Fermented Mare's Milk

A proper post will hopefully happen tomorrow. In the meantime, there are more new photos up over at Flickr.

In the news:

Alpine Skiing: As many competitors -- 41 -- failed to finish (DNF, DNS or DQ) in the men's giant slalom as actually finished the race. But, in the end, Kyrgyz skier Ivan Borisov, 26, finished 41st. His time after two runs was 3:37.10 -- more than a minute behind the gold medallist and a full half-minute behind the next-to-last finisher, and can be attributed to a very poor first run (his second run was much more in line with the rest of the field, while still last). Borisov is Kyrgyzstan's lone athlete at these Games.

After an exhaustive search (that is to say, I was exhausted), I cannot find a picture of this guy anywhere. It seems that coming from a country that elicits the same sort of confused look from most Westerners as a dog who's just been shown a card trick and finishing last in your Olympic event does not afford you good PR. Too bad. I've tried to convince Erin to write some money into her next grant application to get this guy some screen time, but she seems resistant for some reason.



Thanks Danit! (I'm 'delurking' you once and for all!)

Dear Faculty and Staff!

We remind you that February 23, Fatherland Defender Day, will be a day off for the AUCA faculty and staff, when according to academic calendar there will be no classes on this day.

We wish to acknowledge the great historical contributions represented by the defenders of the fatherland holiday and to extend congratulations to our gentleman colleagues!

Sincerely,
HRD

On behalf of the gentlemen colleagues, let me take this opportunity to say thank you. It's tough work, but we defend as we go. A little here and a little there keeps the Fatherland in good defense. We're happy to anonymously defend, but we do appreciate the recognition. There have been some familiar rumblings lately along the lines of the best defense is a strong offense. Well, we wouldn't know about that. As is implied in your message, we are defenders, not offenders. As far as we can see, the best defense is very simply a strong defense. We adapt well to attack, but we dislike change. But I digress. Again, thank you for your kind words. We'll be sure to extend the same good cheer to you lady colleagues on March 8, when we again take a day away from work in order to celebrate the national holiday that is Woman's Day. In the meantime, watch your back. We've got a Fatherland to defend!

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.

There are now a handful of pictures up over on our Flickr page (link on the left) from last Saturday's trip to Chong Tash with the Anthropology club and a few faculty members. For a week leading up to the trip, all we heard when we ran into any of the organizers (Yelena, Janika, others...) was "You will come with us when we go to the mountains? It will be very fun. We will build the fire and eat the food and play the games. You will come to the mountains. Okay." (For the record, there are no definitive articles in either Russian or Kyrgyz, so when speaking English, people tend to toss them around like sprinkles on soft serve.) We did go. And the fire was built. And the games were played.

Highlight: during the Kyrgyz version of Red Rover, one of the students pointed at Erin and the male student she was holding hands with in their Rover line and said, "I will go there. He is drunk and she is weak." Needless to say, he wound up on his ass. Very funny.

And E & I went on a good long hike to the top of a lesser peak, which was also fun and made the view you see above possible. Plus we Superman-ed our way down the top few hundred yards on the way back. Face-first body surfing-esque sledding a couple miles above sea level. Brilliant way to spend a Saturday afternoon. Especially when you build the fire and eat the food and play the games...

I went to the central post office this afternoon to pick up a package my mother had sent and, upon showing the woman at the pick-up window my passport, we had the following exchange (in Russian):

Her [pointing to my passport picture, in which my head is shaved and I look oddly like a bullfrog, fat and squat, partly due to camera angle, partly do to my being fat and squat at the time of the photo]: This is you?

Me: Yes, that is me.

Her: Really?

Me: Yes, really. It is a picture of me. It is my passport.

Her: This is not a joke? I don't believe you. It looks nothing like you.

Me: I understand. I look different now. It is not a joke. No joke. Really. It is me.

Her: Well...okay.

We had that conversation, in various forms, three separate times in the twenty minutes I was there. It was all surreal and wonderfully hilarious to me. She kept holding up my passport in front of her and looking from it to me and back and forth, all the while making a face like she was being duped. I finally showed her my AUCA ID, which has a picture on it taken right after we got here, and she finally believed me. It was like a before, during, after thing. I have hair now (real, honest to Buddha, bangs-over-my-eyebrows, run-your-fingers-through-it hair!) and, well, I've lost a lot of weight since we've been here. Which is a good thing, obviously, as looking like a bullfrog is not exactly a life goal, you know?

I may have mentioned this in a previous post (I think I have but I'm not up to the task of seeking it out), but our friend Elham has taken it upon himself to educate Erin and me about his home country of Afghanistan. This was all prompted by my honestly telling him that aside from an ingrained image of the Buddha statues at Bamiyan being destroyed by the Taliban and my home country's recent carpet bombing of his, I was fairly ignorant when it came to Afghanistan. Elham happily began a campaign to eradicate that ignorance and I have happily accepted.

The first step on this road was an assignment of Persian poets and authors for me to seek out and read. I have complied as best I can with the internet as my only source for good translations (which are remarkably scarce, it seems). We then moved on to a two hour disquisition* on the political history of the country, delivered over dessert in our kitchen on Christmas. Roya, Elham's girlfriend and fellow Afghan (though she is from Kabul, not a rural village as Elham is from--an important difference when talking about Afghanistan's recent history), was also there, frequently correcting his take on things and offering her decidedly different take on things (think: Gender and the Taliban 101).

In the month or so since then, he has been pressing books on us, pointing out news stories, and telling us tales about his time working as a stringer for the BBC Persian service in Kabul. All of these stories keep coming back to two things: (1) the southern border with Pakistan and how just driving through there fills his proverbial shorts with dread pudding ("It's insane--you can be on a bus on the way into Pakistan, thinking you're getting there no problems, then all of a sudden the bus gets sold to someone standing on the side of the road with a machine gun and you're left standing there with no way to keep going but to walk. And you don't want to walk. It is the most dangerous place on Earth. Yes. Most dangerous.") and (2) how the Pashtoon language is downright offensive to the ears (Elham is from the north-central part of Afghanistan, where a dialect of Persian/Farsi is spoken; Pashtoon is the language spoken by the Pashtoon tribes from the south, the same tribes that spawned the Taliban. Elham is a bit of a snob when it comes to the Pashtoon.*)

Last week I finished reading, at Elham's urging, Asne Seierstad's The Bookseller of Kabul, a Swedish journalist's account of life with a 'middle class'* Afghan family immediately following the fall of the Taliban. Elham advertised it thusly (I'm paraphrasing): 'While it is written from a tainted perspective and therefore full of holes and while there are some ethically sketchy things reported by the author, it is clearly an honest account of a certain type of life in Afghanistan, one in which I can very easily see my own family and those of families I know.' And so it was. The book is nearly four years old at this point and was a huge international hit when it was published and the topic of countless reviews, articles, critiques, what have you, so I'll save you from too much on the subject. I will say this, however: it is depressing as hell. And infuriating. The level of humanity systematically stripped from the members of the Khan family--male and female both, though certainly not in equal measure--is astounding. I went into the book with a certain sense of understanding for the horrors of life under the Taliban, some outsider's understanding of life as a woman in an [fundamental]* Islamic society, but that sliver of understanding was blown wide open and shown to be just as ignorant as my other confessions in regard to Afghanistan. Yes, the perspective I was getting was equally that of an outsider, but it at least had the weight of having lived there. And the nodding consent of every Afghan student I've met here, all of whom have told me how remarkably honest and true the book strikes them.*

I finished the book on Thursday. On Saturday, we went to the mountains with the Anthropology students (more on that soon...we forgot to bring the pictures with us today and, well, pictures are essential). We hiked, played games, ate, stood around a fire, went sledding, ate some more. It was a long day and very tiring in that way that having a long day of fun outside can be tiring. When we got back to Bishkek and were walking home with Janika (you'll remember her as Elham's German roommate and maker of the best potato salad on earth), we decided that she and Elham would come to our flat for dinner and some movies. It was all the excitement any of us could think about handling that night. Erin made a rather delicious chicken soup with lagman noodles (see her recent post on the NY Times article on Central Asian food if you want to get your lagman learn on) and Elham and Janika brought over a few beers and some movies and we ate and watched. We first watched Equilibrium, starring Christian Bale, a movie Janika loves to which I say, ahn. A bit too on the nose for me, but damned entertaining to watch--the final battle scene(s) rival the end of the first Matrix for all around bullet-riddled good times. After that, though, Elham said, "Let's watch Osama. It is short and it is early. We'll watch it, yes?" Yes, we'll watch it, we all said.

Whereas The Bookseller of Kabul is the sort of depressing/infuriating that makes you want to take to the streets and demand justice of...well, someone, Osama is the sort of depressing/infuriating that makes you want to blow up the whole world and once and for all exterminate this virus with shoes we so affectionately call humans. Or at least the men. At the very least. All of us. Gotta go. Sorry. There's probably enough sperm kicking around in the various donor programs of the world to get through another generation or two and I'm sure someone could devise a program to extract new bits of DNA from the male offspring not butchered upon birth, but otherwise, not needed. If you're not familiar with Osama, as I wasn't, it was the first film made in Afghanistan (by an Afghan, I assume it is worth noting) after the fall of the Taliban. It is the story of a girl who disguises herself (there seems a bit too much agency in that construction, but "forced to disguise herself" also seems wrong) as a boy in order to work to support her family. This comes after the hospital where her mother works is closed by the Taliban. Her father and uncles have all been killed in the decades of civil war that preceded the Taliban, so without a man, well, you know. Needless to say, there is no happy ending here. The movie left a feeling in the pit of my stomach akin to the time I watched a dog get hit by a car on a freeway. Horrible analogy, maybe, but that's what I got. Erin got up and vomited. That may have more to do with her being a bit sick, but I think the sentiment was spot-on.

After the movie I joked to Elham that "I was raised Catholic. I've got enough guilt already. Now with this and The Bookseller, there's no way I don't kill myself soon." "Ah," he said, "but the country is much, much different now. Very safe. And women are, well, it's getting better." And then, as he was leaving, he added, "Except for the south. And the Pashtoon language. So horrible that language."



*For those of you possibly having difficulty following along here, that was a bit of sarcasm. What we actually had was a lively two hour discussion full of give and take and intellectual poking and prodding on both sides. But Elham tends to talk at length whenever he talks about anything. A simple "What did you do for lunch today?" could take him ten minutes to answer. And this has nothing to do with the language issue. He's just a bit long-winded. My going with "two hour disquisition" instead of "two hour conversation" is a stylistic thing. It's funnier to me. Mostly because the word disquisition is ridiculous to my ear. And it's important, from my perspective, that there's laughter here. To quote the great Q-Tip, "...I guess I laugh to keep from crying / So much going on, people killing, people dying..." There have been complaints lately along the lines of my being too negative. So I'm explaining. What to you is negative is very likely to me funny. That's just how I do.

*Seriously. He once generally referred to the Pashtoon as "unevolved barbarians." There's a bit of pent-up hostility is all I'm saying.

*Middle class being, of course, a hugely relative term in reference to Afghanistan.

*The line between fundamentalist and not is a bit blurry, to say the least, especially when looking at societal impacts on family dynamics. That is, nothing is better for the women of the family following the fall of the Taliban. The only real change is that they maybe don't have to wear the burka anymore and they now have dreams of doing something with their lives other than being sold to the highest bidder for a life of slavery in their new husband's house. And, it maybe goes without saying, those dreams are more or less across the board shattered. Which, it would seem, make reality that much more gruesome and oppressive.

*The Kite Runner, on the other hand, seems to be just as equally reviled by the Afghan students we know. As Elham put it, "It's just, you know, an old Afghanistan, completely out of touch with today. And the author is in London or New York or something. Not good."

Confession: I envy the foreign language voice-over man. Envy and love him. He is a king among the ranks of forgotten talent needed to make a quality movie. We've all cheered on the Best Boy or the Grip. Those cheers are cliche by this point, as tired as Lewinski jokes! Now is the time to cheer the man who puts his brilliant monotone stamp on everything I see on Russian television. For he is a great man. And, as far as I can tell, there's only one of him.

I think we can all agree that it takes a fair amount of talent and an enviable degree of patience to translate a film's every line of dialogue into not only another language, but a distinct monotone as well. It is especially remarkable on lesser-known films. When we see any of the Star Wars movies or anything with Jean-Claude van Damme (trust me: HUGE here...last night we a had a double feature on two separate channels - four times the van Damme! four times the ham-fisted, round-housing fun!), there is a separate voice actor for each character...or at least they take the time to have one of the men talk in falsetto for any of the little kids' parts (sadly, not kidding). But not so much with the less-huge films, the ones that come on and we say, "Huh, I vaguely remember this being on HBO when I was eight, but I thought that that one actress from Charles in Charge or whatever was in it...Huh, guess not." When it's one of those films, there's usually just one guy doing all the voice-work. And that's when it gets fun. And confusing as hell. It's hard enough to follow along when your Russian is on par with a four year old and you only know two tenses and three cases, but when every single character in the film sounds exactly the same and there isn't even a pause between separate characters speaking, well, you can imagine. Sometimes we get lucky and there's a bit of lag-time between the over-dub and the English. This allows for about a third of the movie to be in English, which turns out to be just enough to be confusing. Cinderella Man was like that. For a while I thought Russell Crowe and Paul Giamotti were going to make out and the movie was going to be a lot better, but I was eventually proved wrong and it turned out that it was, in fact, just a shlocky boxing movie made by Ron Howard that will likely earn itself an undeserved Best Picture nod. Damn.

But last night (when we allowed ourselves to be pulled away from the glory that is a van Damme-a-thon) we were rewarded with the greatest moment in over-dub history. Initially, my hopes for such brilliance were not high. We were, afterall, watching Scary Movie 3. (Before you judge me, keep the following in mind: my pop culture intake these days is, at best, anemic. Not long ago I said in all seriousness that I was willing to watch a Rob Schneider marathon. And I meant it. So long as I could watch the movies in English and not feel like watching them was akin to taking a test.) Scary Movie 3, if you're not familiar with it, is among the more obscure, subtle comedies favored by the more world-weary and socially-tortured suburban twelve year-olds and had been likened by some critics (or, well, this critic) as "a slightly less intelligent Hot Shots Part Deux, but without the crucial underpinnings of the later Police Academy outings that really made HSPD hold up as a favorite among more discerning potheads." It is a broad slapstick without any intent in its making other to make us laugh, moving through one blockbuster spoof to the next faster than an SNL table read. (To cement this point, in case we had somehow missed it, the movie casts Leslie Nielsen as the US president. 'Nuff said.)

But where the movie really took off, over-dub-wise, was during the 8 Mile-ripping rap battle spoof, which pits one of the main characters against Fat Joe . I haven't the slightest idea if any of this is even in the ballpark of funny in English or if the rhymes are worth listening to (even if just for laugh factor). But in Russian! Holy Sweet Valley High is it good in Russian. While the movie was "good enough" to warrant more than one voice-actor, it didn't have the pull for more than one for each of our two standardized sexes. So all of the male parts were done by the same familiar droning star of Moscow's Dubwood, Mr. Monotonous Russian Guy. Trust me when I tell you that this made the rap battle straight genius. Some highlights:

English: Awwwwwwwww yeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaah!
Russian: Da.

English: Y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-y-yeah...
Russian: D-D-D-D-Da.

English: [something that I think sounded as though it included the words whack and I'm gonna make you my bitch]
Russian: Plo-ha [bad]...something something Jeena [something something wife...(which, well, yikes!)]

There were other brilliant moments, but I was too busy laughing at them to write them down or even effectively remember them. At some point Fat Joe says something really fast (I couldn't hear it under the Russian) that actually made the voice-over guy stutter. Cross-cultural entertainment doesn't get much better than this. Especially when coupled with four (4!) Jean-Claude van Damme movies in one night. I mean, can you imagine? I need a nap just from thinking about it.


(On a side note: I just spent a little bit trying to find a still photo of the rap battle from Scary Movie 3 without luck. The majority of the pictures that seem to be online from the movie involve either Pam Anderson's breasts or Jenny McCarthy's severed head. So that's nice.)