One final detail about Saturday's mugging

Mike and I were in his apartment eating dinner last night, trying to forget about the scary mugger in his room. The doorbell rang and I looked through the peephole before I opened the door. It was one of the office staff who lives in our building, just checking to see that we were okay and seeing if there was anything that she could do to make us feel better.

The doorbell rang a few minutes later, and I went and looked through the peephole to see who it was. The light had been turned off in the hallway, so I could only see the silhouette, but it was clearly a man. I was too scared to open the door so Mike came out and asked who was there. The man started speaking in Russian, so we definitely didn't open the door. We thought it was the mugger, back for some more! Mike didn't open the door, so he started pounding on the door, jiggling the handle, and ringing the doorbell repeatedly. I called the office manager to see if she could ring the security guard sitting in our office, since I didn't have the number. She said she was nearby and she'd just come back. The guy kept ringing and knocking until she got there. It turned out that it was the policeman who'd taken our story initially. He knew we spoke little Russian, and what could he have possibly needed from us at 8 pm on a Saturday night, knowing we'd just been robbed and were likely very scared? Being that this is Kyrgyzstan, Mike and I think that he was coming to get money from us- he'd seen Mike's apartment, knew how much money we had, and wanted to get some for himself too. The office manager took him into the office and for about 20 minutes was talking to him there. She called me and said that he just wanted to hear the series of events again, which sounds just like an excuse. Tomorrow I'll have to ask more details about what he wanted. It ruined our evening, and we'd just started drinking some hot pepper vodka and were getting ready to go out. We still went out for a bit to celebrate Nicola's birthday, but we called it an early night. Hopefully that was the end of bad things in Bishkek. I onnly want to see the policeman again if he comes back with Mike's camera, my money, and Evan's phone.