Thursday, December 22, 2005
Gone Out the Window
Sometime last week a friend emailed me and asked what it looked like out our window. I realized, after I sent it (actually, after she replied and I saw what I'd written), that this might make for a good blog post for y'all. And since my days lately have more or less consisted only of waking up, writing, throwing myself around the apartment in what I like to call 'exercise,' showering, dressing, walking the three blocks to campus, having Russian lessons, eating wee bits from the bazaar around the corner, and generally not doing anything exciting or out of the ordinary, there's not much else of note to put up on this page. So, looking out my window...
On the kitchen/living room side of the apartment, directly across the street (Togolok Muldo), is a big university building (some other university, not AUCA; there are seriously like 35 colleges in Bishkek) with a really cool Persian-esque tower thing on top (I'm a bit ignorant and therefore inarticulate when it comes to architecture, sorry) and a 6 story apartment building beside it. Most of the apartment buildings in Bishkek have rather ugly faces, as no one technically owns them. Those who were living in the apartments when the Soviet system fell were just given the apartment, but the building itself, formerly owned by the state, fell into some nebulous ownership limbo, where they've stayed since. As a result, the facades of most buildings are crumbly and pockmarked and the stairwells are dark and damp and dirty, even in the nicer buildings where the apartments themselves are warm and well-kept.
(Our apartment building falls into that last category, thankfully. Although there seems to be someone taking care of the building at large as well, as last week someone covered up the few broken windows in the stairwell, replaced lightbulbs, and added a keypad security device on the metal gate inside the outer door. They didn't, however, install any device that would allow one to open the door once the security number had been entered on the keypad, which means that everyone is forced to drop a shoulder into the metal grates every time they come home. It makes for a slightly louder, funnier, bruised-shoulder-ier existence.)
Looking north down the street is more of the same for a few blocks but then it peters out into a sort of shanty town of little tin-roofed shacks and then the edge of town. Before that, around the first corner (Jabek Jaloo), is the small bazaar we go to everyday to buy bread and produce and rice and pasta and some cheese from time to time (we've been here nearly five weeks, I know, but it feels like a year already, so I'm going to leave that "from time to time" in there). And the other day we bought a rotisserie chicken that was delicious (if, ya know, you're into that sort of thing) and a smoky sausage link thing whose origin we have yet to discern with any authority.
Back to the windows, if you were to look south, you'd see the national soccer stadium and sports complex just past the first corner (we're one empty lot from the corner of Togolok Muldo and Frunze, in the middle of the second floor; a small magazine, like a convenience store, stands right on the corner), though you'd be more likely to hear the stadium before you saw it on a game day. (Very much like our house in Bloomington during football season, that.) Beyond that and across the street is some sort of big governmental building, very Soviet looking--concrete, right angles, imposing--with a two-story statue of Manas carrying a horse on his shoulders out front. Manas is the warrior horseman who is the national hero and the protagonist of the most famous Kyrgyz epic poem, The Manas. (When I say famous, I mostly mean among the Kyrgyz and a select group of other Central Asians and Mongolians and Chinese; I don't mean Shakespeare or Shaggy & Scooby.)
Looking past that, out of the city, on a clear day you'll see the rather huge, rather imposing, incredibly jagged Kyrgyz Kirkasi mountain range. On a day less clear, you'll still see the tops of the mountains, covered in snow and looming. They're in the ballpark of 15,000+ feet, which makes for a surprising sight when you suddenly look up from the sidewalk and find them there staring at you.
Out the bedroom window, on the eastern side of the apartment, you'll see the apartment complex courtyard, which looks exactly like a run-down apartment complex courtyard in any city in America. There is a playground equipped with a swing set without swings, a sand box with no sand, and a slide covered in graffiti. On the other side of the far end of the wing running east-west on the southern side (to the right, looking out the window) is the Japanese Embassy, the dubious existence of which you are all by now well aware. On the sidewalk between that same southern wing of the building and the embassy were three large orange dumpsters where we put our trash for pick-up. About a week ago we discovered the dumpsters gone. They have not yet returned and we now walk our trash about a block west down Frunze to another set of orange dumpsters.
The air is clean, the water filthy, and women's footwear is of the L'il Kim / corner ho school of fashion. Actually, most of the younger women dress like what I'd assume was a pro in the states: really short skirts, fishnets, gigantic leather boots (knee high at least, thigh high often) with three/four/five inch stiletto heels in varying shades of bright colors (gold and silver lame, hot pink, day-glo green, etc), shirts that do little to hide anything one might want to hide with a shirt, and long furs covering it all when outside. For the first two days I thought we lived in the red light district. Then I wised up. The men favor a more Mafia-inspired fashion, black on black on black. 3/4-length black leather jackets are the norm, over black pants, pointy (think elves) black leather shoes, black sweater or sportcoat, black oxford underneath. And topping it all off is either a furry Russian box hat (think George Costanza skipping through a winter day in only a t-shirt) or what's called a kolpak, the traditional Kyrgyz hat, which looks like a tipi with flaps balanced precariously on someone's head. The same was true of the men in Armenia (minus the hats), so I'm guessing it's a post-Soviet thing. The Armenian women loved their giant heels, too, but not so much the tiny skirts, fishnets, and teeny tops.
The window is now closed.
On the kitchen/living room side of the apartment, directly across the street (Togolok Muldo), is a big university building (some other university, not AUCA; there are seriously like 35 colleges in Bishkek) with a really cool Persian-esque tower thing on top (I'm a bit ignorant and therefore inarticulate when it comes to architecture, sorry) and a 6 story apartment building beside it. Most of the apartment buildings in Bishkek have rather ugly faces, as no one technically owns them. Those who were living in the apartments when the Soviet system fell were just given the apartment, but the building itself, formerly owned by the state, fell into some nebulous ownership limbo, where they've stayed since. As a result, the facades of most buildings are crumbly and pockmarked and the stairwells are dark and damp and dirty, even in the nicer buildings where the apartments themselves are warm and well-kept.
(Our apartment building falls into that last category, thankfully. Although there seems to be someone taking care of the building at large as well, as last week someone covered up the few broken windows in the stairwell, replaced lightbulbs, and added a keypad security device on the metal gate inside the outer door. They didn't, however, install any device that would allow one to open the door once the security number had been entered on the keypad, which means that everyone is forced to drop a shoulder into the metal grates every time they come home. It makes for a slightly louder, funnier, bruised-shoulder-ier existence.)
Looking north down the street is more of the same for a few blocks but then it peters out into a sort of shanty town of little tin-roofed shacks and then the edge of town. Before that, around the first corner (Jabek Jaloo), is the small bazaar we go to everyday to buy bread and produce and rice and pasta and some cheese from time to time (we've been here nearly five weeks, I know, but it feels like a year already, so I'm going to leave that "from time to time" in there). And the other day we bought a rotisserie chicken that was delicious (if, ya know, you're into that sort of thing) and a smoky sausage link thing whose origin we have yet to discern with any authority.
Back to the windows, if you were to look south, you'd see the national soccer stadium and sports complex just past the first corner (we're one empty lot from the corner of Togolok Muldo and Frunze, in the middle of the second floor; a small magazine, like a convenience store, stands right on the corner), though you'd be more likely to hear the stadium before you saw it on a game day. (Very much like our house in Bloomington during football season, that.) Beyond that and across the street is some sort of big governmental building, very Soviet looking--concrete, right angles, imposing--with a two-story statue of Manas carrying a horse on his shoulders out front. Manas is the warrior horseman who is the national hero and the protagonist of the most famous Kyrgyz epic poem, The Manas. (When I say famous, I mostly mean among the Kyrgyz and a select group of other Central Asians and Mongolians and Chinese; I don't mean Shakespeare or Shaggy & Scooby.)
Looking past that, out of the city, on a clear day you'll see the rather huge, rather imposing, incredibly jagged Kyrgyz Kirkasi mountain range. On a day less clear, you'll still see the tops of the mountains, covered in snow and looming. They're in the ballpark of 15,000+ feet, which makes for a surprising sight when you suddenly look up from the sidewalk and find them there staring at you.
Out the bedroom window, on the eastern side of the apartment, you'll see the apartment complex courtyard, which looks exactly like a run-down apartment complex courtyard in any city in America. There is a playground equipped with a swing set without swings, a sand box with no sand, and a slide covered in graffiti. On the other side of the far end of the wing running east-west on the southern side (to the right, looking out the window) is the Japanese Embassy, the dubious existence of which you are all by now well aware. On the sidewalk between that same southern wing of the building and the embassy were three large orange dumpsters where we put our trash for pick-up. About a week ago we discovered the dumpsters gone. They have not yet returned and we now walk our trash about a block west down Frunze to another set of orange dumpsters.
The air is clean, the water filthy, and women's footwear is of the L'il Kim / corner ho school of fashion. Actually, most of the younger women dress like what I'd assume was a pro in the states: really short skirts, fishnets, gigantic leather boots (knee high at least, thigh high often) with three/four/five inch stiletto heels in varying shades of bright colors (gold and silver lame, hot pink, day-glo green, etc), shirts that do little to hide anything one might want to hide with a shirt, and long furs covering it all when outside. For the first two days I thought we lived in the red light district. Then I wised up. The men favor a more Mafia-inspired fashion, black on black on black. 3/4-length black leather jackets are the norm, over black pants, pointy (think elves) black leather shoes, black sweater or sportcoat, black oxford underneath. And topping it all off is either a furry Russian box hat (think George Costanza skipping through a winter day in only a t-shirt) or what's called a kolpak, the traditional Kyrgyz hat, which looks like a tipi with flaps balanced precariously on someone's head. The same was true of the men in Armenia (minus the hats), so I'm guessing it's a post-Soviet thing. The Armenian women loved their giant heels, too, but not so much the tiny skirts, fishnets, and teeny tops.
The window is now closed.
