too. Jonathan bought a big encyclopedia about only the Kyrgyz SSR, and I got a neat picture book of the Crimea (still waiting on that Fulbright…) One of the most interesting books we saw in there was a huge Russian-Udmurt / Udmurt-Russian dictionary (Udmurt is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in one of the republics of the Russian Federation). Nick and Jonathan bought some cool old Soviet pins, and I was tempted too but I remembered that I bought a bunch in Russian and I never wear them or anything, so I passed this time. We wandered for a ways, then headed back towards the main market for a “gamburger.” Before taking off, Nick wanted to find some stickers that we had seen on cars around town. There’s a sticker with the outline of a high-heeled shoe that, supposedly, female drivers can put in their back window to let other’s know that they are female and therefore poor drivers (this is Kyrgyzstan talking, not me), and in the event of an accident they can be found to be less at fault if they have the sticker in the window. We all think it’s pretty funny, so Nick wanted to buy some of these stickers, as well as a Kyrgyzstan country code sticker like all the cars have in Europe. We found them, and so Nick then headed home on a marshrutka. I, on the other hand, wanted to go to Jonathan’s apartment to check out his komus, a Kyrgyz stringed instrument. His apartment is really close to the market, so we walked over. His apartment is really nice, and he even has high speed wireless internet installed there, which I’m really jealous of. I tried out his komus, as well as this other Kazakh stringed instrument he has called a Dombra (I might have gotten that wrong). They were both really cool instruments, and I decided then and there that I really had to get a komus. Jonathan’s also got a big collection of music from Kyrgyzstan and a lot of other Turkic language-speaking countries (and from a lot of other places as well). He played me some stuff and burned me a DVD with a ton of the music on it. We hung out for a while listening to different Central Asian music, fiddling around on instruments, and drinking this tasty berry wine he had bought at the market. I walked back to my place going through some of the micro-regions (like defined neighborhoods), and got kind of lost and turned around for a second, but figured my way through eventually.
I know Josh wants me to talk more about what I do at school and with my students, but I feel like that would require it’s own post cause I can only really talk about it in general terms, i.e. not a day to day basis like I do with the rest of my posts. I can’t really remember what I do or what happens in each class on a given day, but I could talk about the trends and general goings-on. I can’t really think of a way to fit that in here, so I think I’ll have to leave that for another time. I’ll tell you about it someday, Josh. So, essentially, that next Monday and Tuesday are just miscellaneous work days in my mind now, and I can’t really recall anything specific that I did. Wednesday, however, was my day off and I remember it quite distinctly. I had two goals for Wednesday: 1 – buy a Komus, and 2 – wander around some new parts of town. I started off by walking south along the canal near by apartment, passed the area where the Pakistanis play cricket and stuff. It was a nice day for a walk, and I was walking right towards the mountains so I had a nice view. I walked until the street alongside the canal ended, and then around some apartment buildings to a park my students had told me about called “South Gate.” In this park there’s a big monument dedicated to something or other, and some nice wooded areas around it. I saw one of the crazy Central Asian squirrels with the pointy ears and the red fur. I was kind of under whelmed with the park and decided to head towards Osh Bazaar to get a komus. Fortunately, I learned, this part of the city is where many of the marshrutkas begin their routes, so I caught one that only had two other people in it and rode all the way to the center (of course by then it had gotten packed). There was a young guy who got on the same time as me, and I saw him staring at my boots for a long time. He eventually asked was size they were, and I had to tell him I didn’t know (it’s true, I don’t know what a size 15 is in their shoe measuring system). I got off the marshrutka a few blocks from the bazaar, and walked over. I went to the souvenir booth where I had bought some gifts before, because I knew the people where friendly and that they had a good komus selection. The friendly girl from before wasn’t working, but I reasonably friendly guy was. He didn’t actually play the komus, but he was able to explain their relative qualities. After debating which one I should buy for a while, I settled for one that was middle-of-the-road in quality and price. It’s made from nut wood, which is okay, but apparently apricot wood is the best (I couldn’t afford one of those). I also bought an oz komus, which is essentially a Jew’s harp, and so I got 100 som off of a bag for the komus. All together it was about $40, so not too bad. I wandered around the market some more, and had some shashlyk and beer at one of the shashlyk places in the market. When I ordered the shashlyk from the grill-master guy out front he kept speaking way too fast and I couldn’t understand what kind of meat he was saying he had. When I asked him to speak slower, he just mimed that he had chicken and beef. I wasn’t actually sure if he meant beef or mutton, so I tried to confirm, “mutton?”, and he just shook his head and went “moooo,” and then I understood, though I wish he wouldn’t have given up trying to speak to me in Russian.
The Shashlyk and the beer were good, and I then headed out of the market to do some wandering. I walked down Chui for a bit, then stopped into a Shmel internet club for a bit, and kept going. I finally made it over to the Philharmonic building and got some pictures of the cool statue out front. I then made a loop back around to Molodye Gvardii Street (Young Gaurds), and headed south. This street is one of the ones that has a nice park-like pedestrian walkway down the middle of it separating the two directions of traffic, so I strolled along stopping periodically to rest on a bench. A paint crew was going around and repainting many of the benches in rainbow colors, and I almost sat on a freshly painted bench when some friendly people nearby stopped me and explained that it was still drying. I was reminded of that old Mentos commercial where the guy sits on the wet bench just before a big interview or something, and gets paint all over his suit, but then has a Mentos-inspired stroke of genius and rolls his whole body on the bench, creating perfect pinstripes. It hadn’t struck me until just then how ridiculous that commercial was. I crossed under the train tracks and headed towards a part of town known as “Rabochy Gorodok’ (Workers’ Village). It stands out on the map as this big circle where all the streets meet in the middle, and I had been curious to check it out. I accidentally ended up going down the wrong street and only walking along the edge of the “village” for a little ways and not going through it, but I think I got the gist of it form what I saw. Most of the streets are actually small alleys, it turns out. I have to mention that during my entire walk I was carrying my newly-purchased komus in it’s case, and I ended up getting so much attention from it the whole day. I would see people pointing to it and showing their friends, and on several occasions people would come up to me and ask me if I played it. I think to them it seemed incomprehensible that a non-Kyrgyz person would play the komus, especially a foreigner (I think my short sleeves were a dead giveaway) While walking near Rabochy Gorodok, I passed a couple of kids who were fighting in a driveway, and as soon as they saw me coming they stopped and stared at my komus. I heard them talking to each other about it, wondering if it was actually a komus inside the bag, and they must have decided that it couldn’t be because they called out to me and asked, “Is that a guitar? Or a balalaika? “ (Note to the reader: I’m not quite sure how big a balalaika is, but a komus is certainly way smaller than any guitar). I just smiled at them and said, “nyet.” I little further down the street a guy who seemed to be about my age or a little older enthusiastically came up to me when he saw my komus and started asking if I played. He said that he played the komus and wanted to know if he could try mine. I was really reluctant to let a stranger play it, but he seemed really friendly and honest so I figured why not. He took it out of the bag, readjusted the bridge and tried to tune it a bit before playing around a little bit. He said that the wood wasn’t very good and when I told him how much it cost he said I had over paid. I’m happy with the quality and price, though. He asked me in English, “how is my pronunciation?” (it was pretty good, actually), and when I asked him if he spoke English he said (in Russian), “I play the komus better.” I talked to him a little bit and he did turn out to be really friendly, and just earnestly enthusiastic to meet a foreigner who was interested in the komus. He told me his name, but I forgot it.
I continued along my journey, walking down Yuri Gagarin Street. I ended up at the Humanities University on Prospekt Mira, and then crossed the street and down some small side streets towards Tynystanova. As I got close to my apartment, I found some cool little courtyards and hidden areas, the kind of places you never see unless you make the effort to get off the main streets and explore a little deeper. That’s what I like about cities in the former Soviet Union, there are always these little secret places tucked away between buildings or down small streets that you could pass by every day and never know they’re there unless you take the time to seek them out. I found a small fruit market along the canal only a few blocks from my apartment. I finally made it home, exhausted after my long walk (it really was a big walk, basically across town). I played around with my komus for must of the night, and now even though I don’t really know the proper technique I really do have fun just messing around with it and coming up with my own stuff.
Thursday was another average work day, except for the fact that I had a nice walk home with one of my students named Adilet (yes, he as the same name as my host brother). Usually he walks with two of my other students from the school to a the place where he catches his marshrutka home near my apartment, but on Thursday those two other students were absent, and so he asked if I would walk with him because he said it “wasn’t safe” to walk alone, which I don’t think is true, but I was happy to walk with him if it made him feel better. I had once walked that way with him and one of the other students, so he knew that I needed to go that direction anyways. We had a nice walk, and he’s a really great guy, so I had a good time. Friday was Jonathan’s birthday, and originally he had planned for us to all have dinner and then go to this rock club called Promzona (I went there my first or second weekend here, actually), but it turned out Alison’s sisters were coming to visit the next day and everyone was going to go to Promzona the next night instead, so we delayed Jonathan’s birthday celebration to coincide with that trip instead. We did, however, still go out to dinner. We went to this place called Aria, which was supposedly a Persian place but didn’t actually have any Persian food. They did have some pretty good pizza, though. There menu was in Russian and English, and had plenty of funny English translations, though the best was the Meat ala-Caucasus, which included “beef?” among other things. Jonathan’s friend and fellow Fulbrighter named Laura met us there too, and she seemed pretty cool. She’s from West Virginia and looks a lot like my sister’s friend Lacy, I thought. Jonathan said that she is basically fluent in Russian, and everybody always mistakes her for a Russian, and after meeting her it seems to be true. She’s actually slightly younger than me and I don’t think she’s been learning Russian any longer than I have, yet she’s light years beyond my abilities. We enjoyed our meals, and Jonathan had brought along a nice cake that we all enjoyed as well. This place also had hookahs, and so we ordered one with apple tobacco. It tasted more like black licorice to me, but nobody else seemed to agree. After dinner we all headed home, and I split a taxi with Jonathan and Laura.
Saturday morning I had to get up bright and early, because the school had planned a trip to Ala-Archa Canyon for me and a few other teachers. Only those of us who hadn’t been to the canyon yet were allowed to go on the trip, which meant Jane, Kevin, Ben, and Me. We didn’t have Bayan drive us this time, but instead one of the other drivers the school often uses, who took us the 40 minutes to the canyon, dropped us off, and later came back at our decided-upon pick-up time, 4:00. Along the way we drove through some small villages, and at one point were confronted with two charging horses coming straight towards us followed by their owner chasing after them. We got there at 11:45, and just headed up into the canyon. There have got to be hundreds if not thousands of canyons just like this all over Kyrgyzstan, but this one is special because it’s so close to Bishkek and is designated as a nature preserve. It’s a really nice place, with big jagged mountains and cliffs on either side. We didn’t really know what there was to see or do, so we just kept walking. We soon came across a small river, and sat next to it for a bit before continuing forward. We passed a small footbridge with a metal frame that had big gaps in it. We were able to cross it, but it didn’t go anywhere on the other side, so we just went back over it and kept moving forward. We eventually came upon a big gravel washout with the same river snaking though it, and followed the river a ways. There were some other people nearby, most just throwing rocks into the river. It was kind if windy and chilly, and there were still patches of snow and ice on the ground, but I was comfortable enough in my grey hoodie. We stopped for a picnic by the river, which included eggs and pretzels from Jane, and some cheese, salami, and chips that I had brought. We then continued forward over a hill, and down the other side where the canyon kept going into the distance. We saw another little footbridge over the river below us, this time made of wood and without a handrail. We went down to check it out and crossed to the other side, Once there, we stood at the base of one side of the canyon, and from that angle, looking up, we decided that it didn’t look too hard to climb, and that it might be fun to try and climb it to see what was on the other side of the ridge on the top. I wasn’t really into the idea, but the other’s were kind of gung-ho about it, so I had to follow. After about five minutes of climbing through brush along the ever-steepening slope, we took a breather and decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to keep going, since going back down was obviously going to be a real challenge. Kevin and Ben were still into the idea of going forward, but we decided it was best not to split up, so we all headed back down. Back on the trail, we looked up at where we had climbed and where we would have climbed to had we kept going, and saw that there was a big spot of loose rocks and some pretty dangerous-looking inclines further up, and we knew that we had made the right decision. We were going to keep going along the river, but then decided that it would be a good idea to head back now so we could hit up the little lodge by the parking lot that supposedly had beer and shashlyk. On the way back we saw some pretty blue ice that we were afraid to walk on until we discovered it was just packed snow. We got back to the lodge relatively quickly and sat down at a table inside. We were disappointed to learn that the lodge had no sashlyk, no beer, and literally nothing to serve us except some bottles of soda (they only had one bottle of Coke left, so we got one Coke and one Sprite). I ate some of our remaining picnic food, drank some soda, and just relaxed for a while before the driver returned to pick us up, It was a nice and relaxing way to finish our trip to Ala-Archa. On the way back to town we drove passed the president’s mansion and the US Embassy, which are pretty close to each other. I had the driver drop me off near my apartment, and I went home and had a rest before going out again later that night.
Saturday night was our big Promzona night, so around 9:00 I headed out to meet up with everyone at the school/apartments. I bought a bottle of Coke and a small bottle of vodka at one of the convenient store shacks near my apartment to bring to the apartments and “pre-funk,” as we say back in Eugene. They gave the two bottles to me in this flimsy little bag, and as I was walking to the corner to catch a marshrutka the bottle of vodka fell through the bag and broke open on the sidewalk. Only the top of the neck broke off and there was some vodka left that hadn’t spilled out, but I figured it wasn’t a good idea to drink out of a broken glass so I threw the rest of it away and bought another bottle and another booth. It was only 30 som (less than $1), so I wasn’t to bummed. I got over to the apartments to find that everyone was still kind of behind in getting ready, so I started watching a little Simpsons on Jess’s computer until more people showed up (upon Nick’s insistence that I keep myself entertained while I cooked his dinner). Eventually more people showed up, and I got to meet Alison’s visiting family. After sitting around for a while making Armenian jokes we set out for Promzona in two taxis. It was really windy, and there were actually tumbleweeds blowing around on some of the rural-ish roads we had to drive along to get to Promzona. The place was pretty hopping, but not packed, and we managed to score a big table for all of us. They were playing a Shania Twain concert on all their TVs for a while until the live band started. This band was weird. They had a really wild female signer who seemed to have the whole rock band singer look and stage presence down, which was cool I guess, but the weird part was that, instead of a bass player, they had another girl who would switch between playing the tambourine, the ocarina, and the oz komus (that Jew’s harp thing I mentioned). It was an interesting sound, and they seemed to be playing all original material, but the songs were pretty uninteresting and I think everyone got bored with them pretty quick. It was hard to dance to, also. We sat around at our table for the most part, drinking beer and taking lots of crazy pictures of each other. Once the band stopped they started playing dance music, so we had a good time dancing around. I was getting pretty tired by the end, and around 1:30 or so we all headed out to find that it was raining pretty heavily outside. We quickly got in some taxis and got out of there. Jonathan and I found it would be cheaper to split a taxi with the other teachers back to the school. Then get another taxi to our respective apartments. I was pretty beat from a long day of hiking and dancing, so I went straight to sleep when got home.
And now this finally brings us to today, Sunday. Earlier this week I had convinced Kevin that he should buy a komus for himself, and se he decided to head to Osh Bazaar to find one. I needed to do some more gift shopping too, so I went with him to do that and to help him pick out a komus. We first had lunch at the same place we had lunch before going to Dordoi Bazaar a couple weeks earlier. I had a special type of lagman with egg, and a delicious shashlyk cooked in a tandoori oven, and Kevin had his usual plov. They tried to charge me double for the shashlyk, but I caught their “mistake” and made them fix it. After lunch we waited for a while for a marhsrutka to the bazaar that wasn’t packed with people, but didn’t seem to be having any luck, so we broke down and got a taxi. We went to the crafts area and I took Kevin to my favorite booth with the komuses. The friendly girl was there again this time, and we tried playing a bunch of different komuses before Kevin settled on getting one just like the kind I had bought. The “best” ones seemed to have some problems with the tuning pegs. I also bought some gifts for people here, and we then headed to a few other booths to do some more gift shopping. I ended up burning through all the money I had brought with me pretty quick, but I got almost everything I had wanted to get. When we were done with souvenirs we headed to one of the shashlyk restaurants in the bazaar for a drink and a snack. We split a bottle of Coke and each had a couple small shashlyk skewers before wandering around some more. We at some 5 som ice cream, took some pictures of the market, and saw a pile of cow heads in front of a butcher shop. WE were getting tired of the market, so we got a taxi to take each of us home. I had to borrow some money from Kevin to get home cause I had spent all of mine on gifts. So, ever since then I’ve been hanging around the old apartment, playing some komus, planning some lessons, etc. The movie “Super Bad” was on TV dubbed into Russian earlier, but I was too busy writing this to watch it. This next week is only 4-days long, since Friday is the Muslim holiday “Nooruz.” This means we have to work on Wednesday, but it also means that we have a three-day weekend. Some of the other teachers and I (plus a couple others) are planning a trip to a town called Naryn for our long weekend. Naryn is in the middle of Kyrgyzstan, way up in the mountains surrounded by awesome scenery apparently. We’re hoping to rent out an apartment for all of us, like we had done on my trips to Sochi and Yalta two years ago (almost exactly) Also, we’re going to try to go to this cool place called Tash Rabat, which is an old caravan stop built into the side of a mountain really close to the Chinese border. Hopefully I’ll have time to write about that before heading off for my big Central Asian trip at the end of March. So, until then, keep on rockin’ in the free world.
-Austin
Friday was actually the day before Women’s day, but it was the day people are expected to give gifts to their colleagues and other people they won’t see on the weekend, so this was the day I had to give everyone their presents. I got to the school early so I could buy some flowers at the flower shop down the street. I got a small bouquet each for my supervisor (Kenje) and my Kyrgyz teacher (Rayhan), and tried to sneak everything into the school without any other women seeing. My host mom had explained that it’s best to give all women the same-sized gift, but that if you give more you should do it in private so that others don’t see and get jealous. I wanted to do more for my supervisor and my teacher, so I had their stuff in my room until I could give it to them. I had Kyrgyz lessons first thing, so I gave the flowers, chocolates, and card to Rayhan then. Nick had found out that I was going all-out for Women’s Day, and so in order to not look bad he ran out and bought some flowers for Rayhan as well before class started. Later on I brought Kenje up to my classroom and gave her everything as well. She was really surprised and almost refused to take all of it at first, but then graciously accepted. I then handed out chocolate to all the office, library, cleaning, and cafeteria staff (which consists entirely of women), and they were all very surprised as well, because I don’t think they were expecting anything from the teachers. I even have some chocolate leftover to give to Jess, Katy, and Jane. The girls in my classes were all happy to get their cards and chocolate as well. I think I did pretty well over all for Women’s Day. That night I went with Jane, Jess, and Nick to that new Turkish place we like, and were disappointed to learn that the really good cheese dishes we all wanted were not ready, so we all settled for something else that also turned out to be good. We were going to meet up with Katy and Alison at Sweet 60’s but we were all kind of tired, so instead we went to Nick and Jess’s place and watched a couple episodes of that British show called Peep Show that Nick introduced me to. Before heading home I stopped at a flower shop (they stay open really late the night before Women’s Day), and bought a bouquet for my host mom. I took a taxi home and crept into the apartment trying not to make a lot of noise with the bouquet.
The next morning I presented my host mom with her Women’s Day presents (flowers, chocolate, and a card), and she seemed very touched that I had gotten so much for her. She said that she and Adik were going to the nearby market (Orto-Sai) for a few things, and wanted to know if I would come with them. I figured I should spend some time with her on Women’s day, so I tagged along. I had been told that it is possible to find records at this market, so on the way over I asked Zainap and Adik if they knew where to find them. They thought it was a strange question, but said that it was in fact possible to find them at the market, and that they would show me where to look. On the south side of the market there is a dirt road / parking lot area where some people line up on the weekend and try to sell their junk, including, sometimes, records. We quickly found a guy who had a couple piles of records alongside his other knick-knacks, and I anxiously dove in. Oh my god, I can’t explain how excited I was to find some of the things I found. I got a few records by Vladimir Vysotsky (a great Russian folk singer), some records by some Russian rock bands I’ve heard of but don’t really know anything about (Mashina Vremeny [“Time Machine’] and Piknik), a record by a Russian rockabilly band named “Mister Tvister,” two Soviet-issue Rolling Stones records (though sadly not a copy of the Soviet release of “Sticky Fingers” like I stupidly passed up in St. Petersburg), a Soviet-issue Credence record, and, inexplicably, a copy of my favorite Billy Bragg album released in the UK. But my best find by far was something of a Holy Grail for me: a copy of my favorite Kino album, “Noch” (“Night”)! I would have been ecstatic to find any Kino on vinyl, but this was the one I had been dreaming of finding even back in Russia. I had seen a picture of this record on the internet before, and it has a completely different cover than the CD version, so I had always thought how it would be awesome to find a copy like that, and here it was for about 70 cents! The sleeve was a little beat up, but the vinyl itself seemed to be in perfect condition (all the records were in great shape, actually). I was pretty overjoyed, and walked around the market for a while with a bit of a post-awesome-record-find high (the last time I had one of those was when I finally found my own copy of the Buzz of Delight record in Santa Cruz last spring break). My host mom showed me another part of the market where even more people line up on the weekend to sell junk, and said that on Sunday it would be even bigger. Adik went off for a while and we couldn’t find him, so Zainap called him on my cell-phone and as we waited around I got to try some of this stuff called Shoro (that’s actually the brand name). I had seen it in bottles in stores before, but now that the weather is nice they sell it on the street all over the city. It’s a drink that comes in a few different varieties, but the two main varieties are “Maksim” (with a red label) and Chalap (with a blue label). There was a vendor at the market, so I thought I’d try a small cup. Some of my students had said I should try the red kind, so I decided to give it a shot. It’s a non-alcoholic barley drink, and it basically tastes like drinking rye bread. I don’t mind rye bread, but drinking it is another story. I couldn’t finish my 0.2 liter cup, and gave the rest to my host mom. A few days later I would try the blue kind of Shoro, and it was much better than the red kind. It’s milk-based, and tastes like a runny, tart yogurt that’s a little bit salty and a little bit fizzy. It’s not something I could go crazy for, but it certainly isn’t bad.
Anyways, we finally met back up with Adik and headed back to the apartment. Adik had bought a card to give to his girlfriend for Women’s Day (until this point I didn’t even know he had a girlfriend), and seemed really proud of it, like he had gotten her a really good gift. On the way out of the market we passed a guy who was selling some books, including a road atlas of the USSR that I was kind of interested in, though I didn’t have enough money left on me to pay for it. He asked for 100 som, which was reasonable, but I just didn’t have that much on me, so Zainap and I politely turned him down. He really aggressively tried to get us to buy it, and thumbed through the pages and explained to us that “all of the Soviet Union is here!”, as if that was our main concern and had turned him down because we didn’t think it covered the whole thing. Back at the apartment I admired my new records for a bit, then headed over to the school/apartments to help out in Operation Paint Jane’s Apartment. The weekend before Jane had bought some peach-colored paint to do a couple walls in her living room/kitchen, and so we had been planning a Women’s Day paint party. Nick and Jess had painted their apartment before, and were anxious to help Jane do hers. I wasn’t to enthusiastic about painting since I didn’t have any close to paint in and was worried about getting paint all over myself, but they needed me to reach the tops of the walls. I tried showing up a little late to let them get most of it done before I got there, but everyone had gotten a slow start and I got there before anybody else did. Eventually the others came and we taped of the corners, mixed the paint, and ate some cookies. There wasn’t really enough room for everyone to paint at the same time, so I kind of hung around until they needed the upper reaches of the walls painted. I wore some shorts and my most dispensable shirt, but I actually did a really god job of keeping the paint off of myself. It turned out really well, and we decided we didn’t have to bother with a second layer. Once we finished we all had a celebratory beer, and then headed across the street to Nooruz for some delicious lagman and shaslyk. We were worried that no matter where we would go for dinner it would be really packed because of the holiday, but since Nooruz isn’t really a classy place it was as empty as it usually is (meaning that about half the tables were open). We stopped by Ramstor afterwards to get some drinks, then headed back to the apartments to watch a movie. We got some vodka and Pomegranate (a good combo, I found), and Jonathan bought a bottle of kymys. Is made from fermented mare’s milk, and is basically the national drink of Kyrgyzstan/Central Asia. Usually it’s only available in the summer, but you can buy it bottled year round, and I was anxious to try it out. It smelled pretty awful, which then made me a bit reluctant to try, but I took a sip anyways and it turned out to be not as bad as I thought. It tasted kind of like that blue Shoro stuff I described, but a lot tarter and with a strong parmesan-ish, almost bleu cheese taste thrown in. That probably doesn’t sound too appetizing, and it isn’t really, but after all the hype I had heard about it it turned out to be not as bad as I expected. We watched my copy of Juno on Jess’s computer (I was relieved to learn that it worked on someone else’s computer), and then Jonathan and I shared a taxi home.
For Sunday, Nick and Jonathan both wanted to go to Orto-Sai, and I wanted to see if I could find some more records, so we all met up and went to the market again around noon. Nick was interested in getting some records, so I showed him where I had bought mine. The vendor seemed excited that I was back and that I had brought someone else, cause these were probably the first records he’d sold in a long time. Nick just bought copies of Soviet-issued Doors and Led Zeppelin albums. We wandered along the street where lots of people were selling their junk. I bought one more records called “For you, Women,” only for the fact that it was on clear yellow vinyl. I also bought a cookbook for Kyrgyz cuisine written in Russian, so hopefully I’ll be able to make some lagman back home! We also checked out this cool little book shop along the road too. Jonathan bought a big encyclopedia about only the Kyrgyz SSR, and I got a neat picture book of the Crimea (still waiting on that Fulbright…) One of the most interesting books we saw in there was a huge Russian-Udmurt / Udmurt-Russian dictionary (Udmurt is a Finno-Ugric language spoken in one of the republics of the Russian Federation). Nick and Jonathan bought some cool old Soviet pins, and I was tempted too but I remembered that I bought a bunch in Russian and I never wear them or anything, so I passed this time. We wandered for a ways, then headed back towards the main market for a “gamburger.” Before taking off, Nick wanted to find some stickers that we had seen on cars around town. There’s a sticker with the outline of a high-heeled shoe that, supposedly, female drivers can put in their back window to let other’s know that they are female and therefore poor drivers (this is Kyrgyzstan talking, not me), and in the event of an accident they can be found to be less at fault if they have the sticker in the window. We all think it’s pretty funny, so Nick wanted to buy some of these stickers, as well as a Kyrgyzstan country code sticker like all the cars have in Europe. We found them, and so Nick then headed home on a marshrutka. I, on the other hand, wanted to go to Jonathan’s apartment to check out his komus, a Kyrgyz stringed instrument. His apartment is really close to the market, so we walked over. His apartment is really nice, and he even has high speed wireless internet installed there, which I’m really jealous of. I tried out his komus, as well as this other Kazakh stringed instrument he has called a Dombra (I might have gotten that wrong). They were both really cool instruments, and I decided then and there that I really had to get a komus. Jonathan’s also got a big collection of music from Kyrgyzstan and a lot of other Turkic language-speaking countries (and from a lot of other places as well). He played me some stuff and burned me a DVD with a ton of the music on it. We hung out for a while listening to different Central Asian music, fiddling around on instruments, and drinking this tasty berry wine he had bought at the market. I walked back to my place going through some of the micro-regions (like defined neighborhoods), and got kind of lost and turned around for a second, but figured my way through eventually.
I know Josh wants me to talk more about what I do at school and with my students, but I feel like that would require it’s own post cause I can only really talk about it in general terms, i.e. not a day to day basis like I do with the rest of my posts. I can’t really remember what I do or what happens in each class on a given day, but I could talk about the trends and general goings-on. I can’t really think of a way to fit that in here, so I think I’ll have to leave that for another time. I’ll tell you about it someday, Josh. So, essentially, that next Monday and Tuesday are just miscellaneous work days in my mind now, and I can’t really recall anything specific that I did. Wednesday, however, was my day off and I remember it quite distinctly. I had two goals for Wednesday: 1 – buy a Komus, and 2 – wander around some new parts of town. I started off by walking south along the canal near by apartment, passed the area where the Pakistanis play cricket and stuff. It was a nice day for a walk, and I was walking right towards the mountains so I had a nice view. I walked until the street alongside the canal ended, and then around some apartment buildings to a park my students had told me about called “South Gate.” In this park there’s a big monument dedicated to something or other, and some nice wooded areas around it. I saw one of the crazy Central Asian squirrels with the pointy ears and the red fur. I was kind of under whelmed with the park and decided to head towards Osh Bazaar to get a komus. Fortunately, I learned, this part of the city is where many of the marshrutkas begin their routes, so I caught one that only had two other people in it and rode all the way to the center (of course by then it had gotten packed). There was a young guy who got on the same time as me, and I saw him staring at my boots for a long time. He eventually asked was size they were, and I had to tell him I didn’t know (it’s true, I don’t know what a size 15 is in their shoe measuring system). I got off the marshrutka a few blocks from the bazaar, and walked over. I went to the souvenir booth where I had bought some gifts before, because I knew the people where friendly and that they had a good komus selection. The friendly girl from before wasn’t working, but I reasonably friendly guy was. He didn’t actually play the komus, but he was able to explain their relative qualities. After debating which one I should buy for a while, I settled for one that was middle-of-the-road in quality and price. It’s made from nut wood, which is okay, but apparently apricot wood is the best (I couldn’t afford one of those). I also bought an oz komus, which is essentially a Jew’s harp, and so I got 100 som off of a bag for the komus. All together it was about $40, so not too bad. I wandered around the market some more, and had some shashlyk and beer at one of the shashlyk places in the market. When I ordered the shashlyk from the grill-master guy out front he kept speaking way too fast and I couldn’t understand what kind of meat he was saying he had. When I asked him to speak slower, he just mimed that he had chicken and beef. I wasn’t actually sure if he meant beef or mutton, so I tried to confirm, “mutton?”, and he just shook his head and went “moooo,” and then I understood, though I wish he wouldn’t have given up trying to speak to me in Russian.
The Shashlyk and the beer were good, and I then headed out of the market to do some wandering. I walked down Chui for a bit, then stopped into a Shmel internet club for a bit, and kept going. I finally made it over to the Philharmonic building and got some pictures of the cool statue out front. I then made a loop back around to Molodye Gvardii Street (Young Gaurds), and headed south. This street is one of the ones that has a nice park-like pedestrian walkway down the middle of it separating the two directions of traffic, so I strolled along stopping periodically to rest on a bench. A paint crew was going around and repainting many of the benches in rainbow colors, and I almost sat on a freshly painted bench when some friendly people nearby stopped me and explained that it was still drying. I was reminded of that old Mentos commercial where the guy sits on the wet bench just before a big interview or something, and gets paint all over his suit, but then has a Mentos-inspired stroke of genius and rolls his whole body on the bench, creating perfect pinstripes. It hadn’t struck me until just then how ridiculous that commercial was. I crossed under the train tracks and headed towards a part of town known as “Rabochy Gorodok’ (Workers’ Village). It stands out on the map as this big circle where all the streets meet in the middle, and I had been curious to check it out. I accidentally ended up going down the wrong street and only walking along the edge of the “village” for a little ways and not going through it, but I think I got the gist of it form what I saw. Most of the streets are actually small alleys, it turns out. I have to mention that during my entire walk I was carrying my newly-purchased komus in it’s case, and I ended up getting so much attention from it the whole day. I would see people pointing to it and showing their friends, and on several occasions people would come up to me and ask me if I played it. I think to them it seemed incomprehensible that a non-Kyrgyz person would play the komus, especially a foreigner (I think my short sleeves were a dead giveaway) While walking near Rabochy Gorodok, I passed a couple of kids who were fighting in a driveway, and as soon as they saw me coming they stopped and stared at my komus. I heard them talking to each other about it, wondering if it was actually a komus inside the bag, and they must have decided that it couldn’t be because they called out to me and asked, “Is that a guitar? Or a balalaika? “ (Note to the reader: I’m not quite sure how big a balalaika is, but a komus is certainly way smaller than any guitar). I just smiled at them and said, “nyet.” I little further down the street a guy who seemed to be about my age or a little older enthusiastically came up to me when he saw my komus and started asking if I played. He said that he played the komus and wanted to know if he could try mine. I was really reluctant to let a stranger play it, but he seemed really friendly and honest so I figured why not. He took it out of the bag, readjusted the bridge and tried to tune it a bit before playing around a little bit. He said that the wood wasn’t very good and when I told him how much it cost he said I had over paid. I’m happy with the quality and price, though. He asked me in English, “how is my pronunciation?” (it was pretty good, actually), and when I asked him if he spoke English he said (in Russian), “I play the komus better.” I talked to him a little bit and he did turn out to be really friendly, and just earnestly enthusiastic to meet a foreigner who was interested in the komus. He told me his name, but I forgot it.
I continued along my journey, walking down Yuri Gagarin Street. I ended up at the Humanities University on Prospekt Mira, and then crossed the street and down some small side streets towards Tynystanova. As I got close to my apartment, I found some cool little courtyards and hidden areas, the kind of places you never see unless you make the effort to get off the main streets and explore a little deeper. That’s what I like about cities in the former Soviet Union, there are always these little secret places tucked away between buildings or down small streets that you could pass by every day and never know they’re there unless you take the time to seek them out. I found a small fruit market along the canal only a few blocks from my apartment. I finally made it home, exhausted after my long walk (it really was a big walk, basically across town). I played around with my komus for must of the night, and now even though I don’t really know the proper technique I really do have fun just messing around with it and coming up with my own stuff.
Thursday was another average work day, except for the fact that I had a nice walk home with one of my students named Adilet (yes, he as the same name as my host brother). Usually he walks with two of my other students from the school to a the place where he catches his marshrutka home near my apartment, but on Thursday those two other students were absent, and so he asked if I would walk with him because he said it “wasn’t safe” to walk alone, which I don’t think is true, but I was happy to walk with him if it made him feel better. I had once walked that way with him and one of the other students, so he knew that I needed to go that direction anyways. We had a nice walk, and he’s a really great guy, so I had a good time. Friday was Jonathan’s birthday, and originally he had planned for us to all have dinner and then go to this rock club called Promzona (I went there my first or second weekend here, actually), but it turned out Alison’s sisters were coming to visit the next day and everyone was going to go to Promzona the next night instead, so we delayed Jonathan’s birthday celebration to coincide with that trip instead. We did, however, still go out to dinner. We went to this place called Aria, which was supposedly a Persian place but didn’t actually have any Persian food. They did have some pretty good pizza, though. There menu was in Russian and English, and had plenty of funny English translations, though the best was the Meat ala-Caucasus, which included “beef?” among other things. Jonathan’s friend and fellow Fulbrighter named Laura met us there too, and she seemed pretty cool. She’s from West Virginia and looks a lot like my sister’s friend Lacy, I thought. Jonathan said that she is basically fluent in Russian, and everybody always mistakes her for a Russian, and after meeting her it seems to be true. She’s actually slightly younger than me and I don’t think she’s been learning Russian any longer than I have, yet she’s light years beyond my abilities. We enjoyed our meals, and Jonathan had brought along a nice cake that we all enjoyed as well. This place also had hookahs, and so we ordered one with apple tobacco. It tasted more like black licorice to me, but nobody else seemed to agree. After dinner we all headed home, and I split a taxi with Jonathan and Laura.
Saturday morning I had to get up bright and early, because the school had planned a trip to Ala-Archa Canyon for me and a few other teachers. Only those of us who hadn’t been to the canyon yet were allowed to go on the trip, which meant Jane, Kevin, Ben, and Me. We didn’t have Bayan drive us this time, but instead one of the other drivers the school often uses, who took us the 40 minutes to the canyon, dropped us off, and later came back at our decided-upon pick-up time, 4:00. Along the way we drove through some small villages, and at one point were confronted with two charging horses coming straight towards us followed by their owner chasing after them. We got there at 11:45, and just headed up into the canyon. There have got to be hundreds if not thousands of canyons just like this all over Kyrgyzstan, but this one is special because it’s so close to Bishkek and is designated as a nature preserve. It’s a really nice place, with big jagged mountains and cliffs on either side. We didn’t really know what there was to see or do, so we just kept walking. We soon came across a small river, and sat next to it for a bit before continuing forward. We passed a small footbridge with a metal frame that had big gaps in it. We were able to cross it, but it didn’t go anywhere on the other side, so we just went back over it and kept moving forward. We eventually came upon a big gravel washout with the same river snaking though it, and followed the river a ways. There were some other people nearby, most just throwing rocks into the river. It was kind if windy and chilly, and there were still patches of snow and ice on the ground, but I was comfortable enough in my grey hoodie. We stopped for a picnic by the river, which included eggs and pretzels from Jane, and some cheese, salami, and chips that I had brought. We then continued forward over a hill, and down the other side where the canyon kept going into the distance. We saw another little footbridge over the river below us, this time made of wood and without a handrail. We went down to check it out and crossed to the other side, Once there, we stood at the base of one side of the canyon, and from that angle, looking up, we decided that it didn’t look too hard to climb, and that it might be fun to try and climb it to see what was on the other side of the ridge on the top. I wasn’t really into the idea, but the other’s were kind of gung-ho about it, so I had to follow. After about five minutes of climbing through brush along the ever-steepening slope, we took a breather and decided that it probably wasn’t a good idea to keep going, since going back down was obviously going to be a real challenge. Kevin and Ben were still into the idea of going forward, but we decided it was best not to split up, so we all headed back down. Back on the trail, we looked up at where we had climbed and where we would have climbed to had we kept going, and saw that there was a big spot of loose rocks and some pretty dangerous-looking inclines further up, and we knew that we had made the right decision. We were going to keep going along the river, but then decided that it would be a good idea to head back now so we could hit up the little lodge by the parking lot that supposedly had beer and shashlyk. On the way back we saw some pretty blue ice that we were afraid to walk on until we discovered it was just packed snow. We got back to the lodge relatively quickly and sat down at a table inside. We were disappointed to learn that the lodge had no sashlyk, no beer, and literally nothing to serve us except some bottles of soda (they only had one bottle of Coke left, so we got one Coke and one Sprite). I ate some of our remaining picnic food, drank some soda, and just relaxed for a while before the driver returned to pick us up, It was a nice and relaxing way to finish our trip to Ala-Archa. On the way back to town we drove passed the president’s mansion and the US Embassy, which are pretty close to each other. I had the driver drop me off near my apartment, and I went home and had a rest before going out again later that night.
Saturday night was our big Promzona night, so around 9:00 I headed out to meet up with everyone at the school/apartments. I bought a bottle of Coke and a small bottle of vodka at one of the convenient store shacks near my apartment to bring to the apartments and “pre-funk,” as we say back in Eugene. They gave the two bottles to me in this flimsy little bag, and as I was walking to the corner to catch a marshrutka the bottle of vodka fell through the bag and broke open on the sidewalk. Only the top of the neck broke off and there was some vodka left that hadn’t spilled out, but I figured it wasn’t a good idea to drink out of a broken glass so I threw the rest of it away and bought another bottle and another booth. It was only 30 som (less than $1), so I wasn’t to bummed. I got over to the apartments to find that everyone was still kind of behind in getting ready, so I started watching a little Simpsons on Jess’s computer until more people showed up (upon Nick’s insistence that I keep myself entertained while I cooked his dinner). Eventually more people showed up, and I got to meet Alison’s visiting family. After sitting around for a while making Armenian jokes we set out for Promzona in two taxis. It was really windy, and there were actually tumbleweeds blowing around on some of the rural-ish roads we had to drive along to get to Promzona. The place was pretty hopping, but not packed, and we managed to score a big table for all of us. They were playing a Shania Twain concert on all their TVs for a while until the live band started. This band was weird. They had a really wild female signer who seemed to have the whole rock band singer look and stage presence down, which was cool I guess, but the weird part was that, instead of a bass player, they had another girl who would switch between playing the tambourine, the ocarina, and the oz komus (that Jew’s harp thing I mentioned). It was an interesting sound, and they seemed to be playing all original material, but the songs were pretty uninteresting and I think everyone got bored with them pretty quick. It was hard to dance to, also. We sat around at our table for the most part, drinking beer and taking lots of crazy pictures of each other. Once the band stopped they started playing dance music, so we had a good time dancing around. I was getting pretty tired by the end, and around 1:30 or so we all headed out to find that it was raining pretty heavily outside. We quickly got in some taxis and got out of there. Jonathan and I found it would be cheaper to split a taxi with the other teachers back to the school. Then get another taxi to our respective apartments. I was pretty beat from a long day of hiking and dancing, so I went straight to sleep when got home.
And now this finally brings us to today, Sunday. Earlier this week I had convinced Kevin that he should buy a komus for himself, and se he decided to head to Osh Bazaar to find one. I needed to do some more gift shopping too, so I went with him to do that and to help him pick out a komus. We first had lunch at the same place we had lunch before going to Dordoi Bazaar a couple weeks earlier. I had a special type of lagman with egg, and a delicious shashlyk cooked in a tandoori oven, and Kevin had his usual plov. They tried to charge me double for the shashlyk, but I caught their “mistake” and made them fix it. After lunch we waited for a while for a marhsrutka to the bazaar that wasn’t packed with people, but didn’t seem to be having any luck, so we broke down and got a taxi. We went to the crafts area and I took Kevin to my favorite booth with the komuses. The friendly girl was there again this time, and we tried playing a bunch of different komuses before Kevin settled on getting one just like the kind I had bought. The “best” ones seemed to have some problems with the tuning pegs. I also bought some gifts for people here, and we then headed to a few other booths to do some more gift shopping. I ended up burning through all the money I had brought with me pretty quick, but I got almost everything I had wanted to get. When we were done with souvenirs we headed to one of the shashlyk restaurants in the bazaar for a drink and a snack. We split a bottle of Coke and each had a couple small shashlyk skewers before wandering around some more. We at some 5 som ice cream, took some pictures of the market, and saw a pile of cow heads in front of a butcher shop. WE were getting tired of the market, so we got a taxi to take each of us home. I had to borrow some money from Kevin to get home cause I had spent all of mine on gifts. So, ever since then I’ve been hanging around the old apartment, playing some komus, planning some lessons, etc. The movie “Super Bad” was on TV dubbed into Russian earlier, but I was too busy writing this to watch it. This next week is only 4-days long, since Friday is the Muslim holiday “Nooruz.” This means we have to work on Wednesday, but it also means that we have a three-day weekend. Some of the other teachers and I (plus a couple others) are planning a trip to a town called Naryn for our long weekend. Naryn is in the middle of Kyrgyzstan, way up in the mountains surrounded by awesome scenery apparently. We’re hoping to rent out an apartment for all of us, like we had done on my trips to Sochi and Yalta two years ago (almost exactly) Also, we’re going to try to go to this cool place called Tash Rabat, which is an old caravan stop built into the side of a mountain really close to the Chinese border. Hopefully I’ll have time to write about that before heading off for my big Central Asian trip at the end of March. So, until then, keep on rockin’ in the free world.
-Austin
3/5/08
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What have I been doing? I can’t even remember a lot of it now, and I don’t feel like writing a lot like I usually do, but I want to put something up so I’ll try and briefly go over some of the things I did in the last week and a half or so. Two weekends ago, after writing my last blog post, I hung around the house for a while and then went to hang out with some of the teachers over at their apartments. I got some vodka and soda at the big grocery store near their place and got kind of drunk as we played scrabble. The next Sunday I kind of walked around the neighborhood a little bit to find a good internet place and have some lunch I ate at a place that was sadly out of lagman, but did have some pretty good plemeni. I found an internet place really close to my apartment that’s pretty fast, but was a lot more expensive than most other places. The weather was nice for walking around that day, and actually it’s been really nice this week. It would appear that spring has sprung in Bishkek, after teasing us with a few days of good weather here and there, although this could just be another teaser. Tuesday was the day I had to pick up my Kazakh visa at the embassy, and I had hoped that my host mother would be able to pick it up since I had to be teaching at the specified pick-up time, but alas she called the embassy to see if this was OK and of course the answer was “no” (the Kazakh embassy here doesn’t make any aspect of getting a visa simple or easy). So, I had to reschedule my last two classes so that I could get over to the Kazakh embassy and pick up my passport with the visa inside. I had a pleasant taxi ride there with a friendly driver with whom I talked the whole way. At the embassy lots of people were waiting around to pick up their passports too. There were two other Americans there; a woman and what I assumed was her teenage daughter, and it seemed like an unlikely pair of Americans to be in Kyrgyzstan. It seemed more like they lived here and less like they were tourists, and I didn’t get to talk to them, but I was curious as to what they were doing in this part of the world. I got my visa really quick as soon as we all got through the door, and that was that. There were taxi drivers outside ready to take people to Almaty (the Kazakh capital, about 3 or 4 hours away). I walked home from the embassy (about 45 minutes to an hour by foot), stopping at a samsa stand that had the best chicken and cheese samsas I’ve had yet.
Wednesday I figured I should just get right on securing my final visa (except of course for the Turkmen visa, which I won’t actually get until I get to the border), so I made my way to the Tajik embassy. On the way there I stopped at a samsa stand, and once the girl at the counter learned that I was American and an English teacher, she basically asked if I would marry her. I told her I was too young to get married, but I don’t think she agreed. She wanted me to giver her my phone number but I politely refused and was on my way. Not that I wouldn’t mind going on a date or something with somebody here, but if they’re just looking for somebody to marry them then I’m not interested. So, I wandered towards the embassy, which is in an really awkward place in the middle of some residential neighborhood on the edge of town. I found it easily enough, and once inside the consul was very patient and helped me fill out the forms (just like it said he would in the Lonely Planet guide!) I paid the $50 (plus 50 som) fee, and he said to come back on Monday. It was certainly a pleasant experience, especially compared to the Kazakh embassy. After that I walked through some back streets and found my way to Gorkogo Street at Tash Rabat, so I used the internet and had some lunch there. I also tried called Strand from the IP telephone but he didn’t answer. I still had a lot of time before I had to teach my make up classes at 5:30, so I went downtown on the trolleybus to get some Kyrgyz language material from the bookstores near TsUM. I found a Kyrgyz-Russian-English mini dictionary, as well as a slightly bigger Kyrgyz-Russian/Russian-Kyrgyz dictionary, all for about 200 som. I sat on various benches for a while before catching another trolleybus back to the neighborhood around the school, where I sat on some more benches to kill time before my classes. Then I taught my classes and went home. Thursday was the day I gave all my final test for the month, and some students did really well while other did really bad. I can’t really remember what else I did that day.
Friday we were all itching to go out, and I suggested the Georgian restaurant that we had heard about and I had seen the week before. We got a big group together (Me, Jane, Nick, Jess, Katy, Alison, Jonathan, and Ben [the new guy, who finally decided to come out with us]) and went by taxi. The food was delicious, as was the Georgian wine we ordered. Ben and I split a Khachapuri (Georgian cheesy bread) with an egg cracked on top of it, and I had sausage with potatoes and onions. The sausage had pomegranate pieces baked right inside, which was good but kind of annoying since I don’t like to eat the seeds. I tried bites of others’ food too and it was all delicious. They place quite expensive though, and I think I ended up paying about 700 som (about $20) for my whole meal, but it was worth it. After dinner we went to Sweet 60’s again, which was a lot less hoping this time. Nobody (except us) was really dancing, and even though the band was playing again, the place seemed kind of dead. There was a group of Peace Corps volunteers there, most of them apparently up from Jalal-Abad for the weekend, and apparently Jonathan knew one of them and got to talk with them for a while. We left relatively early, so I got a decent night’s sleep as I recall.
Saturday there had been talk of going to Osh Bazaar, and I was getting antsy to go all morning so I eventually walked over to the other teachers’ apartments (with some samsa stops on the way), and we organized a bazaar party. Nick, Jess, Jane and I caught a marshrutka (one of the bigger kind, like a small bus) out to the Bazaar, and on the way we all got to talk to some people on the way. The others were crammed near the front and got to try a little Kyrgyz out on the driver, while I chatted a bit in Russian with the guy sitting next to me. An older woman overheard us, and wanted to inform me that her children lived in Chicago, and I chatted with her a little too. At the market we shopped for gifts and souvenirs for our friends and family, and I bought quite a few things, though I still need to be more (No I’m not saying what I bought, it will just have to be a surprise). I’ve decided that I want to buy a Komus while I’m here. It’s a Kyrgyz stringed instrument that has a cool eastern sound to it, and it looks like a lot of fun to play. I actually got to try one out at the market. I should be able to get a decent one for around $30, but I’d just have to figure out how to get it home. Also at the market, Nick and Jess bought some mushrooms and noodles, and Jane got some stuff that she needed too, and we caught a taxi back to the apartments. We had an early dinner at Nooruz across the street, and Jane went off to bed while I hung out with Nick and Jess a while longer. We watched a funny show in their apartment called Peepshow (British comedy), and Nick and I went down the street to a video rental place they had found, and rented I Heart Huckabee’s. I was getting kind of tired and decided to head home before they started the movie. I waited in vain for the last marshrutka of the evening, and just as I was about to start walking home, I ran into two of the London School teachers, Kevin and Carl, along with their friend and former London School teacher Tom, who I hadn’t met before. There were headed out for a beer after dinner and invited me to join them, so I agreed. We went to this new Turkish restaurant that had just opened up down the street from the school. The place was really nice and swanky inside, with plush chairs too. We had a beer and talked for a while. Carl and Tom are both British, and seem to have complimentary senses of humor, and just went off on crazy tangents and bizarre trains of thought, playing off on each other while Kevin and I would only manage to get a few words in edgewise. I realized that this is what it must be like to be around Strand and me when we’re together, though Carl and Tom are way raunchier more vulgar than we ever are when we make jokes. After this place the guys were going to some nearby dive bar called Antons, but I was feeling tired so I took a taxi home and called it a night.
For Sunday, Kevin and I had already agreed to check out the biggest market in the city, Dordoi. After changing some money at Vefa Center, I met up with Kevin, and we had a pre-market lunch at a nice restaurant down the street that I hadn’t been to before. Afterwards we caught a marshrutka to Dordoi, and fortunately got to sit down most of the way. Dordoi bazaar is way out in the north of town, and costs about double the normal price of a marshrutka ride to get there. I had heard a lot about Dordoi; that you can find anything there, that it’s the largest market in Central Asia, etc. All in all though, I was pretty disappointed in Dordoi. Yeah it was really big, but it’s mainly just clothes, shoes, and hosehold products. It’s really just the same kind of stuff I can get at the store, and I guess it’s cheaper here, but I’m not really in the market for all that stuff. I was hoping more for a flea market, where I could buy weird old Soviet junk and stuff like that, but this just wasn’t the place for that I guess. There were a few scattered DVD sellers, but the selection and quality was far inferior to what you find at most markets in Russia, so it left me more disappointed than anything. I did buy some DVDs, mostly of Kyrgyz and Russian music, but because my computer’s getting old and doesn’t like to play discs so much anymore, none of the DVDs I bought work on my computer. I’m holding on to them for once I get a new computer, though. Kevin was looking for a cheap DVD player to last him the rest of his two months here, and we found one for 1,000 som under the brand name “Samsungls” (though it said “Samsingls” on the DVD player itself), but Kevin just couldn’t bring himself to buy something that was obviously THAT cheap, so he left DVD playerless. The market is interesting for the way it is set up. It’s a huge maze of stacked cargo crates (like what you see being unloaded at the docks or shipped by train) that have all been modified into little storefronts for each vendor. Some areas of the market weren’t even in operation, so there were whole rows that were empty and kind of creepy. We wandered for a few hours, and then tried to catch a Marshrutka back home. We were in an area in which, for some reason, marshrutkas wouldn’t stop to pick us up in, so we had to walk across the market through the mud just to find a marshrutka that would then back track to where we had just been. After a long ride back we were both hungry again, so we went to a place just down the street from the school called Hollywood café, where Kevin had been many times but I had not been yet. It was really dark inside, and the walls were covered with movie posters and pictures of actors and actresses. I had some “Hungarian meat” with “spaghetti under cheese.” After our early dinner I headed home, where I had a little bit more for dinner with the host family.
Yesterday was Monday, and also the beginning of a new month of classes, which meant some reshuffling of schedules, the addition of some new students, and the loss of some old students. I lost a few students who I will miss having, but I seem to have also gained some good students, so hopefully this month will be pretty good as far as my classes go. Monday morning I went back to the Tajik embassy to pick up my passport, this time taking a different route through the residential neighborhood to get there. I was in and out in about a minute, and now I am the proud possessor of a Tajik visa. I walked again to Tash Rabat to use the internet a bit before going to the London School where I had to meet with my supervisor Kendje to help her edit some information she was sending to an exchange organization in the US.
Today (Tuesday), I was a few minutes late for my morning Kyrgyz lesson because I messed up the light in my bedroom. I accidentally knocked in with my hand as I was putting on my shirt, and tried to inspect it to see if I had ruined it somehow. I then discovered that the light was hanging by a hook coming out of the ceiling, so I detached it form the hook to see of there was any damage, only to find that thelight was nearly impossible to reattach to the hook from my vantage point standing on the ground. After many failed attempts to reattach it, and after my arms started getting really tired from holding it up, I called for my host mom to come help me (thank god she was home). She brought in the stepladder and was able to reattach it from that angle. Somehow in the process of getting the light unattached, I had undone the connection, and so the light didn’t work. Zainap said she would have Adilet fix it when he got home (thankfully it had been fixed when I got home this evening). Kyrgyz was fun, and I think some of it is finally starting to click a little bit. I did some lesson planning after that, used the internet for a while, and taught my classes this afternoon/evening. On Monday we had been talking about going out to dinner tonight, but Nick was sick and Jess didn’t really want to go out, so it ended up being Me, Jane, Katy’s new Kyrgyz boyfriend, Tim (it’s short for something [Timirlan, maybe?]). On my suggestion we went to the Turkish place that I had been to with Kevin, Carl, and Tom. I had been given a limitless 10% discount card to that place and I figured we might as well use it. The food turned out to be pretty good. Mine was actually a bit bland (a Turkish, football shapped “pizza” with egg on top), though I tried Jane’s meal and it was quite delicious (chicken with cheese and peppers in a curry-ish sauce). I’d definitely like to go back and try more things on their menu. Tim doesn’t really speak any English, so we talked with him in Russian. I actually had quite a long conversation with him, and he seems like a really nice guy. I think he’s friends with the band that plays at Sweet 60’s, and had actually sung a few songs with them the other night when we were there. We had a nice time at the restaurant, and I got to catch the last marshrutka home, which was a relief (even if they did charge 10 some instead of 5). I’m glad I was able to keep this to a more manageable length than usual. Tomorrow is my day off, so I have to go to the bank to send some money to Turkmenistan by Western Union (a down payment on my tour), check the internet for the big primary results (go Obama!), do some shopping for Woman’s Day presents (it’s on Saturday), and hopefully do a little exploring. Wish me luck!
Wednesday I figured I should just get right on securing my final visa (except of course for the Turkmen visa, which I won’t actually get until I get to the border), so I made my way to the Tajik embassy. On the way there I stopped at a samsa stand, and once the girl at the counter learned that I was American and an English teacher, she basically asked if I would marry her. I told her I was too young to get married, but I don’t think she agreed. She wanted me to giver her my phone number but I politely refused and was on my way. Not that I wouldn’t mind going on a date or something with somebody here, but if they’re just looking for somebody to marry them then I’m not interested. So, I wandered towards the embassy, which is in an really awkward place in the middle of some residential neighborhood on the edge of town. I found it easily enough, and once inside the consul was very patient and helped me fill out the forms (just like it said he would in the Lonely Planet guide!) I paid the $50 (plus 50 som) fee, and he said to come back on Monday. It was certainly a pleasant experience, especially compared to the Kazakh embassy. After that I walked through some back streets and found my way to Gorkogo Street at Tash Rabat, so I used the internet and had some lunch there. I also tried called Strand from the IP telephone but he didn’t answer. I still had a lot of time before I had to teach my make up classes at 5:30, so I went downtown on the trolleybus to get some Kyrgyz language material from the bookstores near TsUM. I found a Kyrgyz-Russian-English mini dictionary, as well as a slightly bigger Kyrgyz-Russian/Russian-Kyrgyz dictionary, all for about 200 som. I sat on various benches for a while before catching another trolleybus back to the neighborhood around the school, where I sat on some more benches to kill time before my classes. Then I taught my classes and went home. Thursday was the day I gave all my final test for the month, and some students did really well while other did really bad. I can’t really remember what else I did that day.
Friday we were all itching to go out, and I suggested the Georgian restaurant that we had heard about and I had seen the week before. We got a big group together (Me, Jane, Nick, Jess, Katy, Alison, Jonathan, and Ben [the new guy, who finally decided to come out with us]) and went by taxi. The food was delicious, as was the Georgian wine we ordered. Ben and I split a Khachapuri (Georgian cheesy bread) with an egg cracked on top of it, and I had sausage with potatoes and onions. The sausage had pomegranate pieces baked right inside, which was good but kind of annoying since I don’t like to eat the seeds. I tried bites of others’ food too and it was all delicious. They place quite expensive though, and I think I ended up paying about 700 som (about $20) for my whole meal, but it was worth it. After dinner we went to Sweet 60’s again, which was a lot less hoping this time. Nobody (except us) was really dancing, and even though the band was playing again, the place seemed kind of dead. There was a group of Peace Corps volunteers there, most of them apparently up from Jalal-Abad for the weekend, and apparently Jonathan knew one of them and got to talk with them for a while. We left relatively early, so I got a decent night’s sleep as I recall.
Saturday there had been talk of going to Osh Bazaar, and I was getting antsy to go all morning so I eventually walked over to the other teachers’ apartments (with some samsa stops on the way), and we organized a bazaar party. Nick, Jess, Jane and I caught a marshrutka (one of the bigger kind, like a small bus) out to the Bazaar, and on the way we all got to talk to some people on the way. The others were crammed near the front and got to try a little Kyrgyz out on the driver, while I chatted a bit in Russian with the guy sitting next to me. An older woman overheard us, and wanted to inform me that her children lived in Chicago, and I chatted with her a little too. At the market we shopped for gifts and souvenirs for our friends and family, and I bought quite a few things, though I still need to be more (No I’m not saying what I bought, it will just have to be a surprise). I’ve decided that I want to buy a Komus while I’m here. It’s a Kyrgyz stringed instrument that has a cool eastern sound to it, and it looks like a lot of fun to play. I actually got to try one out at the market. I should be able to get a decent one for around $30, but I’d just have to figure out how to get it home. Also at the market, Nick and Jess bought some mushrooms and noodles, and Jane got some stuff that she needed too, and we caught a taxi back to the apartments. We had an early dinner at Nooruz across the street, and Jane went off to bed while I hung out with Nick and Jess a while longer. We watched a funny show in their apartment called Peepshow (British comedy), and Nick and I went down the street to a video rental place they had found, and rented I Heart Huckabee’s. I was getting kind of tired and decided to head home before they started the movie. I waited in vain for the last marshrutka of the evening, and just as I was about to start walking home, I ran into two of the London School teachers, Kevin and Carl, along with their friend and former London School teacher Tom, who I hadn’t met before. There were headed out for a beer after dinner and invited me to join them, so I agreed. We went to this new Turkish restaurant that had just opened up down the street from the school. The place was really nice and swanky inside, with plush chairs too. We had a beer and talked for a while. Carl and Tom are both British, and seem to have complimentary senses of humor, and just went off on crazy tangents and bizarre trains of thought, playing off on each other while Kevin and I would only manage to get a few words in edgewise. I realized that this is what it must be like to be around Strand and me when we’re together, though Carl and Tom are way raunchier more vulgar than we ever are when we make jokes. After this place the guys were going to some nearby dive bar called Antons, but I was feeling tired so I took a taxi home and called it a night.
For Sunday, Kevin and I had already agreed to check out the biggest market in the city, Dordoi. After changing some money at Vefa Center, I met up with Kevin, and we had a pre-market lunch at a nice restaurant down the street that I hadn’t been to before. Afterwards we caught a marshrutka to Dordoi, and fortunately got to sit down most of the way. Dordoi bazaar is way out in the north of town, and costs about double the normal price of a marshrutka ride to get there. I had heard a lot about Dordoi; that you can find anything there, that it’s the largest market in Central Asia, etc. All in all though, I was pretty disappointed in Dordoi. Yeah it was really big, but it’s mainly just clothes, shoes, and hosehold products. It’s really just the same kind of stuff I can get at the store, and I guess it’s cheaper here, but I’m not really in the market for all that stuff. I was hoping more for a flea market, where I could buy weird old Soviet junk and stuff like that, but this just wasn’t the place for that I guess. There were a few scattered DVD sellers, but the selection and quality was far inferior to what you find at most markets in Russia, so it left me more disappointed than anything. I did buy some DVDs, mostly of Kyrgyz and Russian music, but because my computer’s getting old and doesn’t like to play discs so much anymore, none of the DVDs I bought work on my computer. I’m holding on to them for once I get a new computer, though. Kevin was looking for a cheap DVD player to last him the rest of his two months here, and we found one for 1,000 som under the brand name “Samsungls” (though it said “Samsingls” on the DVD player itself), but Kevin just couldn’t bring himself to buy something that was obviously THAT cheap, so he left DVD playerless. The market is interesting for the way it is set up. It’s a huge maze of stacked cargo crates (like what you see being unloaded at the docks or shipped by train) that have all been modified into little storefronts for each vendor. Some areas of the market weren’t even in operation, so there were whole rows that were empty and kind of creepy. We wandered for a few hours, and then tried to catch a Marshrutka back home. We were in an area in which, for some reason, marshrutkas wouldn’t stop to pick us up in, so we had to walk across the market through the mud just to find a marshrutka that would then back track to where we had just been. After a long ride back we were both hungry again, so we went to a place just down the street from the school called Hollywood café, where Kevin had been many times but I had not been yet. It was really dark inside, and the walls were covered with movie posters and pictures of actors and actresses. I had some “Hungarian meat” with “spaghetti under cheese.” After our early dinner I headed home, where I had a little bit more for dinner with the host family.
Yesterday was Monday, and also the beginning of a new month of classes, which meant some reshuffling of schedules, the addition of some new students, and the loss of some old students. I lost a few students who I will miss having, but I seem to have also gained some good students, so hopefully this month will be pretty good as far as my classes go. Monday morning I went back to the Tajik embassy to pick up my passport, this time taking a different route through the residential neighborhood to get there. I was in and out in about a minute, and now I am the proud possessor of a Tajik visa. I walked again to Tash Rabat to use the internet a bit before going to the London School where I had to meet with my supervisor Kendje to help her edit some information she was sending to an exchange organization in the US.
Today (Tuesday), I was a few minutes late for my morning Kyrgyz lesson because I messed up the light in my bedroom. I accidentally knocked in with my hand as I was putting on my shirt, and tried to inspect it to see if I had ruined it somehow. I then discovered that the light was hanging by a hook coming out of the ceiling, so I detached it form the hook to see of there was any damage, only to find that thelight was nearly impossible to reattach to the hook from my vantage point standing on the ground. After many failed attempts to reattach it, and after my arms started getting really tired from holding it up, I called for my host mom to come help me (thank god she was home). She brought in the stepladder and was able to reattach it from that angle. Somehow in the process of getting the light unattached, I had undone the connection, and so the light didn’t work. Zainap said she would have Adilet fix it when he got home (thankfully it had been fixed when I got home this evening). Kyrgyz was fun, and I think some of it is finally starting to click a little bit. I did some lesson planning after that, used the internet for a while, and taught my classes this afternoon/evening. On Monday we had been talking about going out to dinner tonight, but Nick was sick and Jess didn’t really want to go out, so it ended up being Me, Jane, Katy’s new Kyrgyz boyfriend, Tim (it’s short for something [Timirlan, maybe?]). On my suggestion we went to the Turkish place that I had been to with Kevin, Carl, and Tom. I had been given a limitless 10% discount card to that place and I figured we might as well use it. The food turned out to be pretty good. Mine was actually a bit bland (a Turkish, football shapped “pizza” with egg on top), though I tried Jane’s meal and it was quite delicious (chicken with cheese and peppers in a curry-ish sauce). I’d definitely like to go back and try more things on their menu. Tim doesn’t really speak any English, so we talked with him in Russian. I actually had quite a long conversation with him, and he seems like a really nice guy. I think he’s friends with the band that plays at Sweet 60’s, and had actually sung a few songs with them the other night when we were there. We had a nice time at the restaurant, and I got to catch the last marshrutka home, which was a relief (even if they did charge 10 some instead of 5). I’m glad I was able to keep this to a more manageable length than usual. Tomorrow is my day off, so I have to go to the bank to send some money to Turkmenistan by Western Union (a down payment on my tour), check the internet for the big primary results (go Obama!), do some shopping for Woman’s Day presents (it’s on Saturday), and hopefully do a little exploring. Wish me luck!
2/25/08
Мен Америкалыкмын
It sure is hard to keep up with this thing this time around. It isn’t like in St. Petersburg, where I had a fair amount of free time both to do stuff and to blog about it. My days are pretty busy here, and now it’s been over a week and a half since I last wrote and I finally have some time to do it again. Today (Saturday) is Men’s Day across the former Soviet Union. Actually it’s “Defenders of the Fatherland Day,” but since March 8th is Women’s Day everyone just refers to today as Men’s Day. For my faithful blog readers, you may remember that two years ago in Russia I spent Men’s Day at Pavlovsky Park outside of St. Petersburg, sledding with some friends (If you dig around my flickr page you can find some pictures somewhere). Unfortunately, Men’s Day falls on the weekend this year, so we don’t get a day of from work/school like last time. I’m celebrating by writing a blog post, then later going over to hang out with the other teachers. I’m not sure if this was in honor of Men’s Day, but after I woke up and used the bathroom this morning, Adilet had waiting for me a couple of blini with potatoes and a piece of cake! Usually around breakfast I have to get my own food, and the only thing there is usually is bread and butter. I definitely enjoyed being served a nice meal, even if the blini were cold. I suppose I should get writing about the last week and a half, though.
As I mentioned at the end last time, last Wednesday I went to the Uzbek Embassy to get my visa. Zainap went with me because apparently they ask people to bring a translator with them, though I’m sure I could have done it on my own. I had heard weird things about the Uzbek Embassy though, and I figured it would be a good idea to have a native speaker with me either way. We got there around 10:00 and waited outside the gate for a bit with other people applying for visas. They let us in, I filled out an application and gave them all my documents, and they said come back at 3:00 to pick up my passport with the visa inside. Zainap headed home, but I decided to hang around downtown until 3:00. I went to an internet club for a while, and then to that place called Fatboy’s for lunch. I was interested in trying their breakfast burrito, but was pretty disappointed. It was pretty bland, didn’t have any of the spices or flavors right, but what can I really expect from a restaurant in Kyrgyzstan? I appreciated the effort. I didn’t really like being in there to much, though, cause there seemed to be a particularly large number of ex-pats in there at the time, and I don’t really like hanging around ex-pat places too much. There was this big group of who I think were mostly Brits, some of whom I had seen before at TsUM. There were also a fair amount of “biznyesmyen,” as they say in Russian, out on their “biznyes lanch” no doubt. I finished up my burrito and beer pretty quick, then headed out to find an ATM cause I was running low on cash. There are a fair amount of them in Bishkek, but not always in the most convenient places, and not always around when you need them. I ended up walking a ways down Kievskaya street and using the same ATM I had used to give Jonathan the money to pay that taxi driver the Saturday before. I had some more time before 3:00, so I went over to TsUM to see about buying some new DVDs. A woman working at one of the DVD counters suckered me into looking at her stock, and I ended up buying three DVDs: Running with Scissors, Eastern Promises (the Woman assured me it was “Klassno” [like “classy,” but without the irony]), and Juno (sorry Lily). Unfortunately, only Running with Scissors works on my computer! My disc drive has gotten really fickle, and won’t even play some of the DVDs that I brought anymore. I’m holding on to the DVDs though, in hope that they will work on another DVD player, or on my new computer when I get that! After I got the DVDs I killed some more time by sitting on a bench and drinking a Fanta (which was really cold, amazingly!). I ran into Katy while sitting on the bench (I guess I should say Katy ran into me), and we chatted for a moment. I then headed back to the Embassy just in time to meet Zainap there. We were let in and I had to pay the $152 visa fee (yeah, seriously. Add to that the $50 or so I paid for the letter of invitation, and Uzbekistan becomes one expensive country to visit). Unfortunately, none of the USD bills I brought with me to pay met their standards of crispness, and they wouldn’t accept them. They told us to go to a bank and exchange them for better ones. We searched the area for a while and finally found a bank about 5 blocks away. They were able to exchange most of the bills, but the $100 bill I had brought had a really small stamp of a beer bottle on it (who would do that? Why?), and they can’t take marked bills for whatever reason. I had to exchange some of my Som to make up the difference, but we finally got the correct amount, returned to the Embassy, paid up, and now I’ve got my Uzbek visa! Aside from the whole money thing, it was a pretty easy and painless process. Sure I had to get a letter of invitation, but that was a cinch too. I headed home with Zainap in a marshrutka, and I watched Running with Scissors. It was alright, but not what I really expected. The next day was Thursday, and I don’t remember what I did cause it was just another miscellaneous workday.
Friday after work I went out to dinner with some of the other teachers. We decided to check out this Chinese place down the street from the school called “Pekingskaya Utka II” (Peking Duck II). We don’t know where the first one is. It had pretty decent food, and in pretty good portions too. They were blasting music in the main room, so we were offered a private room that was really cold, but they turned on a little heater for us. There was a fish tank in there to, but we later found out that it’s where they keep the small fish that they feed to the larger fish in another fish tank in the main room. We had fun eating a chatting for a while, but none of us wanted to make a long night out of it, so we finished and everyone went home relatively early. I found a taxi home and ended up chatting with the driver a bit. We discovered that we both used to live in the same neighborhood in St. Petersburg! He said he lived on Shchevchenko Street between Malaya and Srednyaya streets, which is basically where Vickie and I walked everyday to catch the bus to school. Small world! His car got stuck in a rut in the snow in front of my apartment, so I helped him push it out. He was charging me 80 Som, but I only had a 100 and he didn’t have change, so we drove to the nearest store so he could exchange it for smaller bills to give me the change, then drove me back to the apartment. What a nice guy! I went to bed sort of early cause I had to get up sort of early the next morning to go to…
…Issyk-Kul! What’s that? It’s a big lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan (check a map, dummy). In fact it’s the second largest Mountain lake in the world after Lake Titicaca. It’s basically the only place where Kyrgyz go for vacation, so it’s kind of a big deal. Most people only go there in the summer, when it’s warm and the water isn’t quite so unbelievably cold, so we were definitely going out of season, but it was awesome nonetheless. So, on Saturday morning I got up kind of early, stopped buy Narodny to pick up some drinks and snacks for the ride, then waited to catch a trolleybus to the school where we were all meeting. It was then that I started feeling kind of queasy and sick, but I was determined to go to Issyk-Kul so I tried to ignore it. The trolleybus wasn’t coming and I thought I might just feel worse if I took a marshrutka, so I broke down and got a cab to take me there. I was a little early, so I hung out with Katy and her friend Alison a bit in Katy’s apartment. We headed out a little after 10:00. Our party included: Kendje, her husband Bayan (the driver), their 4-year-old daughter Aishoola, Me, Jane, Katy, and another American girl named Kelly who’s in Kyrgyzstan on an NSEP grant and living with Kendje’s family. We were being taken on this trip because the school feels obligated to show their teachers the country, and we are the newer teachers who hadn’t been to Issyk-Kul yet. We headed east, passed Kant, Ivanovka, and Tokmok (the same towns we went through on the way to Burana Tower), and kept going further. Past Tokmok the mountains in the distance on either side of the road get closer and closer as the Chuy Valley comes to an end, and the views are really awesome. We were really close to the Kazakh border again. We headed up into the mountains, and stopped for lunch at a nice spot along the Chuy River. We were each given a little packaged lunch that included some bread, cheese, chicken, eggs, and potatoes. It was simple, but pretty tasty, and despite the cold we enjoyed sitting outside in the sunshine near the river. I wore my new kalpak while we ate, and it kept my head surprisingly warm. Bayan offered us some vodka shots to go with our lunch, which I certainly obliged him. I had two, but the others teachers could only handle one each. I chased my shots with potato, which seemed fitting.
We continued on after lunch, but stopped soon after to check out a cool roadside monument. Kendje explained to us that in 1916 the White army started demanding that Kyrgyz men serve in the army, and so they invaded the valleys around here to round up troops. Many fled to China, many were killed, and it’s become a big thing in Kyrgyz history. This monument commemorated the events of 1916. It was perched above a deep gorge and surrounded by big rolling hills. We all took a bunch of pictures, then kept going again. We stopped soon after again at a little spring coming out of the mountain that the locals apparently consider holy, so lots of people stop here to wash their face or hands, or to just fill their water bottles. The water was nice, cold, and good to drink. Not as nice, cold, and good to drink as, say, the spring water at that park in Shasta City, California, but good nonetheless. There were tons of prayer rags tied all over the branches of the surrounding trees, and there was a sad looking dog hanging around begging for scraps. I wish we had given it something. We continued onwards through the mountains to Issyk-Kul, and I knew we were getting close when the mountains gave way to a wide valley. We passed a tollbooth for the Issyk-Kul bioregion, and passed briefly through the lakeside town of Balykchy before heading south to the south side of Issyk-Kul. At this point we could see wisps of blue lake water in the near distance. We drove for a little while along the south shore until we came to a big WWII monument. It wasn’t a statue, but instead like a big billboard made of wood with lots of negative space that you can see through to behind the monument. It had a big picture of the Rodina Mat’ statue in Volgograd, and the names of a bunch of war heroes on it. The real reason we stopped at this spot was to see something that’s happened for the first time in history: party of the lake is frozen over. Issyk-Kul literally means “hot lake” in Kyrgyz, and it’s called this because, due to a combination of salinity and thermal heating, the lake is known to stay ice-free year round. However, with this being one of the coldest winters in years, a small corner of the lake had actually frozen over. Hooray for climate change! Bayan explained to me that, with global warming setting in, many think that the warm season at Issyk-Kul will be a few months longer after only a few years. I don’t know about that, but maybe several decades down the line. We walked around on the ice that had formed in the marshy area along the shore, but we figured it wasn’t a good idea to venture out onto the frozen lake, even though we saw some kids skating on it in the distance. There were some cows wandering around, and we walked with them back to our van and kept driving east. We made a quick pit stop where there were some piles of dirt for people to pee behind, and then drove to a cool little monument to some local hero that had Arabic writing on it. There was also small cemetery nearby, which we got to explore a bit. We had passed a lot of these cemeteries, and they all looked so awesome, so I was glad that we got to see this one up close. These Kyrgyz cemeteries seem to have an interesting mix of Islamic and traditional Kyrgyz characteristics. Many of the graves are marked by yurt frames, many of them with a crescent moon on top. There are lots of large grave stones in interesting shapes, many of them with a picture or painting of the deceased on it. Check out my flickr pictures to see what I’m talking about. There was also a small gift shop nearby that sold a lot of stuff made out of felt. We checked it out, and then got to go inside a small yurt that they had set up. It was pretty nice inside, though to small for a family to live in. The real yurts are over twice as big, but this one seemed like a nice one to have that you could maybe set up in your back yard and live in during the summer. We inquired about prices, and they said that the small one cost $1,000, which actually seemed pretty reasonable. I think Jane was almost contemplating getting one, but how would you get something like that home? After the gift shop we backtracked a little ways down the road to a small village called Karakoo, not to be confused with Karakol, a larger city at the eastern edge of lake Issyk-Kul. This is where Bayan was born and raised, and where we would be staying with his brother’s family.
Bayan’s brother, Uran, lives in a small house with a tiny farm/orchard in the back. He lives with his wife Symbat, three kids, and his 85-year-old mother. We were welcomed into there home and sat in front of a bid table filled with pastries, “salads” (the Russian versions), and lots of tea. Their living room had several beautiful shyrdaks, which are the traditional Kyrgyz felt rugs that are so cool. As per Kyrgyz tradition, the kept insisting we eat more and more, and never seemed to believe us when we said we were full. The main dish was something potatoy an meaty, and of course delicious. We pretty much sat around the table from the moment we got there until bedtime around 10:00. Another man named Aibek and his wife and two children came over to visit too, but I wasn’t sure if he was another brother or just a friend from the village. Everybody was very friendly, and Aibek kept wanting to chat with me in Kyrgyz, so I had to have Kendje translate everything. He wanted to shake my hand when he heard that I support Barrack Obama, which I think goes to show that he has a really good image abroad. Every ones in a while Aibek would poor everybody some vodka shots, which I kept drinking but the other Americans started to refuse them after a while. They were so spaced out that I didn’t really feel them at all. The highlight of the evening was the “concert” that all the children put on for us. It included singing, dancing, and comedy sketches, and all the Americans took tons of photos and videos the whole time. It’s was pretty spectacular, They all dressed up in nice costumes and took turns singing or dancing to Kyrgyz and Russian pop songs, even Uran’s two-year-old daughter Saikal. It was so precious. We all posed for pictures with the children, then wit the adults, and I wore my kalpak again for most of the night. After the concert, we participated in what is apparently a traditional activity, whereby a bunch of food and spices are mixed together with water in a small bowl, and it’s passed around to everyone at the table, and each person must either sing a song, or drink the concoction. Of course, nobody ever drinks it, so we all took turns singing songs for each other. The Kyrgyz would all join in with each other on all their songs, so us Americans tried to think of songs that we could all sing when any of is got the cup. We ended up singing, among other songs: “This Land is Your Land,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Henry VIII”, and “Yesterday.” I sang what I could remember of “Danny Boy,” and Kelly helped me out a little bit with “Thunder Road.” It was a really fantastic time. Around 10:00 we all got ready for bed, which included a run to the outhouse in the back yard (squat toilet only). Originally all the Americans were going to sleep in one room, but I think they realized there wasn’t enough room for all of us there and put me in the living room, which is good because I was worried about keeping the others up with my snoring (Apparently they heard it anyways, though). They made up a little bed for me by piling a bunch of think blankets on top of each other, and it was quite comfortable.
The next morning we got up around 9:00, and I explored the back yard a little bit while Uran let the lambs out to feed on hay. They had a really friendly dog named Rex (I guess dog names transcend cultures) who loved to be pet and scratched. It was a cold morning, but it felt so nice being out in the country and breathing the fresh air. We had plov for breakfast (what a great idea), and then headed out for another day of sightseeing. We first drove south a little ways down a dusty dirt rode into the hills. There is a legend about a hero who carried his horse over a mountain pass and had also lifted a huge rock, which is still resting along the side of this rode. Local men like to prove their manhood by lifting a series of heavy rocks onto this one big rock, to see how many they could do. Of course, we had to stop so that I could prove my manhood by lifting some of these rocks. I got the smallest three no problem, but everyone insisted I stop before getting to the really big ones so that I wouldn’t throw out my back or anything. I’m sure I could have handled it. We went a little further to a small hill that served as a monument to 40 Martyrs who had been killed during the Russian invasion in 1916, and there were beautiful views of the surrounding hills and mountains. A little further and we came to the ruins of an old Kolkhoz (Soviet collective farm) in a little valley that now was used as grazing ground for a heard of cows. We were about to climb this big hill when a couple of shepherds came riding up. One of them approached us and Bayan started to talk to him. He recommended that we not climb this hill because it could be slippery, and that we try another smaller hill a little further down. We walked up this small hill and on the other side was a sweeping view of a large valley on the other side, with huge snowcapped mountains on the other side. It was pretty stunning. There was also a small river snaking through the valley down below us. Kendje said that his was the valley where she grew up, and we could actually see her village in the distance. The mountains of Kyrgyzstan really are amazing, and unlike mountains I have ever seen before. I really wish I could spend a lot more time here just exploring the mountains. We walked back down the hill, and us teachers checked out the ruins of the Kolkhoz. When we got back to the van Bayan was chatting with the Shepherd again, and he discovered that the man had known his father well, and that Bayan’s mother had been his teacher in school! We confirmed this later with his mother, who said she remembered him. We all posed for a photo with the Shepherd, and then were on our way again.
It was finally time to get up close and personal with lake Issyk-Kul, so we drove along a rugged road through some low hills up to a tiny village right on the lake. Here, we met with a friend of Bayan’s who lived in a small house with his wife and baby. We went inside for bread and tea, and watched a bit of a TV program that featured people performing traditional Kyrgyz songs on their instrument called a Kumys, standing in front of shyrdaks and wearing traditional Kyrgyz clothes. Back outside, we were each offered the chance to ride around a little bit on a horse, but only Jane took them up on the offer. The horse wasn’t big enough for me, or else I would have given it a go. The weather was really great, sunny and not too cold, so we milled about the yard and checked out the views of the lake while Jane rode around. Once she was finished we all took the short walk down to the lakeshore, where we found a nice little beach and really got to see the lake for the first time. I was the only one brave enough to test the waters (literally), so I took my shoes off and walked around a bit in the water. It was cold. Really cold. Much colder than the Pacific at the Oregon coast. It was so cold it hurt my feet. I’m still glad I got to go in it a little, though. One of the travel milestones I like to keep track of is the bodies of water that I have had at least some part of my body in. I’m happy to have added Lake Issyk-Kul to that list, and hopefully I’ll be adding the Caspian Sea to that list come April in Turkmenistan. I found a cool shell, and Jane found a sheep jaw that we each took half of as a souvenir. We headed back to the van and then back to Uran’s house for lunch. It was a delicious concoction of wide flat noodles, potatoes, and meat (Kyrgyz food in a nutshell). After lunch we said goodbye to our wonderful hosts and headed back west towards Bishkek. We didn’t stop much along the way this time, only once at that spring again so we could fill up our water bottles. I enjoyed just looking out the window at the beautiful views and listening to my ipod, though. Back in Bishkek I got Bayan to drop me off near my apartment, and I spent the evening relaxing and preparing for lessons the next day. What a great weekend it was!
So, this last week was spent mostly teaching, of course, but there were some things that stood out. The weather had been really nice since the weekend. In fact, when I got back form Issyk-Kul most of the snow in Bishkek had melted, and by Wednesday it was virtually all gone. I thought Spring had come early, but then late Wednesday night it started to rain, which continued through Thursday morning. By Thursday afternoon it started to get cold again and the rain turned to snow. It then kept snowing for several hours, blanketing the city in 2 to 3 inches of snow just after it ha all melted of the day before. Winter isn’t going away just yet! So, on Tuesday night we teachers decided to go out for dinner, and we ended up just going to that place Nooruz right across the street with the really good lagman. For some it was their first introduction to lagman, and I think they were all pretty impressed. I also had some Manty while the others had Sashlyk, but there was plenty of sharing going on. It was a delicious Kyrgyz meal, and somehow seemed a lot less expensive this time. There was a creepy drunk Russian guy at a table near us who kept staring at us and even started mocking Jessica’s gestures as she talked. We all just tried to ignore him. At one point he spontaneously slammed his fist on the table really hard, and everyone in the room felt a little uneasy. He left before we did, so we were able to finish out meal in peace. Talking about lagman has got me jonesin’ for a bowl. Maybe I’ll have to get one later today. On Wednesday the weather was amazing. It’s hard to say exactly, but I would have guessed it was at least 40 degrees F, which may not sound all the warm but after the weather we’ve been having here, it was a godsend. It was sunny and beautiful, so I decided to go for a walk around the city. Wearing only my zip-up hoodie, I set of first to catch a trolleybus downtown to use the internet, but ended up catching a small bus instead. I sat next to a guy who started speaking English with me. His name was Feruz, and he’s from Uzbekistan but goes to school at the American University of Central Asia here in Bishkek (apparently the best University in town). He was really friendly and spoke English really well. I actually got his phone number, so I’ll have to give him a call and hang out one of these days. I used to internet for a while, then had a Shaurma and a blini for lunch. I had to get my photo taken for a Kazakh visa, so I found a photo place by the blini stand and got 6 3x4 cm pictures for 80 Som. The picture doesn’t look great, but I just needed a photo the right size for the visa application. This photo place was also a print shop, and I saw them printing posters for some event called “The Manliest Party of the Year” at some night club for Men’s Day (today). With my photos taken care of, I then set off for my walk. I wanted to see a part of town I hadn’t been to before, so I headed east on Kievsakaya, up to Chuy, and then continued east for a few blocks. I then went north along some miscellaneous street that went through some really poor neighborhoods, and up to Jibek Jolu. I headed back west and then snaked my way through some streets, passed the circus, and then to Victory Square (with the eternal flame), where I sat for a while just enjoying the weather. I was getting thirsty, so I walked over to the area around TsUM where I got a bottle of Coke and sat on a bench for a while and people-watched. After a while I headed back down another street east of Sovietskaya and started walking south. I like getting off of the main drags and seeing how different a city can be just one block away. I walked all the way to the train tracks and then was forced back o to Sovietskaya to go under them. Once on the other side, I slipped through an apartment-complex courtyard (dvor, if you speak Russian) and back onto that side street. I walked all the way to Gorkogo, only a block from the London School. I went to the internet café across from Vefa Center because I also had to print a copy of my Kyrgyz letter of Invitation for my Kazakh visa (don’t ask me why). There, I saw Kevin, and the recently-arrived teacher named Ben. Ben got here on Monday, but he isn’t going to start teaching until April after Nick, Jess and I leave. He came a month or so early to take Russian lessons, because he doesn’t know any Russian at all. He spent a lot of time teaching English in Japan and Ecuador apparently, but he’s totally new to this part of the world. For now he’s living with a host family in the fifth micro-region in SE Bishkek, and he’s been making the hour-long walk to and from the school everyday I think cause the marshrutkas still freak him out a bit (hey, they still freak me out). We were both heading in that direction, so we decided to walk together as far as Akhunbayeva, where we both went different directions. First, we stopped by the bookstore in Vefa Center, because I wanted to buy the Bishkek street atlas and Russian-Uzbek phrase book I’ve had my eye on. We chatted during our walk, and Ben seems like a really cool guy. I spent the rest of Wednesday working on stuff for classes, wishing I had time to write this blog post instead.
Thursday was a frustrating day. See, I need to apply for my Kazakh visa, which I originally wanted to do on Wednesday, but I had Zainap call them to figure out the protocol for getting a visa and they said they aren’t open on Wednesdays, so I had to head out there Thursday morning instead. Zainap was going to go with me but I woke up a little too late and she didn’t have time anymore, so I had to go it alone. Remember, this was the day with the bad weather, so that morning it was all drizzly and slushy on the roads. Now, the Kazakh embassy is in the most awkward spot in the middle of nowhere in the SW part of Bishkek, which isn’t too far from my apartment, but still kind of a hassle to get to. I caught a trolleybus down Akhunbayeva to Prospekt Mira, where I walked the quarter mile or so to the Embassy along a pretty desolate road. Once there I got inline behind 10 or 15 other people applying for visas. I met one guy from Boston who had been teaching in Kazakhstan, but whose visa expired so he had to leave the country to get a new one before he could return. I finally got in the door, where I had to sign in a registry, and then have the unfriendly guy behind the window look over my documents to make sure everything was in order. It was alright, so he gave me an application form that I filled out and glued my picture to, after correcting a few problems with my application, he said OK, now go to this bank downtown and pay the application fee, then come back and give us all these documents. I had heard that you had to pay at this bank, but Zainap asked them on the phone if you had to do it before or after you apply for the visa, and they said after. But apparently, they can’t actually get started on the visa until you’ve paid and can show a receipt of payment. So, basically, I could have gone to the bank first and paid and saved myself the extra trip to the Embassy. All they gave me at the Embassy was a little slip that says how much I have to pay at the bank, which I already knew. It wasn’t an official document or anything, and the bank didn’t even ask to see anything except my passport. By the time I finished at the Embassy it was about 11:00, and he said I should go to the bank and come back, but they close at 12:00 and the bank is half way across town. So, I gave up on trying to get the visa taken care of that day, and headed to the bank to pay the fee so I could return again the next day. I was so pissed at the Embassy for their stupid rules and bureaucracy. I walked back to the corner of Akhunbayeva and Prospekt Mira, where I caught a marshrutka downtown to go to the bank. I was very irritable after being at the Embassy, and so I hated being in the marshrutka. I was able to get a seat, but the woman sitting next to me was kind of turned around to talk to the person behind her, and thus was taking up some of my seat too and didn’t bother to do anything about it, so I was only halfway sitting. I got off an tracked down the bank, where an unfriendly teller handled my transaction and gave me the ever-important receipt. I walked the few blocks back to the area around the London school, where I called home and used the internet at the nearby internet club, and the went to Vefa Center for lunch. I was feeling like treating myself to a little slice of western-style comfort, so I went to one of the fast food places in the food court. I ordered a double cheeseburger, which was tasty but not quite authentic. The ketchup they serve with their fires there is really sweet and pretty gross, too. I’d really like to find some god old Heinz ketchup somewhere in Bishkek. By this point the drizzle had turned to driving snow, so I sought shelter at the London School. It kept raining pretty much the entire time I was teaching, and by the end of the day it was quiet thick. I went home and graded tests, again unable to write a blog post.
Friday morning I got up early to return to the Kazakh embassy. The city was covered with snow, and transportation was way slowed down because of the slick driving conditions. Every single marshrutka was backed to the point of barely being able to close the door, and when the trolleybus finally came I saw that it too was nearly brimming with people, so I decided to avoid the whole hassle and take a taxi directly to the embassy, which means I had to pay about $1.70 to get there instead of about 8 cents (totally worth it, though). The embassy is supposed to open at 9:00, so I got there just after 9:00, and waited for about 40 minutes before it actually did open. At least I was first in line and got in and out quickly once it did open. All my papers were in order, and so now my visa is being processed. The guy said I could pick it up on Tuesday at 6:30, which of course is right in the middle of when I’m teaching. Zainap is going to call on Monday to see if she can pick it up for me, which I really hope she can. After the embassy I walked back to Akhunbayeva-Mira and decided just to take another taxi to the school so I wouldn’t miss my 10:25 Kyrgyz class. Kyrgyz is really fun, and after 5 hours of lessons I feel like I know a lot more than after my first 5 hours of Russian. After that class I had promised to help the school out by conducting a phone interview with some guy from Uzbekistan who is applying for an internship program in the US. Uchkul, one of the office workers, took me down the street to an IP Telephone place so we could call, but after many unsuccessful tries we weren’t able to get a hold of him, so we postponed the interview until later. I was feeling much better on Friday than I was on Thursday, so classes went pretty well and. The weather at least was sunny, so that helped a lot. In one class the students really didn’t want to do real work, so we just played games for most of class, which I think this group really needed. All us teachers knew we wanted to go out Friday night, so after classes we all met up and decided to go to this place called Sweet 60’s. Some of the other teachers go there quite frequently, but this was my first time there. This place is 60’s themed, obviously, so they had lots of posters and pictures on the walls of 60’s icons. They even had some Soviet-era copies of British and American classic rock records from Russia on the wall, and it made me think of how I should have bought that Russian version of “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones at Yunona Fair back in St. Petersburg (still one of my biggest regrets). The house band at this place is good friends with Katy, so we were treated pretty nice. They play covers of Western and Russian rock songs, including several Russian rock songs that I know and like. They played my favorite song by the group DDT. The best part, of course, was all the Kino covers they did! I had Katy ask them to play some, and they obliged by playing about 5 or 6, including some of my favorites (“Kogda Tvoya Devushka Bolna,” “Videli Noch,” and “Zvezda po Imeni Solntse,” to name a few). We had a great time dancing around like idiots, and the atmosphere at this place was really relaxed and friendly. I had some decent BBQ chicken, and most everybody else had pizza. We all had some (tiny) White Russians, and I had about 4 beers. I think everybody had a really fun time. Our friends Natalya and Jonathan (yeah, taxi-kicking Jonathan) were there to, so we had a decent-sized group. We stayed until about 1:00, and after arguing over some extra beers being added to our bill, we paid up and then split up for taxi rides home. I shared one with Jonathan, and finally got to bed around 2:00. Today I’ve spent what is now a few hours writing this up, and now that I’ve finally reached the end I think Zainap wants me to help her practice some English, then I’ll probably head over to meet up with the other teachers. I’ll try not to go this long with out updating the blog to avoid posts like this that are in excess of 6,000 words. Sorry about that. Happy [now belated] Men’s Day everybody!
As I mentioned at the end last time, last Wednesday I went to the Uzbek Embassy to get my visa. Zainap went with me because apparently they ask people to bring a translator with them, though I’m sure I could have done it on my own. I had heard weird things about the Uzbek Embassy though, and I figured it would be a good idea to have a native speaker with me either way. We got there around 10:00 and waited outside the gate for a bit with other people applying for visas. They let us in, I filled out an application and gave them all my documents, and they said come back at 3:00 to pick up my passport with the visa inside. Zainap headed home, but I decided to hang around downtown until 3:00. I went to an internet club for a while, and then to that place called Fatboy’s for lunch. I was interested in trying their breakfast burrito, but was pretty disappointed. It was pretty bland, didn’t have any of the spices or flavors right, but what can I really expect from a restaurant in Kyrgyzstan? I appreciated the effort. I didn’t really like being in there to much, though, cause there seemed to be a particularly large number of ex-pats in there at the time, and I don’t really like hanging around ex-pat places too much. There was this big group of who I think were mostly Brits, some of whom I had seen before at TsUM. There were also a fair amount of “biznyesmyen,” as they say in Russian, out on their “biznyes lanch” no doubt. I finished up my burrito and beer pretty quick, then headed out to find an ATM cause I was running low on cash. There are a fair amount of them in Bishkek, but not always in the most convenient places, and not always around when you need them. I ended up walking a ways down Kievskaya street and using the same ATM I had used to give Jonathan the money to pay that taxi driver the Saturday before. I had some more time before 3:00, so I went over to TsUM to see about buying some new DVDs. A woman working at one of the DVD counters suckered me into looking at her stock, and I ended up buying three DVDs: Running with Scissors, Eastern Promises (the Woman assured me it was “Klassno” [like “classy,” but without the irony]), and Juno (sorry Lily). Unfortunately, only Running with Scissors works on my computer! My disc drive has gotten really fickle, and won’t even play some of the DVDs that I brought anymore. I’m holding on to the DVDs though, in hope that they will work on another DVD player, or on my new computer when I get that! After I got the DVDs I killed some more time by sitting on a bench and drinking a Fanta (which was really cold, amazingly!). I ran into Katy while sitting on the bench (I guess I should say Katy ran into me), and we chatted for a moment. I then headed back to the Embassy just in time to meet Zainap there. We were let in and I had to pay the $152 visa fee (yeah, seriously. Add to that the $50 or so I paid for the letter of invitation, and Uzbekistan becomes one expensive country to visit). Unfortunately, none of the USD bills I brought with me to pay met their standards of crispness, and they wouldn’t accept them. They told us to go to a bank and exchange them for better ones. We searched the area for a while and finally found a bank about 5 blocks away. They were able to exchange most of the bills, but the $100 bill I had brought had a really small stamp of a beer bottle on it (who would do that? Why?), and they can’t take marked bills for whatever reason. I had to exchange some of my Som to make up the difference, but we finally got the correct amount, returned to the Embassy, paid up, and now I’ve got my Uzbek visa! Aside from the whole money thing, it was a pretty easy and painless process. Sure I had to get a letter of invitation, but that was a cinch too. I headed home with Zainap in a marshrutka, and I watched Running with Scissors. It was alright, but not what I really expected. The next day was Thursday, and I don’t remember what I did cause it was just another miscellaneous workday.
Friday after work I went out to dinner with some of the other teachers. We decided to check out this Chinese place down the street from the school called “Pekingskaya Utka II” (Peking Duck II). We don’t know where the first one is. It had pretty decent food, and in pretty good portions too. They were blasting music in the main room, so we were offered a private room that was really cold, but they turned on a little heater for us. There was a fish tank in there to, but we later found out that it’s where they keep the small fish that they feed to the larger fish in another fish tank in the main room. We had fun eating a chatting for a while, but none of us wanted to make a long night out of it, so we finished and everyone went home relatively early. I found a taxi home and ended up chatting with the driver a bit. We discovered that we both used to live in the same neighborhood in St. Petersburg! He said he lived on Shchevchenko Street between Malaya and Srednyaya streets, which is basically where Vickie and I walked everyday to catch the bus to school. Small world! His car got stuck in a rut in the snow in front of my apartment, so I helped him push it out. He was charging me 80 Som, but I only had a 100 and he didn’t have change, so we drove to the nearest store so he could exchange it for smaller bills to give me the change, then drove me back to the apartment. What a nice guy! I went to bed sort of early cause I had to get up sort of early the next morning to go to…
…Issyk-Kul! What’s that? It’s a big lake in eastern Kyrgyzstan (check a map, dummy). In fact it’s the second largest Mountain lake in the world after Lake Titicaca. It’s basically the only place where Kyrgyz go for vacation, so it’s kind of a big deal. Most people only go there in the summer, when it’s warm and the water isn’t quite so unbelievably cold, so we were definitely going out of season, but it was awesome nonetheless. So, on Saturday morning I got up kind of early, stopped buy Narodny to pick up some drinks and snacks for the ride, then waited to catch a trolleybus to the school where we were all meeting. It was then that I started feeling kind of queasy and sick, but I was determined to go to Issyk-Kul so I tried to ignore it. The trolleybus wasn’t coming and I thought I might just feel worse if I took a marshrutka, so I broke down and got a cab to take me there. I was a little early, so I hung out with Katy and her friend Alison a bit in Katy’s apartment. We headed out a little after 10:00. Our party included: Kendje, her husband Bayan (the driver), their 4-year-old daughter Aishoola, Me, Jane, Katy, and another American girl named Kelly who’s in Kyrgyzstan on an NSEP grant and living with Kendje’s family. We were being taken on this trip because the school feels obligated to show their teachers the country, and we are the newer teachers who hadn’t been to Issyk-Kul yet. We headed east, passed Kant, Ivanovka, and Tokmok (the same towns we went through on the way to Burana Tower), and kept going further. Past Tokmok the mountains in the distance on either side of the road get closer and closer as the Chuy Valley comes to an end, and the views are really awesome. We were really close to the Kazakh border again. We headed up into the mountains, and stopped for lunch at a nice spot along the Chuy River. We were each given a little packaged lunch that included some bread, cheese, chicken, eggs, and potatoes. It was simple, but pretty tasty, and despite the cold we enjoyed sitting outside in the sunshine near the river. I wore my new kalpak while we ate, and it kept my head surprisingly warm. Bayan offered us some vodka shots to go with our lunch, which I certainly obliged him. I had two, but the others teachers could only handle one each. I chased my shots with potato, which seemed fitting.
We continued on after lunch, but stopped soon after to check out a cool roadside monument. Kendje explained to us that in 1916 the White army started demanding that Kyrgyz men serve in the army, and so they invaded the valleys around here to round up troops. Many fled to China, many were killed, and it’s become a big thing in Kyrgyz history. This monument commemorated the events of 1916. It was perched above a deep gorge and surrounded by big rolling hills. We all took a bunch of pictures, then kept going again. We stopped soon after again at a little spring coming out of the mountain that the locals apparently consider holy, so lots of people stop here to wash their face or hands, or to just fill their water bottles. The water was nice, cold, and good to drink. Not as nice, cold, and good to drink as, say, the spring water at that park in Shasta City, California, but good nonetheless. There were tons of prayer rags tied all over the branches of the surrounding trees, and there was a sad looking dog hanging around begging for scraps. I wish we had given it something. We continued onwards through the mountains to Issyk-Kul, and I knew we were getting close when the mountains gave way to a wide valley. We passed a tollbooth for the Issyk-Kul bioregion, and passed briefly through the lakeside town of Balykchy before heading south to the south side of Issyk-Kul. At this point we could see wisps of blue lake water in the near distance. We drove for a little while along the south shore until we came to a big WWII monument. It wasn’t a statue, but instead like a big billboard made of wood with lots of negative space that you can see through to behind the monument. It had a big picture of the Rodina Mat’ statue in Volgograd, and the names of a bunch of war heroes on it. The real reason we stopped at this spot was to see something that’s happened for the first time in history: party of the lake is frozen over. Issyk-Kul literally means “hot lake” in Kyrgyz, and it’s called this because, due to a combination of salinity and thermal heating, the lake is known to stay ice-free year round. However, with this being one of the coldest winters in years, a small corner of the lake had actually frozen over. Hooray for climate change! Bayan explained to me that, with global warming setting in, many think that the warm season at Issyk-Kul will be a few months longer after only a few years. I don’t know about that, but maybe several decades down the line. We walked around on the ice that had formed in the marshy area along the shore, but we figured it wasn’t a good idea to venture out onto the frozen lake, even though we saw some kids skating on it in the distance. There were some cows wandering around, and we walked with them back to our van and kept driving east. We made a quick pit stop where there were some piles of dirt for people to pee behind, and then drove to a cool little monument to some local hero that had Arabic writing on it. There was also small cemetery nearby, which we got to explore a bit. We had passed a lot of these cemeteries, and they all looked so awesome, so I was glad that we got to see this one up close. These Kyrgyz cemeteries seem to have an interesting mix of Islamic and traditional Kyrgyz characteristics. Many of the graves are marked by yurt frames, many of them with a crescent moon on top. There are lots of large grave stones in interesting shapes, many of them with a picture or painting of the deceased on it. Check out my flickr pictures to see what I’m talking about. There was also a small gift shop nearby that sold a lot of stuff made out of felt. We checked it out, and then got to go inside a small yurt that they had set up. It was pretty nice inside, though to small for a family to live in. The real yurts are over twice as big, but this one seemed like a nice one to have that you could maybe set up in your back yard and live in during the summer. We inquired about prices, and they said that the small one cost $1,000, which actually seemed pretty reasonable. I think Jane was almost contemplating getting one, but how would you get something like that home? After the gift shop we backtracked a little ways down the road to a small village called Karakoo, not to be confused with Karakol, a larger city at the eastern edge of lake Issyk-Kul. This is where Bayan was born and raised, and where we would be staying with his brother’s family.
Bayan’s brother, Uran, lives in a small house with a tiny farm/orchard in the back. He lives with his wife Symbat, three kids, and his 85-year-old mother. We were welcomed into there home and sat in front of a bid table filled with pastries, “salads” (the Russian versions), and lots of tea. Their living room had several beautiful shyrdaks, which are the traditional Kyrgyz felt rugs that are so cool. As per Kyrgyz tradition, the kept insisting we eat more and more, and never seemed to believe us when we said we were full. The main dish was something potatoy an meaty, and of course delicious. We pretty much sat around the table from the moment we got there until bedtime around 10:00. Another man named Aibek and his wife and two children came over to visit too, but I wasn’t sure if he was another brother or just a friend from the village. Everybody was very friendly, and Aibek kept wanting to chat with me in Kyrgyz, so I had to have Kendje translate everything. He wanted to shake my hand when he heard that I support Barrack Obama, which I think goes to show that he has a really good image abroad. Every ones in a while Aibek would poor everybody some vodka shots, which I kept drinking but the other Americans started to refuse them after a while. They were so spaced out that I didn’t really feel them at all. The highlight of the evening was the “concert” that all the children put on for us. It included singing, dancing, and comedy sketches, and all the Americans took tons of photos and videos the whole time. It’s was pretty spectacular, They all dressed up in nice costumes and took turns singing or dancing to Kyrgyz and Russian pop songs, even Uran’s two-year-old daughter Saikal. It was so precious. We all posed for pictures with the children, then wit the adults, and I wore my kalpak again for most of the night. After the concert, we participated in what is apparently a traditional activity, whereby a bunch of food and spices are mixed together with water in a small bowl, and it’s passed around to everyone at the table, and each person must either sing a song, or drink the concoction. Of course, nobody ever drinks it, so we all took turns singing songs for each other. The Kyrgyz would all join in with each other on all their songs, so us Americans tried to think of songs that we could all sing when any of is got the cup. We ended up singing, among other songs: “This Land is Your Land,” “The Star Spangled Banner,” “Henry VIII”, and “Yesterday.” I sang what I could remember of “Danny Boy,” and Kelly helped me out a little bit with “Thunder Road.” It was a really fantastic time. Around 10:00 we all got ready for bed, which included a run to the outhouse in the back yard (squat toilet only). Originally all the Americans were going to sleep in one room, but I think they realized there wasn’t enough room for all of us there and put me in the living room, which is good because I was worried about keeping the others up with my snoring (Apparently they heard it anyways, though). They made up a little bed for me by piling a bunch of think blankets on top of each other, and it was quite comfortable.
The next morning we got up around 9:00, and I explored the back yard a little bit while Uran let the lambs out to feed on hay. They had a really friendly dog named Rex (I guess dog names transcend cultures) who loved to be pet and scratched. It was a cold morning, but it felt so nice being out in the country and breathing the fresh air. We had plov for breakfast (what a great idea), and then headed out for another day of sightseeing. We first drove south a little ways down a dusty dirt rode into the hills. There is a legend about a hero who carried his horse over a mountain pass and had also lifted a huge rock, which is still resting along the side of this rode. Local men like to prove their manhood by lifting a series of heavy rocks onto this one big rock, to see how many they could do. Of course, we had to stop so that I could prove my manhood by lifting some of these rocks. I got the smallest three no problem, but everyone insisted I stop before getting to the really big ones so that I wouldn’t throw out my back or anything. I’m sure I could have handled it. We went a little further to a small hill that served as a monument to 40 Martyrs who had been killed during the Russian invasion in 1916, and there were beautiful views of the surrounding hills and mountains. A little further and we came to the ruins of an old Kolkhoz (Soviet collective farm) in a little valley that now was used as grazing ground for a heard of cows. We were about to climb this big hill when a couple of shepherds came riding up. One of them approached us and Bayan started to talk to him. He recommended that we not climb this hill because it could be slippery, and that we try another smaller hill a little further down. We walked up this small hill and on the other side was a sweeping view of a large valley on the other side, with huge snowcapped mountains on the other side. It was pretty stunning. There was also a small river snaking through the valley down below us. Kendje said that his was the valley where she grew up, and we could actually see her village in the distance. The mountains of Kyrgyzstan really are amazing, and unlike mountains I have ever seen before. I really wish I could spend a lot more time here just exploring the mountains. We walked back down the hill, and us teachers checked out the ruins of the Kolkhoz. When we got back to the van Bayan was chatting with the Shepherd again, and he discovered that the man had known his father well, and that Bayan’s mother had been his teacher in school! We confirmed this later with his mother, who said she remembered him. We all posed for a photo with the Shepherd, and then were on our way again.
It was finally time to get up close and personal with lake Issyk-Kul, so we drove along a rugged road through some low hills up to a tiny village right on the lake. Here, we met with a friend of Bayan’s who lived in a small house with his wife and baby. We went inside for bread and tea, and watched a bit of a TV program that featured people performing traditional Kyrgyz songs on their instrument called a Kumys, standing in front of shyrdaks and wearing traditional Kyrgyz clothes. Back outside, we were each offered the chance to ride around a little bit on a horse, but only Jane took them up on the offer. The horse wasn’t big enough for me, or else I would have given it a go. The weather was really great, sunny and not too cold, so we milled about the yard and checked out the views of the lake while Jane rode around. Once she was finished we all took the short walk down to the lakeshore, where we found a nice little beach and really got to see the lake for the first time. I was the only one brave enough to test the waters (literally), so I took my shoes off and walked around a bit in the water. It was cold. Really cold. Much colder than the Pacific at the Oregon coast. It was so cold it hurt my feet. I’m still glad I got to go in it a little, though. One of the travel milestones I like to keep track of is the bodies of water that I have had at least some part of my body in. I’m happy to have added Lake Issyk-Kul to that list, and hopefully I’ll be adding the Caspian Sea to that list come April in Turkmenistan. I found a cool shell, and Jane found a sheep jaw that we each took half of as a souvenir. We headed back to the van and then back to Uran’s house for lunch. It was a delicious concoction of wide flat noodles, potatoes, and meat (Kyrgyz food in a nutshell). After lunch we said goodbye to our wonderful hosts and headed back west towards Bishkek. We didn’t stop much along the way this time, only once at that spring again so we could fill up our water bottles. I enjoyed just looking out the window at the beautiful views and listening to my ipod, though. Back in Bishkek I got Bayan to drop me off near my apartment, and I spent the evening relaxing and preparing for lessons the next day. What a great weekend it was!
So, this last week was spent mostly teaching, of course, but there were some things that stood out. The weather had been really nice since the weekend. In fact, when I got back form Issyk-Kul most of the snow in Bishkek had melted, and by Wednesday it was virtually all gone. I thought Spring had come early, but then late Wednesday night it started to rain, which continued through Thursday morning. By Thursday afternoon it started to get cold again and the rain turned to snow. It then kept snowing for several hours, blanketing the city in 2 to 3 inches of snow just after it ha all melted of the day before. Winter isn’t going away just yet! So, on Tuesday night we teachers decided to go out for dinner, and we ended up just going to that place Nooruz right across the street with the really good lagman. For some it was their first introduction to lagman, and I think they were all pretty impressed. I also had some Manty while the others had Sashlyk, but there was plenty of sharing going on. It was a delicious Kyrgyz meal, and somehow seemed a lot less expensive this time. There was a creepy drunk Russian guy at a table near us who kept staring at us and even started mocking Jessica’s gestures as she talked. We all just tried to ignore him. At one point he spontaneously slammed his fist on the table really hard, and everyone in the room felt a little uneasy. He left before we did, so we were able to finish out meal in peace. Talking about lagman has got me jonesin’ for a bowl. Maybe I’ll have to get one later today. On Wednesday the weather was amazing. It’s hard to say exactly, but I would have guessed it was at least 40 degrees F, which may not sound all the warm but after the weather we’ve been having here, it was a godsend. It was sunny and beautiful, so I decided to go for a walk around the city. Wearing only my zip-up hoodie, I set of first to catch a trolleybus downtown to use the internet, but ended up catching a small bus instead. I sat next to a guy who started speaking English with me. His name was Feruz, and he’s from Uzbekistan but goes to school at the American University of Central Asia here in Bishkek (apparently the best University in town). He was really friendly and spoke English really well. I actually got his phone number, so I’ll have to give him a call and hang out one of these days. I used to internet for a while, then had a Shaurma and a blini for lunch. I had to get my photo taken for a Kazakh visa, so I found a photo place by the blini stand and got 6 3x4 cm pictures for 80 Som. The picture doesn’t look great, but I just needed a photo the right size for the visa application. This photo place was also a print shop, and I saw them printing posters for some event called “The Manliest Party of the Year” at some night club for Men’s Day (today). With my photos taken care of, I then set off for my walk. I wanted to see a part of town I hadn’t been to before, so I headed east on Kievsakaya, up to Chuy, and then continued east for a few blocks. I then went north along some miscellaneous street that went through some really poor neighborhoods, and up to Jibek Jolu. I headed back west and then snaked my way through some streets, passed the circus, and then to Victory Square (with the eternal flame), where I sat for a while just enjoying the weather. I was getting thirsty, so I walked over to the area around TsUM where I got a bottle of Coke and sat on a bench for a while and people-watched. After a while I headed back down another street east of Sovietskaya and started walking south. I like getting off of the main drags and seeing how different a city can be just one block away. I walked all the way to the train tracks and then was forced back o to Sovietskaya to go under them. Once on the other side, I slipped through an apartment-complex courtyard (dvor, if you speak Russian) and back onto that side street. I walked all the way to Gorkogo, only a block from the London School. I went to the internet café across from Vefa Center because I also had to print a copy of my Kyrgyz letter of Invitation for my Kazakh visa (don’t ask me why). There, I saw Kevin, and the recently-arrived teacher named Ben. Ben got here on Monday, but he isn’t going to start teaching until April after Nick, Jess and I leave. He came a month or so early to take Russian lessons, because he doesn’t know any Russian at all. He spent a lot of time teaching English in Japan and Ecuador apparently, but he’s totally new to this part of the world. For now he’s living with a host family in the fifth micro-region in SE Bishkek, and he’s been making the hour-long walk to and from the school everyday I think cause the marshrutkas still freak him out a bit (hey, they still freak me out). We were both heading in that direction, so we decided to walk together as far as Akhunbayeva, where we both went different directions. First, we stopped by the bookstore in Vefa Center, because I wanted to buy the Bishkek street atlas and Russian-Uzbek phrase book I’ve had my eye on. We chatted during our walk, and Ben seems like a really cool guy. I spent the rest of Wednesday working on stuff for classes, wishing I had time to write this blog post instead.
Thursday was a frustrating day. See, I need to apply for my Kazakh visa, which I originally wanted to do on Wednesday, but I had Zainap call them to figure out the protocol for getting a visa and they said they aren’t open on Wednesdays, so I had to head out there Thursday morning instead. Zainap was going to go with me but I woke up a little too late and she didn’t have time anymore, so I had to go it alone. Remember, this was the day with the bad weather, so that morning it was all drizzly and slushy on the roads. Now, the Kazakh embassy is in the most awkward spot in the middle of nowhere in the SW part of Bishkek, which isn’t too far from my apartment, but still kind of a hassle to get to. I caught a trolleybus down Akhunbayeva to Prospekt Mira, where I walked the quarter mile or so to the Embassy along a pretty desolate road. Once there I got inline behind 10 or 15 other people applying for visas. I met one guy from Boston who had been teaching in Kazakhstan, but whose visa expired so he had to leave the country to get a new one before he could return. I finally got in the door, where I had to sign in a registry, and then have the unfriendly guy behind the window look over my documents to make sure everything was in order. It was alright, so he gave me an application form that I filled out and glued my picture to, after correcting a few problems with my application, he said OK, now go to this bank downtown and pay the application fee, then come back and give us all these documents. I had heard that you had to pay at this bank, but Zainap asked them on the phone if you had to do it before or after you apply for the visa, and they said after. But apparently, they can’t actually get started on the visa until you’ve paid and can show a receipt of payment. So, basically, I could have gone to the bank first and paid and saved myself the extra trip to the Embassy. All they gave me at the Embassy was a little slip that says how much I have to pay at the bank, which I already knew. It wasn’t an official document or anything, and the bank didn’t even ask to see anything except my passport. By the time I finished at the Embassy it was about 11:00, and he said I should go to the bank and come back, but they close at 12:00 and the bank is half way across town. So, I gave up on trying to get the visa taken care of that day, and headed to the bank to pay the fee so I could return again the next day. I was so pissed at the Embassy for their stupid rules and bureaucracy. I walked back to the corner of Akhunbayeva and Prospekt Mira, where I caught a marshrutka downtown to go to the bank. I was very irritable after being at the Embassy, and so I hated being in the marshrutka. I was able to get a seat, but the woman sitting next to me was kind of turned around to talk to the person behind her, and thus was taking up some of my seat too and didn’t bother to do anything about it, so I was only halfway sitting. I got off an tracked down the bank, where an unfriendly teller handled my transaction and gave me the ever-important receipt. I walked the few blocks back to the area around the London school, where I called home and used the internet at the nearby internet club, and the went to Vefa Center for lunch. I was feeling like treating myself to a little slice of western-style comfort, so I went to one of the fast food places in the food court. I ordered a double cheeseburger, which was tasty but not quite authentic. The ketchup they serve with their fires there is really sweet and pretty gross, too. I’d really like to find some god old Heinz ketchup somewhere in Bishkek. By this point the drizzle had turned to driving snow, so I sought shelter at the London School. It kept raining pretty much the entire time I was teaching, and by the end of the day it was quiet thick. I went home and graded tests, again unable to write a blog post.
Friday morning I got up early to return to the Kazakh embassy. The city was covered with snow, and transportation was way slowed down because of the slick driving conditions. Every single marshrutka was backed to the point of barely being able to close the door, and when the trolleybus finally came I saw that it too was nearly brimming with people, so I decided to avoid the whole hassle and take a taxi directly to the embassy, which means I had to pay about $1.70 to get there instead of about 8 cents (totally worth it, though). The embassy is supposed to open at 9:00, so I got there just after 9:00, and waited for about 40 minutes before it actually did open. At least I was first in line and got in and out quickly once it did open. All my papers were in order, and so now my visa is being processed. The guy said I could pick it up on Tuesday at 6:30, which of course is right in the middle of when I’m teaching. Zainap is going to call on Monday to see if she can pick it up for me, which I really hope she can. After the embassy I walked back to Akhunbayeva-Mira and decided just to take another taxi to the school so I wouldn’t miss my 10:25 Kyrgyz class. Kyrgyz is really fun, and after 5 hours of lessons I feel like I know a lot more than after my first 5 hours of Russian. After that class I had promised to help the school out by conducting a phone interview with some guy from Uzbekistan who is applying for an internship program in the US. Uchkul, one of the office workers, took me down the street to an IP Telephone place so we could call, but after many unsuccessful tries we weren’t able to get a hold of him, so we postponed the interview until later. I was feeling much better on Friday than I was on Thursday, so classes went pretty well and. The weather at least was sunny, so that helped a lot. In one class the students really didn’t want to do real work, so we just played games for most of class, which I think this group really needed. All us teachers knew we wanted to go out Friday night, so after classes we all met up and decided to go to this place called Sweet 60’s. Some of the other teachers go there quite frequently, but this was my first time there. This place is 60’s themed, obviously, so they had lots of posters and pictures on the walls of 60’s icons. They even had some Soviet-era copies of British and American classic rock records from Russia on the wall, and it made me think of how I should have bought that Russian version of “Sticky Fingers” by the Rolling Stones at Yunona Fair back in St. Petersburg (still one of my biggest regrets). The house band at this place is good friends with Katy, so we were treated pretty nice. They play covers of Western and Russian rock songs, including several Russian rock songs that I know and like. They played my favorite song by the group DDT. The best part, of course, was all the Kino covers they did! I had Katy ask them to play some, and they obliged by playing about 5 or 6, including some of my favorites (“Kogda Tvoya Devushka Bolna,” “Videli Noch,” and “Zvezda po Imeni Solntse,” to name a few). We had a great time dancing around like idiots, and the atmosphere at this place was really relaxed and friendly. I had some decent BBQ chicken, and most everybody else had pizza. We all had some (tiny) White Russians, and I had about 4 beers. I think everybody had a really fun time. Our friends Natalya and Jonathan (yeah, taxi-kicking Jonathan) were there to, so we had a decent-sized group. We stayed until about 1:00, and after arguing over some extra beers being added to our bill, we paid up and then split up for taxi rides home. I shared one with Jonathan, and finally got to bed around 2:00. Today I’ve spent what is now a few hours writing this up, and now that I’ve finally reached the end I think Zainap wants me to help her practice some English, then I’ll probably head over to meet up with the other teachers. I’ll try not to go this long with out updating the blog to avoid posts like this that are in excess of 6,000 words. Sorry about that. Happy [now belated] Men’s Day everybody!
2/13/08
Саламатсызбы
Busy busy busy! I find I don’t really have a lot of time to sit down and write blog posts. I teach for about 6 hours everyday, plus 2 to 3 hours for lesson planning, so it’s basically the same as a full-time job. Well, I do get Wednesdays off, so there is some relief in the middle of the week, That’s why I have time to write now, cause it’s Tuesday night and I don’t have to plan for lessons tomorrow.
Last week was alright. I started teaching a new class and by now I think they’re comfortable enough with me and like me to some extent. One of them said that it was a “pity” that I was leaving at the end of March, so that was nice to hear. I like them to, so it’s definitely working out. Some of my classes are better than others, for sure. One of them can sometimes be difficult to teach, because a few of the students I feel should be at a lower level and so getting through exercises can take a long time, especially when some of the better students are absent and can’t help the others out. Also, this class can get pretty rowdy and hard to subdue. They also seem to laugh with each other about me a lot, especially when I try translating a word into Russian for them and I say it or spell it wrong or something. But, for the most part, teaching is going pretty well and I definitely enjoy it over all.
Outside of teaching, I’ve been hanging out with some of the other teachers and some other people as well. Last Thursday night we went out to a Turkish restaurant after school. It was Most of the teachers went, along with another girl who used to teach at the London School and is back in Bishkek. That guy Jake (who took us to the Chinese restaurant) was there too, as well as this other American girl named Alison who hangs around with the teachers, and a local Russian friend of everyone’s named Nataliya. It was a good time, though I think we were being really loud and annoying to everybody else in the restaurant. I was hoping they would have hookahs at this place, but alas they did not. This place was just down the street from the school, so we walked there and back in a light snow. The snowflakes were just like snowflakes in a cartoon, as in they look like real snow flakes when you look at them up close on your sleeve. You could actually make out the intricate details and patterns, as if somebody cut them out of pieces of paper and stuck them on the window. It was pretty cool to see. I hung out in Jane’s apartment with some of the other teachers before heading home by taxi.
The next day was Wednesday, so I of course had the day off. I took the Trolleybus downtown and had lunch at a place called Café Astana that I had read about in the Lonely Planet Central Asia guidebook. It was ok. I had lagman (which I basically get every time I eat at a restaurant now), and chicken curry, which wasn’t really curry at all but rather a chicken in a creamy sauce. After lunch I went to a Shmel’ internet club on Kievskaya to upload pictures to flickr and check the Super Tuesday results (I wish Obama had done a little better). After almost two hours there I decided it was time to leave, and I ran into Kevin sitting at another computer on my way out. After I had gotten a half block down the street he called me to see what I was doing and if I’d want like to grab a drink or something. I was just going to wander around, so I said sure. We went to that place called Fatboy’s, where we each had a beer, and I had some blini with sour cream (though it was probably to runny to really be called sour cream). Kevin and I chatted for a while and drank our beers at a leisurely pace. Kevin’s a cool guy, though I don’t see him much outside of the school, so I’m glad I ran into him that day. After we finished, Kevin headed back towards the school and I decided to take a long walk home through a new part of town. From Sovietskaya Street I went west on Toktagula for a while, then wormed my way over the Prospekt Mira (Avenue of the World), then due south. It was a pretty long walk, but I passed some cool stuff. There are at least 3 or 4 universities on Prospekt Mira with interesting architecture. The sun was “an angry little pinhead” in the sky (to quote Kurt Vonnegut), and I could stare right at it as it hung low in the sky shining through the fog and smog. I kept trudging away, never really aware of how far I’d gone. I was going to go as far as Akhunbayeva Street, where I would turn East towards my apartment. Streets are really poorly and unreliably labeled in Bishkek (this is true for most former Soviet cities, I think), so I tried to find street names as I passed them but wasn’t always successful. I ended up walking right past Akhunbayeva thinking I still had a ways to go, because I couldn’t find a street name as I passed it. I realized after I had gone a few hundred yards past it that I was headed towards the edge of town, so I pulled out the map and figured out where I was, then headed back. I was getting pretty tired by this time, and really just wanted to get home and relax. I hadn’t walked down this part of Akhunbayeva before, and it took longer to walk than I imagined. I stopped by Narodny on the way back to the apartment, then got home and settled in for the evening. I don’t think that long walk in the cold was the best thing for me, cause I think it was the next day that I started feeling a little sick.
Friday night was a night to remember. Let’s see if I can recount it all. Friday was Jake and Ingvild’s (that Norwegian girl I think I’ve mentioned before) last night in Bishkek, so I figured we should do something nice for them before they left. On my long walk home on Wednesday I had passed a Persion restaurant called Parsi, and I thought it looked like a good place to have dinner with everyone. I suggested it to some people and everyone seemed into, so we got it all organized and met there after classes on Friday night. We had a pretty big group: Me, Nick, Jess, Katy, Jake, Ingvild, Nataliya, Alison, and this other guy named Jonathan. Jonathan is a Fulbright scholar in Kyrgyzstan to learn Kyrgyz, which he studies at the London School, and I had seen him around but had never met him. We all had a good time hanging out, talking, and drinking beer (how Persian of us). The food was pretty good, and they even had hookahs (well, that’s the main reason I wanted to go there), so we had one of those too. It was the first time many of the people there had ever tried a hookah. At one point the electricity went out, and we had to talk and drink by candlelight. There was a small dance floor, though most of us didn’t dance. I talked to Ingvild a while about traveling in different places (she’s been a lot of places), and about Russia in general. All in all it was a really great time. As we were leaving, though, Jess took a spill down the front steps. They were dangerous, though, and it’s no wonder somebody got hurt. They had a long carpet running down the front stairs and out the front walk, with long metal bars on each step loosely holding the carpet in place, though they were all sliding around it looked like. I think Jess caught her heal on the carpet, fell down the steps and landed sideways on her ankle. I think it’s doing better now, but it looked pretty painful for a couple days. She obviously went home after that, along with Nick and Katy, but the rest of us decided to go to some place called the Cowboy club, which was just down the street. The place was in fact western themed, and they even had a bunch of flags on the walls from US states (no Oregon, though). I noticed that everyone there appeared to be Kyrgyz, with virtually no Russians. We got a table in the quite back room, had a beer, then hit the dance floor for one song before some of the others decided that the music sucked and that we should go to this place called Golden Bull instead. It was a few blocks away, down a shady ally and in the shadow of the White House (center of Kyrgyz government). There’s no cover charge for foreigners, so I couldn’t really complain. I had already about 5 beers by then and I didn’t want to spend any more money, so I didn’t order any drinks. This place was pretty weird. It was full of crazy lights that flash in your eyes and do crazy shows all over the walls. It actually made it hard to see anything, and really just hurt my eyes more than anything else. Their logo is a complete rip-off of the Chicago Bulls’ logo, which I found very amusing. The dancing was interrupted every now and then for a floor show, which included belly dancing, a traditional Kyrgyz dance with outfits and everything, and male and female striptease acts. There were these two kind-of-sleazy but friendly businessmen type from Pakistan sitting next to us, and at one point one of them gave me the rest of their bottle of champagne, which was about 2/3 full. When the dance floor got moving again they got up to dance and pulled some of us along with them. I love the way people dance around here, cause it’s basically the same way I dance. Nobody knows how to dance well, they just kind of move around and have fun, and since everybody dances that way there’s no reason to be self-conscious about it. This is the way it should always be, I think. So, we all danced around with these Pakistani guys, and after a while I started to suspect that one of them was trying to come on to me, cause he kept trying to take me by the hand to dance with him. It freaked me out a little bit, I’ll be honest. I tried to move away from him and dance near some other people, but he kept trying to move towards me. The rest of the night I tried to avoid making eye contact with him. We sat at the table a little while longer while everybody finished their drinks, then around 3:00 we decided to leave. By this point it was Jake, Ingvild, Natalya, Jonathan, and Me. We stood at the entrance to the alley for a while while everyone said goodbye (Jake and Ingvild were leaving in the morning), when a taxi driver came barreling around the corner and almost hit some of us. It wasn’t a big deal, in fact it’s pretty normal for drivers to narrowly avoid hitting pedestrians, and I don’t think we were really in any danger, but as he came around the corner Natalya yelled something and Jonathan kicked the door behind the driver’s. Now, it wasn’t really a hard kick or anything, and I know it didn’t do any damage to the car, but the driver immediately stopped, jumped out of the car and came after Jonathan. He punched him in the shoulder and tried to grab him by the throat. I helped pull the two apart and keep them separated as best I could, but the guy started yelling and demanding money for the damage Jonathan had caused. He pointed to a scuff on the driver’s door and said Jonathan had caused it (we all knew it was BS, but there was no way of telling him that). Natalya and Jonathan shouted with him for a while in Russian (I could understand most everything they and the driver were saying but I wasn’t confident enough in my own Russian skills to jump in, plus I didn’t want to involve myself any more than I had to). I hovered nearby ready to break things up if they turned violent again, but Jake and Ingvild stayed far back. Luckily it didn’t really get violent after that, though even Natalya ended up getting pushed around some, and even got her cell phone knocked out of her hand. At one point Jonathan tried buffing the scuff with his scarf, and it looked for a second that the guy was going to be appeased, so we quickly got in another cab that was waiting nearby, but the guy came back and tried to pull Jonathan out of the cab. I pulled him back in and tried to push the driver away. He kept shouting at me saying, “Who are you? Who are you?”, but I don’t think he wanted to try and mess with me. He kept saying he wanted to talk to Jonathan privately, but he wouldn’t’ go off with him alone. He finally got Jonathan out of the cab and by this time a small group of cab drivers had converged on the seen and started backing the guy up. They all agreed that 500 som (about $14) was the normal price to repair the scuff, and I think Jonathan should have just paid upfront without even making an argument out of it, and he probably could have gotten off with just 200 or 300 som, but now it was a whole big mess. So, this crowd of about 5 or 6 cab drivers was swarming around Jonathan and Natalya as they all argued with each other, and at one point Jake and Ingvild (who were still keeping their distance) pointed out to me that one of them had a tire iron behind his back. Once they realized we all saw the tire iron I think they realized it wasn’t a good idea to have it out, and so one of them put it away. I conferred with Jake and Ingvild again, and we decided that we should just advize Jonathan to pay the 500 som so we could get the hell out of there, so I went back up to the crowd and told him he should just cut his loses and pay the guy, but apparently while I had been talking to Jake and Ingvild he had managed to get his wallet stolen. He had apparently taken his wallet out to get the 500 som, but as he took it out one of the drivers snatched it from his hand and passed it off to another, who then made off down the ally with it. Meanwhile, the original guy was still demanding his 500 som, which of course Jonathan couldn’t pay because he didn’t have his wallet. The driver either didn’t see the others steal the wallet, or was playing along with their swindle. Jonathan and Natalya went after him down the alley, but the guy they thought had the wallet played dumb and pretended like he didn’t know what they were talking about. In the end Jonathan didn’t manage to get his wallet back, which apparently had included a credit card and over $200 in cash. But, the driver was still demanding 500 som, which none of us had on us either. Jonathan decided to call the US embassy, and eventually ended up speaking to their special investigator over the phone. We hung around for a long time while both he and the driver explained the story over the phone, but it soon became apparent that the only way we were ever going to get out of there was if the driver got his 500 som, so I volunteered to find an ATM and lend Jonathan the money to pay him. After a while we all decided it was the best thing to do, so we walked a block down the street with the driver to the nearest ATM, where I got the money and gave it to Jonathan to pay the guy. He actually shook Jonathan’s hand afterwards, and then walked back to the club where his cab was. That other cab that had been waiting for us before had followed us to the ATM and was ready to give us a ride home, which we were definitely ready to accept. We finally said goodbye to Jake and Ingvild, then Jonathan and I shared a taxi home. I covered his ride too, since obviously he couldn’t pay for that either. I ended up getting home at 4:30. At least I’ve got an interesting story to tell now, and it didn’t cost me my wallet.
On Saturday I wanted to have a relaxing, easygoing day. I didn’t sleep in as long as I wanted to (only until about 10:00), and after I got up I headed to the area near the school to call home and use the internet. I talked to mom for a while on the IP Telephone at the internet club, got on the internet for a while, then went across the street to the big Vefa Center mall to check out movie times. There’s a classic Russian movie called the Irony of Fate that I really like, and they just came out with the sequel. It was still playing at the movie theater in the Vefa Center, and I thought it would be fun to see it finally. The next showing was in an hour, so I bought my ticket and headed to the food court for lunch. I ran into a student from the London School named Kamchubek, who is very friendly and always likes to chat with me when he sees me (he isn’t my student, though). He’s in his 30’s, and he’s just become the manager of a new fast food franchise called Bee Burger, which he told me is a Scandinavian chain that is opening their first Asian franchise here in Bishkek, just down the street from the London School. When I ran into Kamchubek he was sitting in the food court and talking with another man who seemed excited to meet me, and spoke decent English. They said I should sit with them after I got my food. I ordered a Chicken sandwich with fries and a Fanta from a place called Prince Burger, and sat down with Kamchubek and his friend. Soon after I sat down, a third man came and gave me a very annoyed look, like he was thinking, “who the hell is this guy?” I realized that his coat was sitting on the other chair, and that he must have been up to use the bathroom or something, and had just returned. He looked very serious and was well dressed, so I figured these guys had something to do with Bee Burger or some related business matter. They two other men began speaking to each other in a language other than Kyrgyz or Russian, and Kamchubek explained to me that they were from Turkey, and that the well-dressed man was his boss from Bee Burger, and the other was a friend of his. Kamchubek explained that these guys talk business for hours on end everyday, and the he mostly sits and listens. I felt very awkward sitting at this table eating my lunch while these two slick Turkish business men talked business and Kamchubek listened in attentively. I finished my food and excused myself from the table. I had some more time to kill, so I checked out the mall’s bookstore. They didn’t have much, but I was tempted to buy a street Atlas of Bishkek that labels every building, but I decided I’d come back for it another time. I also looked for some books to help me with Kyrgyz, like a Russian-Kyrgyz dictionary or something, but they didn’t have anything about the Kyrgyz language, surprisingly. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that on Friday I had my first Kyrgyz lesson. It was really interesting, and I think I’m going to enjoy learning more. I’ll talk more about that some other time, though. Before the movie started I went down to the big grocery store called Ramstor on the first floor of the mall to buy some movie snacks. It was my first time in there, and it seemed on par with a western grocery store as far as stock and services go. They had a full-service deli and bakery, even. I got some candy and a whisky-and-cola-in-a-can, then headed back to the third floor for the movie. Remember, theaters in most countries outside the US make you chose your seat when you buy your ticket, so I chose one that looked like it had a lot of leg room and wasn’t too close to other people. It did have a lot of leg room, but I didn’t realize that my spot was right next to the door, so people were coming and going right next to me during the movie. Also, some people bought the seats right next to mine after I had already bought mine, so I didn’t get all the room I had wanted. It wasn’t a big deal, though. The movie was alright, though certainly can’t hold a flame to the original. The director of this one is the same guy who directed the Night Watch and Day Watch movies, so there was this strange action movie feel to many scenes of the movie, which detracted more than added. The star of Night Watch and Day Watch was even in this movie. He was the main character, in fact. I feel like they tried too hard to highlight the differences between life in the Soviet Union when the first one was made, and life in contemporary Russia. There were a lot of flashy cell phones and cars, and quite a bit of product placement as well, which just seemed wrong to me. Some of the songs from the first movie were there as a motif in the background, but then they would add heavy guitar parts and it kind of ruined it for me. The plot wasn’t too bad, though. It’s essentially about the children of the main characters from the first film, but brings the original characters into the mix. I think I understood about 70% of the dialogue, and about 90% of the plot (though I think there is one very important twist that I didn’t catch). I’d say if you’re a fan of the original movie it’s probably worth seeing, but don’t expect to be blown away. After the movie I noticed Kamchubek and the Turks where still talking away in the food court, but I headed outside. I didn’t quite feel like going home yet, so I gave Nick a call to see what they were doing. He and Jess were hanging out at their apartment and invited me to come over. We hung out there for a while, played a little Checkers and Scrabble, listened to music, and ate chips. Nick is into a lot of cool music, so I enjoyed looking through his ipod. I told them the story of the mess with the cab driver from the night before. Jess’s ankle was all swollen up from her fall the night before as well. At some point some more people showed up, including Katy, Alison, Natalya, and Jonathan. They told their versions of the story too. I had to get home cause my host mom had cooked me dinner, so around 9:00 I went back and settled in for the night. I had borrowed some DVDs from Nick and Jess, including some Simpsons that I haven’t seen in years, but my computer wouldn’t play the discs no matter what I tried. They were Nick’s DVDs so they region 2 (Europe), but I thought I should be able to play them in the program VLC, but it wouldn’t work. My disk drive has been real fickle since I got to Bishkek, and it won’t even play some of my DVDs some of the time. I guess that’s one more reason to get a new Laptop when I get home. On Sunday I felt really sick the whole day. The few days before I had felt a little bit of a cold, but it was really bad Sunday. My nose wouldn’t stop running, and I couldn’t stop sneezing. Regardless, I spent most of the day writing tests and preparing lessons for Monday. So, these last two days have been alright at school. On Monday I gave tests over the last units in all my classes, and people did pretty well for the most part. Today Natasha, one of the main office employees, observed one of my classes and she had a lot of good things to say about my teaching, so that felt pretty good. Tonight I’ve just spent most of my time writing this monstrous post. Tomorrow I’m going with Zainap to the Uzbek Embassy so she can help me get my visa (apparently you’re supposed to have a translator help you), which should be interesting. Oh, on Saturday the school is going to take Jane, Katy and me out to Lake Issyk-Kul, where I think we will stay the night in a yurt! I’m really excited to go out there, because it’s supposed to be pretty awesome. Look for that in what will probably be my next post. See you then!
-Austin
Last week was alright. I started teaching a new class and by now I think they’re comfortable enough with me and like me to some extent. One of them said that it was a “pity” that I was leaving at the end of March, so that was nice to hear. I like them to, so it’s definitely working out. Some of my classes are better than others, for sure. One of them can sometimes be difficult to teach, because a few of the students I feel should be at a lower level and so getting through exercises can take a long time, especially when some of the better students are absent and can’t help the others out. Also, this class can get pretty rowdy and hard to subdue. They also seem to laugh with each other about me a lot, especially when I try translating a word into Russian for them and I say it or spell it wrong or something. But, for the most part, teaching is going pretty well and I definitely enjoy it over all.
Outside of teaching, I’ve been hanging out with some of the other teachers and some other people as well. Last Thursday night we went out to a Turkish restaurant after school. It was Most of the teachers went, along with another girl who used to teach at the London School and is back in Bishkek. That guy Jake (who took us to the Chinese restaurant) was there too, as well as this other American girl named Alison who hangs around with the teachers, and a local Russian friend of everyone’s named Nataliya. It was a good time, though I think we were being really loud and annoying to everybody else in the restaurant. I was hoping they would have hookahs at this place, but alas they did not. This place was just down the street from the school, so we walked there and back in a light snow. The snowflakes were just like snowflakes in a cartoon, as in they look like real snow flakes when you look at them up close on your sleeve. You could actually make out the intricate details and patterns, as if somebody cut them out of pieces of paper and stuck them on the window. It was pretty cool to see. I hung out in Jane’s apartment with some of the other teachers before heading home by taxi.
The next day was Wednesday, so I of course had the day off. I took the Trolleybus downtown and had lunch at a place called Café Astana that I had read about in the Lonely Planet Central Asia guidebook. It was ok. I had lagman (which I basically get every time I eat at a restaurant now), and chicken curry, which wasn’t really curry at all but rather a chicken in a creamy sauce. After lunch I went to a Shmel’ internet club on Kievskaya to upload pictures to flickr and check the Super Tuesday results (I wish Obama had done a little better). After almost two hours there I decided it was time to leave, and I ran into Kevin sitting at another computer on my way out. After I had gotten a half block down the street he called me to see what I was doing and if I’d want like to grab a drink or something. I was just going to wander around, so I said sure. We went to that place called Fatboy’s, where we each had a beer, and I had some blini with sour cream (though it was probably to runny to really be called sour cream). Kevin and I chatted for a while and drank our beers at a leisurely pace. Kevin’s a cool guy, though I don’t see him much outside of the school, so I’m glad I ran into him that day. After we finished, Kevin headed back towards the school and I decided to take a long walk home through a new part of town. From Sovietskaya Street I went west on Toktagula for a while, then wormed my way over the Prospekt Mira (Avenue of the World), then due south. It was a pretty long walk, but I passed some cool stuff. There are at least 3 or 4 universities on Prospekt Mira with interesting architecture. The sun was “an angry little pinhead” in the sky (to quote Kurt Vonnegut), and I could stare right at it as it hung low in the sky shining through the fog and smog. I kept trudging away, never really aware of how far I’d gone. I was going to go as far as Akhunbayeva Street, where I would turn East towards my apartment. Streets are really poorly and unreliably labeled in Bishkek (this is true for most former Soviet cities, I think), so I tried to find street names as I passed them but wasn’t always successful. I ended up walking right past Akhunbayeva thinking I still had a ways to go, because I couldn’t find a street name as I passed it. I realized after I had gone a few hundred yards past it that I was headed towards the edge of town, so I pulled out the map and figured out where I was, then headed back. I was getting pretty tired by this time, and really just wanted to get home and relax. I hadn’t walked down this part of Akhunbayeva before, and it took longer to walk than I imagined. I stopped by Narodny on the way back to the apartment, then got home and settled in for the evening. I don’t think that long walk in the cold was the best thing for me, cause I think it was the next day that I started feeling a little sick.
Friday night was a night to remember. Let’s see if I can recount it all. Friday was Jake and Ingvild’s (that Norwegian girl I think I’ve mentioned before) last night in Bishkek, so I figured we should do something nice for them before they left. On my long walk home on Wednesday I had passed a Persion restaurant called Parsi, and I thought it looked like a good place to have dinner with everyone. I suggested it to some people and everyone seemed into, so we got it all organized and met there after classes on Friday night. We had a pretty big group: Me, Nick, Jess, Katy, Jake, Ingvild, Nataliya, Alison, and this other guy named Jonathan. Jonathan is a Fulbright scholar in Kyrgyzstan to learn Kyrgyz, which he studies at the London School, and I had seen him around but had never met him. We all had a good time hanging out, talking, and drinking beer (how Persian of us). The food was pretty good, and they even had hookahs (well, that’s the main reason I wanted to go there), so we had one of those too. It was the first time many of the people there had ever tried a hookah. At one point the electricity went out, and we had to talk and drink by candlelight. There was a small dance floor, though most of us didn’t dance. I talked to Ingvild a while about traveling in different places (she’s been a lot of places), and about Russia in general. All in all it was a really great time. As we were leaving, though, Jess took a spill down the front steps. They were dangerous, though, and it’s no wonder somebody got hurt. They had a long carpet running down the front stairs and out the front walk, with long metal bars on each step loosely holding the carpet in place, though they were all sliding around it looked like. I think Jess caught her heal on the carpet, fell down the steps and landed sideways on her ankle. I think it’s doing better now, but it looked pretty painful for a couple days. She obviously went home after that, along with Nick and Katy, but the rest of us decided to go to some place called the Cowboy club, which was just down the street. The place was in fact western themed, and they even had a bunch of flags on the walls from US states (no Oregon, though). I noticed that everyone there appeared to be Kyrgyz, with virtually no Russians. We got a table in the quite back room, had a beer, then hit the dance floor for one song before some of the others decided that the music sucked and that we should go to this place called Golden Bull instead. It was a few blocks away, down a shady ally and in the shadow of the White House (center of Kyrgyz government). There’s no cover charge for foreigners, so I couldn’t really complain. I had already about 5 beers by then and I didn’t want to spend any more money, so I didn’t order any drinks. This place was pretty weird. It was full of crazy lights that flash in your eyes and do crazy shows all over the walls. It actually made it hard to see anything, and really just hurt my eyes more than anything else. Their logo is a complete rip-off of the Chicago Bulls’ logo, which I found very amusing. The dancing was interrupted every now and then for a floor show, which included belly dancing, a traditional Kyrgyz dance with outfits and everything, and male and female striptease acts. There were these two kind-of-sleazy but friendly businessmen type from Pakistan sitting next to us, and at one point one of them gave me the rest of their bottle of champagne, which was about 2/3 full. When the dance floor got moving again they got up to dance and pulled some of us along with them. I love the way people dance around here, cause it’s basically the same way I dance. Nobody knows how to dance well, they just kind of move around and have fun, and since everybody dances that way there’s no reason to be self-conscious about it. This is the way it should always be, I think. So, we all danced around with these Pakistani guys, and after a while I started to suspect that one of them was trying to come on to me, cause he kept trying to take me by the hand to dance with him. It freaked me out a little bit, I’ll be honest. I tried to move away from him and dance near some other people, but he kept trying to move towards me. The rest of the night I tried to avoid making eye contact with him. We sat at the table a little while longer while everybody finished their drinks, then around 3:00 we decided to leave. By this point it was Jake, Ingvild, Natalya, Jonathan, and Me. We stood at the entrance to the alley for a while while everyone said goodbye (Jake and Ingvild were leaving in the morning), when a taxi driver came barreling around the corner and almost hit some of us. It wasn’t a big deal, in fact it’s pretty normal for drivers to narrowly avoid hitting pedestrians, and I don’t think we were really in any danger, but as he came around the corner Natalya yelled something and Jonathan kicked the door behind the driver’s. Now, it wasn’t really a hard kick or anything, and I know it didn’t do any damage to the car, but the driver immediately stopped, jumped out of the car and came after Jonathan. He punched him in the shoulder and tried to grab him by the throat. I helped pull the two apart and keep them separated as best I could, but the guy started yelling and demanding money for the damage Jonathan had caused. He pointed to a scuff on the driver’s door and said Jonathan had caused it (we all knew it was BS, but there was no way of telling him that). Natalya and Jonathan shouted with him for a while in Russian (I could understand most everything they and the driver were saying but I wasn’t confident enough in my own Russian skills to jump in, plus I didn’t want to involve myself any more than I had to). I hovered nearby ready to break things up if they turned violent again, but Jake and Ingvild stayed far back. Luckily it didn’t really get violent after that, though even Natalya ended up getting pushed around some, and even got her cell phone knocked out of her hand. At one point Jonathan tried buffing the scuff with his scarf, and it looked for a second that the guy was going to be appeased, so we quickly got in another cab that was waiting nearby, but the guy came back and tried to pull Jonathan out of the cab. I pulled him back in and tried to push the driver away. He kept shouting at me saying, “Who are you? Who are you?”, but I don’t think he wanted to try and mess with me. He kept saying he wanted to talk to Jonathan privately, but he wouldn’t’ go off with him alone. He finally got Jonathan out of the cab and by this time a small group of cab drivers had converged on the seen and started backing the guy up. They all agreed that 500 som (about $14) was the normal price to repair the scuff, and I think Jonathan should have just paid upfront without even making an argument out of it, and he probably could have gotten off with just 200 or 300 som, but now it was a whole big mess. So, this crowd of about 5 or 6 cab drivers was swarming around Jonathan and Natalya as they all argued with each other, and at one point Jake and Ingvild (who were still keeping their distance) pointed out to me that one of them had a tire iron behind his back. Once they realized we all saw the tire iron I think they realized it wasn’t a good idea to have it out, and so one of them put it away. I conferred with Jake and Ingvild again, and we decided that we should just advize Jonathan to pay the 500 som so we could get the hell out of there, so I went back up to the crowd and told him he should just cut his loses and pay the guy, but apparently while I had been talking to Jake and Ingvild he had managed to get his wallet stolen. He had apparently taken his wallet out to get the 500 som, but as he took it out one of the drivers snatched it from his hand and passed it off to another, who then made off down the ally with it. Meanwhile, the original guy was still demanding his 500 som, which of course Jonathan couldn’t pay because he didn’t have his wallet. The driver either didn’t see the others steal the wallet, or was playing along with their swindle. Jonathan and Natalya went after him down the alley, but the guy they thought had the wallet played dumb and pretended like he didn’t know what they were talking about. In the end Jonathan didn’t manage to get his wallet back, which apparently had included a credit card and over $200 in cash. But, the driver was still demanding 500 som, which none of us had on us either. Jonathan decided to call the US embassy, and eventually ended up speaking to their special investigator over the phone. We hung around for a long time while both he and the driver explained the story over the phone, but it soon became apparent that the only way we were ever going to get out of there was if the driver got his 500 som, so I volunteered to find an ATM and lend Jonathan the money to pay him. After a while we all decided it was the best thing to do, so we walked a block down the street with the driver to the nearest ATM, where I got the money and gave it to Jonathan to pay the guy. He actually shook Jonathan’s hand afterwards, and then walked back to the club where his cab was. That other cab that had been waiting for us before had followed us to the ATM and was ready to give us a ride home, which we were definitely ready to accept. We finally said goodbye to Jake and Ingvild, then Jonathan and I shared a taxi home. I covered his ride too, since obviously he couldn’t pay for that either. I ended up getting home at 4:30. At least I’ve got an interesting story to tell now, and it didn’t cost me my wallet.
On Saturday I wanted to have a relaxing, easygoing day. I didn’t sleep in as long as I wanted to (only until about 10:00), and after I got up I headed to the area near the school to call home and use the internet. I talked to mom for a while on the IP Telephone at the internet club, got on the internet for a while, then went across the street to the big Vefa Center mall to check out movie times. There’s a classic Russian movie called the Irony of Fate that I really like, and they just came out with the sequel. It was still playing at the movie theater in the Vefa Center, and I thought it would be fun to see it finally. The next showing was in an hour, so I bought my ticket and headed to the food court for lunch. I ran into a student from the London School named Kamchubek, who is very friendly and always likes to chat with me when he sees me (he isn’t my student, though). He’s in his 30’s, and he’s just become the manager of a new fast food franchise called Bee Burger, which he told me is a Scandinavian chain that is opening their first Asian franchise here in Bishkek, just down the street from the London School. When I ran into Kamchubek he was sitting in the food court and talking with another man who seemed excited to meet me, and spoke decent English. They said I should sit with them after I got my food. I ordered a Chicken sandwich with fries and a Fanta from a place called Prince Burger, and sat down with Kamchubek and his friend. Soon after I sat down, a third man came and gave me a very annoyed look, like he was thinking, “who the hell is this guy?” I realized that his coat was sitting on the other chair, and that he must have been up to use the bathroom or something, and had just returned. He looked very serious and was well dressed, so I figured these guys had something to do with Bee Burger or some related business matter. They two other men began speaking to each other in a language other than Kyrgyz or Russian, and Kamchubek explained to me that they were from Turkey, and that the well-dressed man was his boss from Bee Burger, and the other was a friend of his. Kamchubek explained that these guys talk business for hours on end everyday, and the he mostly sits and listens. I felt very awkward sitting at this table eating my lunch while these two slick Turkish business men talked business and Kamchubek listened in attentively. I finished my food and excused myself from the table. I had some more time to kill, so I checked out the mall’s bookstore. They didn’t have much, but I was tempted to buy a street Atlas of Bishkek that labels every building, but I decided I’d come back for it another time. I also looked for some books to help me with Kyrgyz, like a Russian-Kyrgyz dictionary or something, but they didn’t have anything about the Kyrgyz language, surprisingly. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that on Friday I had my first Kyrgyz lesson. It was really interesting, and I think I’m going to enjoy learning more. I’ll talk more about that some other time, though. Before the movie started I went down to the big grocery store called Ramstor on the first floor of the mall to buy some movie snacks. It was my first time in there, and it seemed on par with a western grocery store as far as stock and services go. They had a full-service deli and bakery, even. I got some candy and a whisky-and-cola-in-a-can, then headed back to the third floor for the movie. Remember, theaters in most countries outside the US make you chose your seat when you buy your ticket, so I chose one that looked like it had a lot of leg room and wasn’t too close to other people. It did have a lot of leg room, but I didn’t realize that my spot was right next to the door, so people were coming and going right next to me during the movie. Also, some people bought the seats right next to mine after I had already bought mine, so I didn’t get all the room I had wanted. It wasn’t a big deal, though. The movie was alright, though certainly can’t hold a flame to the original. The director of this one is the same guy who directed the Night Watch and Day Watch movies, so there was this strange action movie feel to many scenes of the movie, which detracted more than added. The star of Night Watch and Day Watch was even in this movie. He was the main character, in fact. I feel like they tried too hard to highlight the differences between life in the Soviet Union when the first one was made, and life in contemporary Russia. There were a lot of flashy cell phones and cars, and quite a bit of product placement as well, which just seemed wrong to me. Some of the songs from the first movie were there as a motif in the background, but then they would add heavy guitar parts and it kind of ruined it for me. The plot wasn’t too bad, though. It’s essentially about the children of the main characters from the first film, but brings the original characters into the mix. I think I understood about 70% of the dialogue, and about 90% of the plot (though I think there is one very important twist that I didn’t catch). I’d say if you’re a fan of the original movie it’s probably worth seeing, but don’t expect to be blown away. After the movie I noticed Kamchubek and the Turks where still talking away in the food court, but I headed outside. I didn’t quite feel like going home yet, so I gave Nick a call to see what they were doing. He and Jess were hanging out at their apartment and invited me to come over. We hung out there for a while, played a little Checkers and Scrabble, listened to music, and ate chips. Nick is into a lot of cool music, so I enjoyed looking through his ipod. I told them the story of the mess with the cab driver from the night before. Jess’s ankle was all swollen up from her fall the night before as well. At some point some more people showed up, including Katy, Alison, Natalya, and Jonathan. They told their versions of the story too. I had to get home cause my host mom had cooked me dinner, so around 9:00 I went back and settled in for the night. I had borrowed some DVDs from Nick and Jess, including some Simpsons that I haven’t seen in years, but my computer wouldn’t play the discs no matter what I tried. They were Nick’s DVDs so they region 2 (Europe), but I thought I should be able to play them in the program VLC, but it wouldn’t work. My disk drive has been real fickle since I got to Bishkek, and it won’t even play some of my DVDs some of the time. I guess that’s one more reason to get a new Laptop when I get home. On Sunday I felt really sick the whole day. The few days before I had felt a little bit of a cold, but it was really bad Sunday. My nose wouldn’t stop running, and I couldn’t stop sneezing. Regardless, I spent most of the day writing tests and preparing lessons for Monday. So, these last two days have been alright at school. On Monday I gave tests over the last units in all my classes, and people did pretty well for the most part. Today Natasha, one of the main office employees, observed one of my classes and she had a lot of good things to say about my teaching, so that felt pretty good. Tonight I’ve just spent most of my time writing this monstrous post. Tomorrow I’m going with Zainap to the Uzbek Embassy so she can help me get my visa (apparently you’re supposed to have a translator help you), which should be interesting. Oh, on Saturday the school is going to take Jane, Katy and me out to Lake Issyk-Kul, where I think we will stay the night in a yurt! I’m really excited to go out there, because it’s supposed to be pretty awesome. Look for that in what will probably be my next post. See you then!
-Austin
2/4/08
More things that happened
Whoa, it’s been a whole week since I last wrote anything. I thought it was less than that for some reason. I’ve basically been doing a bunch of teaching the last week. I finished off January with the classes this guy Harun had before he had to go home to Turkey, which included the one morning class, then a 5-hour break, and another three classes in the afternoon/evening. I really like the classes for the most part. With only a few exceptions, the students are all really great and I have a fun time teaching them. Even though there are some really great kids in the morning class, I’m relieved that starting tomorrow (Monday) I won’t be teaching that one anymore. It will be so nice being able to sleep later and not having to spend a lot of time hanging around the school in between my classes. For February my classes will all be lumped together in the afternoon/evening, from 2:30 to 8:20, and although it might be rough going almost 6 hours straight, I prefer it this way. I’m keeping my three afternoon classes, which I’m happy about, plus I’ll be getting a new fourth class of all new students to the school. I’m excited to meet them tomorrow. So, for the most part, everyday the past week consisted of; getting up at about 7:30, catching a tramvai (a bus, basically) to school, teaching from 9:00 to 10:30, spending two to three hours working on lesson plans and other responsibilities, then grabbing lunch and maybe going to an internet café, getting back to the school around 3:30 or 4:00, teaching from 4:30 to 8:20, catching a marshrutka back home, eating dinner, then hanging around the apartment for a couple of hours before going to bed. I guess it’s nice having a routine.
I can’t really remember most of the things I did on specific days, but some things stand out. On Wednesday I finished preparing lessons early, so I headed downtown to get some blini and buy a map of Bishkek. I’ve been jonesin’ for some good blini like they sell in booths in St. Petersburg, but I’ve only found two street vendors who sell it here. The first I mentioned last time and it was severely disappointing. I’d seen another one near the corner of Sovietskaya and Kievskaya, and I wanted to try it out. It was much better than the other place, but still not up to my erudite blini standards. They didn’t make the blini fresh like they do back in SP, but instead have a big ready-made pile that they heat up on the hot plate when you make an order. It satisfied my blini craving for the time being at least. I set off down Kievskaya to hit up that map store I had tried to go to last weekend when they were closed. At that point it was about 12:30 and I knew they were on their break between 12:00 and 1:00, so I wondered around a bit to kill time. I got there a few minutes before the guy came back. This shop had a lot of cool topographical and hiking maps of the country all over the walls, as well as Bishkek city maps and political maps of Kyrgyzstan. I asked for a map of Bishkek and the guy showed me one in English, but I asked him for a Russian map because that seems more authentic. I almost bought the Kyrgyz political map too, but it was kind of expensive and only came rolled up and I was afraid I would smoosh it in my coat pocket, so I just got the Bishkek map. I think I might go back later for the other one, though. The map is pretty cool, though I was surprised at how little it actually showed. I guess Bishkek is smaller than I figured, cause I thought there would be a lot more sprawling suburbs on the map. I walked back down Kievskaya and sat on some bleachers in Ala-Too Square for a bit. The sun was shining all week and snow was starting to melt off in a lot of places. It was nice to see people out and about and enjoying the sun. I ended up catching a slick new mini-bus (bigger than a marshrutka, and actually shaped like a miniature bus) back to the school that most people seemed reluctant to ride one, but it was much more comfortable than a regular marshrutka and cost the same amount.
Let’s see, on Thursday for I decided to try out this restaurant across the street from the school called Nooruz (which means Islamic new year), which seemed lit a little whole-in-the-wall place but it ended up being really expensive. I don’t know if maybe they have a special menu with higher prices that they gave to people who are obviously foreigners to sucker them out of their money, but I ended up paying about $11 for a meal that shouldn’t have been anymore than $5 or $6 around here. It was pretty good, though. I had a bowl of lagman (Central Asian noodle soup), and two shashlyks (shish kebobs on big metal spikes). This was the first time I had had lagman since back in St. Petersburg, and I had forgotten how delicious it is. I’m not much of a soup guy, but this stuff is really good, maybe even my favorite soup. You have to eat most of it with a fork because it’s piled with these thick noodles, vegetables and meat. The broth I think is tomato-based and is really flavorful. I think this lagman may have been extra good too. The shashlyk were pretty good too, though there was a lot of bone on some of the meat chunks. Each one was also topped with a chunk of pure grilled fat (I think it was mutton, but I’m not sure), which I refused to eat. The lagman was definitely worth whatever it cost, but I think the shashlyk was overpriced. When I paid the waitress asked me what I was doing in Bishkek, and I explained that I taught at the school across the street. She seemed really interested and started asking me questions about it. Did they have a computer? How much did it cost? I told her she could go ask the administration, and she said “what about going around the administration, how much would it cost for you to teach me English?” I was a bit confused by her proposal, and just said, “I don’t know.” She kept asking, “is it possible,” and “could you teach me,” and I just awkwardly kept saying, “maybe, I’m not sure.” My contract says I’m not supposed to do any sort of work outside of the school, and I don’t really want to do any private tutoring or anything like that. It was an awkward moment with the waitress, and I’m not sure if I want to go back because of it (and because of the prices), but that lagman might bring me back at some point. Also on Thursday I had to give tests to all my classes, which I just got out of the teacher’s books. It made planning for the lessons a lot easier. Most students didn’t do as well as I would have hoped on the tests. Only two students between all four of my classes got A’s, and a handful even got F’s (though I bumped them up to D’s after making a loose curve). The tests covered stuff they were taught before I even got there, so I know it wasn’t all my fault that some of them did poorly. I ended up doing a lot of reviewing on Friday, and I felt bad giving tests back to the students who did poorly. They’ve got to learn somehow, though.
On Friday, after all my classes, I went out to dinner with a few of the other teachers and this other guy named Jake. Jake’s been studying Russian at the London School for a few weeks, and he wanted to take some of us to this Chinese restaurant he’s been going to a bunch while he’s here. This guy’s crazy. He’s only 24 and he’s probably been to 40 or so countries. He lived in China for a couple years I think and is basically fluent in Chinese, plus he’s got Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and now Russian down pretty well too. He’s been going to this restaurant for a while and getting to know the owners and staff, and now he wanted to bring some more people with him. We left directly from the school and met up at the restaurant with Jane’s Norwegian friend that I had met at Fatboy’s. She and Jake are actually going to Afghanistan and Iran together pretty soon. So, we got there and the place was full, but Jake pulled a few strings and got us a table. He ordered us a bunch of food in Chinese, as well as a few rounds of beers. The food was really good, and I think Jake knew just what to order. He usually gets a discount there, and I think they applied it to us too, cause for five or six plates of food plus a total of about 15 beers the bill came to about 1350 com, or about $38 (split six ways). The best part of the night, though was all the dancing. There weren’t really any young people there besides us, but the place was hoping. They’d play a few songs, turn on the fancy lights, and everyone would dance around for a bit, then they’d take a break for 15 minutes or so and do it all over again. There was a table of middle-aged women near us, and they kept pulling us up to dance with them. There were a few creepy guys that kept inviting to the girls to dance as well, but it was all in good fun. There was also a toddler walking and dancing around the place, often dragging a cat around with him. I didn’t have my camera with me but a lot of the others got some good pictures. I had a great time dancing around and chatting with everybody, and I hope I get the chance to go back there sometime before I leave (hopefully before Jake leaves too, which is actually pretty soon). When we left it was about 1:00 AM, so we took a cab. I had the driver wait for me while I grabbed my bag from one of the teacher’s apartments, then he drove me home. He said it would be 100 com, but once we started driving he said he was bumping it up to 120, so I protested a little. We started chatting and he was interested to hear about where I was from. He told me the few words he knew in English (“Hello,” “How are you doing,” “1,2,3,4,5,” etc.) He asked me about Jean Claude Van Dame and some other movie stars. He asked, “do you know all the actors?” and I said, “a lot of them, but not all of them.” I realized later that he might have meant whether or not I know them personally, and it would be really funny now if he thought I did. When I got out, I asked him again how much the ride cost, and he said just 100. He was a nice guy. I got home, took a shower, and went to bed because I had to get up pretty early again the next day…
The next day (Saturday) was a lot of fun, because I got to get out of Bishkek for the first time. The director of the school arranged to take Jane and me out to this place called the Burana tower, since all the other teachers have already been there and they feel obliged to show there teachers around the country a little. We met at the school around 10:00 and were picked up by Kendje’s husband, who is basically the driver for the school (he had picked me up from the airport). Kendje came along too, as well as their 5- or 6-year old daughter, the guy who guards the gate at the school, and some other young woman I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure how those last two are related to the group. We drove about an hour east of the city, passing through the towns of Kant, Ivanovka, and Tokmok, to name a few. It was nice seeing some of these small towns and villages along the way. Burana tower is a recreation of a watchtower that had existed in an ancient city on the same site however many hundreds of years ago. It’s really close to the base of the Tien Shan Mountains to the south (a branch of the Himalayans), which are the same mountains you can see from Bishkek. The spot is really close to Kazakhstan as well, and we could see the mountains whose crest forms the border with Kyrgyzstan. It was another bright sunny day, and the mountains and everything were just so beautiful. We had a lunch of bread, cheese, salami, hard-boiled eggs, and tea at the van before heading for the tower. We were the only ones there while we were eating, but right as we entered the gate that leads to the tower, a van pulled up and let off about 15 people to see the tower, so we decided to walk around the site for a while and let them climb the tower first. There was a small museum that had artifacts from the ancient city. There was also a bunch of traditional Kyrgyz stone statues and rocks with petroglyphs painted on them. I foolishly walked into an area where the snow had melted and exposed to muddy ground underneath, and slipped and fell in the mud. Kendje’s daughter started laughing uncontrollably, and laughed about it every time she looked at me for the rest of the day. I got my pants and shirt all muddy, and got some mud on my camera too. Luckily Jane had a roll of toilet paper in her backpack and I was able to clean myself and the camera up a bit. We also climbed a mound that is apparently full of artifacts, but there’s no funding to excavate it. I very nearly slipped again on the way back down, but caught myself. The tower cleared up and we all climbed to the top. The bottom part has a typical metal spiral staircase attached to it, but the upper part requires climbing up a steep, dark staircase that wraps around the center of the tower. We all climbed up very slowly and carefully. It kind of takes a while with so many people trying to climb it at once. Once at the top we had a spectacular view of the surrounding area. I could see why they would put a tower there; you can see for miles in every direction, and the mountains are so close and intense. We took some pictures, caught our breaths, and climbed back down. We checked out the museum again, and I bought a gift for Cielle (I’m not saying what it is yet). We then headed back to Bishkek, going to same way back. Passing through Tokmok, we saw what looked exactly like a typical American, and when we passed it I saw that on the side was written something about a connection with Tokmok and Rockford, so I assumed that Rockford (probably Illinois, but I don’t know any other Rockfords) and Tokmok are sister cities and that Rockford donated an ambulance. I found it pretty interesting. The rest of the day I spent at home. I almost went to hang out with the other teachers who were having a pizza and movie night, but I was really tired and ended up going to bed around 10:00. I did watch I’m Not There, which I was pretty disappointed with. I don’t know why, but movies about or starring Bob Dylan just seem to be stupidly pretentious and nonsensical (the other being Masked and Anonymous). I did like Cate Blanchette’s performance though. I think they should have just made a traditional biopic about Bob Dylan starring her.
Today (Sunday) I got about around 11:00 and my host mom really wanted to go to Osh Bazaar to buy me a kalpak (Kyrgyz hat) as soon as I got up. We caught a marshrutka over there, and we started checking around for vendors that sold a kalpak that would fit my massive head. She obviously did all the talking (in Kyrgyz, no less), but after talking to 5 or 6 different vendors and trying on a bunch of hates we couldn’t find one that fit me. One woman said she would get one that fit my head size (62 apparently) and have it for us next week. Hopefully it will work out, cause I’d really like to have one of those hats. There were all sorts of cool Kyrgyz crafts there, and I think I’ll go back later to do my gift shopping. I followed Zainap around a while as she shopped for a shawl and bought some butter, then she headed home while I decided to stay back and look around a bit more. Jake was actually supposed to call me later in the day about going to the same bazaar, and I thought I might hang around until he called and then meet up with him there. I walked all over and saw all kinds of things for sale. Clothes, DVDs, produce, groceries, junk, souvenirs, electronics, you name it. The place was pretty huge, but apparently not as big as another bazaar in town called Dordoi Market. I needed to buy more minutes for my phone, so I went to a booth where I though I could just buy a card and enter the number like my phone in SP, but it was this whole different system where you tell the person your number, pay them for minutes, and they enter it in form their phone. I didn’t really understand how it worked at first, but the woman was very helpful and friendly. She asked if I was British, and excited to learn that I was American. She and another customer asked me questions about where I was from. They said they had only ever heard of Oregon. I left the booth and after a few minutes my minutes had been added. I was a little hungry so I had some sashlyk and a beer at a little café in the middle of the Bazaar. I walked around a little more but was getting tired and didn’t think I could wait for Jake to get there, so I found a marshrutka home. Jake called just as I got on the marshrutka, but he wasn’t that I had already gone. I lucked out and got a seat on the marshrutka, which was really good since it got really packed. The rest of today I’ve spent lounging around and preparing for tomorrow’s classes. I chatted with Zainap earlier while she took a break form studying for her driver’s test. It’s late now (2:00 AM), but at least I don’t have to get up super early like lat week. I’ll try to do shorter, more-frequent posts this next week and beyond. Happy February!
-Austin
I can’t really remember most of the things I did on specific days, but some things stand out. On Wednesday I finished preparing lessons early, so I headed downtown to get some blini and buy a map of Bishkek. I’ve been jonesin’ for some good blini like they sell in booths in St. Petersburg, but I’ve only found two street vendors who sell it here. The first I mentioned last time and it was severely disappointing. I’d seen another one near the corner of Sovietskaya and Kievskaya, and I wanted to try it out. It was much better than the other place, but still not up to my erudite blini standards. They didn’t make the blini fresh like they do back in SP, but instead have a big ready-made pile that they heat up on the hot plate when you make an order. It satisfied my blini craving for the time being at least. I set off down Kievskaya to hit up that map store I had tried to go to last weekend when they were closed. At that point it was about 12:30 and I knew they were on their break between 12:00 and 1:00, so I wondered around a bit to kill time. I got there a few minutes before the guy came back. This shop had a lot of cool topographical and hiking maps of the country all over the walls, as well as Bishkek city maps and political maps of Kyrgyzstan. I asked for a map of Bishkek and the guy showed me one in English, but I asked him for a Russian map because that seems more authentic. I almost bought the Kyrgyz political map too, but it was kind of expensive and only came rolled up and I was afraid I would smoosh it in my coat pocket, so I just got the Bishkek map. I think I might go back later for the other one, though. The map is pretty cool, though I was surprised at how little it actually showed. I guess Bishkek is smaller than I figured, cause I thought there would be a lot more sprawling suburbs on the map. I walked back down Kievskaya and sat on some bleachers in Ala-Too Square for a bit. The sun was shining all week and snow was starting to melt off in a lot of places. It was nice to see people out and about and enjoying the sun. I ended up catching a slick new mini-bus (bigger than a marshrutka, and actually shaped like a miniature bus) back to the school that most people seemed reluctant to ride one, but it was much more comfortable than a regular marshrutka and cost the same amount.
Let’s see, on Thursday for I decided to try out this restaurant across the street from the school called Nooruz (which means Islamic new year), which seemed lit a little whole-in-the-wall place but it ended up being really expensive. I don’t know if maybe they have a special menu with higher prices that they gave to people who are obviously foreigners to sucker them out of their money, but I ended up paying about $11 for a meal that shouldn’t have been anymore than $5 or $6 around here. It was pretty good, though. I had a bowl of lagman (Central Asian noodle soup), and two shashlyks (shish kebobs on big metal spikes). This was the first time I had had lagman since back in St. Petersburg, and I had forgotten how delicious it is. I’m not much of a soup guy, but this stuff is really good, maybe even my favorite soup. You have to eat most of it with a fork because it’s piled with these thick noodles, vegetables and meat. The broth I think is tomato-based and is really flavorful. I think this lagman may have been extra good too. The shashlyk were pretty good too, though there was a lot of bone on some of the meat chunks. Each one was also topped with a chunk of pure grilled fat (I think it was mutton, but I’m not sure), which I refused to eat. The lagman was definitely worth whatever it cost, but I think the shashlyk was overpriced. When I paid the waitress asked me what I was doing in Bishkek, and I explained that I taught at the school across the street. She seemed really interested and started asking me questions about it. Did they have a computer? How much did it cost? I told her she could go ask the administration, and she said “what about going around the administration, how much would it cost for you to teach me English?” I was a bit confused by her proposal, and just said, “I don’t know.” She kept asking, “is it possible,” and “could you teach me,” and I just awkwardly kept saying, “maybe, I’m not sure.” My contract says I’m not supposed to do any sort of work outside of the school, and I don’t really want to do any private tutoring or anything like that. It was an awkward moment with the waitress, and I’m not sure if I want to go back because of it (and because of the prices), but that lagman might bring me back at some point. Also on Thursday I had to give tests to all my classes, which I just got out of the teacher’s books. It made planning for the lessons a lot easier. Most students didn’t do as well as I would have hoped on the tests. Only two students between all four of my classes got A’s, and a handful even got F’s (though I bumped them up to D’s after making a loose curve). The tests covered stuff they were taught before I even got there, so I know it wasn’t all my fault that some of them did poorly. I ended up doing a lot of reviewing on Friday, and I felt bad giving tests back to the students who did poorly. They’ve got to learn somehow, though.
On Friday, after all my classes, I went out to dinner with a few of the other teachers and this other guy named Jake. Jake’s been studying Russian at the London School for a few weeks, and he wanted to take some of us to this Chinese restaurant he’s been going to a bunch while he’s here. This guy’s crazy. He’s only 24 and he’s probably been to 40 or so countries. He lived in China for a couple years I think and is basically fluent in Chinese, plus he’s got Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, and now Russian down pretty well too. He’s been going to this restaurant for a while and getting to know the owners and staff, and now he wanted to bring some more people with him. We left directly from the school and met up at the restaurant with Jane’s Norwegian friend that I had met at Fatboy’s. She and Jake are actually going to Afghanistan and Iran together pretty soon. So, we got there and the place was full, but Jake pulled a few strings and got us a table. He ordered us a bunch of food in Chinese, as well as a few rounds of beers. The food was really good, and I think Jake knew just what to order. He usually gets a discount there, and I think they applied it to us too, cause for five or six plates of food plus a total of about 15 beers the bill came to about 1350 com, or about $38 (split six ways). The best part of the night, though was all the dancing. There weren’t really any young people there besides us, but the place was hoping. They’d play a few songs, turn on the fancy lights, and everyone would dance around for a bit, then they’d take a break for 15 minutes or so and do it all over again. There was a table of middle-aged women near us, and they kept pulling us up to dance with them. There were a few creepy guys that kept inviting to the girls to dance as well, but it was all in good fun. There was also a toddler walking and dancing around the place, often dragging a cat around with him. I didn’t have my camera with me but a lot of the others got some good pictures. I had a great time dancing around and chatting with everybody, and I hope I get the chance to go back there sometime before I leave (hopefully before Jake leaves too, which is actually pretty soon). When we left it was about 1:00 AM, so we took a cab. I had the driver wait for me while I grabbed my bag from one of the teacher’s apartments, then he drove me home. He said it would be 100 com, but once we started driving he said he was bumping it up to 120, so I protested a little. We started chatting and he was interested to hear about where I was from. He told me the few words he knew in English (“Hello,” “How are you doing,” “1,2,3,4,5,” etc.) He asked me about Jean Claude Van Dame and some other movie stars. He asked, “do you know all the actors?” and I said, “a lot of them, but not all of them.” I realized later that he might have meant whether or not I know them personally, and it would be really funny now if he thought I did. When I got out, I asked him again how much the ride cost, and he said just 100. He was a nice guy. I got home, took a shower, and went to bed because I had to get up pretty early again the next day…
The next day (Saturday) was a lot of fun, because I got to get out of Bishkek for the first time. The director of the school arranged to take Jane and me out to this place called the Burana tower, since all the other teachers have already been there and they feel obliged to show there teachers around the country a little. We met at the school around 10:00 and were picked up by Kendje’s husband, who is basically the driver for the school (he had picked me up from the airport). Kendje came along too, as well as their 5- or 6-year old daughter, the guy who guards the gate at the school, and some other young woman I hadn’t seen before. I’m not sure how those last two are related to the group. We drove about an hour east of the city, passing through the towns of Kant, Ivanovka, and Tokmok, to name a few. It was nice seeing some of these small towns and villages along the way. Burana tower is a recreation of a watchtower that had existed in an ancient city on the same site however many hundreds of years ago. It’s really close to the base of the Tien Shan Mountains to the south (a branch of the Himalayans), which are the same mountains you can see from Bishkek. The spot is really close to Kazakhstan as well, and we could see the mountains whose crest forms the border with Kyrgyzstan. It was another bright sunny day, and the mountains and everything were just so beautiful. We had a lunch of bread, cheese, salami, hard-boiled eggs, and tea at the van before heading for the tower. We were the only ones there while we were eating, but right as we entered the gate that leads to the tower, a van pulled up and let off about 15 people to see the tower, so we decided to walk around the site for a while and let them climb the tower first. There was a small museum that had artifacts from the ancient city. There was also a bunch of traditional Kyrgyz stone statues and rocks with petroglyphs painted on them. I foolishly walked into an area where the snow had melted and exposed to muddy ground underneath, and slipped and fell in the mud. Kendje’s daughter started laughing uncontrollably, and laughed about it every time she looked at me for the rest of the day. I got my pants and shirt all muddy, and got some mud on my camera too. Luckily Jane had a roll of toilet paper in her backpack and I was able to clean myself and the camera up a bit. We also climbed a mound that is apparently full of artifacts, but there’s no funding to excavate it. I very nearly slipped again on the way back down, but caught myself. The tower cleared up and we all climbed to the top. The bottom part has a typical metal spiral staircase attached to it, but the upper part requires climbing up a steep, dark staircase that wraps around the center of the tower. We all climbed up very slowly and carefully. It kind of takes a while with so many people trying to climb it at once. Once at the top we had a spectacular view of the surrounding area. I could see why they would put a tower there; you can see for miles in every direction, and the mountains are so close and intense. We took some pictures, caught our breaths, and climbed back down. We checked out the museum again, and I bought a gift for Cielle (I’m not saying what it is yet). We then headed back to Bishkek, going to same way back. Passing through Tokmok, we saw what looked exactly like a typical American, and when we passed it I saw that on the side was written something about a connection with Tokmok and Rockford, so I assumed that Rockford (probably Illinois, but I don’t know any other Rockfords) and Tokmok are sister cities and that Rockford donated an ambulance. I found it pretty interesting. The rest of the day I spent at home. I almost went to hang out with the other teachers who were having a pizza and movie night, but I was really tired and ended up going to bed around 10:00. I did watch I’m Not There, which I was pretty disappointed with. I don’t know why, but movies about or starring Bob Dylan just seem to be stupidly pretentious and nonsensical (the other being Masked and Anonymous). I did like Cate Blanchette’s performance though. I think they should have just made a traditional biopic about Bob Dylan starring her.
Today (Sunday) I got about around 11:00 and my host mom really wanted to go to Osh Bazaar to buy me a kalpak (Kyrgyz hat) as soon as I got up. We caught a marshrutka over there, and we started checking around for vendors that sold a kalpak that would fit my massive head. She obviously did all the talking (in Kyrgyz, no less), but after talking to 5 or 6 different vendors and trying on a bunch of hates we couldn’t find one that fit me. One woman said she would get one that fit my head size (62 apparently) and have it for us next week. Hopefully it will work out, cause I’d really like to have one of those hats. There were all sorts of cool Kyrgyz crafts there, and I think I’ll go back later to do my gift shopping. I followed Zainap around a while as she shopped for a shawl and bought some butter, then she headed home while I decided to stay back and look around a bit more. Jake was actually supposed to call me later in the day about going to the same bazaar, and I thought I might hang around until he called and then meet up with him there. I walked all over and saw all kinds of things for sale. Clothes, DVDs, produce, groceries, junk, souvenirs, electronics, you name it. The place was pretty huge, but apparently not as big as another bazaar in town called Dordoi Market. I needed to buy more minutes for my phone, so I went to a booth where I though I could just buy a card and enter the number like my phone in SP, but it was this whole different system where you tell the person your number, pay them for minutes, and they enter it in form their phone. I didn’t really understand how it worked at first, but the woman was very helpful and friendly. She asked if I was British, and excited to learn that I was American. She and another customer asked me questions about where I was from. They said they had only ever heard of Oregon. I left the booth and after a few minutes my minutes had been added. I was a little hungry so I had some sashlyk and a beer at a little café in the middle of the Bazaar. I walked around a little more but was getting tired and didn’t think I could wait for Jake to get there, so I found a marshrutka home. Jake called just as I got on the marshrutka, but he wasn’t that I had already gone. I lucked out and got a seat on the marshrutka, which was really good since it got really packed. The rest of today I’ve spent lounging around and preparing for tomorrow’s classes. I chatted with Zainap earlier while she took a break form studying for her driver’s test. It’s late now (2:00 AM), but at least I don’t have to get up super early like lat week. I’ll try to do shorter, more-frequent posts this next week and beyond. Happy February!
-Austin
1/28/08
Give yourselves some time for this one
Looks like I’ve got about five days to cover since my last post. That’s ok, it’ll force me to be more succinct (I hope). Let’s see, I guess I left of with Wednesday. Teachers at the London School have Wednesdays of usually, so I had most of the day off until later on when I had to observe “talking club,” but I’ll get to that later. I took the opportunity to check out downtown Bishkek for the first time. Some of the other teachers had mentioned going out for coffee on Wednesday, but I hadn’t heard a time or place and non of them had my phone number (I had only gotten it the day before), so I figured I’d just head out on my own and hopefully get in touch with them somehow. I rode a trolleybus for the first time (In Bishkek, that is) to the city center, and was surprised that there is no “konduktor” who collects your money like on the buses and trolleybuses in St. Petersburg. Instead, you pay the 3 Som fare (about 11 cents) to the driver as you exit, which seems a lot less efficient, but whatever. I got off in the center and just started wandering around and taking pictures. I found a lot of the sights I had read about, including the Erkindik (Freedom) statue, the White House (the center of the Kyrgyz Government), and Ala-Too Square. There were some cool parks I wandered around in to. One is called Dubrovy park and has lots of cool traditional Kyrgyz statues made of stone. As I was coming out of Ala-Too Square, two policemen approached me. One of them said, “Hi,” and I kind of acknowledged him but tried to keep walking. The started walking after me and I knew I couldn’t really get away from them now, so I turned around and went up to them. Anybody who knows about my run in with the militsia in St. Petersburg will understand why I’m a bit paranoid about the police in foreign countries (and to an extent in the US). So I was kind of freaked out here. One of them asked for my passport, which I luckily had with me. He was friendly enough. He asked if I liked it in Bishkek and why I was there. I kind of half intentionally and half unintentionally stumbled over my Russian while talking to him (I was nervous, you understand). While still holding my passport they told me to follow them across the street to where another police officer was standing, which made me even more nervous. They handed the passport to the third guy, who thumbed through it, found my Kyrgyz visa, checked it out and then handed it back to me. That was it! I said thanks and was quickly on my way. It was much less painful than I anticipated. I didn’t even have to bribe them or anything! So, I walked around some more, around the White House and in a park full of rusting carnival rides that are out of operation in the winter, and over to Kievskaya street, one of the main drags in downtown Bishkek. I found a “Shmel” internet club, which was the same as another one I had been using close to the London School, and I went in to get on the internet only to find that the internet was down, and after waiting around for a few minutes to see if they could get it working I gave up and set off to find some food. I found a cluster of stands around the corner of Sovietskaya and Kievskaya and bought a couple of hot Samsas (meat-filled pastries), followed by a shaurma (which turned out to be one of the worst shaurmas I’ve ever had). Just as I was paying for the shaurma my phone started ringing, but I didn’t answer it cause I was in the middle of a transaction. After I ate part of the shaurma and threw the rest away, I called back the number. It was Nargiza, one of the office workers from the London School. She said that the teachers were trying to get a hold of me, and that I should meet them at a restaurant called Fatboy’s, which I had heard about before. The place was close, so I beat them there and got a table, A few minutes later, Jane, Katy, Nick, and Jessica arrived, so I got to chat with all of them really for the first time. Since I had just eaten I only ordered a beer, but it was nice just sitting around and getting to know people. Fatboy’s apparently serves diner-style breakfasts with eggs, hashborwns, etc., so I’d definitely like to come back for a meal sometime. At some point Jane’s Norwegian friend showed up and sat with us. She’s apparently on a never-ending trip that’s taken her all over the world, and she had just flown into Bishkek from Thailand. She was about to start traveling through Central Asia, and is apparently shooting for Afghanistan. She kept name dropping all these places she had been, which of course made me jealous. Once we were finished I had to get over to the school to sit in on talking club, but instead of riding in a marshrutka with some of the other teachers I decided to walk, since I hadn’t seen the area between downtown and the school yet. It’s about a half hour walk. When I got to the school the power was out again, which wasn’t a problem until it got dark out and we had to have talking club by candlelight. Talking club is something the school does every Wednesday evening to let students have an opportunity to get more English speaking practice, all on a volunteer basis. They get a different teacher to guide the club every week, and this week it was this guy named Carl, who's an older British guy who seems like he's done a lot of cool stuff (apparently lived in Russia, Ukraine, and Mongolia for extended periods of time, probably more places too). I just sort of sat in and listened, offering a little help here and there. The topic of the first group was cell phones, and the topic of the second was honesty. There was one older student there who made the argument that cell phones destroy families because the radio signals destroys the area between your waist and your knees, as he put it. He was pretty fun to listen to, actually. Before I left for home, Kenje, the director of the school, pulled me aside and explained that one of their teachers had a family emergency and had to go home to Turkey, and that she needed me to fill in for his classes. This would mean starting teaching over a week earlier than originally planned. I said ok, and started psyching myself up to teach beginning on Friday. I walked home in the dark and hung out at the apartment for the rest of the night after that. Thursday was a weird day. I don’t really remember the whole day chronologically, but the gist is that the realities of my responsibilities while on this internship kind of hit me all at once, coupled with the fact that I felt like I was having some extra pressure being put on me at the school, but I don’t really want to nor am I really supposed to get into it. Also the minor everyday annoyances of living in a new place (especially in a weird place like this) kind of caught up with me too (like, having no power when I got home), and I just felt kind of crummy most of the day. I talked to mom just before going to bed, so that was nice. I guess that’s all there really is to say about Thursday. On Friday I had to be up bright and early for my first class at 9:00. I was able to catch a Trolleybus, and got to the school with about 10 minutes to spare. My first class is at the pre-intermediate level. It’s pretty much all 10-13 year olds, and I think they were pretty apprehensive about having a new teacher, but I think they warmed up to me after a little bit. I taught the next section of the series that their regular teacher was using, which made planning the class somewhat simple. They were all pretty quite in that class, but I would be too at 9:00 AM. I think they’ll warm up to me some more in the coming days. After that class I had something like a six hour break until my next class, so I used most of that time to prepare my next three class lessons, all of which were also already decided by the regular teacher. I actually kind of like preparing the lessons, though it does take me a while at this point. I’m sure I’ll get faster pretty quick. Once I finished with the lesson plans I popped over to an internet club to do some interneting, with a brief stop at a samsa shack on the way over. I finally got to see the last Tim and Eric episode, which had been dying to watch. I had luckily been placed at a computer that was set up for skype and had headphones plugged in. The connection there is super slow, so I had to wait about 15 minutes for both halves of the episode to buffer on youtube. Just as I was finishing the first half, the power cut out for a second and everybody’s computers shut off. I was pretty pissed, but determined to see the rest of the episode, so I loaded it all up again and watched it the second time without interruption. It was definitely worth it. But anyways, the rest of my classes went pretty well except for the fact that the power went off again just before my second class, and by the end of my third class I was teaching by candlelight. The second class was mainly teenagers, and some of them seemed to have a bit of an attitude but most of them were welcoming enough. There is one 9-year-old Afghani boy in that class, which I thought was pretty cool, Near the end of the class his dad was standing outside the classroom liking in through the all-glass walls. Apparently it was too much for some of the girls in the class, and they couldn’t keep from cracking up whenever they looked over at him. He was wearing a funny hat, I suppose. The third class was probably my favorite so far, just because everybody was very welcoming and enthusiastic about having a new teacher, so they were a lot of fun to teach. These guys were mostly teenagers too, with one older guy thrown in for good measure. Everybody in that class was just so sweet, and I’m most looking forward to teaching them more this next week. My fourth class of the day seemed far less enthusiastic and excited about being there. Part of it was probably that the class was so late (7:00), and that the power was still out and we all had to huddle around candles, but a few of the students seemed to have a bit too much of an attitude. Apparently they had already learned a lot of the stuff we covered too, so that probably didn’t help. There are a couple college students in that class, but again mostly teenagers. During this class my host mom started calling me, and after the third time I decided to interrupt class to answer. I had forgotten to tell her that my classes would be late, and she was apparently really worried about me. After class I walked home, arriving around 9:00. I was scolded a little for not telling her that I would be home late, but she was glad I wasn’t hurt or anything. The rest of the night I hung around my room and watched Mr. Show. Saturday came next, and it was nice to sleep in a little bit (until about 10:00, to be exact). Bubuzainap was out, so I had a little bread and butter (my usual breakfast, as it turns out), watched a little more Mr. Show, then decided to take advantage of the sunny weather outside and do some exploring. The weather has been really cold this last week. It’s been at least 0 degrees F (actually that would be “at most,” I guess”) most of the time, and just like when I was in St. Petersburg, people are saying this is one of the coldest winters in 50 some years (though Carl assures me that people always tell you that when you go to new places). However, on Saturday it was nice and sunny, with the temperature a balmy 10 or 15 degrees (I’m guessing, I’m not really sure at all though). It was definitely good walking around weather. I rode the Trolleybus to the center and tried to find this store I read about that sells maps. I tracked it down on the third floor of an anonymous building, only to find out that they are closed on the weekend. I wandered some more, this time going north towards a major street called Jybek Jolu. I found a cool Russian Orthodox church next to a big empty lot filled with rubble and scavengers picking through it. I wandered around in the back allies of some neighborhood where kids were playing in the snow, and I got the feeling that these back allies in poor residential neighborhoods are the true heart of Bishkek. I took some cool pictures and kept moving. I walked down a tree-lined path back towards the center, where a group of kids playing on a play structure saw me coming and had me pinned as a foreigner right away, cause they started saying “Hi!” to me as soon as I walked by. They were all really curious and eager to try out what little English they knew. They let me take a picture of them, which I was excited about because I really want to take more pictures of people. I kept walking and stumbled upon the American University of Central Asia, and the obligatory Lenin statue. I eventually found my way over to Victory Square where there’s a big arch and an eternal flame. One of those ever-ubiquitous wedding parties was there (This is when a newly married couple and all their friends drive around the city and get their picture taken in front of all the city’s most famous monuments), and I took some pictures of them under the arch / around the flame. I then wandered over to TsUM, which is the big central shopping center for all of Bishkek. It’s about five floors of whatever you might want, from cell phones to appliances to cleaning supplies to souvenirs to house ware to pirated CDs and DVDs. Guess which section I went to! The prices here weren’t as good as I know they are in outdoor markets and other places, but the quality is better and you can even watch some of the movies in English! I ended up buying three pirated movies: The Simpsons Movie, Hot Rod, and I’m Not There. I ended up paying $16 for the three of them, but they checked them all on the DVD player to ensure that they were in English as well as Russian, and they all looked good. I left TsUM and walked past some street vendors outside. I bought a power strip for me room, so now I can use my laptop from the bed and keep it plugged in (there’s no outlet near the bed). I had a shaurma for a late lunch (better than the first, but still not great), and headed home to watch a movie. I took a marshrutka back, and let me tell you, the marshrutkas here are insance compared to the ones back in Petersburg. There, once all the seats are full they won’t bother stopping to pick you up. Here, all the marshrutkas have a standing area in the front, and so the drivers let as many people as want rides cram in, regardless of whether or not there is any room. These things would be a nightmare for anybody with claustrophobia, especially if they are as tall as me. These things are basically big vans, so the roof is only about 5 1/2 feet from the floor inside, so my head is crammed up against the ceiling. There’s never an open spot, so I always have to stand, which means trying to squirm around people who are trying to get in or get out while also trying to grasp on to a handrail cause it is after all a moving vehicle. The worst part is that since my head is crammed up against the ceiling I’m not able to see out the window at all, and so I have no way of knowing where I am at any given time. I have to estimate how far I am from my destination and yell out a stopping place to the driver when I think we’re getting close. This time I got off at a point when I thought I was pretty close to home, but I actually had quite a ways to go, so I had to walk the rest of the way. It’s insane. Anyways, I got home and chilled out by watching the Simpsons Movie. There was talk amongst the teachers of going out to a nightclub on Saturday, and so I eventually got a text message from Nick saying to meet them at their apartments at 9:00. I was originally planning on going, but as 9:00 approached I started getting pretty tired, and sent another text back saying I was gonna stay in. I was practically tucked in when Nick called and urged me to come out with them, and after a lot of pleading I finally decided to go. My host mom and bother were already in bed, but my host mom got up to call a cab to take me to their place. She’s very sweet. The cab came and took me to the other teachers’ apartments (which are right next to the school). Nick, Jess, and Katy were in Katy’s apartment with a few of their friends from around Bishkek (some American and some Russian), and they were all giving Katy dreadlocks. We hung around the apartment for a while before we called for a couple cabs to take us to this place called Promzona, which is out in the middle of nowhere a ways east of town. I was somewhat apprehensive about going to the place, but once we got on I saw it was actually pretty nice. We managed to find a table for all of us (7, plus some others who came later). We snuck in a bottle of vodka because it was apparently really expensive here. I had a couple beers and some vodkas with Coca Cola, and I was feeling pretty good. There was a live band that did a bunch of Russian and American cover songs. They even covered a Kino song (Vosmeklassnitsa, for those who were wondering), which I of course got really excited about. I danced around a bunch to them and to the recorded music that they played after the band (which included another Kino cover [Videli Noch]). This Bulgarian girl who had been one of the teacher’s students and who I had met at talking club came to meet us with her German boyfriend. The bill for every table came in a hard hat for some reason (The place was industrial-themed, I guess), so I wore that for a while. I ended up having a really fun time, and I was glad to get to talk with the other teachers some more. Around 2:00 I rode back to town in a cab with Nick and Jess, and ended up paying a little more for the than was probably fair, but it was only a matter of 75 cents or something, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I got home safely, at least. I slept in until about 11:00 on Sunday, and later on in the afternoon I went with Adik (host brother) to the Orto Sai market, about a 15 minute walk away. This place was pretty big, and had all kinds of junk you might want to buy. There was lots of clothes, cleaning products, produce, CDs/DVDs, etc. There was even a row of pet vendors selling fish, birds, and even some guinea pigs. I didn’t buy anything, but Adik bought some meat for diner, a bag full of apples, and a new hook for the bathroom. Actually, I did buy some blinis from the blini stand, but they were pretty bad. I miss the blini stands in St. Petersburg, but I think I know where I might be able to find a good blin here in Bishkek. I’ll let you know how that turns out. I got my first real look at the mountains south of town while we were walking to the market, and they sure are impressive. They’re huge, and they’re only about 10 or 20 miles out of town I think. My host mom said we’ll take a trip out to Ala-Archa Canyon south of the city sometime maybe next month, so I’m pretty excited about that. The rest of the day Sunday I hung around in my room, watched Hot Rod, and relaxed. I showed Zainap and Adik some pictures of my family, and gave Zainap some informal English lessons (she’s learning pretty fast). I worked on Monday’s lesson plans, talked on the phone to mom and dad, took a shower, and then started writing this post up. And now, 3672 words later, I’ve gotten all caught up. It’s 1:44 AM now, so I better get to sleep. Thanks for sticking this one out. Oh, and check out the flickr page if you haven’t already, cause there should be about 40 new pictures up by the time I post this. Peace!
-Austin
-Austin
1/24/08
This is two days old at this point
I’ve just finished my third day in Bishkek, and the second of my internship. Here’s what’s been happening: Monday morning I got up around 9:00, had some bread and cheese for breakfast, watched a little TV, received and unexpected phone call from mom, and then Zainap (that’s the short version of Bubuzainap, my host mom’s name, and I think I’m just gonna use that from now on) walked me to the London School for my first day. It’s about a 25-minute walk between my apartment and the School mostly down a major street named Sovietskaya. The walk includes going through the courtyard of a children’s hospital and crossing two other major streets (Akhumbayeva and Mederova). One of the first things I’ve noticed about getting around in Bishkek is that crossing the street can be really treacherous; way more than it was in St. Petersburg, even. There’s no light to tell you when to go and no established crosswalk even. You just have to watch the cars and wait for the cross-traffic to stop, then cross quickly while keeping in mind the cars trying to turn, while also being sure to walk gingerly across the slippery ice underfoot on either side of the street. I still haven’t made it to the center yet, but apparently there are underground walkways between the streets like there were along Nevsky Prospekt in St. Petersburg, so hopefully it won’t be so bad there. Anyways, Zainap showed me to the School and then went off on her own, and I had my first meeting with the director, Kendje, with whom I have been in contact for a while. Before Kendje was ready, I waited in the school’s café where a young girl was watching that show Kablam on Russian Nickelodeon. She was really friendly and started talking to me as soon as I sat down. We had a short conversation in Russian about our mutual love for Nickelodeon (the old Nickelodeon for me, anyway). Kendje then showed me around the school, introduced me to the office staff, and then we went over some basic information about my duties, expectations, etc. I met with some other member of the staff as well, who each went over specific information with me. The entire office staff there is really friendly and helpful, and I think I’m going to enjoy working with them. I also met a few of the other English teachers, and they seemed to be very friendly as well. I had some free time before I had to do a class observation later, so I asked one of the English teachers if he could recommend a good internet club in the area, and he pointed me in the direction of a big shopping center down the street called Tashrabat that had a relatively cheap internet place inside. I hadn’t used the internet since I had left Corvallis a few days before, so I was pretty anxious to check my email and everything. The shopping center was really modern and slick-looking inside, and the internet place was pretty nice. There’s this thing I see signs for all over called IP-Telephone, which I guess is like a phone service that uses the internet so it’s a lot cheaper top call internationally than a regular phone. They seem to have them at every internet club, including this place, so I think I’ll have to try it out for calling home one of these days. I got caught up on all my internet stuff, and even tried to watch the last episode of Tim and Eric on YouTube, but I couldn’t get the sound to work, either through the computer’s speakers or headphones, and now I’m really anxious to see it because it looks really funny, as always. I had some samsas (meat pastries) in a café inside the shopping center, then headed back to the London School. I still had a bunch of time to kill, so I walked around some backstreets a little bit before heading back in. I had a meeting with one of the office workers named Natalya, which only took 15 minutes instead of the allotted hour, so I spent the rest of the time sipping a Coke and relaxing in the school’s café. After that I had my first class observation, and it just so happened to be in the class of the other teacher from Oregon. Her name is Katy, and instead of focusing on the fact that two Oregonians ended up in the same obscure country, she seemed kind of hung up on the fact that I go to U of O and she went to OSU, which seems pretty silly to me. She was nice enough, though. I sat in on her class and was supposed to take down some notes for my own benefit. Some of the kids in her class were a bit rowdy, but it seemed like a lot of fun to me. They were all pretty curious about me and asked a lot of questions. Most of them were teenagers with a few young adults. There was one 10-year-old kid from Turkey, and he reminded me of the 10-year-old girl named Kcyusha that I taught back in St. Petersburg. After Katy’s class I sat in on a lower-level class taught by one of their local teachers named Kaira. This class was much more disciplined and task-oriented than the other one, which I guess I might have expected from a local teacher as opposed to an American teacher. She didn’t even take the time to introduce me to the class or say what I was doing there, which made me feel a little awkward, as well it probably did the students. As soon as this class ended, all the power went out in the neighborhood around the London School, and it was already dark out so nobody could really see anything. Amidst the confusion of the blackout I met Jane, who started teaching at the London School a couple weeks ago and whose blog I had found a while back. Zainap was there to pick me up and walk me back to the apartment, and she assured me that this type of blackout was completely normal in Bishkek. I hope it doesn’t happen again at some really inopportune time, though I’m not really sure when that would be. We walked in the darkness until we got out of the blackout zone, which luckily did not include our apartment. When we got home Adilet was gone, but he had cooked some sort of pasta and potato dish for us and left it waiting on the stove. After dinner I relaxed in my room for a while. As per her suggestion, Zainap helped me move my mattress off of the bed frame and onto the floor, since I decided that the bed frame was too small and creaky. I think that I’ll end up going to bed pretty early most nights while I’m here, because walking to and from the school in the snow and ice and everything really seems to take it out of me. This morning when I woke up both Zainap and Adilet were gone, so I had the apartment to myself. I took the opportunity to take some pictures of the apartment and check out the balcony for the first time. Zainap got home before I headed out and we chatted a little bit. One of these days I will write more about my host family, because there are a lot of interesting things to say about them, but for now I’m just going to write about what I did today. I walked to the school alone this time with no problems. Kendje went over some of the work she wanted me to do today, which was mostly sending some emails to a few different organizations through whom the London School is hoping to send some of their students to the US. I had another break and walked back to Tashrabat to use the internet place again. I used a different computer this time but I still couldn’t get the sound to work, so still no Tim and Eric! I’ll find a way to make it work somehow, someday. I had lunch at a little fast food place called Domino (not like the pizza chain), where I had a Russian cheeseburger and fries. The quality was pretty low by western standards, but it was tasty enough so I was reasonably satisfied. I had a meeting with Uchkul from the office staff and helped her formulate some questions to ask another organization in the US, then sat in on another class. This one was with a teacher named Kevin, who I had met the day before and who seems like a pretty cool guy. His teaching style was really laid back and casual, which I liked. After his class I worked on writing up and sending out the emails that Kendje had wanted me to do. The internet connection at the school is limited and very slow, so it took a while to take care of it all. I was then done for the day, and I figured it was probably time to get a new SIM card for my old phone from Russia. I asked some of the office staff where they would recommend buying one, and the suggested a company called Megacom, which has a sales center in the big shopping center across from the London School called the Vefa Center (I guess it has two names because people also call it Ramstor). On my way there I ran into a few of the students in Katy’s class that I had met the day before. They asked me where I was going, and when I told them I was going to go buy a new SIM card they offered to come with me and help me out. I probably would have been able to do it on my own, albeit awkwardly with my limited Russian and reluctance to talk to salespeople, but I figured it might be a good idea to have these guys help me out so I didn’t get screwed over or end up with the wrong plan or something. They really did make it easy. We walked right in, they talked really briefly with the woman behind the counter and told her what I wanted, then they helped me pick out a number from the list of available numbers. I paid the $4 or so for the SIM card, and in about 3 minutes we were done. We took the new card and the phone outside and tried to get ‘er going, but one of the students checked the balance and it showed that there was no money on my account, after he assured me that there would automatically be some once I got my new card. We took it back inside to the store and found out that we had left before they could activate the card on the phone. I might have made the same mistake if I had gone alone, and I wouldn’t have known to go back and get it fixed, so I’m really glad that these guys were there to help me. So, now I have a phone, which will definitely make things more simple once I start getting around the city more and meeting new people. I headed back home after that, and after a quick stop at the grocery store for some snacks, I got back just after dark. I’ve been lounging around my room feeling pretty tired sore, which seems weird but I guess I’ve forgotten how much trudging through the cold can take a lot out of you. It has been quite cold, by the way. Not as cold as it was when I first got to St. Petersburg, but pretty darn cold nonetheless. I guess that’s all for now. To be honest I felt like this post is pretty boring and not that great overall. It probably has something to do with being tired, but I’ll try to be livelier and write only about the interesting things in later posts. Until then, take it sleazy!
-Austin
-Austin
1/22/08
It worked this time!
(written on Sunday night, Jan 20)
I am here, safe and sound at my host family’s apartment in Bishkek. I’m really tired but I’d like to try and recount the experience getting over here before I go to bed. I left Portland Friday morning, first stop Minneapolis. Before I even boarded, I looked at my luggage return tag and noticed that it said that my checked back was only going to be checked through to Moscow and not Bishkek, despite my having made it very clear to the woman at the counter that it needed to be checked all the way through. The reason this is so important is because I didn’t have a transit visa for Russia, which is fine if you’re only changing international flights and not leaving the terminal, but if I would have had to get my bag it would have meant leaving the terminal, which I wouldn’t have been able to do and who knows what would happen to my bag. So, that stressed me out a little, but I knew I couldn’t do anything about it until I checked in with Aeroflot in New York. Anyways, the first flight was alright. I was seated in the window seat of the very last row, and the woman who had the aisle seat had her 18-month-old daughter with her, which visibly seemed to annoy the guy seated between us. Luckily he was able to move up to a different seat, and I was left with the Mother and her kid. At least we had more room in the aisle, even if the baby was sitting in the middle seat most of the time. The mother seemed pretty old for having such a young child (I think she said she was 44), and seemed REALLY into being a mom, with lots of books, toys, juices, and diapers crammed in a big baby bag. She even had a portable DVD player and a brand new Elmo DVD to keep the baby (whose name was Glenn-eden, by the way) entertained. I just looked out the window most of the time and dozed off a bit, though the baby was really cute and I did enjoy playing that game where you smile at a baby and they smile back. I had about an hour wait in Minneapolis, during which time I called my mom to tell her about the baggage thing, and bout a bottle of Coke at the Fox News store, though I really hated giving them my business. I don’t even get why Fox News has a store in the airport selling magazines and drinks. For the flight to New York I was seated next to a young couple who I assume were from Minnesota and who were headed to New York for the weekend just to party or whatever. Again I just looked out the window, listened to music, and napped a little bit. It was fun flying into New York and looking down on Manhattan and everything. I had about 4 hours to kill in the airport this time, and I was starting to feel pretty tired and travel-weary. I didn’t have my boarding passes for my next two flights with Aeroflot, so I didn’t even know which gate or terminal I needed to be at. I wondered around for a while lugging my heavy bags and reading the monitors and trying to figure out where to go. The flight wasn’t showing up on the monitors and as it got closer to the flight I started freaking out a little bit cause I really didn’t know where to go or what to do. I had asked one airport employee if they knew where to go and they said that the flight would definitely be in that terminal somewhere, but with less than 2 hours before the flight it still wasn’t showing up on the monitors. I asked someone else for help and after talking to three more people, I was informed that Aeroflot operated out of an entirely different terminal. I rode the train thing to the new terminal and got to the check-in both with plenty of time to spare. I checked in at the Aeroflot counter and told them about the whole bag situation. The woman at the counter got this other guy to help (neither of them were Russian), and he seemed really pissed at whoever had made the mistake, and seemed intent on fixing the problem. He took down some information about the bag, and said he would contact Moscow about it and they would sort it out there. I was very pleased that they were able to take such decisive action, and in fact this would be the first of many things about Aeroflot that would come as a pleasant surprise. So, I got my boarding passes and headed to the gate with some relief about the bag. The flight was delayed for about 1 1/2 hours, which was fine for me because it just meant that much less time waiting in the airport in Moscow later. As we boarded the plane, an Aeroflot employee checked everyone’s passports for visas I think. I was prepared to explain to him that I was only transferring and didn’t need a visa, but he saw my Russian visa from two years ago and immediately handed back the passport, which saved me the hassle of explaining the situation. I was seated on the aisle of the middle row of the plane, second from the front of economy class, and there was nobody sitting in the middle so the older gentlemen on the other aisle and I were able to put our bags in the middle seat. It was interesting to see all the jet-setting “New Russians” on the flight with their fancy phones and bags of duty-free goods. The woman in front of me was one of those, and in true Russian form, made no apologies about spreading out all of her things, and herself. Even though she was in the bulk head seat and had her legs up on the wall in front of her, she still had to put her seat all the way back, and put her boots under her seat taking up more of my leg room. It was kind of annoying is all. There was this other guy sitting near us who I mistakenly took for some typical crazy Russian alcoholic dude, cause he seemed lost and helpless, would just sit still and make weird facial expressions the whole flight, and would make huge messes of his in-flight meals. I later figured out that he was actually blind, which accounted for his strange behavior. He was also Bulgarian I discovered after seeing his passport, and I just couldn’t help but wonder what a blind, disheveled Bulgarian man was doing on a flight between New York and Moscow, or what he was doing in New York in the first place. Now, about Aeroflot: I had heard all kinds of horror stories about taking the Russian airline, about how they had a terrible flight record, how the planes were old and crumbling, how the flight attendants are rude, and how the flights are generally a bad experience. I found all of this to be completely untrue, and if fact just the opposite in most cases. Both of my Aeroflot flights seemed on par with or better than any flight I’ve ever taken with any other airline, domestic or international. The ride was smooth, the planes were clean and well-maintained, the flight attendants were as friendly as any Russian woman typically is (which isn’t saying too much, but I’ve never really found flight attendants in general to be all that friendly and personable, so these ones seemed as friendly as any do. Actually, some were very polite and patient. The picked up after that blind guy without any complaints, and one of them was even patient enough to fill out the migration card for him), and even the food was good. For dinner I had curry rice with chicken, and for breakfast, and honest-to-god breakfast burrito! Considering it was being served by a Russian airline, it was pretty darn good and fairly authentic. I was quite pleased with the whole experience. Of course all the typical annoyances of any flight were there (cramped seats, difficulty sleeping, etc.), but these aren’t things that Aeroflot could control. I guess my only real complaint was with the movie selection. First they showed Ocean’s Thirteen dubbed into Russian, and even though there were multiple channels when you plug in the headphones, there was no English channel for the movie (there were two in Russian, though), I watched it in Russia anyways, and was actually a little disappointed in myself because I couldn’t really understand a lot of what they were saying. My Russian has gotten a bit rusty, but I know it will come back while I’m here. I had seen Ocean’s Thirteen before, so, I already knew the story and could follow along fine. The second movie was a terrible Russian movie called “Shadow Boxer 2” or something. It’s about a Russian boxer (apparently you’re already supposed to know about him from the first movie,) who comes to the US and blows everybody away with his amazing boxing. This one Mexican guy at his gym provokes him so he basically beats the guy to death, only to find out that the guy’s dad was a bigwig in the Hispanic mafia who’s now got a big vendetta against him and his girlfriend through his connections with the Russian mafia. It wass really stupid, and I couldn’t even watch the whole thing. It was interesting, though, because a lot of the dialogue was in English with Russian over-dubbing and English subtitles. But, anyways, I guess that’s enough about that flight. We got to Moscow and I went through the “transfer without visa” desk before entering the terminal. Amazingly, the woman at the counter had a note about my bag, and called the baggage people to have to put in the Bishkek flight, which was pretty reassuring again. I had about 9 hours to spend in the terminal, and after shelling out $10 for 2 20 oz. Bottles of soda, I didn’t want to spend any more money there. I wasn’t even hungry, and the only thing to buy really was a bunch of cheap “Russian” souvenirs and duty-free perfume. I was able to find a power outlet and had high hopes of getting a wifi signal on my laptop. There were several, actually, but all of them required a password or registration with different cell phone companies. So, no internet for Austin. Most of my time in the terminal was spent reading magazines or trying to sleep on the floor. I think I actually got a fair amount of sleep there, though it wasn’t very satisfying as I would often wake suddenly with paranoid thoughts of people robbing me while I was asleep. The time flew by relatively fast, and before long I was on my plane to Bishkek. This plane was even nicer than the last one, with high-tech reading lights and fancy seat backs with adjustable pillow tops. I was seated next to two Kyrgyz guys, but there were plenty of open seats and after we were served our meal (meat and pasta), they both sat somewhere else and I got three seats to myself. It still wasn’t that comfortable, but three is better than one. The flight attendants were relatively polite again, and even though it was a flight between two Russian-speaking countries, they still made announcements in Russian and English. I slept a little bit, and before you knew it we were finally in Bishkek! Passport control was no problem, then it was off the baggage claim. Even though Aeroflot had been so good about taking care of my baggage situation, I was still prepared for my bag to be lost, but wouldn’t you know it, there it was on the conveyor belt! I was quite thrilled with the idea of not having to go through the hassle of having a missing bag, which I had already kind of resigned myself to. I was met at the airport by a woman from the London School named Nargiza, who lead me to our van and we were driven off to my host family. It was still dark when I arrived so I couldn’t really see much out the window, though we did pass the philharmonic. I asked Nargiza a lot of questions and she was very helpful. I was taken to my apartment, where I was met by my host mother (her name Bubuzainap Baidlde, though the polite way to address her is Zainap Eje) and host brother (Adilet, or Adik for short). We briefly got acquainted, but I had to crash for a while cause I was so beat from 33 hours of traveling. I woke up a few hours later and chatted with them some more, gave them their presents, and walked down the street to a supermarket so they could buy noodles and I could buy some beverages. Here’s what I know about my host family so far: Bubuzainap works as a freelance Dutch translator/interpreter, even though she only started learning the language about 5 years ago. She has a very strong talent for learning languages, as she apparently just started learning some English but already speaks it pretty well. In fact, she speaks to me mostly in English already. Her and Adilet speak Kyrgyz in the home, because she was born in a town in rural Kyrgyzstan called Naryn so Kyrgyz was her first language. Adilet is 16 and really likes American rap music. I’m actually staying it what is obviously his room while he sleeps in the living room, and there are pictures of 50 Cent and Eminem on the wall. Both Bubuzainap and Adilet are very kind and friendly, and I don’t foresee any real problems living with them. Bubuzainap told me that while I am here, I am like family (you know, like at the Olive Garden), so that was nice to hear. She told me that they are Muslim, but not very strong. They do observe the rules of no pork and no alcohol, but she said that she doesn’t mind if I drink in the bars, just not in the apartment. They also have a picture of Mecca above the kitchen door. All in all, a very pleasant and fun experience so far. I’ve only seen a tiny bit of the neighborhood so far but it seems easy to get the hang of. There are plenty of little details about the host family I’m leaving out but by now I am getting really tired and need a good night’s sleep before going to the school tomorrow for my first orientation meeting, so all the other details will have to be revealed in later posts. Look for some pictures on flickr and facebook soon. Bye for now!
I am here, safe and sound at my host family’s apartment in Bishkek. I’m really tired but I’d like to try and recount the experience getting over here before I go to bed. I left Portland Friday morning, first stop Minneapolis. Before I even boarded, I looked at my luggage return tag and noticed that it said that my checked back was only going to be checked through to Moscow and not Bishkek, despite my having made it very clear to the woman at the counter that it needed to be checked all the way through. The reason this is so important is because I didn’t have a transit visa for Russia, which is fine if you’re only changing international flights and not leaving the terminal, but if I would have had to get my bag it would have meant leaving the terminal, which I wouldn’t have been able to do and who knows what would happen to my bag. So, that stressed me out a little, but I knew I couldn’t do anything about it until I checked in with Aeroflot in New York. Anyways, the first flight was alright. I was seated in the window seat of the very last row, and the woman who had the aisle seat had her 18-month-old daughter with her, which visibly seemed to annoy the guy seated between us. Luckily he was able to move up to a different seat, and I was left with the Mother and her kid. At least we had more room in the aisle, even if the baby was sitting in the middle seat most of the time. The mother seemed pretty old for having such a young child (I think she said she was 44), and seemed REALLY into being a mom, with lots of books, toys, juices, and diapers crammed in a big baby bag. She even had a portable DVD player and a brand new Elmo DVD to keep the baby (whose name was Glenn-eden, by the way) entertained. I just looked out the window most of the time and dozed off a bit, though the baby was really cute and I did enjoy playing that game where you smile at a baby and they smile back. I had about an hour wait in Minneapolis, during which time I called my mom to tell her about the baggage thing, and bout a bottle of Coke at the Fox News store, though I really hated giving them my business. I don’t even get why Fox News has a store in the airport selling magazines and drinks. For the flight to New York I was seated next to a young couple who I assume were from Minnesota and who were headed to New York for the weekend just to party or whatever. Again I just looked out the window, listened to music, and napped a little bit. It was fun flying into New York and looking down on Manhattan and everything. I had about 4 hours to kill in the airport this time, and I was starting to feel pretty tired and travel-weary. I didn’t have my boarding passes for my next two flights with Aeroflot, so I didn’t even know which gate or terminal I needed to be at. I wondered around for a while lugging my heavy bags and reading the monitors and trying to figure out where to go. The flight wasn’t showing up on the monitors and as it got closer to the flight I started freaking out a little bit cause I really didn’t know where to go or what to do. I had asked one airport employee if they knew where to go and they said that the flight would definitely be in that terminal somewhere, but with less than 2 hours before the flight it still wasn’t showing up on the monitors. I asked someone else for help and after talking to three more people, I was informed that Aeroflot operated out of an entirely different terminal. I rode the train thing to the new terminal and got to the check-in both with plenty of time to spare. I checked in at the Aeroflot counter and told them about the whole bag situation. The woman at the counter got this other guy to help (neither of them were Russian), and he seemed really pissed at whoever had made the mistake, and seemed intent on fixing the problem. He took down some information about the bag, and said he would contact Moscow about it and they would sort it out there. I was very pleased that they were able to take such decisive action, and in fact this would be the first of many things about Aeroflot that would come as a pleasant surprise. So, I got my boarding passes and headed to the gate with some relief about the bag. The flight was delayed for about 1 1/2 hours, which was fine for me because it just meant that much less time waiting in the airport in Moscow later. As we boarded the plane, an Aeroflot employee checked everyone’s passports for visas I think. I was prepared to explain to him that I was only transferring and didn’t need a visa, but he saw my Russian visa from two years ago and immediately handed back the passport, which saved me the hassle of explaining the situation. I was seated on the aisle of the middle row of the plane, second from the front of economy class, and there was nobody sitting in the middle so the older gentlemen on the other aisle and I were able to put our bags in the middle seat. It was interesting to see all the jet-setting “New Russians” on the flight with their fancy phones and bags of duty-free goods. The woman in front of me was one of those, and in true Russian form, made no apologies about spreading out all of her things, and herself. Even though she was in the bulk head seat and had her legs up on the wall in front of her, she still had to put her seat all the way back, and put her boots under her seat taking up more of my leg room. It was kind of annoying is all. There was this other guy sitting near us who I mistakenly took for some typical crazy Russian alcoholic dude, cause he seemed lost and helpless, would just sit still and make weird facial expressions the whole flight, and would make huge messes of his in-flight meals. I later figured out that he was actually blind, which accounted for his strange behavior. He was also Bulgarian I discovered after seeing his passport, and I just couldn’t help but wonder what a blind, disheveled Bulgarian man was doing on a flight between New York and Moscow, or what he was doing in New York in the first place. Now, about Aeroflot: I had heard all kinds of horror stories about taking the Russian airline, about how they had a terrible flight record, how the planes were old and crumbling, how the flight attendants are rude, and how the flights are generally a bad experience. I found all of this to be completely untrue, and if fact just the opposite in most cases. Both of my Aeroflot flights seemed on par with or better than any flight I’ve ever taken with any other airline, domestic or international. The ride was smooth, the planes were clean and well-maintained, the flight attendants were as friendly as any Russian woman typically is (which isn’t saying too much, but I’ve never really found flight attendants in general to be all that friendly and personable, so these ones seemed as friendly as any do. Actually, some were very polite and patient. The picked up after that blind guy without any complaints, and one of them was even patient enough to fill out the migration card for him), and even the food was good. For dinner I had curry rice with chicken, and for breakfast, and honest-to-god breakfast burrito! Considering it was being served by a Russian airline, it was pretty darn good and fairly authentic. I was quite pleased with the whole experience. Of course all the typical annoyances of any flight were there (cramped seats, difficulty sleeping, etc.), but these aren’t things that Aeroflot could control. I guess my only real complaint was with the movie selection. First they showed Ocean’s Thirteen dubbed into Russian, and even though there were multiple channels when you plug in the headphones, there was no English channel for the movie (there were two in Russian, though), I watched it in Russia anyways, and was actually a little disappointed in myself because I couldn’t really understand a lot of what they were saying. My Russian has gotten a bit rusty, but I know it will come back while I’m here. I had seen Ocean’s Thirteen before, so, I already knew the story and could follow along fine. The second movie was a terrible Russian movie called “Shadow Boxer 2” or something. It’s about a Russian boxer (apparently you’re already supposed to know about him from the first movie,) who comes to the US and blows everybody away with his amazing boxing. This one Mexican guy at his gym provokes him so he basically beats the guy to death, only to find out that the guy’s dad was a bigwig in the Hispanic mafia who’s now got a big vendetta against him and his girlfriend through his connections with the Russian mafia. It wass really stupid, and I couldn’t even watch the whole thing. It was interesting, though, because a lot of the dialogue was in English with Russian over-dubbing and English subtitles. But, anyways, I guess that’s enough about that flight. We got to Moscow and I went through the “transfer without visa” desk before entering the terminal. Amazingly, the woman at the counter had a note about my bag, and called the baggage people to have to put in the Bishkek flight, which was pretty reassuring again. I had about 9 hours to spend in the terminal, and after shelling out $10 for 2 20 oz. Bottles of soda, I didn’t want to spend any more money there. I wasn’t even hungry, and the only thing to buy really was a bunch of cheap “Russian” souvenirs and duty-free perfume. I was able to find a power outlet and had high hopes of getting a wifi signal on my laptop. There were several, actually, but all of them required a password or registration with different cell phone companies. So, no internet for Austin. Most of my time in the terminal was spent reading magazines or trying to sleep on the floor. I think I actually got a fair amount of sleep there, though it wasn’t very satisfying as I would often wake suddenly with paranoid thoughts of people robbing me while I was asleep. The time flew by relatively fast, and before long I was on my plane to Bishkek. This plane was even nicer than the last one, with high-tech reading lights and fancy seat backs with adjustable pillow tops. I was seated next to two Kyrgyz guys, but there were plenty of open seats and after we were served our meal (meat and pasta), they both sat somewhere else and I got three seats to myself. It still wasn’t that comfortable, but three is better than one. The flight attendants were relatively polite again, and even though it was a flight between two Russian-speaking countries, they still made announcements in Russian and English. I slept a little bit, and before you knew it we were finally in Bishkek! Passport control was no problem, then it was off the baggage claim. Even though Aeroflot had been so good about taking care of my baggage situation, I was still prepared for my bag to be lost, but wouldn’t you know it, there it was on the conveyor belt! I was quite thrilled with the idea of not having to go through the hassle of having a missing bag, which I had already kind of resigned myself to. I was met at the airport by a woman from the London School named Nargiza, who lead me to our van and we were driven off to my host family. It was still dark when I arrived so I couldn’t really see much out the window, though we did pass the philharmonic. I asked Nargiza a lot of questions and she was very helpful. I was taken to my apartment, where I was met by my host mother (her name Bubuzainap Baidlde, though the polite way to address her is Zainap Eje) and host brother (Adilet, or Adik for short). We briefly got acquainted, but I had to crash for a while cause I was so beat from 33 hours of traveling. I woke up a few hours later and chatted with them some more, gave them their presents, and walked down the street to a supermarket so they could buy noodles and I could buy some beverages. Here’s what I know about my host family so far: Bubuzainap works as a freelance Dutch translator/interpreter, even though she only started learning the language about 5 years ago. She has a very strong talent for learning languages, as she apparently just started learning some English but already speaks it pretty well. In fact, she speaks to me mostly in English already. Her and Adilet speak Kyrgyz in the home, because she was born in a town in rural Kyrgyzstan called Naryn so Kyrgyz was her first language. Adilet is 16 and really likes American rap music. I’m actually staying it what is obviously his room while he sleeps in the living room, and there are pictures of 50 Cent and Eminem on the wall. Both Bubuzainap and Adilet are very kind and friendly, and I don’t foresee any real problems living with them. Bubuzainap told me that while I am here, I am like family (you know, like at the Olive Garden), so that was nice to hear. She told me that they are Muslim, but not very strong. They do observe the rules of no pork and no alcohol, but she said that she doesn’t mind if I drink in the bars, just not in the apartment. They also have a picture of Mecca above the kitchen door. All in all, a very pleasant and fun experience so far. I’ve only seen a tiny bit of the neighborhood so far but it seems easy to get the hang of. There are plenty of little details about the host family I’m leaving out but by now I am getting really tired and need a good night’s sleep before going to the school tomorrow for my first orientation meeting, so all the other details will have to be revealed in later posts. Look for some pictures on flickr and facebook soon. Bye for now!
1/21/08
I'm here, but...
So, I have a big long post to make, but it looks like I didn't save the file the right way and now I can't open it here at the internet center. So, I guess I'll have to try again tomorrow. I may even have a second post to make by then. I'll just say this really quick: I've made it safely to Bishkek, have moved in with my host family, and have started my training and everything at the London School. Check back tomorrow and hopefully I'll have gotten the longer post up.
-Austin
-Austin
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