Ugh. What is it with people here! So I went out to a bar last night with Mike and some friends. We were making plans for going out to a club, and our friend Ben came from the other end of the table to talk to Mike. He sat down at the end of a booth occupied by three middle-ages Kyrgyz women, who were sitting at the other end. Not even one second after he had sat down, the woman started yelling at him in Russian. She called him names and told him to fuck off, just for sitting there. He swore back in Russian and called them bad names, and they got REALLY angry. A jerk Kyrgyz guy, Daniyar, who'd started speaking English with us earlier came up to BEn and told him to leave them alone. He used the excuse, "Kyrgyz women are different from Western women." (which is bullshit...someone swears at you unnecessarily, you can sewar back. What did they expect?! Kyrgyz men would just have beaten them instead, maybe they'd have preferred that.) One of the male waiters came to Ben and told him to relax, but he said that when he is sworn at for no reason, he has the right to defend himself. THe women left the bar, but each one individually came back into the bar just to swear at him once more and to bare their set of gold teeth. We left as soon as we could, be we were sure that they'd call their man friends to come beat us, because that's what Kyrgyz men do.
(ok, so maybe I'm SLIGHTLY overgeneralizing here. But I'm bitter, because we can't go out for a night of fun without witnessing some ridiculous fight, probably caused by one of the guys in my group of friends standing near someone's girlfriend, or glancing in the vicinity of the girl that a Kyrgyz guy wants. And that is NOT exaggerated. Kyrgyz men are EXTREMELY possessive, of girls that don't even "belong" to them.)
Mike and I were out to lunch the other day when a Kyrgyz man wanted to sit at th e seat behind Mike, and he needed him to pull his chair in a little bit. Instead of just asking nicely like a normal person would do, he said, in Russian, rudely... "AMERICAN, move your chair." So Mike obviously isn't AMerican. But we let it go. THen he turned around and said, sneeringly, (in Russian, loosely translated because I didn't understand the words, just the sentiment) "What do you think of the Airbase leaving? Bye Americans. I'm SOVIET!!!!" And was generally just haughty and agressive.
THEN, last night, before the event above with the gold-teethed women, we were in a different bar, and were were meeting two of our friends. There were no chairs, so we stood around for a few minutes deciding where we were going to go. A woman with a guitar at the table next to them started bad-mouthing us in Russian, "I want to sing. I can't sing because the foreigners are talking loudly. We: STAY. FOreigners: GO HOME." I made eye contact with her friend and made it clear that I had understood. He whispered to her and she covered her mouth in embarrassment. Ugh.
The jerk Kyrgyz guy from last night, Daniyar, was also an ass. As soon as he found out I was American, he stood up, sagged his pants, started doing rapper hand gestures and said "Oh, I bet you call everyone nigger and listen to rap music." Said in the right tone of voice, this could have been taken as a joke, because here rap is one of the most popular things to come out of America. But, he said it agressively as if he was accusing me of something rather than making a joke. In any case, it wasn't funny. At all. Then he kept being annoying and basically demanded that we let him come out with us to the bar. So we said we'd meet him outside when he'd paid, and we quickly booked it to make sure he didn't make it out in time.
Enough of that though. Tomorrow is International Women's Day, so I sure hope my students will bring me cards and chocolate and flowers on Monday. The office staff gave all the women carnations. Mike and I will probably go to our favorite Dungan restaurant, which will be celebration enough. Tomorrow our favorite rock bar is re-opening after a few months of renovation, so we're going out.
And except for today, which is cloudy and drizzling, I think spring is coming! The past few days have been sunny and warmish- I've even had to turn on the AC in my classroom. Bishkek will get a whole lot more beautiful when the leaves come out!
On a different note- Did anyone read about the chimpanzee in Stamford, CT that attacked his owner's neighbor?! She lost both her hands, her lips, her nose, and her eyelids! That would be pretty terrible, to say the least.
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