It seems ages since I've updated- sorry. It's just because not that much is going on here.
Today Mike and I are going to Osh Bazar to buy travelling backpacks. Initially when I thought my mom was coming, we were just going to have her bring them, but she's not anymore and getting them shipped here from America would be lots of money and lots of hassle. So we saw some at Osh that look pretty durable, so we're going to buy them now if they're still there. They're 1500 som each, which is about 40$.
Yesterday I bought some new sunglasses since I broke my other ones. Tonight my roommate Nicola is leaving Bishkek and Mike is moving into my apartment, so tonight and tomorrow we'll be busy moving stuff and rearranging furniture. It'll be great to have 2 rooms to ourselves- a bedroom and a living room! We can start entertaining :)
Spring is here. There was talk of a revolution on Friday, but it was raining and nothing to speak of happened. Too bad! We were hoping for some excitement around here, and maybe some days off work.
Another month of teaching is done- only 2 more to go! Time flies when you're having fun I guess...
Oh and we saw The Vagina Monologues last night. It was presented by mostly non-native English speakers, but the parts that I was able to understand were pretty good. I'd never seen it before.
Ok, we're off to my favorite place, Osh Bazar. I'll update again soon!
Sunday, March 29, 2009
Sunday, March 15, 2009
Sun!
Spring has arrived in Bishkek, and it's glorious. The past 4 days have been sunny and cloudless, and I've spent the most part of all the days sitting in The London School courtyard reading, listening to music, and knitting. Today it was so nice that I was out in shorts and tanktop! According to one of those big temperature signs, it got up to 23 degrees Celsius today in the sun. I haven't checked a weather forecast, but I don't think it's going to get cold again- I think spring is here to stay!
The trees are all budding and the leaves look like they'll be coming out in full-beauty in a few days.
Everyone seems happier, and it's great to walk to and from the center of town in just a t-shirt!
I knit Mike a great orange and blue beanie, and knit myself a teal and orange one, with the same pig pattern as my tattoo. It's by far the coolest and most complicated thing I've ever knit, and everyone says it looks like it was store-bought. If anyone wants one, let me know! I can make it however you want :)
Nothing else is new. Saturday is Nooruz, which is Kyrgyz/Muslim New Year, so I hope that I can see some Kyrgyz men singing the Manas epic poem. Also, now that spring is here, Mike and I are going to start leaving Bishkek on the weekends again. In the near future, we're going to go to Kochkor, where they sell shyrdaks (Kyrgyz rugs). I'm going to buy a bright-colored one, which hopefully will fit into my rucksack that I will somehow pack full of all my stuff to take across land to Turkey.
Mike and I are going to Istanbul in August. If we have a job or not, we'll show up, and find a job there if we don't have one already. Should be cool!
Happy Nooruz :)
The trees are all budding and the leaves look like they'll be coming out in full-beauty in a few days.
Everyone seems happier, and it's great to walk to and from the center of town in just a t-shirt!
I knit Mike a great orange and blue beanie, and knit myself a teal and orange one, with the same pig pattern as my tattoo. It's by far the coolest and most complicated thing I've ever knit, and everyone says it looks like it was store-bought. If anyone wants one, let me know! I can make it however you want :)
Nothing else is new. Saturday is Nooruz, which is Kyrgyz/Muslim New Year, so I hope that I can see some Kyrgyz men singing the Manas epic poem. Also, now that spring is here, Mike and I are going to start leaving Bishkek on the weekends again. In the near future, we're going to go to Kochkor, where they sell shyrdaks (Kyrgyz rugs). I'm going to buy a bright-colored one, which hopefully will fit into my rucksack that I will somehow pack full of all my stuff to take across land to Turkey.
Mike and I are going to Istanbul in August. If we have a job or not, we'll show up, and find a job there if we don't have one already. Should be cool!
Happy Nooruz :)
Saturday, March 7, 2009
I'm fed up with Kyrgyz people!
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.
(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.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
My Russian is good enough to buy medicine!
So it turns out I have ringworm on my leg :) And before you get TOO grossed out, it's not a worm, it's a fungus. Anyways. I've had this circle on my leg since Kazakhstan in January, and I just thought it was irritation from wearing the same jeans for 2 week... (haha)
But it never went away, and the circle got bigger. It started to really look like giant bite marks on me, which of course it wasn't! So finally I googled treatments, and then wikipediaed the names of the creams in Russian, and went to a pharmacy, found them in Russian, and it seems to be working! So Kyrgyz pharmacies can be useful after all :)
There was something else random and not interesting that I was going to post also, but I can't remember... maybe I'll remember tomorrow!
But it never went away, and the circle got bigger. It started to really look like giant bite marks on me, which of course it wasn't! So finally I googled treatments, and then wikipediaed the names of the creams in Russian, and went to a pharmacy, found them in Russian, and it seems to be working! So Kyrgyz pharmacies can be useful after all :)
There was something else random and not interesting that I was going to post also, but I can't remember... maybe I'll remember tomorrow!
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Spring has sprung?
Spring is finally here, hopefully. Mike and I spent the weekend just walking around Bishkek, enjoying the warmth and the sunshine! We went again to my favorite place in Bishkek, Osh Bazar, just to wander around and explore. It's such a big place there are always new aisles to walk down! I bought a necklace and neon yellow comb.
Nothing too much is new since I last posted. Mike and I got tattoos last weekend though, which I'm sure most of you know from facebook. We heard about the tattoo place from Mike's students and decided to check it out. Mike wanted to add to his collection of 4 tattoos, and I wanted to get one for the first time. It seems shady to most foreigners to even imagine having a tattoo done in Kyrgyzstan, but the salon was really clean and hygienic, and the woman was Russian, not Kyrgyz, which made us feel a lot better (not to sound too blatantly racist against Kyrgyz people, but...) So we made an appointment and went back the next day. Mike got a tunduk from the top of a yurt and also featured on the Kyrgyz flag, and I got a little pig. (you can see it here, the outline on the right:
This is what the finished tattoo looks like! The woman offered to fill it in with neon orange color for free, so of course I said yes. When the tattoo heals completely, the orange will fade and it will only be visible under blacklight, which will look so cute when we go to nightclubs :)
There is so little to do in Bishkek in winter that Mike and I are saving 450$ per month each, which is great because travelling the Pamir Highway will be SO expensive.
New classes start tomorrow, and it means we only have 3 teaching months left! We're working on getting visas now for Central Asia- there's a tour agency here in Bishkek that will do Uzbek and Tajik, and we are hoping we can get Azeri and Turkmen visas in Dushanbe (Tajikistan). We're still working out the details of our trip. AND now we're again thinking about going to Istanbul instead of Thailand, because one of the new Russian students just came from teaching in Turkey, and has many contacts she can give us. So hopefully we'll get a job out of it!
Nothing too much is new since I last posted. Mike and I got tattoos last weekend though, which I'm sure most of you know from facebook. We heard about the tattoo place from Mike's students and decided to check it out. Mike wanted to add to his collection of 4 tattoos, and I wanted to get one for the first time. It seems shady to most foreigners to even imagine having a tattoo done in Kyrgyzstan, but the salon was really clean and hygienic, and the woman was Russian, not Kyrgyz, which made us feel a lot better (not to sound too blatantly racist against Kyrgyz people, but...) So we made an appointment and went back the next day. Mike got a tunduk from the top of a yurt and also featured on the Kyrgyz flag, and I got a little pig. (you can see it here, the outline on the right:
This is what the finished tattoo looks like! The woman offered to fill it in with neon orange color for free, so of course I said yes. When the tattoo heals completely, the orange will fade and it will only be visible under blacklight, which will look so cute when we go to nightclubs :)
There is so little to do in Bishkek in winter that Mike and I are saving 450$ per month each, which is great because travelling the Pamir Highway will be SO expensive.
New classes start tomorrow, and it means we only have 3 teaching months left! We're working on getting visas now for Central Asia- there's a tour agency here in Bishkek that will do Uzbek and Tajik, and we are hoping we can get Azeri and Turkmen visas in Dushanbe (Tajikistan). We're still working out the details of our trip. AND now we're again thinking about going to Istanbul instead of Thailand, because one of the new Russian students just came from teaching in Turkey, and has many contacts she can give us. So hopefully we'll get a job out of it!
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