Fermented Mare's Milk

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...