Fermented Mare's Milk

It's been really warm here the last few weeks. For a while there it was in the 60s on a regular basis. It's cooled down some, but it's still getting up into the 40s during the day on a pretty regular basis, and after the -10 degree January we had, 40 feels downright tropical. Even when we woke up on Sunday morning to find it had snowed during the night, we went outside and found it was oddly warm. I know, I know, most of you are still digging your way out from under all the snow last week and we're in between Siberia and people freezing to death in Moscow all winter and I'm walking around in a Speedo and cowboy boots shooting finger guns at everyone I pass and saying "Ciao" in my best Sean Connery-as-James Bond-mocking an Italian hipster voice. Well, plthththth! Central Asia is where it's at. Give it up for Global Warming! High five!

Anyway, as a result of all the happy sunshine and ice-free sidewalks, I've been doing a lot of wandering around the city. It's a good city for walking, with big sidewalks everywhere, parks every couple blocks, lots of vegetation everywhere (mostly still on the dormant side, though, so I've been using my imagination, but lemme tell ya: I got me a purdy darn good imagination), and a big downtown area full of interesting (ie: new to me) things to look at.

It was after such a stroll a couple of days ago that I came home to find the door of the security booth at the (now-infamous to our loyal readers) Japanese Embassy next to our building wide open. Their closed-circuit tv was still on, the phone was blinking to mark lines in use, there was a coat hanging on the hook inside the door. But the security guard was nowhere to be seen. There didn't seem to be any commotion at the embassy--as usual, not much happening at all, in fact--so I shrugged and rounded the corner toward the apartment.

And then I found the guard. He was dressed in the familiar Kyrgyz army uniform and very slowly strolling toward me up the little driveway between the embassy and our building, his hands clasped behind his back and his face turned up to the sun. When he saw me he stopped. "Hello," he said, in Russian. "How are you?"

"I'm fine, thank you," I said. "How are you?"

"Oh," he said. "I'm very good. It is a perfect day, yes? A perfect day."

"Yes," I said. "A perfect day."

"Have you been at work? Or are you a student?"

"I was strolling. I...I work now. I write. I am a writer." [My inability to nail down the future tense has left me more than a couple times sounding annoyingly like Bill Murray in What About Bob?: "I'm sailing! I'm a sailor! I sail!"]

"Very good, very good," he said, adding, "It is a perfect day." Then he smiled at me, nodded, and walked on, looking back up at the sky, his hands clasped again behind his back.

So it turns out that while the Japanese Embassy seems to maybe be a front for some sort of toxic storage facility or an elaborate facade for the bunker Steve Guttenberg's been hiding out in since 3 Men & a Little Lady oh so long ago, they do employ at least one really wonderful guard harboring an untapped kinship with Lou Reed. It also turns out that learning the verb 'to stroll' does in fact come in handy, which is just as amazing to me, quite frankly.