Random Musings

Since I’m in school most of the time these days, there’s not that much interesting to report. So I thought I’d write down a few of the peculiar things that make Kyrgyzstan….special.


One of my favorites, which I will warn still causes a gag reflex, is that I’m sure we find hairs in our food a significantly larger amount of time than in America. And this is thick, black Kyrgyz hair too (I really hope no one is eating their breakfast while reading this post). I’m talking so significant, that it’s almost rare for someone not to find one. Apparently, the Kyrgyz find that to be good luck – though there must be overly benevolent, bald cooks all over the country. The scary part is that boxed, sealed food is not exempt from this tradition – though I chalk that up to ridiculously underpaid Russian factory workers just trying to get even. On the third occasion that I found a hair in my box of muesli, I asked a friend and was told that in Russia they don’t have the health and safety concerns of the Western world. I pour cereal really slowly these days for a hair check.

Kyrgyzstan is also a very superstitious country. I particularly enjoy the superstition that if you eat ice cream on the street in the winter, you will without fail catch a cold. Wednesday during talking club I was bantering with our teacher about this and we decided to hold an experiment. During the break we walked across the street, bought ice cream, and then ate it standing in a snowy part of the sidewalk. If only I could have taken pictures of the looks we got from people on the street. This superstition is so engrained; they looked at us as if we had serious mental disorder - people to be avoided, surely. Though completely against my will I actually had the thought that night, “Oh man, I hope I don’t get sick from that ice cream – that was really tempting fate”. I have officially been in Kyrgyzstan too long. I can happily report that I have felt perfectly fine ever since.

Another Kyrgyz tradition is having one’s own personalized car horn. Some sound angry, some sweet, and some play Kyrgyz/Russian pop tunes. Our driver to Tash Rabat had one that sounded like turkeys. And as it happened, we came upon a group of turkeys on the road and spent a while getting them all excited by the car horn. It honestly never gets old to hear a turkey gobble. There is also the manner in which one honks their horn. A few beeps may mean, “Please, walk in front of my car as I will gladly stop for you”, while another says, “If you walk in front of my car I will not only hit you, I will also hang you on my wall as a trophy”. I’m still learning to decipher them.

No kidding, at this moment the electricity has just gone out – for the 3rd time today. Well done Bishkek, you have nothing if not good timing. So yeah, electricity and internet in Bishkek, ‘nuff said.

I have not yet mentioned toilets and such on the blog yet – afraid it might be vulgar and uninteresting. Well, vulgar at least – third world toilets are nothing if not interesting. But for those who have enough boredom to have read to the end of the post --- toilets here are the standard Asia fare. Squatters. The nice ones have a porcelain hole on the floor. And one must never flush toilet paper (you can actually flush the hole in the floor sometimes – it’s like an enigma) – this is a Soviet piping system after all.

Well, as toilet-speak is the clear conversation killer…I’ll just go watch a movie with the remaining battery on my computer. Evidently I’m not getting any homework done tonight with the lights off.

Orthodox Church

As i'm not done using up the cafe's internet on my computer, i'll go ahead and write a bonus post today. Also, i've had 3 cups of coffee here to try and justify staying for 3+ hours for "free-wi-fi" - so have some extra energy.

As much as I wanted to keep this a secret from my Dad, I wanted to share the pictures more. So yes Dad, we found an Orthodox Church here and you may or may not be getting a gift from it. Man, I have no ability to bluff....

Last Sunday 3 of us walked to the Russian Orthodox Church in town - it's very small, but most of the population here is Muslim anyway.

When we entered we found out that we needed to cover our heads with scarves, and my friend's jacket wasn't very long so an old Russian lady made her wrap a skirt around herself. This old babushka (grandma) was standing at the entrance to the church with a pile of skirts that she kept forcing on people. We entered while a service was going on - it was all in Russian, but I didn't understand most of it. People were singing and chanting alot and everyone was standing up (there were only a couple of benches in the back - and those were only for old ladies).

The priest gave a sermon, which I also didn't understand. He was yelling alot and some of the babushkas started to cry. And he was holding a large cross up to his mouth as if it were a microphone, which I found comically distracting. After a while our guy friend walked out and we tried to follow, but the babushka at the door wouldn't let us leave and shoved us back into the service. Apparently we didn't not look sufficiently saved. I think she expected us to be contrite and crying too - which we may have been, had we understood a single word of the message. We finally got out and my friend gave her borrowed skirt back.

Here's the other pictures I took of the church:

This one is a new section that is under construction:

Around Bishkek

I'm currently spending a relaxing day off in a cafe - in no small part due to the fact that I woke up this morning to find this:

Snow!! This is the view outside my bedroom window.

I've gone on a few walks around the city recently and took some random pictures.
Here's a great one of the radio station - I love the giant red man shouting out to the nations (don't need to think too hard to figure out the symbolism there):

And a Bishkek Police Lada - on the side it says it works in the Lenin district of town:

And a gym advertisement - I love how all the gym posters have crazy athletes on steroids:

We also bumped into the stock exchange (very unimpressive building) and a pretty view of what I think is one of the universities here (there are too many universities to count here):

One random fact about Bishkek I haven't shared yet, but find very amusing is that along the streets here you see people with bathroom scales - just sitting on the sidewalk. When I asked about it I was told that in Bishkek they don't sell scales for you to weigh yourself (a fact which definitely raised my opinion of this city). Instead, you pay a person roughly 5 cents to weigh yourself on their scale. So weird. I am not planning to partake of this unique cultural tradition - not only do I hate weighing myself in the privacy of my own bathroom, I cannot imagine subjecting myself to that in public. I'll save my 5 cents thank you very much :)

Monday I also had a breakthrough of sorts and walked around the city by myself for the first time. I had to walk 30 minutes to the Hyatt to the BMI airlines ticket office to change my flight date. Not only did I not get lost (okay...so i technically never had to make a turn), but I exchanged my flight all in Russian. I was a bit nervous in handing over my credit card - but it turns out I correctly specified the date I wanted and understood the fees involved. 2 months of intensive studying  = being able to say: Change. Ticket. 17th of January please. Done? Easy. Thanks a bunch.

That's time and money well spent i'd say.

Naryn Part 2 – or “I’ll trade Jen for a Lada”

The second day in Naryn we took a taxi out to Tash Rabat – about a 2 hour drive each way. Tash Rabat is an old Silk Road caravan outpost full of lots of history which I’m sure you can Wikipedia or Google to find out about. The scenery on the drive was gorgeous – lots of snowy mountains.

There was this section of long straight road - I heard that it was used as an emergency Russian airstrip in case of war with China (we were really close to China on our trip):

Tash Rabat:

Uber Cute puppy at Tash Rabat:

And of course, me:

After we got back we were walking along the streets and encountered a hilarious group of 3 slightly intoxicated Kyrgyz men. We talked for a few minutes before they asked if I’m married and then talked up their friend as a potential husband. As bride napping is a national sport here, I learned how to say “I’m married” around my 3rd day here (just to clarify: I’m not actually married). The men replied that I may have a husband in America, but I don’t have one in Kyrgyzstan yet, so it’s okay. My friend then asked the guys what kind of price I’d fetch – a yak, a few sheep, etc. The guy said he’d definitely pay a Lada for me – I was quite flattered. He had a good hold of my arm, and though he said he was joking, there was definitely love in his eyes. So we made a quick escape before they could bundle me into a sack and steal me, and I narrowly avoided having to boil meat for a drunken Kyrgyz man for the rest of my life.

Naryn Part 1 – Hotel of Horrors

Four of us had wanted to visit Naryn for weeks but kept postponing the trip. Whenever our teachers learned of the plans, including one teacher who grew up there, the only reaction was “why would you want to go there – there’s nothing there and it’s terribly boring”. After a long weekend spent investigating the sites, their estimation was proved entirely correct.


Great Lada pic - our taxi had to stop for a few liters of oil (which they sell in old Sprite bottles) at this auto shop.

Scenery on the way there:

The guy who organized the trip told me we were staying in a hotel; however, I neglected to read about the hotel in the guidebook until we were almost there. It states that you will be greeted with “dilapidated rooms and a stinky toilet”. Another helpful guidebook says “avoid this hotel at all costs”. For one of the first times ever, a guidebook was actually correct about something. I ended up bunking in a room with the married couple – they were going to go for the “lux” room until we saw that it was exactly the same room as the others, only with a completely broken toilet and 3 times the cost.

Here’s a picture of the lovely hotel and adjacent restaurant: (note due to all the windows in the restaurant being broken, we assume that it is only open during the summers - free air conditioning and such.)

To our good fortune, there was also a boxing team staying in the rooms directly across from ours. Here’s where the prostitutes enter the story of course. The first night our friend was awoken to the sounds of a “business transaction”, and the next morning he heard what sounded like the men beating the crap out of the poor girl. Now we debated talking to management – however : 1) the managers hated us after we tried to haggle the room price down; and 2) these things just kinda happen a lot here. Not a good idea to go around telling not nice Kyrgyz men what they should or should not do with their prostitute.

The second night we had a prostitute accidently come to our room. When we asked through the door who it was, she said “manager” - so we opened up thinking we’d done something else to make our hosts upset. Nope, instead some short, squat, disheveled prostitute was there – and her friend was hilariously signaling in the background that she’d gone to the wrong side of the hall. Well, it ain’t the Ritz.

After we settled into the hotel we took a long walk down the main street of the town and saw the mosque which was funded by Saudi Arabia. We then met up with one of our teachers, who invited us to her parents’ house to celebrate Kyrman Ait. We were too late for any goat slaughtering, but we saw some on the ride to Naryn. We saw one family taking apart a horse – must have been a big family. Our teacher provided us with lots of yummy donut sticks (borsok) with homemade jam and manti (steamed dumplings filled with meat and onions).

Being a Muslim holiday, there was no chance of finding drinks in town so we turned in early the first day. I wore lots of clothes to bed and slept with a t-shirt over my pillow because I was horrified at the thought of my skin touching the sheets. I had to pick off quite a few darks hairs from the sheets. ::shudder::

And some pics of me - for some reason i always get strange eyes when I try to do the long arm pics:

End of a hectic week

I’ve somehow survived one of the hardest school weeks here (I have over 500 new words to memorize by Monday just from this week alone). School on Friday was great – my teachers were so exhausted from an extra day this week that I ended up watching old Soviet comedy films for 3 hours of the day. Very enjoyable – until, of course, the teachers pause the film and ask what the characters were saying. In one memorable scene a character gives a traditional long drinking toast in which he tells the story of a bird that leaves the collective and flies into the sun and is burned to a crisp. The message of the toast was to celebrate the Soviet collective and to warn against having individual thought or action – lest you also be burned to a crisp. The scene directly following the toast was dead birds on kabobs over a fire. Classic stuff.


We celebrated Friday night with beers and Rambo 1 and 2 (with Russian subtitles). Party time indeed.

For ease of uploading, I’m going to break the Naryn posts into 2 – it was a very full weekend.

Back from Naryn

We've made it back from our weekend trip to Naryn. I can't post the full details and photos at the moment. We're having classes every day this week to make up for the holiday last Friday, so i'm a zombie right now and can't make it to the internet cafe to upload the photos.


But to try and sum up the trip - we stayed in an old Soviet-era hotel as one guy wanted "true Soviet atmosphere". Well, we got it - less than clean sheets, a toilet that didnt stop running - plus the Kyrgyz touch of having a prostitute show up at our room the second night. And my friend tried to sell me to a Kyrgyz man on the street for a Lada. (The man's words said joke...but his eyes said I can fit you in a sack and stuff you in my trunk). But luckily I have escaped bride-napping for another day.