The exchange rate is getting better, yet again. Now it's up to 38.3 som to the dollar! Pretty soon I'll really be rolling in dough. Tomorrow is payday too, which is wonderful. I spent about 100$ last weekend with food, eagle hunting, transport, and the homestay, so it will be nice to have money again.
I thought that we were going away this weekend to our boss's village near Issyk-Kul, but it turns out it was a misunderstanding. We were invited for last weekend, but we already had eagle festival plans, so we thought it would just be this weekend instead. Our boss thought that since we were already going, we wouldn't want to go again so soon, so it's been postponed to a future date. We were planning on going away, so we have no weekend plans yet. I'm sure we'll find something to do.
The first month of teaching ends tomorrow. Today was test day, so I just got to sit in class for 6 hours listening to music and reading Anna Karenina. I got it from Derek, an NSEP scholarship student here from Arizona, and this time I'm going to read the whole thing. Sophomore year of high school I got most of the way through when I had to bring it back to the library, and then I never got around to renewing it or starting it again.
Mike and I went to Osh Bazaar yesterday, and I got a traditional Kyrgyz felt winter hat and some boots. Boots were 750 som (20$), which isn't that cheap, but they're black and just the right height where I can still walk normally and comfortably. My ankle finally healed enough for me to be able to walk in heels. I was worried my ankle would hurt me forever! I also tried a new fruit. It's called hurma in Russian, and I just discovered that in English it's a persimmon . It looks sort of like a tomato/apple, but doesn't taste anything like either. None of the English teachers knew the English name for this fruit, and my students didn't even know if there was an English name since it's an Asian fruit. But it's great to have found something that I've never seen or really heard of anywhere before! The word persimmon is familiar to me, but I wouldn't even have know that it was a fruit, it sounds more like a spice name.
So- eagle hunting. Friday night after classes ended, 8 teachers took 2 taxis to Kadji-Sai, located near the town of Bokonbaevo on Lake Issyk-Kul. Our friend Josh had arranged the taxis and the homestay, and he'd gone down a day earlier. So we met him there. Our homestay was with one of the eagle hunters. We arrived around 23:00 and went straight to bed- 7 of us were staying in one big room. Electricity was out and there was NO heat, so it was really really cold. Most people slept in their coats and hats.
In the morning, we had porridge for breakfast at the homestay, and then took a marshrutka to the eagle festival. It was WONDERFUL. The festival was situated a little bit in the mountains within walking distance of "downtown" Bokonbaevo. We got there and we were the only foreigners there. There were lots of men in a big field with their eagles/hawks/horses/donkeys/wolfhounds. There were Kazakh eagle hunters with great hoods that resembled something out of Lord of the Rings. We just walked around for a few hours admiring all the birds and taking lots of pictures. Then the show started. There was a stage and there was an announcer speaking Kyrgyz, and then some Kyrgyz pop singers, an accordian player, and the best part, a Manaschi- a sort of bard type of man who sings/chants the epic story of Manas. When I get my videos on facebook, you can sort of hear the chant in the background. He got so emotional that he started crying and had to be escorted off the stage. Then there was an entrance parade with all the eagle hunters, horse racers, and hawk hunters. The festival began with hawk hunting. Men brought a rabbit out into the field and let it go, and then the hawk hunter let his hawk go and it flew out and got the rabbit. They reused each rabbit a few times. There was a hilarious moment when one of the rabbits escaped, and there were a few minutes where 3 men on foot and 2 men on horseback were chasing it all around the field. In the end, the rabbit got away. There was another rabbit that just did not run. It sat in one place, and the man even kicked it a few times to get it to run, but it just sat there until the hawk came and landed on it.
There were a few seats set up in front of the stage, but mostly people were just standing around or squatting, Asian style. We had a lunch break with some bread and cheese we'd brought from Bishkek, and walked a little ways up the mountain so we'd have a good view. There were a long-distane arrow shooting competition, as well as an archery target competition. There were some long long distance horse races all around the valley, which were pretty boring to watch, but there was one race of "Kiss the girl"- where a girl and a boy ride horses, and the boy tries to catch up to the girl and kiss her. Once they'd gotten most of the way around the track, one of them fell off the horse, and as the ambulance was driving to pick up the person, it almost crashed into a ditch. It seems so typical Kyrgyzstan. It was around this time that my camera battery died :(
The only other foreigners we met there were an American guy from Georgia who's been living here for a bit, and an Australian guy who's biking around India/China/Central Asia.
Even with all the animals in the festival, I was mostly amused by the mules. There were 4 or 5 that were ridden by little boys, and I wasted my camera battery taking many many pictures of them. I would love to have my own mule, they are sturdy and adorable!
The "climax" of the festival was the wolf-hunting portion. The men brought a big wooden crate out onto the field, and it took them a long long time to get the wolf out and situated. It was a six-month old wolf cub/adolescent, and it was chained to a large ball weight. We had assumed it would be a wolf let loose and chased by an eagle, but it was really disappointing. First, wolfhounds were let loose on the wolf three at a time. The wolf did a great job fending them off, but every time he got a good hit, some men held him down with a pitchfork-type tool and let the dogs rest. When the 3 dogs were done, 3 more were let loose. All in all, there were probably 12 dogs that had their chance at the wolf, but when it all ended, a few of the dogs were bleeding, and the wolf was still in one non-bloody piece, although I'm sure he was exhausted. But that wasn't the end! Then the men toyed with him for awhile, and tied him up and untied him and moved him to a different place on the field. Then it was the eagles' turn. He still was attached to the chain and the ball weight. The first eagle that was let loose, instead of flying from the mountaintop down to the wolf, turned around and flew into a crowd of people sitting on another mountain, and landed on a man's head. I wasn't close enough to really see what happened, but he clearly got some gashes from the talons. He was escorted down the mountain to the ambulance, and he wasn't walking straight because of the shock. The second eagle that was sent to get the wolf belonged to the man whose house we were staying in. His eagle, instead of attacking the wolf, started a fight with another eagle. People swarmed in and had to pull them apart. Third time's the charm, and the wolf finally was attacked. It wasn't much of a sight because the wolf was on a chain, but he put up a pretty good fight and the bird was injured a bit. The poor wolf was still alive and was put back into its wooden crate. A woman from the Kyrgyz Tourism Board told Derek that he would be released back into the wild, which I'm sure means taken out behind the stage and shot. I couldn't watch any of the wolf hunt, so all of this I know from Mike commentating it to me. It made me want to cry from the get-go because it wasn't a fair fight. Our homestay hunter said that he disagreed with it too, and said that the wolfhounds and the eagles were really unsure of what to do since they are trained to hunt animals that are in the wild and not tied up. The wolf situation sort of put a damper on the mood for the rest of the day, and we decided to leave the festival.
We walked down the mountain back to Bokonbaevo and passed a great cemetery on the mountainside. Cemeteries are really beautiful in Kyrgyzstan- almost all of the gravestones have a photograph or etching of the dead person, and there are many brick walls with the Islamic moon and star. We had dinner at a mediocre cafe and then went back to our homestay. We were all exhausted and wanted to go to bed at 19:30, but stayed up until around 22:00 talking- there was actually power!
The next day we went on a real-life eagle hunt. We had breakfast at our homestay again, and when we woke up at the bottom of the stairs, there was a shoebox of three TINY puppies! I played with them all, and then we learned that one of them was going to be traded for a fox for us to take on the hunt with us (we later found out that the fox we were getting had died overnight, so I don't know what happened to the puppies... I'd probably rather not know. I'm just glad we didn't use it as eagle food!) We took a marshrutka ride about an hour up into the mountains. It was strange and quite scary to be sitting just a few inches away from a giant scary eagle named Tuman. Once far enough into the mountains, we found the horses that we'd hired for the day. I got the smallest, most docile one, but he turned out to be stubborn as a rock and refused to walk for most of the day. I spent probably half the time leading him because when I sat on him he would not move. I was last the whole way up the mountain, and there was about half an hour where he just ate and ate and ate and I couldn't get him to move. Mike tried to lead him, but then Mike's horse wouldn't walk unless mine walked, so we were stranded and left behind as the rest of our group rode to the top of the mountain. We were rescued by our eagle hunter only coincidentally when he came down the mountain to pick up his eagle after the first hunt. He led my horse all the way up, and then Mike's followed. We rode all over the mountain to various peaks where Tuman would lauch from. We'd brought along a Kyrgyz guy from the village who ran around in the underbrush of the valley with a soda bottle full of rocks, shaking it and whistling to scare up some wildlife. Mountains (heights) and horses don't mix for me, and I had a fairly miserable time, especially since my horse was ornery. We rode across some really steep slopes through thorn bushes. At times it was so steep that we had to get off and lead the horses because they were slipping and falling down and it was dangerous to be on them. There came a point fairly early on where I lost interest in the actual hunt, because being on the horse and in the mountains was scary enough. But Mike was super wonderful and stuck close to me and kept me company, and it was a good experience regardless. Finally Tuman caught a fox on the 5th peak we'd climbed to, and then we headed down the mountain. We all got our picture taken holding Tuman- once he'd eaten he was docile and not so scary to be around. At that point it started snowing and hailing- we were stuck in the middle of a blizzard and we were a LONG way from "home". My horse refused to move, AGAIN, and the Kyrgyz guy who'd been scaring up wildlife offered to take my horse and lead Mike's. We walked the whole way down. It was really slippery in the mud on the road down the mountain, and walking was sort of difficult. Ben's horse slipped and landed on his leg, so he had to limp all the way down. The hail quickly turned to rain as we got more into the valley, and we were 1000% soaked through from head to toe. We walked all the way across a giant field, and then through the village basically from one end to the other in the pouring rain, past some miserable looking donkeys, cows, sheep, and goats who were seeking shelter under some measly trees. We finally got down to the marshrutka that was waiting for us. We were all soaked and FREEZING, and it was at least a 30 minute ride back to our homestay. We were all so cold, and some of us didn't have dry clothes to change into! I luckily had sweatpants and dry socks, but no top, and Mike, Evan, and Josh had no dry pants. We got back to our homestay, packed up our stuff, and dried off/warmed up as much as we could, and then we got a marshrutka back to Bishkek.
The marshrutka was much more high-tech than any other one I've been in, and it had a tv screen and a DVD player on board! Our driver put on Kyrgyz music videos, and it was great fun to watch/make fun of the videos here. There was one where there was a blind guy who had his pet canary killed, his girlfriend stolen, and then eventually was poisoned by the same guy- how morbid and politically incorrect! Poor blind teenager. There were other amusing ones where men were eating money, women were seducing pre-pubescent boys, but the best one was Salam Kyrgyzstan, which I mentioned in my last post.
It was a good weekend, and it was wonderful to get out of the city! We didn't really spend time at the Lake, but I saw it from the marshrutka window. There were lots of snowy mountains to admire, and there were strange red sandy mountainy things, which made it feel like we were in a desert.
I was sick most of the weekend, and I thought that being stuck in the rain would make things a million times worse, but I feel much better. My cold is mostly gone. But I used up half of my supply of Sudafed, so next time someone mails a package, include some!
I hosted my first couch surfer this week named Loh! He's from Singapore and is traveling by himself for the next few months. He's really fun and easy to hang out with. He's gone to Issyk-Kul for the week, but we're meeting him next weekend in Bokonbaevo (again!), this time for a horse festival. It involves "kiss the girl", wrestling on horseback, another Manaschi, AND DEAD GOAT POLO! We have to pay for our homestay tomorrow after we get paid, but then everything will be all set and we'll meet Loh there on Friday night after work.
I mailed my absentee ballot last night back to Connecticut, so my voice will count in this election! I just hope it will arrive in time.
Electricty is out more often now- I think it's up to 10 hours a day of no power. It doesn't match the outage schedule anymore, but it seems that twice a week power goes out around 18:00. Winter nights will be VERY dark if our apartment has no lights. Our classrooms all got new lights installed today that are attached the generator, so when we lose power in class, we'll have one measly lightbulb to see by. Better than nothing, I guess.
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