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
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