Fermented Mare's Milk

One Last List

2006-05-14T17:11:00.000+06:00

Number of hours left in Bishkek: 10

Number of hours of travel to follow: 27

Time in Bishkek when we leave: 6:35 am, Monday

Time in Boston when we arrive: 8:05 pm, Monday

Number of hits on this page since November: just south of 5,000

Estimated amount of mutton eaten since November, in kilograms: 23,456,789

Number of bags packed and waiting in our living room: 7

Estimated collective weight of said bags, in kilograms: 150

Estimated percentage of that weight caused by gifts and souvenirs: 87

Estimated percentage of that weight caused by shoes and clothes: < 1

Number of bags given this morning to a charity: 11

Estimated percentage of the donations involving clothing and shoes: 92

Number of pairs of underwear staying behind in the Bishkek trash: 14

Number of pairs of socks staying behind in Bishkek's trash: 26

Most unexpected addiction to crop up since November: Merinda orange soda

Number of times I will again have to "sleep" in the bed in our apartment: 0

Level of my glee on realizing that fact this morning, on a level of 1 to 10: 9.5

Number of hours between landing in Boston and my first massage appointment: 19

Estimated enjoyment factor of said massage, on a scale of 1 to 10: 11

Length of layover at Heathrow, in hours: 6

How said layover will be spent: basking in the glow of a pregnant friend

Number of years since last seeing said friend: 7

Number of children who have cried because I am leaving Bishkek: 1

Number of adults who have cried because I am leaving Bishkek: 0

Song listened to most while in Bishkek, according to iTunes stats: "Strange," Patsy Cline

How much that stat shocks me, on a scale of 1 to 10: 8.5

Number of potential rental properties we are already scheduled to visit next week: 11

Number of dogs I've stopped to pet in Bishkek since November: 987

Number of weeks still between me and seeing my dogs: 2

Desire to end this list, on a scale of 1 to 10: 9.5

Number of posts remaining on this blog: > 2 (so stay tuned...)

This Isn't an Ending, Even Though It Looks Like an Ending

2006-05-12T01:19:00.000+06:00

You remember Ryspek, right? From a couple weeks ago? The one on trial for a triple murder charge who recently won an open seat on Parliament? Yeah, you remember Ryspek.

Well, he's been murdered. It happened yesterday afternoon as he was coming out of a mosque in a village outside of Bishkek. According to reports, he was shot a number of times in the head and chest by three men in a dark Audi who were all wearing masks. It was reported that the masked men were firing Kalashnikov submachine guns. When the Audi was found earlier today in Bishkek, there were three Kalashnikovs in the trunk. None of Ryspek's guards were wounded and they didn't get off any shots at the masked men in the Audi. At least two students near the entrance to the mosque were shot and wounded, though. Following the shooting, his guards put Ryspek's body into his car and drove him to his family's home in Cholponata, forcing the police to search nearby hospitals, morgues, and the trunks of many cars trying to locate the body. When his body arrived home, a man "close to the family" made a statement confirming Ryspek's murder and his subsequent travels. The body was reportedly examined by a physician but no officials ever saw it, nor will they, as he was buried this afternoon.

Wanna play conspiracy theory? C'mon, it'll be fun...

So, three men in a moving vehicle fired 30-31 shots (according to the number of shells recovered on the scene) from submachine guns and managed to hit only their intended target and innocent bystanders located directly behind the target. The armed henchmen on either side of the target failed to get off even a single round but then managed to get the body into their car and away from the scene before anyone could id the body or ask questions. No officials saw the body and no evidence outside of the guns has been recovered from the car driven by the shooters.

If I could figure out any reason at all for the US to be involved, I'd throw out the CIA just for fun. But, alas, I'm not that clever. But lemme ax ya this: is he really dead? I mean, if you were a newly-elected Parliamentarian with a triple murder charge still hanging over your head and a fairly sizable chunk of the population more than a little pissed off at you, wouldn't you maybe want a little vacation time? Or a lot? Say, the rest of your life? No, probably not. But it'd be a better story if it worked out that way. If his family suddenly moves to some obscure South Pacific island, I'll be the first to scream I told you so! In the meantime, we'll have to simply enjoy the fact that his murder case was today suspended indefinitely. Which, I guess, is something. We'll also have to agree with the head of the Bishkek city police department, who "thinks that the murder of [Ryspek] Akmatbaev is a result of criminal showdowns. Where do you see politics here? [he asks]." [from AKIPress] But, Mr. Police Chief, what about the fact that the sitting Prime Minister is both a political opponent of Ryspek's and a known criminal boss himself. And that PM Kulov was also very loudly accused of having Ryspek's younger brother murdered last fall during a prison riot. What about that? Not political. Right. Sorry. The thing is, it's virtually impossible to even guess at who could have done this -- there are just too many options.

I don't know what happens now. There will be another election soon, I assume. And the rise of the civil society movement may increase. It is likely that other officials, President Bakiev included, will join with the police chief in wondering where the political motivation is in this. And that will pretty much swing the country right back around to where it was last fall, before this whole thing got going. Only there are now more dead bodies. And a man with a hole in his head.

And on that note, I go to bed. Which I will do exactly three more times in Bishkek. This tour, anyway.

Filed under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Politics, Murder, Crime, Ryspek Akmatbaev.

It's Hump Day!

2006-05-10T22:32:00.000+06:00

So mostly I've been sitting in the apartment in front of the computer reloading the craigslist Providence rentals page and frantically emailing landlords to ask them things like "Can a 90 lb golden retriever who functions more as furniture be considered a 'small pet'?" We're leaving in four days and I want a place to land that is mine. Not that my sister doesn't have a wonderfully comfortable futon. It's just, you know, when going home doesn't actually involve a home, it loses a bit of the sexiness.

Beyond that, I also got drunk with a bunch of guys from the US Embassy beside a keg of Steinbrau's finest lager and an impromptu bon fire in a brand new Weber grill sent from the States. It was fantastic, and not merely for the gossip we learned about members of the current administration (for instance, in Dick Cheney's travel rider: upon his arrival anywhere in the world, El VP's hotel room must be at exactly 68 degrees and the television must be tuned to Fox News). That was followed by my lying around the apartment moaning with hangover and the repeated whimper of "Christ, when did I get so old?" There's also been packing. Almost all of the packing is done, actually, with the obvious exception of the few bits of clothes we're still wearing and not just burning when we leave.

Oh, and there's this, too. It's a picture of Zamira, the so-called Bread Lady you may remember from my early love-letters to lepyoshka. She makes the bazaar less bizarre, if you know what I mean. And her voice--squeakier than Bernadette Peters after a tank of helium--ranks high among the things we will miss. If you ever find yourself in Bishkek, swing by the west end of the bazaar on Jibek Jaloo and say hello...

Assorted Nonsense That Has Spilled from My Mouth over the Last 24 Hours:

2006-05-04T18:26:00.000+06:00

I think "Tofu Dad" should be slang for something. Only I'm not sure what that something is.

As we only have a little over a week left here in the land of meat, I think tonight I'd like to eat enough meat to induce Meat Sweats. Seriously, I'm talking Competitive Eater-style gluttony.

This is the most difficult confection I've ever attempted to eat in my life. But I'm not willing to give up on it yet, as it still contains a fair bit of deliciousness.

I think the starboard/port thing would work really well when informing someone they've got food in their teeth.

What is the virtue in my showering right now? I mean, what effect will my cleanliness have on the greater good of the world? Yeah, I didn't think so. Best just get used to my man stink.

Nine Days? Nine days is nothing. I've spent more time than that in the bathroom since we've been here.

Filed under: Nonsense, Gluttony, Advice.

Developing Dial-Up

2006-05-03T23:56:00.000+06:00

I just spent over an hour trying to upload a one minute QuickTime video of E doing a Buster Keaton routine with some wee slippers we were given as a gift and failing to realize that I was filming though the camera was roughly a half foot away from her head. It ends in serious laughter. (It's much funnier than that description may have let on. Really.) But, alas, it is not for you. The dial-up in these parts doesn't cater to such things. Hell, the high speed connection friends of ours have in their apartment is only marginally faster than our dial-up. So, no video for you, Internet. And I got nothing on deck. Sorry. Maybe tomorrow...

In the meantime, go explore the Urban Dictionary and find all the slang you never knew you needed. My favorite today: Man Cookies.

Details about Kyrgyzstan I Would Not Have Guessed Would Be Missed but Nonetheless Will Be

2006-05-02T20:52:00.000+06:00

juice boxes in the hands of every third adult

driving on sidewalks

mouthfuls of gold teeth

unexpected vodka shots in the corner kiosk at 9:00 am

official holidays seemingly every three or four days

women's bizarrely dyed hair

street food

children staring at me and calling out "Hello" in English as I walk past

the drunk guy in the apt above us who carries a conch shell wherever he goes

tea

stray dogs

this blog (tho decidedly less than the rest)

I Haven't Been This Let Down Since I Didn't Get the Casio Keyboard I Was Banking on for Christmas in '85

2006-05-01T21:32:00.000+06:00

The giant, we-might-have-to-hide-behind-the-locked-door-of-our-apartment, not-ending-until-some-changes-get-made-god-damn-it protest over the weekend was over about twenty minutes after it started. I'm exaggerating, but not by much. The square was empty of all but normal traffic by noon. Sure, it was raining pretty hard, but c'mon! I was looking forward to some good people watching. And there were rumors floating around on Friday that Prime Minister Kulov was going to resign his position as soon as the rally started and join the crowd in their call for change. Instead, he accompanied President Bakiyev out to the square sometime shortly after things got going and the two of them convinced the protesters to pack it in and come back in a month. By then, said the politicians, changes will have been made. Or, you know, you can get your protest on then. In the meantime, though, why don't you go on and get out of the rain, have a cup of tea, maybe a nice lunch, and head on back to wherever it is you come from. And change your wet socks soon as possible, 'k? You don't wanna catch a cold.

When Erin and Janika and I walked through the Ala-Too square around 2:00 Saturday afternoon, it looked like this:

which is exactly how it looks most all the time. Except there's usually more people moving around. You got some serious staying power, protestors. You get an E for effort and a T for nice try.

Beyond the crushing blow that was the lack of protest and mayhem, this weekend was surprisingly action-packed. Friday night we went over to Janika and Elham's for some delicious fricasse made by Janika's cousin Katerina, here on vacation. There were about 25 people there at its height and about 67 liters of beer. Needless to say, it was a late night. By the time we left it was down to us and about five Germans too drunk and/or tired to speak English, so any inter-ethnic communication was done primarily through body language and vocal tonality. Mostly there was laughing. Lots and lots of laughing.

Saturday we met up with Janika and Katerina and another German from Friday night, Heiller (here working in orphanages teaching kids to read) for dinner at Time Out, a restaurant halfway down the next block south of us. Though it was after 7:00 at night and none of us had done anything more strenuous with our day beyond going for a walk and watching movies, the atmosphere at the table during the meal can only be described as "hungover."

After the no-holds-barred fiesta that was dinner, we walked down to the Metro Pub for the late night jam session scheduled as part of the first annual Bishkek Spring Jazz Festival. (It was, for the record, actually scheduled as a jam session; I'm not just being hokey.) The music on stage that night was variously described by those among us as "rigid," "competent," and "unfortunate" (with the exception of a Puerto Rican band who came in from Almaty around midnight to save the day). We opted to get drunk and the good times picked up from there. It was an especially good move considering it was our first foray into the large ex-pat community and therefore our first experience with nightlife surrounded by a large number of Americans. I've gotten used to not being around our kind, so to speak, and the results were mixed at best. Let's just say that the culture shock on the tail end of this trip will likely be greater than those experienced at the front.

Sunday passed as Sundays pass, with much time spent on couches with books and computers and imagined playtime with dogs. (That last is pathetic, I know, but the dogs always get good treatment on Sundays and as I'll be seeing them soon, I had a little fantasy time with the mutts. What? Don't look at me like that. Oh, whatever.) Then today we went on a mission--thus far successful--I can't talk about currently. Suffice it to say it involves artwork, a man with magic feet, and four people soon to be legally bound. Well, two and two, not all four. I'm not sure all four's legal anywhere. Not even Massachusetts.

Anyway, following phase one of Mission Magic Feet, we came home with Zemfira for a lesson in how to make manti, the ubiquitous Central Asian dumpling. It was delicious. If you happen to find yourself sitting at our table sometime in the future, feel free to request manti. In the meantime, you'll have to imagine their deliciousness and simply enjoy their surface beauty:

Filed under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Protest, Cuisine.

The Proletariat & the Nature

2006-04-28T16:29:00.000+06:00

There is a rally planned to take place tomorrow here in Bishkek. It's been speculated that it will bring in anywhere from 10 to 20 thousand people from all over the country, all of them either angry with the lack of change since last year's revolution or, at least, willing to be influenced, paid, or transported about by those who are. The event's organizers initially stated that the protests would continue on in the central square until some change has been made, which is a disturbing bit of rhetoric in my opinion. Thankfully, that was later changed to three days. Maybe four. Essentially, the ralliers are looking to exert themselves onto the government in such a way as to force President Bakiyev to come out to speak with them, negotiate something, and, preferably, get that something into writing. Their demands are many, but they include lessening of state control on mass media, constitutional amendments to lessen the power of the executive, and some sort of pledge to at least begin moving corruption and criminality from a spot among the normal activities of elected officials to something of an anomaly. We'll let you know next week how all of that goes.

In the meantime, we're loading up on reading material and movies in the off chance this thing boils over and we're forced to hole away behind our apartment door for a few days. It's doubtful that situation's a real possibility, but people are angry, it's been hot, and 20,000 hot, angry people standing in one place for a few days listening to other hot, angry people speaking to them may stumble upon some new ideas. Thankfully, bootleg DVDs are both cheap and hold a near-ubiquitous place in the Bishkek marketplace. (I do, however, know what booth in Tsum I'm staying away from while shopping for new movies.) And we've both got some writing and reading to get done, so we should be fine. Besides, there are less hateful things than being locked in your apartment for a few days. Like, for instance, being locked in someone else's apartment for a few days.

Tonight we'll be heading over to Janika and Elham's apartment for a big ol' dinner party being thrown in celebration of Janika's cousin Katerina being here for a visit over her spring break. Yeah, you read that right: her cousin traveled from Frankfurt to Bishkek for spring break. She's putting you people to shame!

Tomorrow a group of us will (hopefully) rent a marschutka for the day and head out of the city to Ala-Archa, the beautiful park in the mountains south of town. There will be picnicking, hiking, and, I'm sure, enjoyment of "the nature," a phrase I still giggle at every time it's uttered in my vicinity.

The weekend, we can only hope, will be wonderful. And entirely free of anything a journalist might be moved to report as "looting and rioting."

Filed under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Protest, Nature.

Say Cheese!

2006-04-28T01:30:00.000+06:00

For about two blocks between the White House just west of Ala-Too square in the center of Bishkek east down Prospect Chui to Tsum, from early in the morning until well after dark every day of the week, the north side of the street is littered with photo booths. These aren't the sort of photo booths you might find in a mall or movie theatre with a ratty curtain pulled shut on a teenaged couple canoodling before a mechanized camera. These photo booths are more like public art installations designed by a tourism ministry with a miniscule budget and a fabulous eye for camp.

The thing is though, these booths aren't just for tourists (you're just as likely to see a Kyrgyz family posing as you are tourists, which there aren't too many of in the first place) and they're definitely not governmentally controlled. The booths are run by men (they all seem to be run by men, unlike virtually every other sort of service industry in Bishkek excepting taxis--bazaars, kiosks, restaurants: all women), men with old cameras and an eye for kitsch that could rival John Waters. If only they knew what they were doing was kitschy. There's a certain sincerity to the collections of toy cars, stuffed animals, fake trees, mannequins dressed as Father New Year or a snow leopard, trellises rung with plastic ivy and garland and proclaiming in hand-painted Cyrillic letters "Bishkek 2006" or "Happy New Year" or "Happy Nooruz." There are a number of such set-ups visible in the background in some of the pictures from Nooruz and the winter holidays among our pictures on Flickr (here and here, for instance).

E and I have long wanted a photo booth picture, but have been holding out either for something truly wonderful or for the right mood to strike. On Tuesday we found both. We were walking west on Chui heading from the direction of Tsum back toward the square. We had just come back up from the underground bazaar at the Chui/Moscovskaya intersection and were about halfway to the next corner when I tapped Erin on the shoulder and pointed off to our right.

"That," I said. "We need to do that."

Erin turned her head and gasped. Then, when her faculties were back up to full capacity, she nodded. We moved over to the guy lounging under the umbrella attached to his little stand and asked him how much. The picture ran twenty-five som, which is about sixty cents American, give or take.

Erin nodded and said, "Okay, excellent. We want that." She raised her arm and pointed to the plastic patio furniture sitting in the sun twenty feet away, two chairs flanking a table topped with a tower of plastic flowers and fronted with a couple of seemingly Bedazzled hearts. All of this sat in front of a sign that stood maybe six feet tall bookended by two braying horses, their front hooves at either side of a circular emblem reading "Bishkek 2006" in Russian above a picture of a mountain range, rays of sun, and, due to some brilliant stroke of Dadaist inspiration on the part of its creator, a smiling pink cartoon puppy. Because nothing says Bishkek like a smiling pink cartoon puppy.

"There?" the man asked.

"Most definitely," we replied.

You'll have to excuse the quality of the photo: as our resources are a bit slim here, rather than scan the photo I simply took a picture of it. Glare and a bit of fuzziness ensued. My apologies.

Filed under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Photo Booths.

There's Always Time for a Cartoon

2006-04-26T15:34:00.000+06:00

I just stumbled upon this over at Salon (well, maybe stumbled is the wrong word; I purposefully went to read This Modern World and just kept going...) and it made me giggle such that one of the other people currently in the AUCA computer lab, someone I don't know at all, pushed back from her computer and leaned over to see what it was I was looking at. I'm not sure she found it as funny as I do. Maybe you will...

T-Minus 20 Days

2006-04-25T23:59:00.000+06:00

So, we're leaving Bishkek soon and heading on back to the land of extra wide theatre seating. In celebration of this fact, and due to my complete lack of blog fodder this evening, I've decided to start listing. Lists are fun. The kids like the lists. Frank O'Hara liked lists and I like Frank O'Hara a lot (I'd hold his hand in public if the dune buggy hadn't gotten him, is what I'm saying), and if it's good enough for Frank, it's good enough for me. Without further ado, our first list:

Number of bootleg DVDs purchased during stay: 12

Number of said DVDs not in English though assured by salesperson they'd be in English: 3

Number of copies of Munich among the 3 non-English DVDs: 2

Number of DVDs involving Catherine Keener: 3

Number involving Hope Davis: 3

Number involving both Catherine Keener & Hope Davis: 0

Degree to which E & I previously considered ourselves Catherine Keener or Hope Davis fans, on a scale of 1 to 10: 4

Degree to which E & I now consider ourselves Catherine Keener or Hope Davis fans, on a scale of 1 to 10: 7

Number of original dozen films involving Asia's "Heat of the Moment": 2

Last time I thought about either Asia or "Heat of the Moment" prior to watching either of those two films: 1987

Favorite scene among the dozen films: The dragon fight in Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire, specifically Hermione's exuberant cheering upon Harry's return to the stadium. Cute girl, that Hermione.

Least favorite scene among the dozen films: The camel toe montage in The Weather Man (based entirely on unexpected squirm factor, not so much artistic merit; as I've seen only 12 films during the last 6 months, I'm in no position to be judging artistic merit).

Best gift idea for my post-Stateside-return upcoming birthday: The 3-at-a-time unlimited Netflix membership plan.

From the Whosiwhatsit? Files (& AKIPress)

2006-04-24T12:46:00.000+06:00

Osh, 21 April: A peaceful rally was held at the foot of the Sulayman mountain in Osh [southern Kyrgyzstan] today. Over 200 people who attended it protested against holding rallies.

The rally was mainly attended by leaders and representatives of organizations and enterprises in the town of Osh, deputies of the town council, leaders of public organizations and political parties. Some people said that they came from Kara Su and Uzgen districts [of Osh Region] and even [northern] Chuy Region.

The protesters said that they supported Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev's policy and protested against holding rallies.

A rally against rallies? Protesting against protesting? I can't help but think of the late Mitch Hedberg’s “I really hate picketing but I don’t know how to show it.” It doesn’t strike me as very complimentary for a group of adults to be living out a Mitch Hedberg joke. In fact, it seems like a really, really bad idea. And a little bit sad.

But than again, I’m very confused. Apparently as confused as the good people of Osh.

Filed under: Kyrgyzstan, Osh, protest, and Mitch Hedberg.

Full Frontal Friday

2006-04-21T15:24:00.000+06:00

I fell in the shower this morning. Yeah, I thought that was an activity reserved for the Depends demographic as well. Turns out, not so much. I somehow lost my balance while performing what I like to call "the sudsy pirouette." Shower ballet, you know? I'm kidding, obviously. (I hope it's obvious, anyway; though after yesterday's post, all bets are maybe off.) I don't know how I fell; I just did. I tried to grab the wall in those few seconds of Wile E. Coyote arm-waving don't-look-down-don't-look-down off-balance fun, but it turns out that flat, wet, ceramic surfaces provide little resistance against the force of gravity and my inability to stand upright. When Erin came in to see what the ruckus was about, she found me with the shower curtain draped around my neck like a cape and the rod across my shoulders like some avant crucifix. I did something to my knee on the way down--I'm thinking it involved being smacked against porcelain--and my left shoulder is unhappy as well. It is now official: I'll do anything for a laugh.

The shower tumble happened not long after I woke up in some bizarrely contorted position in which I was somehow sleeping simultaneously diagonal across the bed and straight up and down and was wearing one blanket as a toga and another as a kilt. Erin and Janika were having a Kyrgyz language lesson in the kitchen with Jarken, so there was a faint hum of the percussive/liquid flow that is a Turkic language pouring into the room. And it was raining outside quite heavily. There was some shadow of a dream still playing with me and I think one of the blankets may have been tugging a little tight or something, because the first thing out of my mouth was, "Saigon...shit."

So that was my morning. E and I got out of the house around 1:00 and headed over to the university for lunch (delicious, thank you very much), after which she went off to a meeting and I went off to Tsum for a few new DVDs. I walked through the park, startled a couple of teenagers making out on a bench under a tree and affectively embarrassing all three of us, went through the underground bazaar at Chui and Sovietskaya, and on to Tsum, which is essentially a mall or department store or four-story indoor bazaar, depending on how you choose to look at it. So I buy a bunch of new DVDs from the woman we usually buy DVDs from and started out again. As I headed back over to the escalator, a woman in the booth sort of diagonally across from the one where I'd just bought movies from called out to me. "I have good movies," she said, "in English!" "I'm sure you do," I said. "But I just bought some. Next time I'll come to you." "I have special movies," she countered. "Ones you don't see. You'll like." Well, I was intrigued. I walked over to her counter and asked, "How special?" She smiled and bent down to pull a box out from under the counter. "You will like them," she said. "Men like them." Yup, you guessed right: she started dropping porn all over the place. "European girls, Asian girls, Japanese girls, all girls, this one I don't know, African girls...four hundred som each." I don't have a special porn wing in my house and I don't think Bishkek is really the place to start the addition. "Listen," I said, "I don't want any of these." "I have boys, too," she said, "if that's what you want." You don't want all-girl porn? You must be gay. Right, where was the escalator again?

Back outside, laughing and literally shaking off the conversation, I headed back toward the university. On the way, I passed a woman singing karaoke, on the sidewalk, all by herself. She was kicking out a pretty fair version of Madonna's "La Isla Bonita." It was enough to stand in front of her for a few minutes smiling to forget about the unexpected porn dealer in Tsum. And I think that's what it was, too, the totally unexpected nature of it. I moved from buying bootlegs of very recent blockbusters (sorry, copyright police...but I like a little mindless entertainment every now and again) to being shown boxes with photos on them of naked people doing things I couldn't even figure out. It's one thing to knowingly go into an adult bookshop (our house in Bloomington was no more than a hundred yards from College Adult Books, a cleverly named emporium of the biggest little secret in America...it was only a matter of time before I gave it a look-see is what I'm saying). You can mentally prepare yourself for the onslaught of images you're going to be faced with and plan out evasive maneuvers against whatever variety of sketchy old dude you may come into contact with. But just going about your Friday, thinking happy thoughts about finally getting to see King Kong so you too can trash it, and then wham!, you're getting the hard sell on a movie called Hong Kong Suck Fu. It's like one minute you're washing your hair and the next you're wearing the shower curtain like a yoke and limping around the bathroom naked with soap in your eyes screaming obscenities. Peter Jackson, take me away...

You Know You're in Need of an Emotional Massage When, without Irony, You Proclaim...

2006-04-20T22:30:00.000+06:00

...Mr. & Mrs. Smith to be "an utterly brilliant film."

Especially when this comes only hours after you say to your wife, again without even a passing glimmer of irony, "I think I'll try something new with my hair today."

An Entirely Crap Bit of News

2006-04-19T21:50:00.000+06:00

Paige
1992 - 2006

When I was leaving my parent’s house the night before E and I left the country, as I was scratching Paige in the same way I have when leaving my parent’s house for any considerable duration of time since going to boarding school when I was seventeen, I very purposefully told her not to die while I was gone this time. Not even dogs can control those things, I guess. News to me.

George Carlin once said that life is just a series of dogs. I got Paige as a gift from my parents on my fifteenth birthday, about four months after our other dog, a dachshund-beagle mix named Bonnie, died at the age of sixteen. I named her after Jimmy Page because I was fifteen and Hendrix was vetoed by the others present. My mother added an I in order "to make it more like a proper name." There are two dogs currently waiting for me in Ohio (or at least they’ll come home with me when I go to retrieve them; I’m not convinced dogs wait for anything in an emotional sense). Neither of them are named after guitar players (one a song by Mephiskapheles and the other thoroughbred jockey and Saratoga god Jerry Bailey) I got one of those two dogs on my twenty-fourth birthday—by coincidence, not as a gift—when she was one day shy of six weeks old and weighed less than ten pounds. She’s now a few weeks from five years old and just shy of a hundred pounds.

There’s no real narrative here, I just felt incredibly distant and wanted to type something below the photo. And I’m sad and heartbroken and feel a little foolish being so in the face of the world’s larger problems and as a result have no idea what to say. So.

The Midnight Special at 21 Togolok-Moldo

2006-04-19T01:48:00.000+06:00

Time: Monday, April 17, 2006, 11:36 pm

Last Meal Eaten: Sometime Sunday

Reasons for Hunger Strike: Mostly to do with laziness & excessive sleeping

Contents of Refrigerator:

* 1 rotisserie chicken, minus both breasts and a drumstick, purchased from a street vendor

* 1 open, half-full can of mushrooms, purchased by Janika for Saturday night's calzone & beer fest

* 1 open, half-full can of sliced black olives, purchased by Janika for Saturday night's calzone & beer fest

* 1/2 bunch slightly wilted but still salvageable green onions

* 1 open 2/3-full 200 gram tub of sour cream, inexplicable purchased for Saturday night's calzone & beer fest

* 1 open, half-full jar of rather loose, not-so-pasty tomato paste of unknown origin

* 1 reused tomato jar 2/3 full of what we shall guess as having once been milk

* Assorted jams, jellies, and condiments

Pantry supplies:

* Rice of some unspecified variety of "white"

* 1/3 jar of local honey, declared "Best Honey Ever" by certain residents of apartment

* Small bag of candied cherries purchased months ago and since forgotten

* Assorted spices, herbs, and whatnots of the flavor variety

Preparations:

Remove jar of milk from fridge and throw it from window during lull in traffic. Remove remaining fridge items (excepting jams, jellies, and condiments) and set them on countertop for inspection. Place among them the bag of rice, leaving cupboard door open for spice consult. Remove candied cherry mass and throw into street. Notice that the house is void of any cooking fat and swear loudly. Hand open jar of olives to wife along with a fork for her snacking convenience and in order to get the disgusting "food" interloper away from the superior cuisine makings. Stare at assembled foodstuffs for some time, occasionally turning gaze either in direction of stove, wife, or ceiling. Emit familiar groans of the perennially stupid while reminiscing on having declared only hours earlier I don't need to eat dinner. Hastily grab pan and get some rice cooking in water, vinegar, hot sauce, and smoked paprika. Demand mid-career Miles Davis to be played over tinny computer speakers in hopes that improv skills & inspiration might somehow travel through the agitated air and into your pores. Begin shredding chicken. Upon finding the chicken's wishbone, squeal with the delight of a fat man drunk on the idea of dinner. Demand of your wife that she stop actively working on her research, C'mon, just make a wish, and wrap her pinky around the slimy skeleton bits. Taunt wife when you win the greater half of bone, insisting that your wish was better anyway, as it involved time travel. Ignore mocking laughter and continue shredding remaining chicken meat. Place shredded meat and mushrooms in bowl and place on stove beside cooking rice. Wait. When rice stops hurting teeth upon tasting, empty contents of bowl into rice and mix through. Find tomato "paste" jar, open, and sniff. Confident in your gag reflex to discern spoiled food from non-spoiled, empty contents of jar into rice and stir through. Grab an armload of spices from the still-open cupboard and scatter contents of pan liberally with cumin, salt, pepper, a leftover packet of samsi mix, and ground coriander seed. Worry over sudden lack of moisture in pan and re-open the fridge for some culinary life preserver. Find previously overlooked box of Jaffa Gold grape juice and declare it a suitable salvation. Pour "about enough" juice into pan, and stir through for some minutes, while simultaneously holding the upended and open jar of honey over contents of pan. When finally some amount of honey has been added, recover pan with tin-foil and wait.

Presentation:

After enough time has elapsed to allow for your having sliced the wilted green onions and to engage in a heated discussion regarding your query as to whether or not the commentary on The 40 Year Old Virgin was even better than the movie or whether it's just been awhile since you've experienced funny people being funny in a language easily followed, remove tin-foil from pan and waft delicious scents wife-ward. Remove two plates from cupboard in anticipation of wife's comment that It looks like you've made enough for both of us... Serve half of the pan's contents on each of the plates, top with sliced wilted green onion bammage and serve alongside 2/3-full tub of inexplicably bought sour cream. Bask in the steamy warmth of the dish and your wife's unprovoked comment that This is actually not disgusting. I mean, I'd maybe eat it again.

Finished Product:

The "Midnight in Bishkek Special" at 21 Togolok-Moldo, seen here paired with a hearty plastic mug of Jaffa Gold Grape Juice, mid-March vintage, with a full bouquet and a sweet, unrefined finish. A boxed grape phenomenally well suited for accompanying such a well-planned culinary adventure.

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Cuisine, & Kitchen Adventures.

Wanna See an Eagle Kill a Fox?

2006-04-17T20:55:00.000+06:00

Well, someone at the BBC did and they posted the pictures as a slideshow here. It's awesome, in that holy holy, them's some big talons wrapped around that fox's neck! kind of way. Enjoy!

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Hunting, Eagles, and BBC News.

Short Takes #6

2006-04-14T15:10:00.000+06:00

In the first installment of these Short Takes, oh so long ago, I mentioned that E and I find ourselves often baffled by someone known around the apartment as Yelling Guy. Multiple times a day he walks through the courtyard behind our apartment and, well, yells. For a while I thought it was a call to prayer, as it sounded something like the call to prayer (which begins with Allah akbar), but not exactly like the call to prayer. And while I've never heard him five times in a single day, I've heard him a few times and I'm not home all the time, so I could be missing something.

Turns out he's selling milk.

The Russian word for milk is mahliko. When yelled so that every vowel sound stretches to its limit like the grandstand vendors at Fenway with a tray full of popcorn or beer, mahliko can sound an awful lot like Allah akbar. Especially when you don't speak Russian too well.

I will now forever associate the call to prayer with milk. I don't know what that will mean in the long run.

***

As the above demonstrates in a sideways sort of way, E has not been eaten by wolves or been swept up in revolutionary fervor or even taken to hunting down Kyrgyz criminals who shoot people we know in the head. Nope, she's alive and well. And incredibly busy with the last leg of her dissertation research before we trade in the angry, debauched politics of Kyrgyzstan and flitter on back home to the angry, debauched politics of the US. If you don't want to take my word for it, head on over to her blog and see for yourself. She's taken a break from the madness long enough to post an update and say hello.

***

I have completely given up shaving cream. Not shaving, just shaving cream. Post-shower I walk my still warm and wet face over to the mirror and have at it. Better results, razor burn -- counter-intuitively -- a thing of the past, and, as a special bonus for the lazy OCD-sufferers among us, less clean-up. I'm totally smitten.

Thank you, McSweeney's Recommends.

***

Sitting at dinner the other night with E and Janika, I was asked, by Janika, what computer games I played as a child. I had drank my way through a half liter of Baltika 9 by then and was momentarily stumped. (Baltika, you see, the beer of choice in these parts, comes in brews of various alcohol content ranging from 0 to 9, with 0 being non-alcoholic, 6 being a porter, and 9 being flammable and something akin to bubbly grain alcohol. The rest all taste like Bud Light to me, with just a little bit more of that inexplicable formaldehyde flavor mixed in for fun.) While I battled to right my soggy brain cells and find the name of a game I played as a child, Janika threw out Maniac Mansion as one from her childhood. I got excited, as I too spent a good amount of time talking to green tentacles and meteors and searching out fuel for the chainsaw (damn you, LucasArts, and your clever ruse!). My Maniac Mansion fun mostly happened in the Flanders' basement, though. When it came to computerized geekery on the homefront, there was only one real answer: King's Quest.

When we got home, still reeling from the Baltika 9 and the giddy fun had explaining to Janika the wonders of mid-80's RPGs (what up, Oregon Trail!), I hopped on the computer and discovered, much to everyone's delight I'm sure, that one can now download the original King's Quest in an updated version. I highly recommend it. If you've got some free time. What I'm saying is: prepare to become obsessed.

***

It is about 75 degrees outside right now, a Friday afternoon, and I have a remarkably smooth face and comfy new shoes on my feet. In the words of my man Bobby Plant, it's time to ramble on. We'll chat on Monday. Until then: stay classy, Internet.

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Milk, Shaving, Maniac Mansion, King's Quest.

OK, Now I'm Really Pissed (& Feeling Just a Little Bit Nauseous)

2006-04-13T11:53:00.000+06:00

From EurasiaNet:

ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IN KYRGYZSTAN UNDERSCORES SLIDE TOWARD INSTABILITY
4/12/06

Concerns about Kyrgyzstan’s political stability are rising following an assassination attempt April 12 against a prominent civil society figure.

The attack against Edil Baisalov -- head of the Coalition for Democracy and Civil Society, a Bishkek non-governmental organization – occurred as he was leaving the organization’s offices in central Bishkek at approximately 6 pm local time. He suffered a wound in the back of his head, but doctors could not immediately determine whether the wound was caused by a bullet, or by a blunt object. The lone assailant, who was not immediately apprehended, was described as a "young man of Kyrgyz nationality," the AKIpress news agency reported.

Witnesses to the incident reported hearing a bang, as if a pistol, possibly equipped with a silencer, had gone off. Baisalov, who only briefly lost consciousness, was quoted by AKIpress as saying, "It was a clap. There is a hole [in my head], but I am alive." After suffering the wound, Baisalov’s driver hustled him into his car and sped off to a nearby hospital. Doctor’s now believe Baisalov’s life is not threatened, but say the wound will require extensive treatment.

Kyrgyzstan has experienced frequent spasms of political violence since the Tulip revolution swept Askar Akayev’s old regime from power in March 2005. Prime Minister Feliks Kulov, who visited Baisalov in the hospital, characterized the assassination attempt as politically motivated.

In early April, Baisalov led an NGO effort to organize mass demonstrations, calling on President Kurmanbek Bakiyev’s administration to vigorously pursue an anti-crime and corruption agenda. Baisalov had also been vocal in his opposition to a Supreme Court decision that enabled reputed organized crime boss Ryspek Akmatbayev to contest a parliamentary by-election. Akmatbayev subsequently won the parliamentary race. But the head of the country’s Central Election Commission (CEC), Tuigunaly Abdraimov, announced April 11 that Akmatbayev would be temporarily barred from taking his seat, pending judicial review of a January murder case in which the MP-elect was a defendant. In the initial trial, Akmatbayev was acquitted of the murder charge against him, but officials are now probing whether any improprieties occurred during the proceedings.

The assassination attempt sent shock waves through Kyrgyzstan’s NGO sector. Medet Tiulegenov, the executive director of the Soros Foundation – Kyrgyzstan, suggested that the incident could fuel criticism of the Bakiyev administration for not taking a tough stand against rampant crime and corruption. "Today’s attempt to take the life of a civil society leader signifies yet another manifestation of the deteriorating governance of Kyrgyzstan," Tiulegenov said. [Both EurasiaNet and the Soros Foundation – Kyrgyzstan are affiliated with the New York-based Open Society Institute].

Bakiyev, Kulov and members of parliament have been locked in a three-way power struggle in recent months. There is widespread suspicion in Bishkek that the Bakiyev administration engineered the court decision that reversed the CEC-imposed prohibition and allowed Akmatbayev to run.

Akmatbayev, via an attorney, denied involvement in the assassination attempt against Baisalov. Kulov, meanwhile, told reporters that the incident underscores the need for a comprehensive anti-crime offensive, hinting that only such measures could prevent Kyrgyzstan’s descent into lawlessness. The president must give the government the power to "undertake measures to restore law-and-order in the country. Otherwise the consequences for the nation’s future are already known," Kulov told reporters.

Kyrgyzstan has been the scene of geopolitical competition between Russia and the United States in recent years. However, there are indications that both states are alarmed by the country’s burgeoning disorder. US Assistant Secretary of State for South and Central Asia Richard Boucher urged Bakiyev to implement stabilization measures during talks held April 11 in Bishkek. Meanwhile, in an interview with the Regnum news agency, Russian political analyst Arkady Dubnov indicated that Moscow policymakers are chagrined with Bakiyev’s conduct.

"The [parliamentary] victory of Ryspek Akmatbayev was a surprise for the Russian leadership," Dubnov stated. The Kremlin had made its concerns about stability known, and right up until the by-election "Moscow assumed that the Kyrgyz leadership would not allow such a development [Akmatbayev’s win]."

"The threat of a new wave of instability in Kyrgyzstan is not in the interest of either of the two world powers [The United States and Russia]," Dubnov added.

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Politics, Edil Baisalov , Assassination.

It Ain't Revolution, But I Kinda Dig It

2006-04-12T23:48:00.000+06:00

So not much exciting has happened since last week, which means I don't have much to say. I could tell you what I've eaten for lunch the last few days, but that would bore me. Or I could tell you that it's been dangerously close to 70 degrees for nearly a week, but who wants to talk about the weather? I could even tell you that E and I went on something of a shopping spree recently and have nearly hit our quota for trinkets and gewgaws to be handed out upon our return to the country we left (US), which I assume is now called I Hate Immigrants & I Vote or something equally fun, but I like surprises and think you should, too. So I won't do any of those things. And I didn't go to any other Chinese restaurants today and copy their menus down for the sole purpose of allowing others to laugh at them as much as I do. Which leaves me with very little to talk about. So what I'm gonna do is drop a poem on you.

Since I finished a draft of the novel I was working on, I've been writing these "Postcards from Bishkek" poems as a way of keeping busy and taking up the time I usually spent every day writing. Muscle memory works in this context as well, it would seem. But anyway, I should maybe point out that though I suffered through a great many years of ill-advised poetryphilia, I have recently been beset with an all-consuming hatred for the state of contemporary poetry as is made by Americans. So these postcards have served as a way for me to continue actively making poems while simultaneously continuing to actively hate poetry. A sticky wicket, for sure, but one that is proving to be quite a bit of fun. The thing is, you see, I no longer care. At all. And that's a lovely thing to have happen to your writing, let me tell ya.

Anyway, here's one of the dozen or so I've written thus far. This is, I think, the first one. Or the second one maybe. I don't know, actually. Do with it as you wish...

To Salt Lake City, UT

RECTO:

Wedding party beside a mountain road, smiles big as sky. The bride is beautiful, happy, a fluff of white and bows. Her eyes look out at the viewer, clear and dark, seemingly sincere. The women around her laugh, flash gold teeth, fill the roadside with the colors of their clothing. Men beside them touch one another--hand to shoulder, hand to back, hand to hand--and hold vodka in paper cups, bottle necks gripped in tight fists. At the right edge of the frame a maroon Lada sits with its hood raised, engine bared. Ribbons and bows decorate the windows, the antenna, stream from the hood ornament down to either door latch. No one appears to pay it any mind in the makeshift celebration.

VERSO:

Dude (do you mind
if I call you Dude?)--

polygamy's got nothing
on bride kidnapping.

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Poetry, Bride Kidnapping, The Evil Men Do.

English Translations as They Appear on the Menu at Our Favorite Chinese Restaurant in Bishkek, Where I Just Ate My Weight in Deliciousness

2006-04-11T21:07:00.000+06:00

Cup of Meat
Fish as though Grapes
Rich Crop
Smoked Language
Beef with a Strange
Peanuts in sweet cover
Stewed Sine of Beef
Safe Crisp Fish with Spice Sauce
Special Safe Crisp Fish
Paste Circles with Honey & Sesame
Duck over Peking
Splint-Chopping Chicken
Book Salad
Book with Mustard Sauce
Crisp Book
Bowels with a Pepper
Fish Squirrel with Sweet & Sour Sauce
Tofu with Stuff in Dough
Cabbage with ???
Fried Potatoes over China
Soup with Egg & Purple

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Bishkek, Food, Translation, Deliciousness.

The Saga Continues...

2006-04-11T00:20:00.000+06:00

Elections were held yesterday in the district where Ryspek (surely you remember Ryspek, right? The accused murderer/gang leader running for the seat in Parliament left vacant following his brother's murder last fall? You remember him. Of course you do.). Things turned out exactly as everyone assumed they would turn out: He killed his competition. Figuratively, I mean. He took a sizable chunk of the vote, not a sizable chunk of his opponent's flesh. One must be careful with language when discussing dirty politicians.

Though he won, the controversy is far from over. Not that anyone thought it would be. According to the AP, Edil Baisalov, leader of For Democracy and Civil Society, a Kyrgyz civil society coalition (and organizers of a wonderfully peaceful and well-executed protest here in Bishkek on Saturday), is echoing what I hinted at in my post on Friday and has "accused President Bakiyev of pressuring courts to allow [Ryspek] Akmatbayev to run for parliament in breach of the law."

The fun doesn't stop there, dear readers. Oh, hell no! This comes from AKIpress (roll with the language here; they're primarily non-native English speakers at AKI):

Chairman of the Central Election Commission Tuigunaly Abdraimov at the press conference in Bishkek on April 10 said that he plans to apply to the Kyrgyz parliament with request to clarify two articles of the Elections Code that contradict each other.

The contradictory situation is related to registration of Ryspek Akmatabaev as a candidate for membership in the Kyrgyz parliament who gained 79.22% of votes as a result of elections on April 9 in Balykchy constituency . The Bishkek City Court suspended the court investigation of the criminal case brought against Ryspek Akmatbaev. He was accused of organizing a gang, committing triple murder, possessing weapon, etc. Ryspek Akmatbaev was declared not guilty in January 2006 by Pervomay District Court of Bishkek. However, family members of Ministry of Internal Affairs Colonel Chynybek Aliev murdered in May of 2004 appealed to Bishkek City Court.

Mr. Abdraimov reported today that the Article 28 of the Elections Code on candidate's status stipulates: "Registered candidate is not subject to criminal proceedings, detention or administrative nonpunitive measures imposed by court. Institution of a criminal case will not be the grounds for not allowing a candidate to realize the right to be elected."

According to Mr. Abdraimov, this article contradicts to paragraph 4 of the Article 56 on grounds for cancellation of registration that runs: “in case when the court initiates criminal proceedings with regard to the candidate that gained the majority of votes and has not announced the respective verdict, the Election Commission suspends determination of voting results and registration of elected candidate”.

So, you can't still be on trial for triple murder and run for Parliament? Or you can? What if the sitting president seems to think it's a good idea for you to be in Parliament, what then? Oh, now my head hurts.

Actually, at this point I'm beginning to feel toward the Kyrgyz political monster as one might toward a sibling accused (and by all accounts, sickeningly guilty) of some heinous crime. You want to protect him, make everything go away, bury both of your heads in the sand and pretend the future will be just as rosy as you thought it would be when you were nine and spent most of your time sprawled out on your back in Technicolor-green grass looking up at the clouds ("That one looked a wicked lot like Oil Can Boyd's right hand! Did you see that?") thinking the biggest of the big nine-year-old thoughts, all of which always came out to the same two conclusions, though you obviously favored the one that went When I'm an adult, I'm gonna be wicked awesome. But at the same time, you can't help but want to punch him in the face for a few hours while screaming, "How could you be so awful...how could you be so awful?" to the same rhythm as your fists. (Somebody please cue the "Why are you so fat? Why are you so fat?" scene in One Crazy Summer. It's Bobcat at his best, kids. Well, no, this is Bobcat at his best. But Egg Stork still gets a special place in my heart.)

It's a love/hate thing is what I'm saying. I want them to get their act together and I want this whole thing to work out--the fledgling democracy, the national identity, the foundations for a lasting economy, et cetera, et cetera, on and on. But I also want to march into Parliament and scream until that one vein in my neck goes from scary-throbbing to out and out explosion. Of course, neither my Kyrgyz nor my Russian is up to the task. So I'll just go to bed and read a book until I fall asleep in hopes that tomorrow will be better. Which, for the record, was the only other conclusion my nine year old, cloud-gazing thoughts ever came out to. And that ain't half bad, either.

File under: Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, Politics, Elections, Bobcat Goldthwait

If It's Good Enough for NYC, It's Certainly Good Enough for This Lil' Corner of the Interweb

2006-04-07T15:49:00.000+06:00

My bookcase now lives in many boxes somewhere in Ohio, so my favorites are not at hand. However, this will do (and strikes me as oddly appropriate). But enough about me; I turn the floor over to Mr. Ashbery:

JUST WALKING AROUND

What name do I have for you?
Certainly there is not name for you
In the sense that the stars have names
That somehow fit them. Just walking around,

An object of curiosity to some,
But you are too preoccupied
By the secret smudge in the back of your soul
To say much and wander around,

Smiling to yourself and others.
It gets to be kind of lonely
But at the same time off-putting.
Counterproductive, as you realize once again

That the longest way is the most efficient way,
The one that looped among islands, and
You always seemed to be traveling in a circle.
And now that the end is near

The segments of the trip swing open like an orange.
There is light in there and mystery and food.
Come see it.
Come not for me but it.
But if I am still there, grant that we may see each other.

(If you're confused, go here. If you're really confused, go here.)

Tags: Poetry, John Ashbery, John Ashbery Day

Panic in the Streets of Bishkek, Pt. 2

2006-04-06T14:04:00.000+06:00

So the character thus far missing from this lil' story is the current President of Kyrgyzstan, Kurmanbek Bakiev. Yes, Kyrgyzstan has a parliamentary system with a PM and a president. And, oddly, the President still retains the bulk of the political power. Yet Bakiev has been strangely quiet through this ordeal, allowing events to unfold as they may and staying a bit quiet until then. He gained his seat following last year's revolution and remains more or less the only person to have positively gained as a result of the uprising. (So far; many people here still hang on to the idea that things will be looking up soon enough. I'm less sure, simply due to the fact that these things seem to have historically taken a long time in other parts of the world. The US didn't really get the kinks out until...well...is Karl Rove in prison yet?)

Many of Bakiev's critics following the revolution claimed that he was continuing with business as usual. (Former President) Akayev and his family may not be in office and sucking the economy dry anymore, but the wealth and power isn't spreading too far afield in their absence, either. Those critics were somewhat quieted last month when Bakiev went unannounced onto the floor of Parliament and demanded of the legislators that they either get their act together regarding the embroiled budget debates or he would disband them all and hold open elections to fill their seats. A big move for a man of up to then questionable political might. (Aside from, you know, leading successful revolutions, I mean.) So what happened on Friday was both a surprise and another in a series of shocking political moves. Well, sort of anyway.

When E and I made our way to AUCA on Friday morning, we noticed a rather large number of marschutkas and cars parked along Frunze, the street running parallel to Abdumomunova, where both AUCA and Parliament sit. We walk along Frunze toward the university more or less everyday and usually find it essentially without traffic, much less rows and rows of cars and mini-buses parked along the roadside and up on the grass. So our curiosity was piqued, to say the least. When we crossed through the park and got onto Abdumomunova, we were greeted with a few bands of riot police and what appeared to be a makeshift cage constructed across the street from the parliament building, just in front of the Lenin statue I'm posing in front of over there in my profile picture at left. I was reminded of the Arrested Development episode where Lindsey sets off to protest the war (I think; maybe the destruction of the wetlands?) and winds up doing a wet t-shirt cage dance for the local police. I wondered aloud what the Kyrgyz equivalent might be but was shushed by Erin, ever the wiser of the two of us.

When we got into the school building there were rumors flying around about the upcoming events: Ryspek had assembled an army of supporters and they were coming to Bishkek to get their protest on! I heard he had 11,000 people! I heard they had guns! I heard about a guy one time who ate a hundred hard boiled eggs in one sitting! Oh, sorry, wrong game. Anyway, amidst the rumors and sketchy details, all that was really clear was Ryspek was pissed, he was coming to Bishkek, and he had a posse. Around 3:30, as we were sitting in the teachers' computer lab, the university sent out an alert that the building was to be cleared immediately and all students, faculty, and staff were to get somewhere safe as soon as possible, somewhere preferably more than ten feet from Parliament. The shit, as they say, was well through the fan and splattering about the room like water from a Wacky Wiggle. I don't know who says that either; just me, I guess. The point is: exodus!

When we got to the street, people were huddled in bunches, passing gossip and cigarettes and eyeing the neighboring Parliament building with a fair bit of worry. Everyone we ran into said essentially the same thing: "What are you still doing here? It is not safe. Go home!" So, we went home, Janika in tow. But first we made a pitstop at the bazaar around the corner so we'd have some food and drink to hold us over during what Erin dubbed the Revolution Rerun Party. The bazaar was packed, with people throwing elbows to get their hands on cucumbers and rotisserie chicken, clutching their bags in tight and scurrying with an alarming speed, given the usual stroll-on-the-beach pace of most pedestrians here.

We got home, we ate, and, because if there was any possibility for an anti-Westerner contingent to this revolution we wanted to give them every possible reason to hate us, we watched a fuzzy bootleg of Wedding Crashers. Around 8:00, Aida (#2, from the Social Research Center at the university) called to inform us that the protest had broken up peacefully and all was again well with the world, or at least the Bishkek part of the world. "The protest just broke up peacefully?" Erin asked. "Well," answered Aida #2, "President Bakiev went out and addressed them, told them to wait to see what happened with the appeal of the ruling, and off they went."

The man can move a crowd, that's for damn sure. Of course, he was flanked at the time by roughly a hundred armed guards and later went on television to say that some other high-ranking elected official should have also addressed the crowd (You hear that, Kulov? Yeah, I'm talking to you, buddy. You blew it!). But still, pretty sweet move, right? Maybe not. As Aida #2 said, Bakiev told the assembled to wait for the appeal ruling. The ruling came out Monday: Ryspek is allowed to run. The Supreme Court ruled on Monday that "the Judicial Collegium has decided to uphold the ruling of Bishkek's Birinchi May District Court dated April 2, 2006, on this case. The reviewing appeal by the representative of the Kyrgyz [Central Election Commission] has been rejected." The one that said Ryspek couldn't run because he didn't meet basic residency requirements. That one. It has been rejected. Pish-posh, law!

So maybe Bakiev isn't on the up-and-up after all. I'm not sure anyone actually ever thought he was. But having made men in office isn't always a bad thing. Just look at Providence. There's a reason it's called organized crime. (The protestors on Friday--a few hundred at the very least--were served lunch on paper plates by Ryspek's people and trucks showed up an hour later to clean up the trash. That's my kind of protest.) And if they operate somewhere within the scope of their prescribed responsibilities, well, so what, right? Right now it may be more important to get things done in this country than worry about occassional kick-backs to village leaders and the guy smuggling stereos in from China.

But what does all of this mean? Fledgling democracies take a bit longer to get off the ground than maybe we'd like. Well, we knew that. I hope we knew that, at least. Just as we know that it takes some time to get corruption out of the public sector. Just ask Chicago. Or, hell, ask the current administration in Washington. Or recent representatives in the UN. What all of this means in the end is, I think, we're just gonna have to be patient on getting these countries back on their feet. And with the CIS countries, especially those like Kyrgyzstan who benefited from a more hands-off approach from Moscow than some of the other Soviet republics, that they have a bright future behind them is only going to make patience a bit more difficult to muster. And with the World Bank threatening to pull out completely, that doesn't leave much wiggle room. I guess we'll just have to wait for someone to change the world. Any takers?

(I unconsciously used the word wiggle twice today! High five!)

Tags: Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, Politics, Bishkek, Protest

This has nothing to do with Bishkek, me, or, really, any impact on anyone living outside the NYC area...

2006-04-05T23:59:00.000+06:00

...but I really like John Ashbery and think you should, too, as I like to impose my fancies on the world. I also like to use the word "fancies" before a vast, nameless audience such as you, Internet. Anyway, let's get to it.

From Poets & Writers:

NEW YORK CITY DESIGNATES APRIL 7 AS JOHN ASHBERY DAY

Led by council speaker Christine Quinn, members of the New York City Council recently honored poet John Ashbery for his “literary and cultural contributions” by designating April 7 as “John Ashbery Day” in the city.

The proclamation coincides with the Ashbery Festival at New York’s New School. The event, which takes place on April 6 to April 8, features readings by Ashbery and other poets, including Mark Bibbins, Billy Collins, Daniel Halpern, Bob Holman, Ann Lauterbach, Ron Padgett, James Tate, and Susan Wheeler, and a staged reading of Ashbery’s one-act play The Heroes.

Ashbery, who lives in New York City and Hudson, New York, has published more than twenty poetry collections, including Where Shall I Wander (Ecco, 2005), Girls on the Run (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999), and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (Penguin, 1976). He is the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the Bollingen Prize, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Academy of American Poets, the Fulbright Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation. He currently serves as the Charles P. Stevenson Jr. Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College.

Tags: Poetry, John Ashbery

Panic in the Streets of Bishkek, Pt. 1

2006-04-05T14:09:00.001+06:00

Last Friday (March 31) saw a dramatically energetic change to the usual "we'll get there when we get there" pace of life here in Bishkek. This was mostly due to a large number of people (anywhere from 200 to 2000 in the news reports we've read) gathering in the central square demanding that Ryspek Akmatbayev be allowed to run for a vacant seat in Parliament. (Ok, it was entirely due to that, but with a little dose of the subsequent flashback to last year's Tulip Revolution immediately drawn into everyone's mind thrown in for good measure as well.)

This story really starts last October, when Ryspek's brother, Tynychbek Akmatbayev, a member of Parliament and political rival of the current Prime Minister, Feliks Kulov, was killed in a prison riot outside of Bishkek. Why was a member of Parliament at a prison riot? you ask. I haven't the slightest idea. There are rumors (very loud ones) that Kulov, who himself spent time in prison and is said to have connections with the underworld and its imprisoned cohorts, planned the riot in order to lure Tynychbek there in order for him to be killed. That doesn't explain what an elected official is doing inside a prison during a riot, but it does get points both for upping the drama and moving the plot of our story along nicely. Following the murder, Ryspek led the chorus in blaming Kulov for his brother's death. Of course, he (Ryspek) has ties to organized crime as well (he is rumored to be whatever the Kyrgyz equivalent of a don might be; think John Gotti in a kolpak) and was very recently tried on murder charges (though subsequently acquitted due in large part, if one were to believe the rumors, to a series of well-timed, very firm, very rewarding handshakes), but it would seem the pain of losing his sibling overrode any sense of hypocrisy that may have bubbled up inside him alongside the accusations.

After the furor of the murder subsided a little, Ryspek declared that he'd be running to fill his brother's vacant seat in Parliament. Naturally, people weren't so keen on the idea. The Kyrgyz equivalent of "We don't cater to their kind 'round here" was heard with some frequency around the capital. But after a few months of handing out money and televisions and food to the voting public in his district, the people came around to Ryspek's side. Or some of them did, anyway. The ones with the new money, televisions, and food. Everyone else seemed to continue either not caring or actively cursing his name, depending, of course, on where they stood before the Santa Claus routine.

So for a while there, during the quiet moments between cups of tea or during the walk home from the bazaar, the country was braced in a contemplative calm, quietly concerned about the future of Parliament, wondering what could be done to stop a known criminal from running and essentially buying his way into government (he wasn't, after all, convicted; and even if he had been, the sitting PM was very recently in jail, so where's the line in the sand?). The question was put before Parliament (via the Central Election Committee), which, if anything like the rest of the world's elected bodies, is just brilliant at policing itself. Early last week they announced that Ryspek was out on a technicality: it seemed he did not meet residency requirements, as he has not lived in Kyrgyzstan continuously during the past five years. That announcement was followed on Thursday by his followers blocking all of the main roads in the area along the northern shores of Lake Issy-kul, where he would be running from, as well as blocking the mayor's office there. As that went so splendidly (sarcasm aside, it did work to disrupt commerce and traffic and local governance and in that sense was a brilliantly executed bit of political demonstrating), Ryspek and his posse decided to up the stakes and move things to Bishkek. And that brings us to Friday, which, as this has gone on long enough for a single post, I will get to tomorrow. I will leave you only with this: Where's Buddy Cianci when you really need him?

Tags: Kyrgyzstan, Central Asia, Politics, Bishkek, Protest

Bus Stop Beauty

2006-04-04T22:59:00.000+06:00

I had a nice long post planned for today about last Friday's pseudo-uprising here in Bishkek. But then I took a nap and things got all fuzzy and that post will have to wait until tomorrow. In the meantime, I'm throwing a back-up post at you, one far less manpower-intensive on my end, as the working folk like to say. Plus, it's got pictures!

During our travels around the country, Erin and I have both been admiring the weird and wonderful bus stops adorning roadsides pretty much everywhere. They are truly remarkable, partly-crumbly, fifteen (or so) foot tall cement monuments to various cultural aspects of the Kyrgyz and their Soviet friends. We've seen giant kolpaks (the traditional hat you may have seen the lone Kyrgyz Olympian wearing during the opening ceremonies in Turin this past February), eagles, horses, yurts, Lenin's head, various mosaics, on and on. And all with cozy spots inside to hang out and wait for the marschutka. So that's nice.

On our last trip to Talas, after passing a particularly brilliant fifteen foot kolpak, Erin leaned over and said, "I want to hire a driver next summer and spend time driving around the country taking pictures of these bus stops." Unfortunately, someone beat her to it. In some sense, anyway. His name is Christopher Herwig and you can find him here. But what you really want is this. They're apparently not just in Kyrgyzstan. Who knew?

Opening Day!

2006-04-03T12:02:00.000+06:00

I just wanted to get the good mojo started right from the get-go. I may be in Central Asia, but that doesn't mean I don't care.

Also, check out this week's surprisingly applicable PostSecret highlight here.

Tags: Red Sox, baseball

Move It Move It

2006-03-31T14:23:00.000+06:00

Right, so apparently none of you have been moved by music or economics lately. Neither have I, so no worries. (Though if you've got something on either tip, let's hear it, please.)

Maybe this'll move you, though: there's a new issue of The Burnside Review now out. I like the Burnside Review. I think some of you will also like the Burnside Review. I also think that what Sid Miller has managed to make in the last couple years in enviable and something to be applauded. And since it's a small, independent literary journal, the best way to show your love is to buy a copy. Or eight. If you're not into showing love through monetary transactions (isn't that the American way?), I will point out that I have a poem in the new issue. I had a couple poems in the first issue, as well, so if you're looking to get a hold of collectibles and/or a foundation for that shrine to me you've been thinking about, here's as good a place to start as any.

If you're just plain not into active engagement, Erin uploaded some of the pics from our trip to Talas, so there are pretty things to passively look at here, including this:

A Couple of Requests from the Other Side of the Globe

2006-03-30T10:51:00.000+06:00

Request the first:

So, it's gotten to the point where I would rather stab myself in the ear with a pencil then listen to the music on our computer. Not all of it, certainly, but most of it: Yellow #2 'twixt the anvil, stirrup, & hammer, for sure. It's just that what's on the computer represents about 1/3 of the music typically available for perusal and selection when at home. We just didn't get around to digitizing everything before we left. (What? We had other things going on. No, don't look at me like that--we did. Really.) Plus, to make matters worse, there had been a considerably greater number of albums/songs/artists on my ipod, but through some mysterious force unknown to me, it decided to erase itself about a month and a half ago. Listened to it one day, hooked it up to the laptop to charge and update, woke up in the morning and there's nothing there. So, pencils in the ear. And here's where we get to the first request: songs. See, our internet connection is such that it takes about twenty or thirty minutes to download a single song. So the songs absolutely have to be choice, or else it's such a let down I feel like its the day after the presidential elections all over again. According to the stats, a fair number of people swing through here every day. And not all of them are looking to drop some comment spam on us. Some of you actually read. And I'm sure a few of you are even listening to your new favorite song while you're doing it. Or thinking about your new favorite song, at least. I want to know what that song is. And then I want to go find it and download it and listen to it as a balm against pencils in my ears. Let the comments section be your mount, music shepherds, and sermonize.

(For the record, to perhaps give you some sense of what's been coming through lately, my recent downloads include: The Modern Lovers' "New England" [we're getting dangerously close to Opening Day and I wanted to ensure I felt the proper level of Fenway love]; "The Killers' "All These Things That I've Done" [yeah, well, it rules, so quit yer cool stance and try dancing, ok?]; Sam Cooke's "A Change is Gonna Come"; some old Saigon battle tracks [it seems the hype is well founded]; some old Jay-Z I was desperately missing; and Elliott Smith's cover of Big Star's "Thirteen.")

Request the second:

I like to think that I'm engaged and intelligent enough to garner some sense of cohesion and relevance from the daily news, to make connections, see why such and such may affect this other place over here, why these people are taking to the streets and itching to lob a few Molotov cocktails embassy-ward. I can recognize all the major world leaders (and most of their seconds) or the Supreme Court Justices when presented with a line-up. (Junichiro Koizumi remains the coolest looking official on earth.) But then the world business report comes on and I glaze over like an abused chimp nearing an overdose level of OxyContin (that Rescue show on Animal Planet can keep you up nights, lemme tell ya). It's not that I don't care (entirely), or that I don't recognize that some people really want to hear reports about the Nikkei Index or the FTSE 100. (That last one I actually rather like, as it's pronounced Footsie, which has that seventh grade in the roller rink kind of feel to it and so almost manages to whisk away the three piece suit aspect of the market.) Or I read something like this (from "Capitalism: the Movie" by Clive Crook in the March 2006 Atlantic Monthly) and have to reread it a few times before I admit that I have no idea what it means: "America regulates its market force more lightly than Europe, hence its low rate of unemployment; but in many other areas, especially so far as risk, product safety, and the environment are concerned, America's economy is at least as heavily regulated as Europe's." The problem is, I am as ignorant of global-level economics as I am of animal husbandry. I somehow managed to never take an economics class, never, not once. Five years of high school, four (and a half) years of college--nothing. I'm not even going to include the three years of grad school, because the chances of my having gotten any economics when working toward a creative writing degree were slim to begin with. For all I know, Alan Greenspan is a warlock and regulated interest rates all those years only after studied concentration over a bubbling cauldron. I clearly need some help. And so we get to my point: do any of you feel you have a good enough grasp on the larger economic happenings of the world to provide me with a little study session? My email's in my profile: hit me up. I'll even do the homework. Promise.

Because Lists Are Fun & the Primary Reason I Carry a Notebook around with Me

2006-03-29T14:54:00.000+06:00

It has been pointed out to me (by Erin, who does the bulk of the pointing out of things to me) that in yesterday's post, when I referred to the shiak (guardian) from the sacred sites complex as Holy Man Jim, I may have been being a bit culturally insensitive and maybe even a little mean. In an attempt to right that potential wrong, and as possible proof of my being a bit daft and/or deaf, I offer you this list of other English-esque phrases I misheard intermixed with Kyrgyz during our trip to Talas:

murder phonebook sloth

dinner plans foretold

Daniel stinks

possum possum hat trick

rock and fractal plane

gruff dinner hardtop kitchen

Machiavelli

jokes sure suck

rock top joke teller

Jerry Lewis joke

Are you a republican?

Short Takes #5 (or: What's 3 Weeks between Friends?)

2006-03-24T21:43:00.000+06:00

So I've been sick. Not deathbed sick, but sick enough to not leave the apartment for three days and to have amassed enough dirty tissues to build a 2/3 scale model replica of the Taj Mahal. I blame it on having drank from a communal tea cup that had been sitting out for who knows how long water that was taken from a spring only yards away from a pile of poo. Erin says I'm being paranoid. I thinks she's nuts. Here is proof of my side of the story:

If you look just below the Sprite bottle, you'll see the tea cup in question. Guarding said cup (and the spring and the 26 other sacred sites in this particular complex) is the man in white, Holy Man Jim. Or at least that's what his name sounded like to me and let's face it, that's a pretty good name for a man who guards sacred sites for a living. Below is proof #2:

That's poo, just on the other side of the stone wall surrounding the spring visible in the first picture (the poo would be up and to the right from that point of view). I don't like poo in my water. Nor do I like the saliva of an indefinite number of other people in my water. But beyond that, I hate being sick. Maybe I'm wrong, but I blame the poo water. Poo water bad, very very bad.

Sometime not long before we left Bloomington, I popped into the Corner Book Store (a wonderful independent bookstore whose name for some utterly inexplicable reason I always want to say as The Book Nook, even though it is located--shocker!--right smack dab on the corner of Walnut & Kirkwood) and loaded up with some new lit journals for the road. One among them was the debut issue of Barrelhouse, whose intent is to marry once and for all pop culture and literary culture. Naturally, I loved it. (The fact that Steve Almond was involved in that first issue didn't hurt matters much, as I have stated for years that he's a god among lesser men. Or at least a damn funny and damn fine writer.) Beyond the magazine proper, however, I've recently (since being here, anyway) discovered that the good folks at Barrelhouse are also blogging (here), and their blog more or less makes me laugh every day, which is more than I can say about most things I regularly read on the internet. Yesterday's post points to an art show in Brooklyn containing a sculpture of Britney Spears giving birth atop a bear skin rug. A quote from the page:

According to the announcement, the piece is a "monument to pro-life." Leaving aside for a moment the problematic grammar of that phrase's construction, I've got to assume (hope?) that the sentiment is meant ironically. Though, if it is, apparently no one bothered to clue in the Manhattan Right to Life Committee, which purportedly donated materials to the project.

However, the real highlight recently (beyond Mrs. Federline, of course) has been their version of March Madness, in which pop icons have been put up against literary icons in a battle royale (of on-line voting). The first match saw Joyce Carol Oates get utterly destroyed by the esteemed Mr. T. (As it should be; I've still not gotten over Ms. Oates spending a week at Pomfret my junior year.) You can find the brackets on the blog and get your votes in (yesterday was a round two match-up between Mr. T and Willie Nelson!). And, of course, check out the magazine. The second issue is now out (I think; I've obvioulsy not seen it, as they don't sell it in Bishek), so maybe buy it and give the Barellhousers a try.

One aspect of our recent trip to Talas that Erin failed to mention in her recap was my having to 'purify' myself before we went up to one of the mazars. Essentially, this meant I dropped my pants and, standing ankle-deep in a partly frozen river, splashed Arctic-like water all over my nether regions for a few long minutes while five or six Kyrgyz elders looked on approvingly. Maybe that has something to do with the vicious cold, too. I don't know. And I don't particularly want to think about it, either. But I'm not above sharing it with all of you.

Last Saturday, as Erin was in Kochkor with her advisor and Kubat and others and I was left to my own devices in Bishkek, I wandered around town for awhile and when I got hungry I stopped into the Metro Pub, which is a self-described 'ex-pats hangout' with a Western-esque menu (hamburgers, traditional English breakfasts, Philly cheesesteak, etc.). All of our experiences there have been tainted by the presence of other Americans (not that you need my word to point this out, but we tend to be an annoying bunch when left to our own devices in foreign territory; especially those of us in the Peace Corps, it seems), but I was hungry and it wasn't lunch time and looked empty, so I went in. There was a big table full of military guys in from the base having lunch and no one else. I sat off by myself by the window, ordered a sandwich and a drink, and started reading. Not long before I left, an American scholar E. & I have met before but who apparently didn't recognize me (though I smiled and did the male head nod of recognition thing as he walked past) came in with a Kyrgyz woman (KW). They sat right next to me. The restaurant is rather big, with about twenty tables, 17 or so at that point empty. But the real point of my story is that this is the conversation they had almost immediately upon sitting down, when American scholar man (ASM) told his server, when she brought over menus, that he'd like an order of onion rings immediately:

KW: What are onion rings?
ASM: You'll find out.
KW: But what are they?
ASM: They're onions in the shape of rings. What more can I say?
KW: Whole onions?
ASM: They're an American thing. You'll find out soon enough.

I asked for my check immediately. And then went and bought some bootleg DVDs down the street.

On a more positive note, the one-year anniversary of the Tulip Revolution (March 24) came and went without much to report. The day was made a national holiday about a week and a half ago and the requisite hoo-ha went down in the center of the city: tanks and ballistic missiles rolled through followed by hundreds of men dressed in camo and simultaneously holding Kalishnikovs and beer bottles (always a fun combo). There were fireworks and performances and general yippie-type activities, but in the end, perhaps thanks to the constant reminder recently of the government's sizable military might (I mean when compared to, say, the guy in the bazaar selling cabbage, not the global military powers), everything went on peacefully and is now back to what passes as normal.

Would it be Asking Too Much...

2006-03-10T14:25:00.000+06:00

...if I were to request someone TiVo these, burn them onto DVD, then ship them to us in Kyrgyzstan? Would it? I'll pay. For real. C'mon, you know you want to.

Happy Family Do Cooking!

2006-03-09T18:00:00.000+06:00

So say the aprons, in English, worn by the women in the cafeteria at AUCA. A good point, I think. And one I like to enact as often as possible. Sitting around a table with a (few) bottles of wine talking with people I’ve just fed ranks really high on my lists of things that make life good. Especially when the dogs do the bulk of the cleaning up of leftovers. But the feeding and sitting and eating and reveling hasn’t really happened on any large scale since we’ve been here, for a number of reasons. Until yesterday.

Yesterday was Woman’s Day. (It is singular in title, oddly, and thereby gives the sense that each woman individually owns the day as an autonomous entity, which strikes me as sort of contrary to the whole socialist thing, considering this holiday was birthed [pun? me? never.] by the Soviets way back when. Maybe collectivism was only for men. Are Communists still beholden to patriarchy? Well. But the women got their own day! One whole day! Suckers.) Where were we? Right, Woman’s Day. So a couple weeks ago, you’ll remember, we celebrated Fatherland Defender’s Day, aka Man’s Day (a holiday whose motto may very well be “we get most of them anyway, but it’s nice to set one aside every now and again to really revel in it.” When we get to Straight White Middle Class American Day is when the real party gets going!). So on Man's Day, we trucked over to Nathan’s apartment with the usual crew of students and faculty and friends we’re taken to trucking around with and you’re no doubt used to hearing about by now. Once there, Yelena and Asel (Yelena’s best friend and fellow AUCA student) made us all samsi and in the process taught us how to do so ourselves. As you’ve seen over on Erin’s blog, we’ve done our best to put the teaching into practice. But while we were still learning and the samsi were still not yet oven-bound, I commented that I’ll have to cook for Yelena and Asel sometime. I like to cook, you see. And Fatherland Defender’s Day made for the second time I had been cooked for in a short period of time by one of the women among us. So it was only right, right? I thought so. Yelena and Asel didn’t quite understand. “Erin will cook for us?” they asked. “I don’t cook,” lied Erin. “Well then,” said Yelena after a long quizzical look at both Erin and me, “we will have pancakes. For Woman’s Day.”

Somehow, by the end of the evening it was further decided (by Nathan, I think) that I would make crepes. Blini were out of the question, as you don’t make borscht in the buckle of the world’s borsht belt without a serious wish for failure. (Does that metaphor even work? I don’t know. It would be best to just move on…) And American pancakes were vetoed as well, as Yelena (wrongly, but with conviction) assured us that they were the same thing as blini. So crepes it was.

We bought a new, smaller non-stick pan and a whisk, milk and eggs and flour and sugar, some jam and ground meat and sour cream and mascapone cheese (Italian cheese made in Wisconsin, bought in Bishkek; living abroad has more rewards beyond the obvious, I'd say), and on Sunday had Janika over for a test run. All went well. I was afraid without a blender (most crepe recipes I know involve blenders) that things might be a bit clumpy and weird. I whisked all of the batter together in a bowl then transferred it to a jar left over from the tomatoes we used for lasagna a couple months ago and shook it like Tom Cruise doing his bartender thing in Cocktail. Like Catharine Hepburn in an earthquake I shook. Like Otis at Monterey. Shake with the feeling! In the end, all was well. The batter was smooth and problem-free. Let’s hear it for jars and rapid movement.

Because the number of people coming over was constantly in flux (when I saw Yelena at the university on Monday, she listed people she’d invited for what seemed like twenty minutes; turns out I missed a segue in the conversation and after some amount of time she had moved on to talking about who she had seen over the weekend. My bad.), I decided to make a minimum of six batches of crepes—two savory, two sweet, and two neutral (or, as I’ve taken to calling them, bland). I figured I’d spread the crepe-making over three days and save myself some work—bang out a couple of batches on Monday, a couple more on Tuesday, finish up on Wednesday in time for guests. As with most things I plan, that didn’t work. Monday I woke up late and fell asleep early, obsessing over some revision work I was doing the entire short-lived period of wakefulness. Then on Tuesday we were invited at the last minute (totally normal move here, by the way, which I love) to a party at a cafe in celebration of Woman’s Day hosted by the former head of the Anthro department at AUCA. It was weird and took most of the night and involved another American forcing unwilling Kyrgyz to do improv games ripped right off from the lesser of the two What’s My Line?s and adapting Eliot’s poems from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats over and over again to the point of people literally groaning whenever he started to even mention a cat. So the night wasn’t entirely a waste (ahem). But that left me to spend eight hours yesterday standing in the kitchen flipping crepes. Well, most of the time I was flipping crepes. There was also some sautéing of mushroom, some cooking of meat, some sitting around checking my email and reading about the Red Sox pre-season woes. But mostly flipping, which looked a lot like this:

Eventually people showed up and ate the crepes, which was really the point of this ramble wasn’t it? Janika and Alexander showed up first, but, as they themselves pointed out, that’s to be expected: they’re German and have a stereotype to live up to. Matt, an American here running the Alpine Fund (as well as a fellow New Englander—Maine—and Red Sox fan, so he gets extra points), turned up next with what seemed enough pussy willows for every women in Bishkek to have her own four foot stalk. They are all still in a vase on our balcony, which is pretty rad, if you ask me. Shortly after that Yelena and Asel showed up and kicked me off the stove. “I’m supposed to be cooking for you,” I said. “But you’re doing it wrong,” said Yelena. Who can argue with that? She was at the stove long enough to make one pancake, thick like a blini, then wandered off to argue with Alexander in Russian about the Uzbek/Kyrgyz relationship (she’s half Uzbek, half Kyrgyz; Alexander is German; they were arguing in Russian. Brilliant.) and Asel took over the cooking. I hopped in the shower in an attempt to scrub off the layer of grease that had taken over my entire body. When I got out, grease-free, there were about twenty people in the apartment, smoking, drinking, laughing, telling stories, reading poems, making toasts, and eating crepes. Many, many crepes. There were over a hundred in the end and they all got filled with the many tasty things people brought—Nutella, jams, meats, veggies, cheeses, on and on—until there were no more left and people were full and content and talkative. It was wonderful. If the dogs had been here to give the plates a once over, it may have been perfect.

The Defenders Keep Their Word: a Woman's Day Message from the Menfolk

2006-03-07T15:20:00.000+06:00

A selection from the message that popped up on the AUCA server today, just in time for tomorrow's Woman's Day celebrations:

Dear Ladies of AUCA!

The spring season always starts in an atmosphere of a holiday. Indeed, what else can compare with the magic of the spring thaw, songs of birds, and first flowers? There is one thing – the International Women’s Day, with its spirit of Love and Beauty that enliven our senses and elevate our spirits.

On behalf of all gentlemen of our University and us personally we would like to extend our most sincere congratulations to you on this special day. Thank you very much for your tremendous work and graciousness.

We wish so much that your kind smiles never leave your faces! Be loved and be happy every day!

I for one am looking forward to having my senses enlivened and my spirit elevated, as it's been quite some time since that's happened without the aid of chemicals or Peter Jackson's special effects team. But I'm still waiting on the magic of the spring thaw. I mean, the bits that had been covered in snow are now piles of mud with wee sprouts of grass poking out, but I'm still not feeling the magic. Maybe tomorrow. That is, after all, when the spirits of Love and Beauty (capitalized in honor of Emily Dickinson, I assume), those renowned harbingers of magic, supposedly get going. Either way, I'll keep you posted.

The Biggest Little State in the Union

2006-03-06T18:41:00.000+06:00

I was either in Lake Placid or Montreal the first time I realized Rhode Island didn't make it onto many people's mental maps. Either way, there were Canadians involved and it was in an ice rink. My sister was doing her precision skating thing and I was trading pins with the teams that had come, because that's how everyone spends their childhoods, damn it. Anyway, I walk up to a group of Canadians and we start exchanging pins. They look at the one I've given them and then one of them says, "Rhode Island? Is that in New York?"

Turns out, yes, yes it is.

In the four months we've been here, I've gotten quite used to people not knowing what the hell I'm talking about when I answer the question "What part of the US are you from?" I've become accustomed to saying "It's south of Boston." I've even gotten used to saying "It's between Boston and New York," which, aside from being a geographical fib of sorts, seems to settle the issue nine times out of ten. The biggest exception came this past Friday, when E and I went to Kochkor with Kubat (the Kyrgyz archaeologist working on Erin's project with her) and one of his colleagues from the Turkish Manas University here in Bishkek, Anil, a Turkish archaeologist (pictures here). At some point early in the day, Anil asked where we were from and we went through the list--Indiana, Ohio, Rhode Island, met in school in New York....

Wait, did you say Rhode Island?
Um, yeah, Rhode Island. It is where I grew up.
What is this Rhode Island? What state is that in?
Rhode Island is a state. It's between Massachusetts and Connecticut, in the northeastern part of the country.
It is part of Massachusetts?
No, it is a state near Massachusetts, to the south.
I don't know where this is.
Near New York.
Ah, New York.

Later in the day, while Erin was battling a friend of Kubat's in a Kyrgyz game called Nine Stone (with perhaps only slightly more pride than warranted, I assure you she kicked his ass), we went through the role call again. The friend, the head of a school in Kochkor, asked Anil if I was Turkish too (apparently I'm not nearly as pale as I used to be; no more getting called the Galloping Ghost, thank you very much). Anil told him no, Dan is American, from New York. The man looked at me and nodded in recognition.

So, turns out I'm a New Yorker. By birth. The accent's a little off, but I guess I could work on it.

Fat Tuesday at the Wee Purple Palace

2006-03-01T14:05:00.000+06:00

Wee Purple Palace

(2000-2006)

All of the utilities have been transferred, the cave crickets in the basement informed of their new landlord, the mortgage payments stopped, the papers signed, the realtor paid, and the bank account is healthier than it was yesterday morning.

The Wee Purple Palace is no longer ours.

If you're in Bloomington (and I know at least a couple of you are), give it a drive-by and a wave on our behalf. And if anyone is sitting on the porch when you're there, shout something offensive at them, just to make them feel like locals.

Enter Elham

2006-02-27T16:21:00.000+06:00

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

Olympiada

2006-02-24T15:59:00.000+06:00

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!)

From Human Resources

2006-02-23T15:54:00.000+06:00

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!

We Have Contact!

2006-02-22T12:38:00.000+06:00

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.

We Will Go to the Mountains and Make the Fire and Play the Games...

2006-02-13T15:32:00.000+06:00

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...

The One in Which Our Correspondent Walks into A Monty Python Sketch

2006-02-10T17:12:00.000+06:00

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?

Information Overload

2006-02-08T14:35:00.000+06:00

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."

D-D-D-D-Da! or How Over-Dubbing for Foreign Markets is a Neglected Art Form

2006-02-02T14:02:00.000+06:00

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.)

The Fresnish Are Taking Over!

2006-01-29T19:20:00.000+06:00

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."

Further Proof 2006 Will Fill Us All Full of White Noise and Cotton Candy:

2006-01-24T22:58:00.000+06:00

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...")

Mail Call

2006-01-18T22:52:00.000+06:00

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.

Short Takes #3

2006-01-18T15:48:00.000+06:00

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?

The Noodles Box Read Lazanya

2006-01-16T09:59:00.000+06:00

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!

Wednesday Was Pizza Night

2006-01-15T01:21:00.000+06:00

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."

A Week Late & 42 Som Short

2006-01-07T11:44:00.000+06:00

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...

Procrastinating New Year's

2006-01-01T23:48:00.000+06:00

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.

Happy New Year from Kyrgyzstan!

2005-12-30T17:55:00.000+06:00

In the words of Bishkek Bailey, Happy New Year!

Transliteration = Funny

2005-12-27T20:55:00.000+06:00

A bit of fun in the supermarket aisles (and with The Beta Store re-opening last week, we actually have a supermarket now!):

Multi-Lingual Embarrassments Continued

2005-12-27T19:54:00.000+06:00

Last Friday during our Russian lesson, I inadvertently learned a dirty word. I'm still not sure what the word means exactly, but I can at least say it.

We were learning new verbs, so Jarken, our tutor, was having us use the verbs in sentences. One of the verbs we were learning, peasat (I can't type in Cyrillic, so phonetics will have to do for now), means 'to write.' Of the verbs we know, most all of them are conjugated by dropping the last consonant and adding, in the first person, what sounds like you. Given no evidence to the contrary, I assumed this would be how one should conjugate this verb as well. I looked at Jarken and said Ya peeshayou poemey, thinking I was saying 'I write poems.'

She sat back in her chair and shook her head. Then, in a voice far more stern than usual, she said, in English, No. Please remember, 'peeshyou, not peeshayou.' I chalked this up to the usual and frequent instances when I somehow foul up the language and Jarken kindly reminds me of it. As it was late in the lesson and she'd already been correcting me on a fairly steady basis for over an hour, the stern tone of voice seemed maybe fitting.

A few minutes later, again piecing together sentences with our new verbs but in a different context, I again said Ya peeshayou poemey. Jarken immediately said No. That is for...that is for toilet! Please do not say. Confused, Erin and I looked at one another then both looked at Jarken. She explained in broken English and a series of charades that it is what little children do in their pants, what people do in the toilet, and that by adding that one syllable I was horribly altering the meaning of my sentence. Shaking her head, she repeated what I'd said and laughed for a good, long minute.

I piss poems. Or I shit poems. I'm not sure which. Either one, though...not so much, thanks.

Cupcakes, French Fries, & Jesus Christ

2005-12-23T01:03:00.000+06:00

Well, as you've undoubtedly figured out by all the ridiculous specials on television over the last two weeks and the gaudy light display on the house across the street (an apparent attempt to get the electric bill to match the gas), it's Christmas time again! I don't know what that means for you, but for me it means one thing. And, even though Erin and I are in Kyrgyzstan this year and a lot of other things are different, I can at least take comfort in the fact that my favorite annual tradition can still be enjoyed, time and again. I'm speaking, of course, of this wee bit o' genius, which, for the sake of good taste and those who are made to spend time with me on any regular basis, I only allow myself to partake of for a few brief minutes in the few fleeting days around the holiday. To get in the spirit. To feel the cheer.

If you're one of those pesky few not in the Jesus fan club or just don't feel like singing carols right now but still wanna laugh a bit, may I recommend this, a gem that brilliantly manages to pay respect to both C.S. Lewis and Dr. Dre simultaneously.

'Tis the season, folks. Enjoy.

Gone Out the Window

2005-12-22T13:32:00.000+06:00

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.

Contrary to Popular Opinion, I am Not in Any Way Depressed, Unhappy, or Otherwise Disgruntled & I Offer to You, as Proof, These Following Truths:

2005-12-18T23:18:00.000+06:00

I have put my purist tendencies aside and, beyond merely accepting Erin’s setting Snood to the “Christmas” option, find myself giggling frequently at the weird, new Santa and Ornament Snoods.

*

While walking home from the university last Wednesday night during a terrific snow storm—big, thick flakes in rapid succession and a still, crisp air—I felt as though I’d slipped into the musical drama version of my life, or, at least, a music montage segue between plot points, and, in order to supply the requisite soundtrack and still not quite comfortable enough when alone in the dark to wear headphones and deafen myself with the ipod, I sang, out loud, Nina Simone’s “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good” all the way home. While I’ll concede that it is indeed a sad song, the choice was made not because it twinned my own inner-self in some way but because I felt it better upped the drama of the situation, of the musical I had slipped into. These things happen. Directors call them artistic choices. Psychologists call them psychotic episodes. The few Kyrgyz I passed on the street called it funny. I agreed.

*

We visited the Meat House again and, as of this afternoon, we are now in possession of nearly two pounds of cured, smoky pork, spicy mustard, a block of white semi-soft cheese, and what amounts to a giant loaf of white sandwich bread. Have I mentioned that I love sandwiches?
*

Having watched the European finals, it appears the Norwegian curling team will be a favorite for the ’06 Olympic gold. I have no special allegiance to Norway, but curling, my god, could a sport possibly be any more ridiculously fun? I don’t think so.

*

And then I watched the Scottish lawn bowling finals and realized that yes, yes there can be a funnier sport in the world. Scottish lawn bowling—not to be confused with bocce, though other than the slightly-oval shape of the lawn bowling balls, I couldn’t be sure what the specific difference is—is genius to watch, full of men with the same athletic build as PBA stars in the US, glorious comb-overs, and a weird little stutter-step strut thing after every roll. Watch for it, it’s good stuff. Promise.

*

I saw a drunk man slip on sidewalk ice and slide ten feet on his chest, his arms and legs raised and spread in ecstatic revelry, then spring up from the ride’s end smiling, begin singing, and stumble on, unscathed. It was 2:30 in the afternoon.

*

I have managed to conjure, out of the few bits of produce not frozen inedible at the bazaar by the recent patch of serious cold and what I think was lamb and a smoked sausage of unknown origin, to make rather delicious and perfectly passable versions of both jambalaya and shepherd’s pie. Delicious, I tell you, delicious!

*

Among the Most Played on our iTunes right now, as I type this, are A Tribe Called Quest’s “Award Tour,” The Beatles “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” The Detroit Cobras’ “Shout Bama Lama,” and Dr. Teeth & the Electric Mayhem’s “Can You Picture That?”. This is not the soundtrack of a depressive ex-pat, people. These are the songs a happy man sings and dances to by himself in his apartment after a few hours of writing that’s been going well.

*

This weekend saw me surpass the 20,000 word mark on the novel. Erin and I shared a tiny apricot cake in celebration.

*

Lastly, I honestly believed that a bizarre, somewhat inedible sandwich and noises like cars being eaten by enormous lizards in the middle of the night were funny stories, not indications of my desire to be air-lifted home.

Pipe Dreams

2005-12-12T16:21:00.000+06:00

Last Wednesday night, around 3:30 or so, I woke up and rolled over so that I was facing the bedroom door. I was on my way back to sleep when I realized I hadn't actually woken up because I was cold or because the bed is too short or because I was having a dream where the same horrible person keeps calling and calling me until I finally have to smash my cell phone to bits with a hammer (all of which have recently woken me from sleep) but because the world was vibrating and making an awful noise while it was at it. Awful like a subwoofer implanted in your molars, like someone feeding a mid-70s model Lincoln through a paper shredder. The more I woke up, the louder the noise became.

I woke up Erin after a little bit and told her, "The blender is stuck on puree but something's blocking the blades." She made a noise meant to mean What the hell are you talking about? "Do you hear that awful noise," I asked. "Oh," she said.

We laid there a bit not talking. Eventually Erin put her glasses on and went to the bedroom window, the one that overlooks the courtyard of our apartment complex. She thought maybe a car was out there making the noise. It would had to have been a monster truck with a jet engine, so not surprisingly, there was no car out there and Erin got back into bed.

I put my glasses on and got up. The computer was sitting on the dresser by the bedroom door so, thinking it could have maybe been running roughly and using the dresser as a sort of amplifier, I reached out and felt the drawers for vibrations. Nothing, which, of course, is a good thing, as they probably would have signaled the end of the laptop.

The noise was so loud and so bass-heavy that it was difficult to tell which direction it could have been coming from. The only corollary I have at my disposal is if you were to experience seeing Jucifer in a very small closet. Or there was a story on This American Life once (Episode 279, if you're looking) about a group of people who compete in car stereo contests, something called db drag racing, where they build car stereos so loud they can't actually be played while someone is sitting in the car. It was something like that. So we went blindly into the hallway in search of the source, like David Livingstone setting off to find the source of the Nile, only in pajamas and without such lofty goals.

Once into the hallway a few feet, it became clear that the noise was originating somewhere in the direction of the bathroom or kitchen. Moving in that direction it became even clearer that the noise was definitely coming from the bathroom. In the wall behind the washing machine, to be exact. We looked at each other and then both went to shut off the water for the wash. It was off. "Off is to the right, right?" I screamed. Erin ignored me and began turning the machine on and off again, thinking maybe it had somehow come to life and was eating a Jabberwocky. No dukes. Finally we noticed that the wall was actually vibrating. The pipes inside that bit of wall were not well and were letting us know as much through the only means they had available to them: retched, horrible noise.

We closed the bathroom door and the bedroom door, too, and climbed back into bed. The noise didn't stop for another hour and a half, during which I sat awake trying to keep my teeth from chattering while Erin slept soundly beside me.

The noises have come back a few times since. And some horrific banging noises as well from the same spot. The banging noises sound like someone's knocking on the door with a ball peen hammer. The first few times I actually got up to look.

There is no moral here, no punch-line. Anecdotes can fail in that way and still exist.

Cheating & How My Body Hates Me

2005-12-09T19:33:00.000+06:00

I've been feeling kind of myneh all week. The specific symptoms of myneh have included sleeping far, far longer each day than one would deem "normal" (say, 16 hours easy), eating next to nothing, and feeling little desire to perform the simplest tasks or even those that typically bring me joy (writing, for instance). Thus, no blog posts all week. Sorry about that. I think the annual one-off round of flu is here for me (not Bird Flu damn it, just your average God Damn! it's cold out there kind of flu...). I'm more or less recovered (though I didn't get out of bed until mid-afternoon today and skipped yesterday's Russian lesson) and will attempt to make up for lost blog-time.

This all seemed to start on Monday, when Erin and I decided that for dinner we'd walk up to Fat Boys, the English-speaking, American-friendly, English language library-having restaurant downtown. We were both tired and very hungry (neither of us having eaten all day), and these factors combined into an all-encompassing laziness. As I've said before, it's tiring just leaving the apartment. So we cheated and took the easy route to dinner.

This week has been cold, very, very cold. As I write this it is 10 degree F in Bishkek (according to the weather widget on the Mac, anyway). That's about right for the week's weather in general. The walk downtown on Monday night was no exception, and by the time we reached Fat Boys--after a half hour or so--we found our faces numbed to the point that it was difficult to form words correctly. And our noses were running in a very unflattering, seemingly unstoppable manner.

Fat Boys is two rooms connected by a bar/foyer area on the ground floor of a large, block-long building a few minutes east of the main square. The room on the right houses the library. Neither of us ventured over there for a look-see, so I have no reports. (We may, in the near future, need to do so, however, as we're both dangerously nearing the end of the reading materials we brought with us. I found three back issues of The Economist last night in one of the cupboards and was gleeful for hours.) The room on the left is the dining area proper, with maybe twenty two-tops spread around the room, some pushed together against the walls to form four-tops.

Upon entering, E and I just sort of lingered inside the door, unsure of what to do next. The waitstaff (five or six young Kyrgyz girls) were all sitting or standing by the bar directly opposite the door. After a minute or so of our sizing up the place and slowly regaining feeling to our faces, one of the girls at the bar said, "Please sit anywhere" in English. There were a few couples toward the front of the room and a foursome at the table by the door. We sat ourselves at a free table in the corner furthest from the door, in the back left-hand corner of the building, and very shortly menus were brought to us.

It was oddly comforting and refreshing and just plain nice to find the menu in English. I was surprised by that (the response from my emotional center, not the English) and welcomed it, as it seemed to be helping with the physical warming of my body, which even after a few minutes inside I was still in desperate need of. We were left alone with the menus for a few minutes, then a waitress came over and asked us, in Russian, if we were ready to order. My yeeha English! feeling diminished a bit, but didn't vanish completely. Erin ordered, in English, a Greek Salad and a grilled cheese with tomato. I asked for a Turkish salad (essentially a Greek salad with the Feta and olives replaced by a metric ton of shredded carrots) and a curried chicken sandwich. The sandwich order was of the oh no, need to say something now sort. I had noticed the sandwich in my initial look through the menu and for some unknown reason went back there in my panicked need to order. I wasn't quite up to eating one of the dinner entree items (a full lamb dinner [of unknown cut] seemed a bit much, really) and didn't quite know whether or not it was cool to still order pancakes (a perennial comfort food, thank you very much; one of the other breakfast dishes was called "The Cholesterol" and involved grits, toast, several meats, and eggs...very funny). So curried chicken sandwich, obviously.

When our food came, all at once, everything looked good. The salads were big and delicious. Erin's grilled cheese was straight out of a sandwich maker, grill marks and all. The tomatoes in it were sliced nice and small, so as to both be warm and to avoid the unfortunately common occurrence of pulling the tomato slice out of the sandwich with a misplaced bite (I more or less lived on grilled cheese with tomato at Skidmore for two years [Spa Ladies of my past, I thank you], so I was happy to see such brilliant craftsmanship, so to speak). My sandwich, on the other hand, looked like a 1950s B-movie UFO: a large, round bulb, hard and brown, with bits of lettuce and a gelatinous, yellowy substance spilling out of the middle. In a way, it resembled a jelly donut filled with curried chicken. Only, you know, different.

And the roll was hard. Really, really hard. Too hard to easily bite into in one try. The added effort in grinding through the roll led the filling--with a consistency like super-loose tuna salad, only Grey Poupon brown--to shoot out in various directions. And while the filling was mayonnaise heavy to begin with, there was also another, autonomous layer of mayonnaise, thick and viscous, on either side of the filling. The overall effect was like attempting to bite through two cast-iron pans with a layer of potato salad in between, held in place by KY Jelly. Not easy. But it was really tasty and I was hungry, so I kept trying. The curry was flavorful and the roll, after it'd been gnawed away and allowed to sit for a bit in the mouth, was actually pretty tasty, too. But the whole thing was just too tiring. After five or six bites, I gave up. Erin gave me half of her grilled cheese and did her best to have a go at the curried chicken. She managed three or four bites and gave up, claiming to be full (bless her heart). Eventually, the waitress came back and cleared all of the plates except the sandwich, which continued to sit between us like an emblem of our failure for another ten or fifteen minutes.

We just sat there after that enjoying our tea and sodas (Central Asian Sprite has a tendency to taste like 7-Up, so I was having Pepsi). Erin helped me plan out the rest of the novel I'm working on (there was a rather sizable black hole in the plot and I was rapidly approaching it, but we managed to get that taken care of while sitting there). Eventually, the sandwich was adios-ed and we got our bill. The whole thing was about $6.50, including tip. Brilliant.

On our way out a group of three men came in. They stood just inside the doorway, looking confused, until one of the waitstaff directed them to a table. We smelled our kind in them, but left before letting on that we knew. Instead we went home, played a few games of Blokus and cribbage, then I went to bed, where I stayed until about four o'clock the next afternoon, alternately sleeping and waking long enough to moan, achingly roll over, and fall back asleep.

I'm This Far from Full-On Paranoia

2005-12-05T00:45:00.000+06:00

As you may have picked up from the last dozen posts or so--I've been hinting at this since getting off the plane--living abroad, especially in Central Asia, can be a bit trying. Not that I don't love being here or that I'm not glad we're doing it or any of the many things that could also go in this sentence. That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is, sometimes it's a bit hard to be an American not living in America. Especially when only one tiny sliver of a country separates you from a country we handily carpet-bombed a few years back then turned over to warlords and opium dealers and called liberation. The Kyrgyz Republic still has a great relationship with the US and a predominately warm and trusting relationship with its people. But, ya know, the more times people go on television and say things like this, the more I'm gonna feel the need to start looking over my shoulder every time I leave the apartment:

We are working hard in good faith on both sides to come up with an approach that can be supported by the president and the Congress, to both find a way to be aggressive in the war on terror and still comply with U.S. law. -- National security adviser Stephen Hadley, on "Fox News Sunday."

I mean, c'mon! Negotiating being able to torture people? And not even caring enough to hide it anymore? And telling a man who spent years in a POW camp that his proposal banning our use of torture is ill-advised? Really? That's what we're doing now? Really?

All I'm saying is, this could make these next six months harder than they need to be. And I don't want that. I don't want that at all. I just want to wake up in the morning, write for a few hours, exercise, take a shower, go around the corner to buy some delicious 8 cent bread and fake a conversation in Russian, head to campus and edit some press releases, come home, watch Return of the Jedi or a Tom & Jerry cartoon dubbed in Russian, eat some tofu and weird black mushrooms, read a little, then go to bed. That's all. But if this keeps up, I don't know, boy, I just don't know.

Link to the full story here.

For the Record,

2005-12-02T15:02:00.000+06:00

this is nowhere near us (I'm looking in your direction here, Mom):

Follow me, please, for the best squirrel story ever.

Just saying.

(Thanks to Ms. Fu for the story.)

Short Takes

2005-12-01T13:38:00.000+06:00

On our second or third day here in Bishkek, I was asked my name by a student at AUCA. His English was only slightly better than my Russian (well, not that bad, but close), so it took me a few seconds to understand what he was asking. Before I gave him my name, while still computing what he'd asked, I said or uttered or whatever it is that comes out, "Uh." A few minutes later another student came up to us and the first student introduced me as Uhdan. I have been very careful with every sound I make since then.

There is a man who walks by our apartment everyday, at random times, yelling. As he is yelling in Russian, we have no idea what it is that he's yelling. We have taken to calling him Yelling Guy, as in, "Yelling Guy's back." "I know, I'm not deaf."

We live directly next door to the Japanese Embassy. We walk past it more or less every time we leave our apartment, as it is on the way to both the university and downtown. I have never, not once, seen anyone enter, leave, or otherwise exist within the tall, imposing fence of the Japanese Embassy. I have concerns regarding its operation.

The only channels we get in English on our television are BBC World News, CNN World News (for about four hours a day), random sporting events (the 1997 NBA playoffs were on this morning), and Fashion Television. While we both enjoy watching random American films from the 80s dubbed in Russian (Crocodile Dundee, Mad Max 2, Major League, and Batman so far), it is sometimes nice just to have something in English in the background. And sometimes it's nice not to have that something be reports of the world's approaching explosion delivered in a posh British accent. So, Fashion TV. I have learned much (an astounding number of Ukrainian models) and been utterly baffled with an alarming frequency.

There is a building somewhere near our apartment that rings a bell every morning at 7:30. The bell ring 37 times. I have no idea why.

Hanging against the wall on the first landing of the university's central staircase are three flags: The Kyrgyz flag on the right, the US flag on the left, and in between an IU flag in crimson and cream. It makes me giggle a little bit every time I see it. As though it is a nation or world power or somehow as important as the two places/ideas symbolized by the flags flanking it. So many reasons to laugh. Too many to list.

About four days ago I put up a picture of our two dogs as the wallpaper on the laptop. It is a great picture, taken sometime over the summer, with the two of them peeking out at the driveway of our house in Bloomington through the slats in the porch railings, looking off to the right with their mouths open and their tongues just barely poking out, like a smile. I put it up because I was missing them and thought seeing them more often would tamp that down a bit. Not so. Seeing them every day only increased the missing of the mutts. There is a new picture on the desktop now.

Why, after five years of miserable basketball (even the year of the NCAA finals was miserable, considering the victory over Duke that got them there; and, when you live with E., the day Duke leaves the tournament is miserable, trust me) does IU finally have a team this year?

There is, as I assume is the case in most places where English is not the first language, a certain type of English spoken by even the best English speakers here, one that is buffered with subtle, awkward pauses and a syntax both formal and, at times, convoluted. I find myself thinking in this new English when in conversation with an English speaker here. I have even found myself composing emails that way. I recognize it as it is happening, but can do nothing to stop it.

More Pictures

2005-11-29T16:37:00.000+06:00

There are more pictures up over at Flickr. The network on campus is going nice and fast again, so no problems on that end. However, I've hit my quota for uploads on my free Flickr account and as I've gotten into the habit of not carrying my wallet or any credit cards, I couldn't buy a larger account. So, unless one of you kind folks wants to buy me a gift subscription, you'll have to wait until tomorrow for me to get my credit card bidness together. But you can check out what's up now, right here.

New Additions to the List of 'Firsts'

2005-11-29T15:14:00.000+06:00

Today we had our first official Russian lesson. A faculty member in the Russian Language Dept. at AUCA is coming to our apartment three times a week for an hour and a half each session and more or less making us feel like we've recently been hit hard in the head with something very, very heavy the moment she arrives until the moment she leaves. Simply learning the alphabet--which we both thought we had a pretty good understanding of already--is like trying to swim while wearing a space suit. There's a special kind of embarrassment reserved for otherwise intelligent people on the doorstep of 30 repeatedly being corrected on the pronunciation of one letter of the alphabet. There's also a special level of comedy in having three adults sitting around a table for twenty minutes jutting out their chins and making what to my ear sounds like the worst stand-up comedian's imitation of the retarded kid down the street. Our homework for Thursday's lesson is to do more of the same, repeatedly and in front of the mirror if need be. Sexy!

The other big news of the last two days was yesterday's bomb threat at the university. I had a meeting with the university President at 3:00 yesterday afternoon, so Erin and I walked the few blocks over to the school building around 2:30. As we were approaching, we noticed a rather larger cadre of military and police officials milling about on the sidewalk directly in front of the school building. As the Kyrgyz Parliament building is immediately next door to the university (we were walking past it when we noticed the police) and there seemed to be some protesters setting up in front of that building, we guessed that maybe they were a peace-keeping group of sorts or, on the other side, a show of force. But when we reached them, they all came together to form a sort of loose human wall and told us (we assume, it was in Russian) that we couldn't go any further. Erin pulled out her Visiting Professor id card from the university and the response from the officers was more of the same. Finally, after a few brief moments of utter befuddlement on both sides, a soldier stepped through the wall and told us, "There is bomb. In the building, there is bomb." At which point we and the officers all shared a look of recognition and nods of acceptance. We crossed the street and were made to move into the park opposite the school building by another group of police. Not knowing what to do, how long things would last, where to go, etc., we walked up to the main square and bought a couple of meat pies from a vendor (sort of like Indian frybread stuffed with lamb and onion and other goodies; totally delicious and only 4 som, which is about 6 or 7 cents). When we got back, nothing had changed, so we went home and got on line. There was no information on any of the pertinent web pages--US Embassy Bishkek page, AUCA page...--nor is there any now. An hour or so later I received a message from the President asking if it would be okay if we moved our meeting up a day, as the university was closed due to a bomb scare. Uhmm...sure?

I did meet with the President earlier this afternoon and she assured me the bomb scare was no big deal, happens from time to time, and was nothing to worry about. She was only out of the building for about an hour while police bomb techs went through the building, where they found nothing. Due to the proximity to Parliament and the frequency of protests, this sort of thing sometimes happens in order to stir up some media. Of course, we have no connection to local media, so I can't vouch at all on how that's working out, but I'll let you know if I hear anything. The President also told me to expect more and not to worry until something actually blows up. She followed that statement with a good hearty laugh then changed the subject back toward why I was actually sitting in her office in the first place.

So, bomb scare. As I've been telling my mother and Erin for months, I was shot at from the back of a pick up truck in Bloomington, Indiana, right smack-dab in the Heartland of America, only miles from the little pink mansion* John Mellencamp calls home. It doesn't matter where we are. What matters is that we remain. And I assure you all, we intend to.

* No, his mansion is not pink. Or little, for that matter. But it'd be a whole hell of a lot cooler if it were, don't ya think?

A Weekend Journey to the Osh Bazaar

2005-11-28T17:17:00.000+06:00

Saturday morning we joined an American couple we met during our Armenian getaway on a trip to the Osh bazaar, the largest bazaar in Bishkek (there's a bigger one just outside the city, but it seems that no one we know ever goes there). In talking about the Osh bazaar with the few Kyrgyz people we've come to know, they all gave the impression that the bazaar was a den of pickpockets and swindlers, with violence bristling just under the surface of what was essentially a produce-stand front and a place to be avoided at all costs (unless, of course, you need something...sort of like Wal-Mart). What we found in reality was nothing of the sort.

The Osh bazaar is huge and, in places, crowded, but it seemed at all times, no less safe a place than anywhere else in the city. The bazaar proper covers three square city blocks. The size of city blocks in Bishkek being more or less fluid, what this comes out to in real terms is about three or four acres of open-air bartering. And that's just the "official" bazaar. There's a patina of lesser bazaars on all sides, something Bob, the man we were with, referred to as the "bazaar suburbs." Within that vast realm of commerce, one can pretty much get his hands on whatever his little heart desires. There's an electronics section, clothing, shoes, books, housewares, cleaning products, flea market-like odds and ends, a dentist, and, of course, food, lots and lots of food. What we've come to know as the usual bazaar fare was all represented--fresh fruit, vegetables, and herbs, breads, grains and pasta, dried fruit, stuffed frybreads and sweetbreads, etc--but there were also some things we hadn't been able to find before, like nuts, dried spices (Erin's craving for black pepper has been, temporarily, sated), tofu (made fresh by the Korean women we bought it from...still warm!), various other pantry products we hadn't found (vinegar, soy sauce, sesame oil, honey, corn starch, flour...), and, the true highlight of the day for me, the Meat House.

The first room we entered in the Meat House (more of a building full of meat sellers, I guess, but there's a nice ring to meat house, don't you think?) was the Kyrgyz room, where only ethnically Kyrgyz people were selling meats. Among them were beef, horse, lamb, yak, rabbit, various poultry, and something else none of could adequately guess at (even the Russian explanation to Sue, the woman we were with, didn't help clarify anything). All of these meats were hanging from metal hooks attached to wooden slats above the stalls, so that there were just rows and rows of hanging raw meat, like the work-out scenes in the first Rocky without Sly or any refrigeration. This was no place for a vegetarian or anyone with a weak stomach. Even though it was about 35 degrees or so outside, with all of the traffic in the room all day, the smoke from people's cigarettes, and whatever warmth the sun slanting in through the big, wide doorway was giving off, the smell was pretty strong. I assume when someone says in a war movie that It smelled like death, it is that smell he's referring to. Bob bought some yak butt (sadly, not nearly as funny a phrase in Russian) and then we moved on to the Russian room.

The Russian room is the Russian room for the simple reason that it involves pork, and lots of it. Kyrgyzstan is, for the most part, an Islamic country. When the Turks converted in the 10th century, they were already here (give or take), so Muhammad and his peoples have been on Central Asian soil a good long time. And while most every Kyrgyz will sit down to a bottle of vodka and is more likely to go to New Jersey than the masque in his or her village, one of the facets of Islam they do uphold is the abstention from all things swine. Thankfully, there are gobs of Russians around to pick up the slack.

The first thing one notices upon climbing the single flight of wide, stone steps into the Russian room of the meat house is the immediate change in smell. Gone is the slightly sweet / slightly sickening tang of rotting flesh and melting back fat. In its place is the mouth-watering richness of smokehouse-cured pork. If you've ever had the pleasure of cooking ten or twelve pounds of bacon some Sunday morning, before, say, a big game or something, then you've got some sense of what I'm talking about. If not, I suggest you fry up ten or twelve pounds of bacon next Sunday, invite the local high school soccer teams over for breakfast, and see for yourself what we're on about here. (For you vegans [I'm looking at you, Dee], you're just shit out of luck and you may want to skip ahead to the next paragraph, as this is only going to get worse for you before it gets any better.) The first sight I got upon reaching the top of the steps was that of a man hacking away at a side of pork ribs with a cleaver more closely related to a battle axe than anything found in the average American kitchen. We could actually hear the suck and schlump of each giant swing and could see bits of flesh and cartilage fly off onto the floor or under a stall bottom, lost forever. There were loins and hams and ribs and livers and other nameless organs and the bottom foot or so of pig legs, hoof and all, lining tables and stalls on either side of the hallway, stretching completely to the facing wall some hundred yards away. There was all manner of cheeses (including head cheese forced upon me by an overzealous Bob--I will eat damn near anything but swallowing the first of two bites was a fight I nearly lost; the second one ended up on the ground outside) and sausages as well. Around the corner, after the last pair of stalls hawking "processed" pork, was another row of stalls, each with their own knife-wielding babushka. Every single one of those old women were doing some business to a pig's head--one was peeling back skin on the snout, another hollowing out the space behind one eye, another deftly taking off an ear. I promise to sometime bring my camera and document this for you, as I'm sure the smile on my face in seeing this is also on yours in reading it. I'm right, right?

After the bazaar we walked the few blocks over to Bob and Sue's apartment where they treated us to a fantastic lunch involving many of the things we'd both just bought at the bazaar. We sat around talking for awhile, helped them with some computer woes, then walked the half hour back to our place, loaded down with our goods. Before we left their apartment, Bob and Sue told us of a Chinese store downtown where we can buy Chinese pantry items, woks, good knives and cleavers, etc. Much of our walk home was spent inventorying the items we might potentially buy there. But that's for next weekend.

Photos

2005-11-25T15:23:00.000+06:00

I've added a link over on the left to a new Flickr page, where you can find all of my pictures. Right now, there are only about half of the apartment pictures up, as the network on campus is incredibly slow today for some reason and causing it to take forever to upload. But I'll add more tomorrow...

A Kyrgyz Thanksgiving

2005-11-25T13:55:00.000+06:00

The first indication that this Thanksgiving was going to be a bit different from my previous American versions came on Tuesday afternoon, when I received an email from the University containing, in part, this message:

Special Recognition of Thanksgiving, the American holiday when families celebrate their gratitude for one another and for the freedoms of a democratic republic, will be held on Wednesday, November 23 at 5 pm in the Fourth Floor Conference Hall. The Thanksgiving holiday itself will be November 24. It will be a day-off at AUCA.

It's just that I don't remember celebrating my gratitude for the freedoms of a democratic republic. Hell, I don't even remember being from a republic. I think I've been wasting a perfectly good holiday these last three decades. But that's not much of a surprise, I guess.

Next came the actual Special Recognition of Thanksgiving celebration referred to above. We arrived there with Aida (pr: ah-EE-duh), the woman who has been showing us around and helping us not get entirely overwhelmed (she's wonderful, to say the least), and sat toward the back of the few rows of chairs set up in the small auditorium. Not much was happening. People were still coming in, others were setting up, others putting out some of the food we'd later eat, etc. I was mindlessly looking around the room, taking everything in while simultaneously not really paying attention to anything (it was the end of a long day and, like I think I said before, it's damned tiring walking around the world a virtual deaf-mute). My senses finally came back to life when the guy on the soundboard turned up the volume of the music he was playing and started actually spinning some songs via a double CD rack and a mixer. What initially perked my interest was when he dropped Jefferson Airplane's "Somebody to Love" over a generic house/drum & bass line to startlingly brilliant results. Then he moved seamlessly into the ubiquitous Pussycat Dolls "Don't Cha," at which point the entire room seemingly exploded in a chorus of Don't cha wish your girlfriend was hot like me... This was the third time in as many days we'd heard Kyrgyz kids singing this song. First, while walking downtown, a couple of young Russian boys walked by us singing it, then I overheard a couple of University girls singing it as they walked to class. Very odd that this should be what hits it Central Asia. I suppose it could be worse. At least they weren't singing Big & Rich or something equally insipid. Plus, as of yet, I've not heard a single person do a Lil' Jon impression.

After a time everything settled down and the celebration got under way. An older student (I'm assuming a senior) acted as MC. The tenor and pitch of his voice, his mannerisms, and the general state of his presence all reeked of Cheesy Game Show Host. It was remarkable and proved incredibly difficult not to just laugh at him every time he spoke, which he did often and at length. I have no idea what he was saying, as it was primarily in Russian, but I assure you it's worth catching if his tour hits a city near you.

The first activity of the event involved bringing the newly elected student government officials (all in matching sweater vests) to the stage to thank everyone and remind us that this holiday is all about celebrating the democratic process, which they are living embodiments of. They ended their time on stage with a call and response of "Thank you" and something else (it was in Russian and I only caught the thank you, as it's one of the words I know), an activity that would be repeated by nearly every person who got up on stage over the next hour or so. The president of the university then got up to speak, explaining what Thanksgiving is like with her family and how it is primarily a time for family to be together. For a few brief minutes I was sad, for a number of reasons, then a young student got up and made my week.

She came to the stage from the row directly behind us, with her little posse of friends cheering her on. She got up to the stage and, into the microphone, told us (I think; it was in Russian too, but I think I got the gist of it) that the song she wanted to sing was a special song of thanks perfect for the holiday and about something she and her family and friends all held very dear. I was expecting maybe a traditional Kyrgyz song (we'd heard a few the night before at the Anthro Dept. meeting), but what we got was so, so much better. Without hesitating at all, she burst into an a capella version of Abba's "Thank you for the Music."

I'm nothing special, in fact I'm a bit of a bore
If I tell a joke, you've probably heard it before
But I have a talent, a wonderful thing
'cause everyone listens when I start to sing
I'm so grateful and proud
All I want is to sing it out loud

So I say
Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing
Thanks for all the joy they're bringing
Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty
What would life be?
Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say thank you for the music
For giving it to me

She sang through the entire song, clapping and stomping her feet to keep time. It was utterly brilliant. And it made the rest of the evening's activities a bit anti-climactic for me, but that's perhaps to be expected when a 19 year old Kyrgyz student unexpectedly belts out some Abba as her gift to Thanksgiving.

That said, other highlights included the entire room full of people (maybe 150 or so) shouting "Turkey, turkey, turkey" over and over for some three, four minutes. This preceded the presentation of an actual roasted turkey as a prize for the best thanksgiving message (these were recorded for a few weeks leading up to this one on huge poster boards hanging by the front entrance of the main school building). The winner actually received what I'm certain was a roasted duck, but it was fully dressed with little paper crowns on the drumsticks and jam packed with stuffing.

After that things sort of fell into chaos, with everyone diving and elbowing their way for bits of other roasted birds staff were circulating and the few tables set up with sweet breads and pizza (we ate a sort of Kyrgyz tart, with a thick sweet crust and a filling that I think was apricot; it was very good and I've now got my eye out for it in the bazaars). Aida left us then and we left shortly after as well.

Yesterday, Thanksgiving proper, we spent the early part of the day in the apartment, as the university was closed. Erin did some research while I wrote (first chapter out of the way finally!), then we just sort of lounged around until mid-afternoon, when we joined an American couple we met during our layover in Armenia at their friend's house for Thanksgiving dinner. As it was just the two of us and four middle-aged missionaries who've lived in Kyrgyzstan for the better part of a decade at the dinner, we were a bit weary of how the afternoon would unfold. Very quickly, however, it became quite comfortable and we left after having had a wonderful time (and a delicious meal, bigger than the bread and veggies we've been living on, too!). On the way home our new friends drove us past their favortite restaurant in Bishkek, which turns out to be about ten minutes from our apartment. There's a good chance we'll be going there for dinner tonight. For that, and so much more, I give thanks...

Thank you for the music, the songs I'm singing
Thanks for all the joy they're bringing
Who can live without it, I ask in all honesty
What would life be?
Without a song or a dance what are we?
So I say thank you for the music
For giving it to me

In the Ever-Prescient Words of Ice Cube, "Today Was a Good Day"

2005-11-23T13:54:00.000+06:00

I know, nothing yesterday. Well, this is a tiring business moving nearly-mute through the world. Plus we had quite a bit of the getting-to-you-know-you-type meetings yesterday and today at the American University of Central Asia, all of which have been helpful and incredibly friendly. Yesterday we met with the Vice President of Academic Affairs, a remarkable man full of enthusiasm for Erin's project and what he referred to as my Writing about the inner soul of the Kyrgyz people. We'll have to see about that. He also volunteered his wife to us as a shopping and sight-seeing guide through the various historical sights and museums around the city. I'm certainly looking forward to that.

Today we met with the President of the University, an American woman with odd ties to virtually everything I've ever done: She has a daughter currently living in Providence; both of her children went to a boarding school more or less down the road from the one I attended and she recalled fond memories of Pomfret's campus; she's friends with the last three presidents of Skidmore and a number of faculty; she once spent a summer in Bloomington, Indiana, learning Russian; and she claims as her best friend on earth one Mr. Gerald Stern, a poet I've long loved. Plus, she offered me a job almost immediately, as the University's biggest problem right now is communication, among its faculty and staff and students as well as out to the rest of the world. She'll let me know early next week what position she has invented for me and what amount of the annual budget she's syphoned away for my salary (her words, not mine!). Needless to say, I'm digging the President right now.

Other things are moving along as well:

Yesterday we managed to go to the bazaar around the corner from our apartment and buy some bread and produce all by ourselves! You'd be amazed how easily performing that simple task successfully can enhance the quality of your entire day.

We also attended an Anthropology department meeting for the full faculty and student body of the department. Erin discusses it in her most recent blog post, so I won't go into too much detail. I would like to add this, however: While I am neither an Anthropologist nor do I speak Russian or Kyrgyz, I was completely swept up in the enthusiasm of everyone at that meeting. Honestly, sitting in that room one could very easily get the idea that anthropology in general and the anthro students at this university in particular will save the world. And that they're going to do so very soon, too. Plus they had snacks and people sang songs and recited poetry and played instruments. Amazing meeting. (America, you're on notice: get your departmental meetings in order before I get back...or else!)

Just a few minutes ago we hired a private Russian tutor who will come to our apartment three days a week and, at least initially, confuse us silly for an hour and a half. Hopefully not for too long, though.

Very soon we will be going to the Habitat for Humanity office here in Bishkek to volunteer with them. It'll be a good way to meet some people outside of the university and hopefully increase our Russian skills a bit (it may very well prove useful to know the Russian word for "roofing nail"). Plus, you know, it's nice and I've done a lot of bad things in my life that need to be balanced out at some point. Neither of us have been on a build since college (there was a deterrent to doing so in Bloomington...I'll leave it at that), so we're excited to get back into it.

That's about it for now. I realize I still haven't uploaded any pictures; the connection in our apartment is too slow to do it there and we only today got out computer access at the university. I'll have them up possibly later today, though more likely tomorrow. Promise. Now we're going to go wander around aimlessly in hopes of learning the city a little bit better before we head down to the Habitat office.

Third Time's the Charm

2005-11-21T20:13:00.000+06:00

Well, we're finally in Bishkek. After being shuttled to the airport on Saturday night, checked-in, moved through customs, and playing a bit with the cat living in the Yerevan airport, we were sent back to the hotel again. Our ranks were tripled at that point, as we were meant to be on the next regularly scheduled flight through Yerevan into Bishkek and it too, obviously, was then cancelled as well, along with the forty-some passengers on it. But only an hour or so after returning to the hotel we learned (via a note slipped under the door) we'd be leaving at noon the next day. Noon was actually closer to 3:00, but that's just splitting hairs--we got off the ground and landed a few hours later, finally, in Bishkek.

The views out of the airplane on the way were fantastic. We flew over the Caspian Sea and it was clear enough to see straight through to the horizon. And it was interesting to watch the mountain ranges grow the further we flew east, with the Himalayas only a fart and a whisper away. That is, when I wasn't sucked in by the in-flight entertainment. Why will I watch absolutely anything on an airplane? And not only why will I watch it, but why will I find it far, far funnier or moving or engrossing than really it has any right being? I mean, I love me some Will Farrell, too, but Bewitched just doesn't warrant the sort of silent belly-laughing I was giving it. Maybe I was a bit giddy to be in the air after three days in Armenia, I don't know. But I actually shush-ed Erin so I could hear the punchline of rather unimportant scene in The Fantastic Four. And that's a film adaptation of a comic I didn't even like growing up. Altitude is a special drug. (Nonsensical aside officially over.)

Before (not) leaving on Saturday, we took a tour out of Yerevan* with some of the fellow-stranded and an incredibly nice undergrad Armenian / tour guide whose name escapes me right now. We first stopped about a half hour out of the city at an overlook with a great view of Mt. Ararat, the "heart and soul of the Armenian people" (so says the tour guide) and the spot often hypothesized as being the final mooring place of Noah's Ark. If, you know, you're into that sort of thing. The spot where we were looking from was a big stone archway built on the top of a hill overlooking a huge valley and the mountain range further west. Better than that, the spot and the archway both were named after a poet. They name things after poets in Armenia! The rest of the trip was sort of anticlimactic for me after I learned that fact and fell madly in love with all Armenians, though we did see some pretty cool things. Like a first century pagan temple in the village of Girni, a place that can trace its permanent settlement back to 4,116 years ago. I have trouble with the US founding fathers (quick, name three people other than John Hancock who signed the Declaration of independence...didn't think so) but the residents of Girni can tell you the names of former residents of their house from 4000 years ago. My self respect keeps diminishing the more time I spend away from the Midwest. And to make matters worse, no one will ever name anything after me because I managed a descent sonnet once. But if I were Armenian...

Anyway, after that we drove up to a 12th century monastery (a rebuild of a 4th century one lost to earthquake, which itself was a rebuild of an older one also lost to earthquake) carved into the face of a mountain. It is believed to be the place where the spear used to pierce Jesus' side was kept after being brought to Armenia by two of Jesus' apostles as proof of His existence and good salesmanship for future conversions. The spear itself is now in the biggie Gregorian church elsewhere in Armenia. For an atheist who gave up "all that nonsense"** at the sagastic age of eight, this was an odd little tour. But the monastery was amazing. It is three churches and a series of monastic cells and passageways and antechambers and, oh yeah, did I mention--all of it carved out of the face of a mountain! Say what you will about zealots (I've said it all myself...twice), but these cats carved three churches out of stone so that they'd have a safe place to worship. That's some god damn devotion right there, boy.

The tour was capped off and, besides discovering the possibility of everything being named after poets, was really highlighted by the lunch we had in someone's home back in Girni. Four courses involving lamb and potatoes and different salads and freshly baked breads and homemade yoghurt, several rounds of apricot-peach vodka, desserts, fruit. Oh so good. So, so good. All of the entree foods and the breads were cooked in an underground oven similar to but different from a tandoor oven. The Armenian version is also clay and underground, but it is, well, different. And thousands of miles away from India. But damned tasty all the same.

But we're in Bishkek. I was meant to speak about Bishkek. I'll have to do that tomorrow. Right now I'm entirely too tired. It is 21:00 and Erin is snoring away on the couch behind me and her snoring is acting as some sort of odd anti-Siren song, lulling me, too, into sleep. So, tomorrow Bishkek. Until then, know this: we have an apartment, it is nice, close to things (we're told; though we did find a bazaar full of fresh produce and household goods and whatnot literally right around the corner, so that's nice), and has everything we need. We are settling in (though the language thing--my more or less complete lack of Russian and Kyrgyz--is freaking me out a bit). And we are tired. So...tomorrow.

* There will be pictures and links to pictures tomorrow (unless I do them in the morning shortly after I wake up and you're reading this not long after I post it, in which case my tomorrow will still be your today. Eleven hour time diferences rule!). I'm too lazy right now to upload them and write the HTML required, though, so you'll have to wait.

** The last three words I uttered on my way out of my last CCD class that got me sent to Father Frank for the last time (the theory is, I say last enough times and it almost makes it like a martyrdom...only, you know, not...not at all). He always smelled heavily of cigarette smoke and he had two earrings in his left ear and he was a bit handsy, if you know what I mean. My only punishment that day was to sit quietly until the end off class in his office while he worked on whatever it was he worked on. It smelled retched in that office. And he made rather disgusting mouth and throat sounds that seemed to indicate some sort of severe bronchial problem in need of medical assistance. Though he threw something in my direction when I suggested as much. Ah, good Catholic childhood memories, the stuff therapy and heretical poetry is made of...

Not There Yet...

2005-11-19T06:56:00.000+06:00

The route to Bishkek took us from Boston to London's Heathrow Airport to Yerevan, Armenia for a refueling stop then onto to Bishkek. In theory, anyway. Right now, we're still in Yerevan. When we landed to refuel we were told there was "freezing fog" shrouding the airport in Bishkek and that we'd be unable to land. So that was nice.

What followed was an oddly hectic middle of the night run through Armenian customs (3-day visa paid for by British Airways, thank you very much!). First one line for a speed visa, then another for customs, then we were marched to another spot to retrieve our checked luggage. Finally, we were brought outside and told the bus would be arriving shortly to take us to the hotel, but in the meantime we could (and should) take a taxi. Our luggage was loaded into a taxi without much say on our part and we were repeatedly told to "sit down. Hotel next. Sit down." So we sat.

We very shortly after left (we being just me and my wife, Erin), me up front with the taxi driver, her in back with the luggage that didn't fit in the trunk. On the way out of the airport we passed a caravan of other taxis with other passengers from our flight apparently waiting to all go together with the bus which had just then arrived and been taken over more or less completely by a band that was on our flight and their sizable amount of equipment. We slowed down beside the parked taxis, the window beside me was rolled down, words were shouted between the driver of our taxi and another taxi driver in what I think was Russian. Our driver made some annoyed gesture at the other driver as a way of signaling the end of the exchange and we sped off, leaving the rest of the taxis sitting there by the side of the road. We knew only the name of the hotel we were to stay in and pretty much nothing else.

Armenia, like most of the former Soviet countries without massive oil or gold reserves, has only recently crawled out from under the yoke of horrific economic problems. And it shows. The landscape surrounding the airport, as a result, didn't help soothe us any, as it looks something like a BBC News story involving the words "war" and "torn" and possibly "Hurricane Katrina." That is to say, the area directly adjacent the airport looked as though it has been recently bombed, though it hasn't. Lots of concrete in various states of disarray, small stalls selling fruit (it was after midnight - who is buying fruit on an otherwise deserted road after midnight?), and little by way of road signs, traffic lights, etc. This improved as we got closer to the city and into downtown, but we weren't there yet.

We drove in silence. And we drove fast. For a while, anyway. After about ten minutes or so of break-neck speeds, the driver dropped down to about 35-40 km/h, which is slow enough to perk up both my ears and the hair on the back of my neck. About thirty seconds after the speed drop off, the driver began pounding on the dashboard then furiously pressing some buttons beside the radio. Then he picked up the microphone for the CB radio and mumbled something into it (he really did mumble; I was sitting maybe eight inches from him and had trouble hearing anything he said). A few minutes later, still traveling at a disturbingly slow pace, the caravan of our former flight-mates flies by on our left. Our driver ignores them. When the last of the taillights from the bus pulling up the rear of the caravan are no longer visible and we'd still not increased our speed any, the muscles in my legs tense to the point of straining. The taxi kept up its turtle pace for another five minutes or so.

We passed a number of Petrol stations during that time, so my initial thoughts that perhaps we were running out of gas vanished and I was left only with hamstring massages to console myself. That is, until we pulled off the road into what looked like an American self-service car wash, the sort with long standing rows of open-ended cinder block garages equipped with a brush, sprayer, change machine, et cetera. Only there was no brush, no sprayer. Only a long metal pole and the row of garages.

When we'd stopped inside one of the stalls, the driver popped out of the car almost immediately, closing the door behind. Then he opened the door again and spoke to me in any of the three languages he speaks that I don't understand (thank you, American pompousness!) and again shut the door. A few seconds passed then Erin said, "Uhmm, sketchy?" I answered only with a noise part laugh, part agreement. The driver by then was under the hood of the car, attaching the long metal pole to something I couldn't see in the engine. Then he came around to my door and opened it, motioning for me to get out and talking loudly at me. I eventually got out and he said a few more things and pointed back inside the car, then at me, then back inside the car. I went to sit back down and he said "No" in Russian, the first word I understood of the trip, and waved his hand in the same annoyed way that had ended the conversation with the other driver at the airport. He then opened Erin's door and went through the same series of gestures, leaving all three of us very confused. Finally Erin said the name of our hotel a few times and he nodded his head yes and then did the hand wave thing again. He walked out about twenty or thirty feet in front of the car, turned to face us, and made motions for us to join him there. We did, with Erin holding onto my arm tightly while I nattered on about the rest of the world hating monolingual Americans for precisely this reason.

Once in front of the taxi and turned back around to look at it, we saw that this was a taxi hangout of sorts. There was a small army of Armenian men all wearing Addidas sweat suits and black cowboy boots, throwing monkey wrenches between the stalls. Our driver was back under the hood by then, making some adjustments to the engine/long metal pole connection. When he'd finished, another man came over, took some money from our driver, and turned on a rather large electrical box mounted at the front of the stall. So, we were refueling after all, only with electricity. We both relaxed a bit at that point, laughed at ourselves and our apprehensions, and made some apologizing and ha ha-type gestures to the driver. It was still a bit unnerving though that the remainder of the twenty or so others from our flight were nowhere to be seen and very likely already safely at the hotel while we were standing in the middle of a huge parking lot at 1:00 in the morning waiting for our taxi to recharge. But we weren't going to be killed or robbed or made to play soccer or anything right then, so that was a comfort, at least.

Refueled and back on the road, we made up for lost time, taking corners at 130 km/h and turning what seemed like a mini Armenian Vegas into a blur of streaking neon Casino signs. Yerevan showed itself to us first in row houses and small markets, then in monuments and tree-lined streets, and finally in a giant, breathtaking open square (a gift from the Soviets, so to speak) lined with four of the most imposing buildings I've ever seen, just down the street from our hotel, which we finally reached around 1:30 or so. And aside from a rather off-putting drunk quietly haranguing Erin on the sidewalk while the driver and I unloaded the trunk, things picked up from there and continued on rather smoothly.

The hotel is quite posh (I'll have some pictures later; I don't want to rifle through all of our luggage to find the cord I need to transfer pictures from the camera to the computer) and they've arranged special meals for the lot of us and a sight-seeing tour for tomorrow (Saturday). We found out this afternoon that we'll be trying again tomorrow night for Bishkek, though the British Airways woman who gave us this news wasn't too confident with our being able to get in then, either, as November is apparently a rather touchy time weather-wise in the valley where the airport is outside of Bishkek. But, we'll try.

It is currently 5:30 locally and I've just woken up from a twelve hour post-lunch, post-sightseeing nap. Soon, breakfast. Then another day in Yerevan, Armenia. Which today, I think, means a guided tour of some 1st century temples.