Fermented Mare's Milk

I've been feeling kind of myneh all week. The specific symptoms of myneh have included sleeping far, far longer each day than one would deem "normal" (say, 16 hours easy), eating next to nothing, and feeling little desire to perform the simplest tasks or even those that typically bring me joy (writing, for instance). Thus, no blog posts all week. Sorry about that. I think the annual one-off round of flu is here for me (not Bird Flu damn it, just your average God Damn! it's cold out there kind of flu...). I'm more or less recovered (though I didn't get out of bed until mid-afternoon today and skipped yesterday's Russian lesson) and will attempt to make up for lost blog-time.

This all seemed to start on Monday, when Erin and I decided that for dinner we'd walk up to Fat Boys, the English-speaking, American-friendly, English language library-having restaurant downtown. We were both tired and very hungry (neither of us having eaten all day), and these factors combined into an all-encompassing laziness. As I've said before, it's tiring just leaving the apartment. So we cheated and took the easy route to dinner.

This week has been cold, very, very cold. As I write this it is 10 degree F in Bishkek (according to the weather widget on the Mac, anyway). That's about right for the week's weather in general. The walk downtown on Monday night was no exception, and by the time we reached Fat Boys--after a half hour or so--we found our faces numbed to the point that it was difficult to form words correctly. And our noses were running in a very unflattering, seemingly unstoppable manner.

Fat Boys is two rooms connected by a bar/foyer area on the ground floor of a large, block-long building a few minutes east of the main square. The room on the right houses the library. Neither of us ventured over there for a look-see, so I have no reports. (We may, in the near future, need to do so, however, as we're both dangerously nearing the end of the reading materials we brought with us. I found three back issues of The Economist last night in one of the cupboards and was gleeful for hours.) The room on the left is the dining area proper, with maybe twenty two-tops spread around the room, some pushed together against the walls to form four-tops.

Upon entering, E and I just sort of lingered inside the door, unsure of what to do next. The waitstaff (five or six young Kyrgyz girls) were all sitting or standing by the bar directly opposite the door. After a minute or so of our sizing up the place and slowly regaining feeling to our faces, one of the girls at the bar said, "Please sit anywhere" in English. There were a few couples toward the front of the room and a foursome at the table by the door. We sat ourselves at a free table in the corner furthest from the door, in the back left-hand corner of the building, and very shortly menus were brought to us.

It was oddly comforting and refreshing and just plain nice to find the menu in English. I was surprised by that (the response from my emotional center, not the English) and welcomed it, as it seemed to be helping with the physical warming of my body, which even after a few minutes inside I was still in desperate need of. We were left alone with the menus for a few minutes, then a waitress came over and asked us, in Russian, if we were ready to order. My yeeha English! feeling diminished a bit, but didn't vanish completely. Erin ordered, in English, a Greek Salad and a grilled cheese with tomato. I asked for a Turkish salad (essentially a Greek salad with the Feta and olives replaced by a metric ton of shredded carrots) and a curried chicken sandwich. The sandwich order was of the oh no, need to say something now sort. I had noticed the sandwich in my initial look through the menu and for some unknown reason went back there in my panicked need to order. I wasn't quite up to eating one of the dinner entree items (a full lamb dinner [of unknown cut] seemed a bit much, really) and didn't quite know whether or not it was cool to still order pancakes (a perennial comfort food, thank you very much; one of the other breakfast dishes was called "The Cholesterol" and involved grits, toast, several meats, and eggs...very funny). So curried chicken sandwich, obviously.

When our food came, all at once, everything looked good. The salads were big and delicious. Erin's grilled cheese was straight out of a sandwich maker, grill marks and all. The tomatoes in it were sliced nice and small, so as to both be warm and to avoid the unfortunately common occurrence of pulling the tomato slice out of the sandwich with a misplaced bite (I more or less lived on grilled cheese with tomato at Skidmore for two years [Spa Ladies of my past, I thank you], so I was happy to see such brilliant craftsmanship, so to speak). My sandwich, on the other hand, looked like a 1950s B-movie UFO: a large, round bulb, hard and brown, with bits of lettuce and a gelatinous, yellowy substance spilling out of the middle. In a way, it resembled a jelly donut filled with curried chicken. Only, you know, different.

And the roll was hard. Really, really hard. Too hard to easily bite into in one try. The added effort in grinding through the roll led the filling--with a consistency like super-loose tuna salad, only Grey Poupon brown--to shoot out in various directions. And while the filling was mayonnaise heavy to begin with, there was also another, autonomous layer of mayonnaise, thick and viscous, on either side of the filling. The overall effect was like attempting to bite through two cast-iron pans with a layer of potato salad in between, held in place by KY Jelly. Not easy. But it was really tasty and I was hungry, so I kept trying. The curry was flavorful and the roll, after it'd been gnawed away and allowed to sit for a bit in the mouth, was actually pretty tasty, too. But the whole thing was just too tiring. After five or six bites, I gave up. Erin gave me half of her grilled cheese and did her best to have a go at the curried chicken. She managed three or four bites and gave up, claiming to be full (bless her heart). Eventually, the waitress came back and cleared all of the plates except the sandwich, which continued to sit between us like an emblem of our failure for another ten or fifteen minutes.

We just sat there after that enjoying our tea and sodas (Central Asian Sprite has a tendency to taste like 7-Up, so I was having Pepsi). Erin helped me plan out the rest of the novel I'm working on (there was a rather sizable black hole in the plot and I was rapidly approaching it, but we managed to get that taken care of while sitting there). Eventually, the sandwich was adios-ed and we got our bill. The whole thing was about $6.50, including tip. Brilliant.

On our way out a group of three men came in. They stood just inside the doorway, looking confused, until one of the waitstaff directed them to a table. We smelled our kind in them, but left before letting on that we knew. Instead we went home, played a few games of Blokus and cribbage, then I went to bed, where I stayed until about four o'clock the next afternoon, alternately sleeping and waking long enough to moan, achingly roll over, and fall back asleep.