Fermented Mare's Milk

The first time I experienced what I would come to know as the global ubiquity of Fresno, CA came during the very first day of teacher orientation before the start of my MFA program at Indiana University. We were split into small groups to discuss various problems that might arise with our students. The case my group had involved a student who’d been great for most of the semester, then began slipping and seeming morose, then, finally, handed in the poem that was attached. As three of the four of us in the group sat silently reading through the materials, the fourth among us sat back and said, “Well, at least he picked a good poem.” The rest of us looked at him for a second, then the woman running the session walked over and asked if we recognized the poem. “Of course,” said Doug, “he’s from Fresno.” The student had plagiarized a poem by Larry Levis.

In the four and a half years since then, as I learned that the Good Father Dougal was not nearly as normal as he looked that first day of orientation, it became increasingly clear that everyone who has ever done anything that lands them on television or a bookcase in my house has, at some time, been involved with Doug’s hometown of Fresno. We’ll be sitting in a bar talking over drinks and he’ll randomly look up to the television to see a baseball game and casually mention that the pitcher, batter, and plate umpire are all from Fresno. Or at least went to Fresno State. Football players, actors, soccer players, basketball stars, an absurd amount of baseball players, politicians, poets, novelists, maybe an astronaut or two, I think maybe the Tooth Fairy, and Steve Perry (“The Jewel of Fresno”)—they’ve all, at some point, spent time in Doug’s hometown. And, somehow, Doug knows all of the connections. There was a This American Life episode a few years ago in which the brilliant David Rakoff explained how it is less a matter of pride than it is simply a cultural hiccup that Canadians in America can identify, without hesitation or even full knowledge of who the person in question is, the many Canadians among us. (“So I was listening to Celine Dion—” “Canadian.” “Did you know Deryck Whibley and Avril Lavigne were—” “Canadian and Canadian.” "Captain Kirk was..." "Canadian!") Fresno, it seems, is the Canada of the US. (How that analogy functions I don’t know. I merely make it a habit to connect as much as possible to TAL, if only to make my having listened through the entire history of the program three times last year seem like less of a waste of time [beyond the obvious entertainment].)

So it came as no surprise that on Friday night, while sitting in Janika and Elham’s apartment, among Americans and Kyrgyz guests and our German and Afghan hosts, I found out that one of the women there hailed from (of course) Fresno. One of the Kyrgyz anthro students was asking Erin about graduate programs in the US. They were talking about IU and Erin mentioned how boring Bloomington is. After she trashed our former home with her usual hyperbolic bluster, I said, “Well, it’s not that boring. I mean, it’s not like…” Before I could finish the sentence with whatever perfect example of boredom I could come up with, the woman to the left of Erin, Cathy, finished it for me: “Fresno,” she said, then laughed. Curious, assuming that no one without connections to the so-called Armpit of California would possibly have dropped that particular F-bomb in casual conversation in Bishkek, I asked her where she was from. “Fresno,” she said again. Of course. I assume she will one day be famous or, at least, a professional athlete. And that Doug somehow knows her.

It must say something about Fresno that so many of its former residents are now scattered around the world. Or maybe it says something about me that I keep running into them, no matter where I am. But I think my initial theory holds true: the Fresnish are taking over. Look out for ‘em. As Doug tells it, Fresno is so fun that children will stack wood for fun or stand in their front yard throwing darts into the air to watch them land point-first into the grass, as though either of those activities could ever be considered an entertainment. The Russian tutor some friends of ours use once told them that the Russian language is so convoluted and difficult and that there are so many different words for, say, how one goes from one place to another because of all those long, cold nights spent holed up against the Russian winter with nothing else to do but play with the language.Perhaps Fresno is the same way: it is such a failure of a city (literally, in terms of layout and design—it is often in city planning textbooks as a “how not to” example) that its residents are forced to spend the hazy summer afternoons with nothing to do but repeat the same task over and again until they get good enough to take the show on the road. Doug had soccer before poetry. One of his sisters danced her way out. Cathy seems pretty skilled at litigation and will likely save the world soon at the helm of some NGO or other. And don’t even get me started on Steve Perry.

Telling you: "Fresno, it’s where it was."

From the folks over at This American Life, one of my absolute favorite things in life and about the only thing that kept me from a shooting spree while trapped in the sub-basement last year as a data entry monkey:


NEW BEGINNINGS, PART TWO: Last week Showtime made it official: we're going to produce a series for them, a television version of This American Life. We shot a pilot last year, and the full series will begin broadcasting in the fall or winter of 2006. We'll continue making the radio show while we do the TV show. Again: the radio show will stay on the air.

What we can say about the series: It doesn't look a TV newsmagazine. It's shot to look like a movie. Widescreen. Beautiful lighting. And the stories feel just like the stories on the radio show. When we started the pilot, we weren't sure that'd be possible. Now we're convinced it is. We'll give more details -- and hopefully some previews -- in the coming months.


To the inevitable haters: Wider audiences are almost always a good thing and the people who argue that point are almost always bitter and lacking in basic hygiene skills. Just saying. Plus, we can now all see just how oddly huge Ira Glass really is, even though we've been convinced by his voice on the radio for the last decade that he's about the size of Gary Coleman. So celebrate.

(Oh, and while we're celebrating things, everyone who knows the Story known as Julie should send her a virtual high five: she's in the next Ploughshares! Trust me when I tell you: huge. As Jay-Z once said, "Ladies is pimps, too...")

We received our first package today. Well, we got a slip telling us that we had received a package and tomorrow we have to walk down to the main post office to pick it up. But it's in the country. And it only took a month. So that's nice. (Oh, and thanks, Mom.)

If you are planning to send us anything, it may behoove you to review this article, especially if you were planning to send your package while in the UK.

We attended a charity gala ball on Saturday night at the National Opera and Ballet House hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce Kyrgyz Republic. Also in attendance was the US Ambassador. During the performances (among them the weirdest version of Porgy & Bess ever), Madame Ambassador looked to lack inner resources, for she was heavy bored. Her legs were in constant swing below her seat (the chairs were kind of tall but mostly she's just tiny) and at one point she took out a compact and reapplied her make-up. Erin leaned over during a particularly rowdy dance number and said, "You know what? She looks exactly like Mary Poppins. Do you think she's going to sing the country into first world status?" I had difficulty explaining to the Kyrgyz woman we were sitting with why I was laughing so hard.



*

At the bigger intersections around Bishkek there are underground passages for pedestrians to use for crossing rather than the street. These all take the form of small bazaars, some of the bigger ones with booths and full-on stores built right in. We were walking through one of these last weekend on the way home from the Osh bazaar when we saw a Kyrgyz man sitting in his guitar booth playing a song we both recognized. He was singing in Russian, but we clearly recognized the melody and the rhythm of the lyrics. We looked at each other, then at the man and when he hit the chorus and switched briefly to English, we knew what it was: Big D & the Kids Table's "Find Out." (For those of you unfamiliar, they're a ska band from Boston whose guitar player, the honorable Sean P. Rogan, is a friend from high school.) We stood there dumbfounded until he stopped playing when a customer approached him and the push of the crowd moved us away from his booth. We haven't yet been able to find him again. But I will. And I'll be wearing a Big D t-shirt when I finally talk to him.

*

In the midst of a lunchtime Scrabble battle, during which I was particularly hyper and talking in an army of different voices and dancing in my seat and loudly singing along to each and every song that played on the computer, fueled by unexpected word-making success and a fair bit of sugar, Erin turned to me and said, in a very pleasant voice, "So, you're going to go away and put on your headphones and write after this, right?"

*

I had a full-on conversation with a man at the bazaar the other day. We discussed, of course, the weather. Then he embarrassed the two women Erin was buying veggies from by introducing them as his beautiful wives. I understood it all and joked back and forth with him. As we walked away I felt like I had just split the atom or walked on the moon.

*

I cannot stop listening to a live version of Sleater-Kinney's "Words & Guitars" I accidentally downloaded a few days ago. Seriously--cannot stop. 123 times played already. Yes, I've loved those three women since high school, but this is ridiculous. Even for me. But it could be worse. I just downloaded Tom Jones' "What's New Pussycat?" and Christopher Cross' "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)". The fun's just getting going.


















*

There are rumblings of another revolution sometime in the future, as people aren't happy with the considerable lack of change following last March's Tulip Revolution. But not to worry. By all accounts, if it is to happen, it won't happen until the weather clears. Wouldn't want to revolt in the cold now, would we?

All I'm saying is, sometimes Turkish noodles, Hungarian tomatoes, Kyrgyz mushrooms, Russian cheese, a French cream sauce, and four Americans can come together to be something wonderful. I'm not talking world peace or anything, but a good Sunday dinner is something to celebrate if you ask me. No, it was not the best-looking lasagna I've ever made. No, we were not sure the cheese was going to melt. No, we weren't sure if the ground meat we bought was lamb or beef. But in the end it was damn tasty. And a tasty Central Asian lasagna is worth something in my book. Huzzah!

Janika called a little after 6:30 to ask if we wanted to join her and Elham and a few others at a hookah bar somewhere on the other side of the city. When Erin said of course we'd join them, Janika said, "Oh, you two are so spontaneous!" Little did she know we were mostly just bored. Well, we just hadn't gone out in a while, anyway. And two people can really only go head-to-head in Scrabble so many times in a week before bad things happen.

An hour later Janika and Elham met us outside our apartment and the four of us began walking through the cold in the direction of downtown. As we were walking up Togolok-Moldo, less than a block from our building, Elham pointed to the restaurant we walk by nearly every day and said, "They have really good pizza there." "Oh?" I said. "Very good pizza, yes," he said. Our night had begun.

We walked for about a half hour, first up Togolok-Moldo to Kievskya, which runs parallel to Chui on the southern side of the square (we're north of the square, so we crossed Chui and went on one more block until we hit Sovietskya). We turned left onto Sovietskya and walked for another four or five blocks, until we hit Moskovskya. Along the way, Elham continued to point out good pizza places. After the third such instance, I laughed and asked him if he was hungry. "I've been sick," he said. "I haven't been eating much for two weeks. Yes, two weeks." He then described in detail how I could get to what he considers the best pizza restaurant in Bishkek. When he'd finished, without any attempt at segue, he asked me if I am currently reading anything beside my own writing. I told him I do my best not to read what I write too often and as such I've been eating books since getting to Kyrgyzstan. I then had to explain that eating books was a figurative expression. After we got that cleared up, I told him I was in the process of re-reading One Hundred Years of Solitude, which I'd bought at The Metro (a restaurant/bar here in Bishkek catering to Westerners to such an extent that the owner sells English-language books along with the cheese burgers and Buffalo wings on the menu) because I'd read through all of the books we brought with us. "I know that book," he said. "Marquez is a very famous writer in Iran and Afghanistan. Many works translated into Persian. I have not read him, but I know the book." He then told me about a book written by a Swedish journalist who lived with an Afghan family shortly after the fall of the Taliban. "The man of the family she lived with tried to sue her, but he is wrong. I see my family in some of her writing. You will borrow it soon."

Shortly afterward, we arrived at the park where we were to meet Yelena, a Kyrgyz Anthro student at AUCA, one of her friends, and Rizza, another Afghani student. Rizza showed up first. He came into the park from the street sort of behind us, so that we didn't see him coming. I turned around and saw him slowly approaching, his hood up and pulled tight around his head. I couldn't see his face. Elham called out to him when he saw him--they're former roommates. Rizza turned to Erin first and introduced himself and they shook hands. I said, "You're Rizza?" "Yes," he said. "Rizza." "Wow," I said, every Wu Tang song ever released simultaneously running through my head. I told him my name and shook his hand, wondering if Ol' Dirty Bastard transcended cultures.

Shortly after Yelena and her friend showed up and we began walking to the hookah bar, a place we found out when we got there was called Cafe Charisma. How can you go wrong, really? Yelena ordered some peach tobacco and we all got settled in with some draft beer and commenced discussing whatever it is seven people talk about when sitting around a table smoking a hookah and drinking beer. Mostly our discussions centered around language. There were seven different languages being spoken around the table--English, Russian, Kyrgyz, Persian, Arabic, French, and German. Not too bad. Really what we were doing was swapping vulgarities. As a result, Erin and I now know a solid handful of choice expressions that may come in handy the next time some kid rams a hand truck into my leg at the big bazaar (an event that occurs with a disturbing frequency, actually). After we'd been there long enough to drink our half-litre Amstel Lights, Janika decided she was hungry. Without much by way of hesitation, she ordered the "assorted" pizza for her and Elham to split. The choices for pizza were cheese, meat, and assorted, which seemed to be meat and cheese when it arrived, which led me to ask the obvious, "But doesn't the meat have cheese on it." The answer was confusing and no one was really certain of the answer, so I let it drop and sucked at the hookah nozzle as a way to divert my focus.

"You can blow smoke rings!" It is one of the few skills I possess in life and Yelena seemed genuinely amazed. Far, far too much time was then spent with me trying to teach everyone at the table how to blow smoke rings, which mostly amounted to me opening my mouth as wide as possible and trying to talk with the tip of my tongue stuck to the bottom of my mouth. That everyone else's mouths were open and we were all leaning across the table and peering inside one another's mouth and giggling didn't help matters any. Luckily, we weren't really near any of the other customers. Finally tired of failing to blow a smoke ring, Yelena announced that we were leaving and going to a dance club near the Hyatt called Fire & Ice. "It's the night where women get in free," she said. "But you mens have to pay."

We got to Fire & Ice about forty minutes later, losing The RZA and Yelena's friend along the way (I don't know his name...sorry). Yelena and Janika, having just spent the last two weeks in Osh with Yelena's family and forging a rather fierce friendship, spent the long walk more or less reenacting the Flying Circus "Ministry of Silly Walks" skit and generally finding ways to make the five of us giggle and forget we were so cold. At one point the two of them ran up half a block ahead of us and ducked into a doorway. When Elham, E, and I reached them, they very seductively asked, "Natasha? You need Natasha?" How 'bout a date?" It was a callback to a rather disturbing story I had elicited from Yelena earlier. I had learned a few weeks ago that the Kyrgyz word for prostitute is natasha. Or so I thought. When I asked Yelena at Cafe Charisma, she told me it was the Turkish work for prostitute and then went in to a story about being in Istanbul when she was younger (she's only 18 now) and being constantly pestered by men asking her "Natasha? You natasha?" She laughed as she told the story, Janika, Erin, and me exchanging worried looks. The proposition on the street by Janika and Yelena somehow worked to erase all of that and I found myself laughing in a very loud, high pitched way, the sort of laugh that attracts dogs and dirty looks.

A few minutes later, the five of us still laughing against the cold, Elham pointed up to a strip of neon in the first floor of a long building and said, "That's my favorite restaurant in Bishkek." Erin read the sigh aloud--"MacBurger"--and asked, "Really?" "Yes," he said, "it is a wonderful place. Good food, the service is very attentive, and I like their menu. Much more than just the MacBurger. They also have pizza." Of course they do.

Fir & Ice was around the corner from the Hyatt and completely empty when we got there. The women were free, but Elham and I each had to pay a 250 som cover--a little over six dollars, which is more than we usually spend on food for an entire week. The room was dark, a wide rectangular dance floor surrounded on two sides by tables and chairs, one side by a low stage and a dj booth, and stretching along the wall by the door we'd come in, the bar. We sat in the back beneath a neon sign and were quickly brought menus, which we read by the light of Janika's cell phone. Just as the waitress was coming back to the table, Janika asked if anyone was hungry. "I could eat," I said. "Pizza?" she asked. "Of course," I said. "Yes," said Yelena, "I would like some pizza." We ordered two large pizzas, one with grilled chicken and mushrooms and another called the cheese burger pie, which had some ground meat (we couldn't decide if it was lamb or beef) and bacon and a few other tasty things.

Our drinks came and Yelena told a story about making babies out of mud when she was a little girl, dressing them in newspaper dresses, and marrying them off to the boys in the neighborhood. "We'd make little cakes and breads out of mud to serve the guests," she said. Janika told a story about her and her friends making 'witch's brews' when they were little, pots of mud and leaves and dirt in rain water. I thought about the "Yuck Juice" Brian Schneider and I used to hide in the bushes to ferment, but before I could share, our pizza came. As the waitress put the pizzas down on the table the PA system began to sing Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me... It was the second time we'd heard the song since leaving the house. It wouldn't be the last for the night. A few minutes later Janika said, "This is the best pizza I've had in Bishkek." I looked up at the wall above us, where a neon stripper swung around a pole in an endless arc beside a poster proclaiming the United Colors of Benetton. The pizza was delicious, she was right. For the next few hours we danced to horrible American hip-hop (why is 50 Cent one of our biggest exports? Hell, why is 50 popular? The man can't rhyme and his voice is annoying. Getting shot nine times and not dying is not by itself enough to warrant global fame.) and when we finally left we found the streets empty, the sky clear, and the moon huge above us.

"In my village," Elham said, "the moon would be the only light at night. I found it very comforting to be out late at night there."

"I could hear the water from almost everywhere at night," I said. "Or at least smell it." And then, as we passed the Japanese Embassy and the shuddered convenience store on the corner beside our building, more to myself than anyone else, spurred on by the drinking and the cold, by having skipped a proper dinner, maybe by the inexplicable amount of blood in the bathroom at Fire & Ice, definitely by Elham's odd little food tour of Bishkek, "And we can get pizza delivered more or less 24 hours a day."

There was a hole in the center of that puzzle that for about a week Erin and I got totally sucked into. A faux-wood black hole. You see, it's been cold. Not just your average it's January so I'd better break out the goose down kind of cold. It's more of the sort where it's only been above zero for a couple hours every day this week. And our apartment is surrounded on all sides by outside--street side in the front, courtyard in the back, and the stairwell banging up against the front door and the bathroom and bedroom walls, with its broken windows and always-open door, is essentially outside too. And we've got a lot of big, floor-to-ceiling windows. So, even though the radiators are doing some good work (they've been too hot to touch for over a week), the apartment's been so cold that we've been sleeping wearing layers and socks and huddled in a mass in the middle of the bed and frequently finding ourselves sitting at the kitchen table for multi-hour stretches building a puzzle while the oven blows at full blast with its door hanging open. It's warmed up some--last night it was 7 degrees when we went to bed and right now, at noon, it's up to almost 20. We were told by our Russian tutor that the first three weeks of January are typically the coldest of the year. So, one down.

And we've seen a lot of Jarken, our Russian sage, in the last week as well. We had a lesson every day this week. I slept for sixteen hours on Thursday. Those two things may not have a direct relationship, but I like to think they do.

But New Year's, this was meant to be about New Year's. Right.

The decorations went up weeks in advance--all of the government buildings are draped in multi-colored banners, all of them proclaiming the same screaming message, "S'novum godum!" Happy New Year! Many have dogs on them as well, as 2006 in the Chinese calendar is the year of the dog. So, bright colors and giant pictures of dogs all over the city. It could be worse. New Year also brings out what to my eyes look like Christmas trees, Santa Claus, and his young, hot, blue-clad niece. The Western Christmas clap-trap are used here (and, as far as I can tell from watching Russian television--especially the Russian version of The Nanny--in Russia as well) as New Year's props. There are trees for the New Year, a bearded fat man in red handing out New Year gifts, and (in my opinion, a brilliant addition to the Western traditions) what Erin has begun calling the Ice Princess: a woman--only young and physically gifted, so to speak, in the many renditions we've seen--in a pale blue satin outfit similar to Santa's, only involving a short skirt and a lower neckline on the jacket. She is everywhere Santa is, though Santa is not Santa, he is Grandpa New Year (or something close to that). I have no idea what the woman in blue is called. Sorry.

The week leading up to New Year's Eve was filled with strangers coming up to us on the street to shake our hands and wish us a happy new year. Men in the bazaar, women on the street, a drunk on the stairwell in our apartment building who was inexplicably carrying a conch as he swerved down the stairs mumbling gibberish in English and Russian in some attempt to befriend me. All of them grabbed our hands and wished us Happy New Year. It is the biggest holiday of the year, full of fireworks, vodka, and champagne. Nooruz, the Muslim New Year, is the other big day, but we're told the January one beats out the March one in Kyrgyzstan. "We're not very good Muslims," said our friend Aida. She was holding a glass of champagne at the time. Good point, I'd say.

Aida was the woman assigned to us by the university when we arrived in Bishkek--she picked us up at the airport, shuttled us around, helped us shop, gave us a few essential Russian lessons during our first few days ("Aida, how do you say sorry? How about still water so I can drink something other than sparkling water? Ok, what about half kilo?"), and was our all-around Bishkek sherpa for a few days. On the Wednesday between Christmas and New Year's she took us to the New Year's party thrown by the university for faculty and staff. When we got there we found tables full of food, plates of salads laid beside the next until they were nearly falling off the table. "Choose three," Aida said. "Each." We did as we were told. Once the lights dropped and the festivities officially got under way, I was handed bottle after bottle of champagne and wine to open ("Dan, you are only man at table. You must open bottles.") and the toasts got rolling. The Kyrgyz love toasts, long, continuous, non-stop toasts. It was the first alcohol I'd had since Armenia and I got drunk. So drunk I danced for over an hour. Of course, that very likely would have happened one way or another, as Erin and I were both dragged onto the dance floor by Aida and others and any time we made the slightest move in the direction of the table we were grabbed again and moved back onto the dance floor. Everyone was dancing, young and old, drunk and sober (though I'm not sure how many were among the latter), screaming and whistling. There were dance competitions, sweaty men doing Russian folk dancing, younger Kyrgyz women dancing in serpentine wiggles all over the floor, visiting professors doing the white man's over-bite, administrators with their arms over their head screaming and shuffling their feet in a rhythmical sort of running-in-place. All of this was done to the worst pop music America and Britain have offered the world over the past twenty years. It was brilliant.

Before that, though, before the dance and the over-the-top drum and bass, there was more food, more drinking, and live entertainment. First was a woman in a fairy costume who entered the room to the Star Wars theme song. Why she did so was never explained. With her came a pair of clowns (and a tiny trained dog!) who made audience members put down their forks and embarrass themselves for the benefit of the rest of us. Nikolai, the man who found our apartment and organized our being here, got the worst of it--he was made to run through a series of obstacles, act as a human backboard for some ad-hoc clown basketball, and then, blindfolded, was spun around a few times then made to walk through another series of obstacles and lay a kiss on someone sitting under the big tree in the center of the room. When he took off his blindfold it was the Ice Princess sitting there. But she had replaced the Vice President who'd been sitting there only seconds before. It was very amusing--and odd--to say the least. After the Star Wars Fairy Princess came a magician. He entered wearing a Reaper costume surrounded by a group of dancing women dressed as showgirls--tiny tops, sequence, headdress and all. There was quite a bit of mystery surrounding him for quite a while, as the women danced around him for many minutes and he just posed in his black robes. He finally revealed himself and went on to perform not-terribly-impressive tricks, the sort of tricks I know I can't do but I'm certain I could master in an afternoon if I were to buy a beginner's magic trick set at Toys R Us--he pulled fake flowers from a wand, magically connected and unconnected metal rings, and then, as his finale, he draped AUCA's Vice President in a black sheet and magically removed his sportcoat. The seams on his tricks were showing but we were all drunk enough by then to clap wildly. Next came a trio of Kyrgyz break dancers. If these three are any indication, there are some ridiculous break dancers in Bishkek. I'll leave it at that. We left hours later, sweaty and tired and still a little drunk and were happy for the cold walk home, for the unexpectedly great time we had, for the salad forced upon us with the weirdest texture of anything we'd ever put in our mouths up to that point, the one with pomegranate seeds on top and the eggy-mayonnaisey custard beneath it shaped into a ring and drizzled on top with some mysterious green goo. We were thankful for all of it.

The rest of the week passed uneventfully. We walked the city that Friday afternoon for hours, ate at the Metro, a bar/restaurant owned by a British guy and catering primarily to Western ex-pats. We walked down to the big bookstore and bought the puzzle we finished last night (and I bought a hardback copy of Absalom, Absalom with an introduction in Russian), and visited the Beta Store yet again. New Year's Eve we stayed in, too cold and, as always, a bit too weary of large drunken crowds to want to venture down to the main square to watch fireworks and watch out for the pick-pockets we keep being warned about. We started the puzzle and watched Beverly Hills Cop 3 on television, as it was unexpectedly in English. Right around midnight the world began to explode. It would seem everyone in Bishkek has a stockpile of fireworks under his bed. We'd seen the tables at the bazaars but I'd only seen young boys blowing off salutes and bottle rockets and hadn't seen anyone else buying anything. I was wrong. For the next three hours the entire city sky was lit in red and green and white flashes the equal of any professional fireworks display I've ever seen. It apparently pays to be neighboring the birthplace of fireworks. Our neighbors put on a pretty good show in the courtyard beneath our bedroom window, sending up giant screaming rosettes of color and flying saucers of sparks and everything else I've come to expect from drunken undergraduates on the Fourth of July in Bloomington. And then some. We opened the window to take some pictures and that's when the fist sign of the real cold came in. I could see ribbons of steam when I exhaled through my nose, which is never a good sign. And even with a coat on I could only stand to have the window open for a couple of pictures. S'novum godum, here's a cold reminder that Siberia's just over those mountains! In the meantime, watch the pretty colors...

I'll get around to some actual descriptions and stories of New Year's in Bishkek soon, but for now I just wanted to let you all know that I am certain 2006 will be a great year. My certainty is based entirely on the fact that this was posted on this week's Post Secret. Proof enough in my book.

Happy New Year, kids.