.damn city slickers

Blogger’s Note: Since I now have access to the computers at Peace Corps, which I am reasonably sure will not riddle my USB drive with viruses, I may be able to actually update this thing more often than I have been. (Namely, more than “once a year.”) These are a random assortment of writings that I’ve been amusing myself with since I got here. They’re in chronological order, but they do jump around a hell of a lot, so… well, at any rate, enjoy!

Written Sunday, August 31, 2008

I could probably talk for hours about culture shock – I’ve had it in Japan, and I’ve had tastes of it here, though I’m willing to bet that it’ll hit in a more full-frontal capacity after training and I’m not surrounded by Americans all day. But, in both Japan and the rest of Asia, one of the most interesting (and frustrating) juxtapositions of culture is American independence and Asian hospitality.

Let me first start out by assuring you that it’s not all bad. They treat guests like royalty in Asia, no matter what the family’s social or monetary status. In fact, one of the things they warn about while traveling through this region is to make sure that, if you happen to visit a family, they don’t do too much in your honor, like slaughter their only sheep or fix a feast when it’s clear that they can barely feed their own children. As an American in a part of the world where foreigners rarely go, this essentially assures two years of being a constant guest.

Which definitely has its downfalls, especially with the American propensity to do things for oneself. I had never realized how base this urge is until now, and my current family isn’t even particularly patriarchal. In some families, the volunteer there isn’t even allowed to boil water for themselves, but they have to ask one of the women of the family to do it for them.

I’m not sure how prevalent this is in the rest of Asia, but the one fate that all women want to avoid here is being the kalin. I’m not sure how the hell that translates, because it’s Kyrgyz and not Russian, but essentially the kalin is the wife of the youngest son. Here, it’s the youngest son’s duty to live with the parents as an adult and care for them. However, though the duty technically falls to the son, it’s the wife that ends up doing most of the caring, and most of everything else. In very traditional Kyrgyz families, it's the woman in the role of kalin that cooks the food, serves everybody, cleans up after the meal, milks the cows, does the laundry, works the fields, fetches whatever needs fetching… think a Kyrgyz-speaking Cinderella.

And, I mean, it’s normal here. It does, however, make a lot of the other volunteers uncomfortable, because our general reaction is I can boil water for my goddamn self, and I don’t need this woman who has permanent list of chores longer than the Nile to take care of me on top of it.

My host family currently is Turkish, so I don’t think they really enforce the kalin thing as much. Of course, my host family has grandparents, and my host mother does a hell of a lot of work, but the grandmother probably puts in about equally as much. Even so, I had to fight to get the right to do some chores. Now, don't get me wrong, I’m not so motivated that I’ll wrestle with them to do things like wash dishes or work in the fields. I am, after all, paying a handsome amount to live with them, and I don’t feel any pressing need to account for as many chores as a host country national of my age and status would do. However, it’s entirely within my own means to do things like fetch the occasional bucket of water, or refill the sugar bowl, peel fruit, or do my own laundry.

On a side note, another hilarious/disconcerting thing here is my status. There is no such thing as an unmarried 22-year-old female here. Or at least, I’ve never met one, and whenever I proclaim my lack of husband people look at me like they don’t know what to do with me. And, really, they don’t. There are three words for female here – “girl,” which is a child, “young girl,” which is generally somebody between the ages of 12 and 18, and then “woman, which is supposedly anybody older. However, a prerequisite to being a “woman” is a husband, which I don’t have. (Woman = zhjenshina, wife = zhjna, so the word “woman” kind of translates to “wife-person.”) Generally, they call me “young girl,” but everybody involved knows that it’s not quite correct. Plus, it screws up the whole general arrangement for seating, since most of the time the men hang around, smoke, and talk before the meal while the women are preparing it, but since I have no idea how the hell to cook Kyrgyz food, and I’m also a guest who’s not supposed to be working, and I’m not technically a woman anyway, sometimes they put me with the men. This also messes everybody up, but nobody knows what else to do otherwise.

Anyway, with my current host family, I managed to get in with the water thing. At first, they wouldn’t let me do anything, but I noticed that the cooking area is far from the one pump for water on our property. They have two water buckets that they keep full next to the outdoor stove. If I hung around while they were cooking for long enough, a bucket would go empty and I could grab it. By the time they noticed and were all like, “NO LAURA DON’T,” I was like, “TOO LATE AND YOU’RE GETTING SOME WATER.”

Eventually, they got used to it, and even occasionally ask me to go get some water if I happen to be loafing around and they need it.

Just today, I pretty desperately needed a bath. The weather is just starting to swing into cold here, which renders the sun shower more or less out of service, because the day isn’t hot enough to heat the water, and bathing with a chill wind in cold water outside doesn’t sound like a pleasant time. However, our banya is also out of commission because the tub that heats the water needs to be repaired.

I hadn’t actually bathed in a week. I was able to stave off being too ripe by taking foot and face baths every day and I even did a quick rinse of my hair under the cold water pipe during a warmer day, but it was getting to be about that time. It’s a Sunday, so I didn’t have anywhere in particular to be, and I set out for a proper wash.

The women were both working out in the fields, so I didn’t want to bother them. There are three ways of getting hot water here – cowpat/wood burning stove, gas stove, and electric teakettle. Unfortunately there was no hot water on the wood burner since we hadn’t eaten lunch yet and they don’t fire it up for breakfast. I don’t particularly like using the gas, since I know it’s expensive, not to mention the latent risk of death by explosion that lurks nearby. The easiest is the electric teakettle, provided there’s electricity. You know, fill ‘er up, plug er’ in, and in about three to twenty minutes (depending on the electric flow) a liter of hot water, just for you!

Since the electricity usually doesn’t get shut off until three in the afternoon, I boiled a liter of water (eight minutes), poured it in a bucket, took it to the banya where there’s a working cold-water pump, and got my bath on. It was fabulous.

For the record, I never thought that I’d ever say that bathing in a small, dark, damp, unheated room full of spiders and centipedes with a single liter of hot water would be fabulous, but there you have it. Clean is clean, and it doesn’t matter if I have to pick daddy longlegs out of my hair to get that way.

I came out, and the women of the house were assembling to make lunch, and they saw me with my soap and the like, and they all came like RUNNING at me being all like, “HOW DID YOU BATHE OH GOD YOU DIDN’T USE COLD WATER DID YOU?”

They have a Thing about cold here. They even think it’s really bizarre (and unhealthy) that I have a penchant for drinking cold water. (For the record, it’s not even actually cold. I keep my supply in my room, so it’s more tepid than anything else. I might actually consider doing murder for hire for some ice cubes, if anybody’s interested.) I have no idea how they subsist imbibing nothing but hot tea and the occasional Fanta, but I suppose they’re used to it. Me, I love hot tea, but I end up painfully dehydrated if I don’t consume at least a liter of cold water a day on top of the bazillion trillion cups of tea, but to each our own methods of hydration.

Due to the fact that I drink “cold” water and I don’t wear socks and a sweater every time the temperature dips below eighty degrees, they have deduced that “Americans like cold.” I always agree, but what I wish I could say is that Americans just don’t like sweating balls. Or, at least, this American doesn’t.

After I assured them that I did not take a bath using nothing but cold water, they asked how in the world I had managed to heat it, and when I told them I used the electric teakettle, they looked at me like I had managed to compute pi using an abacus.

I frequently get looks of awe when I say that I do things alone. A couple weeks ago when I went to Bishkek to meet up with the volunteer that worked at my site before I did (he’s since closed his service after two years and is now traveling around Iran and India before returning to the States for law school) and when I got back the family asked who went with me to Bishkek. When I told them I went alone, I got more pi-computing stares.

People don’t do things alone very often here. We’re not all that far from Bishkek (which, by the way, is the capital city of Kyrgyzstan) here, maybe about 45 minutes total by public transport, but nobody from my family has ever gone alone. They just don’t.

Similarly, with my host family at my permanent site, I explained to them that my college was very far away from where my family lived – about thirteen hours by car. At first they thought that I somehow managed to commute every day. I assured them that I did not have time-travel powers nor a private jet, and that I had actually lived at school. Then they were convinced that my mother had gone with me. When I denied that, they asked if my brother had come.

Eventually, I managed to convince them that I had indeed gone alone, and that, in America, this is normal. In Kyrgyzstan, the kids tend to live with the parents until they get married (and if the one getting married is the youngest son, he stays at home regardless). It took me a while to explain that leaving home at seventeen or eighteen is normal in America, and even expected, but for a long time they didn’t believe me. And I don’t think it had anything to do with my language skills. Wide-eyed, my sixteen-year-old sister asked if anybody stayed with their families, and I just shrugged and said “sometimes.” If I had the language skills, I would have said that if somebody is past the age of twenty in America and still lives at home with no immediate plans to leave, it’s a little weird, but if they’re past 25, people begin to think that something is seriously wrong. Of course, I had never questioned this, and I myself had pretty much been gunning to leave home since I hit puberty, but the fish is ill equipped to judge it’s own cultural pond, I guess. I just knew that what I wanted – and what I was pretty much expected to do – was leave.

Now, maybe most Americans don’t leave in quite the same radical fashion that I did – go across the country to college, go across the world during college, go even farther across the world after college – but that’s what we’re programmed to do. The vast majority of my friends after high school had some sort of plan to get out from under their parents’ roofs, be it by virtue of college or a job. Some even got kicked out, but even this isn’t unusual.

My new host mother even asked me if my parents actually loved me. I laughed. Of course they do. But if they had made me stay at home, I would have considered it stifling. Some things, I guess, just don’t culturally compute, but that’s why I’m doing this. If it all made sense and nothing offended anybody’s sensibilities, this wouldn’t be as educational and as fun as it is.

Anyway, after the bath episode, my host aunt had deduced that the way I had been able to figure out how to heat water and take a bath by myself was that heating water by electric teakettle and sponge baths were the way that things were done in America.

Ah, the beauty of cross-cultural exchanges. Now, I have to go do my laundry by hand before my host mother tries to do it for me.

Written Friday, September 12, 2008

Laundry instructions on clothes kind of make me giggle. Directives like “tumble dry low” or “wash with like colors” or even “dry clean only” are almost as foreign to me as pronoun declensions these days.

We actually do have a laundry machine here, but from what I’ve seen it’s been used as little more than a laundry hamper. Washing machines here look like giant open cans with a dial and a wringer on the side. You fill the can with water, plug it in, twist the dial to start the agitator, and add the soap. You still need to rinse by hand. I’ve only seen it been used once, and it was extremely noisy. It did, however, mean that I didn’t have to wash my sheets by hand as well as rinse, so I can’t complain.

The rest of the laundry is done by hand. This is accomplished with the following steps:

1.Retrieve metal laundry basin from its place in the banya building. (The basin only moonlights as a laundry basin. It’s also used for bathing.)

2.Procure hot water. This can be done on the gas stove or the wood/cowpat burning stove, but because gas is so expensive, and the amount of hot water needed is so great, we’ve never used the gas stove to heat water for laundry. Using the wood-burning stove requires going to chop wood or retrieve cowpats if there aren’t any about. Generally, though, I tend to time my laundry sessions to be right after meals, and they always keep pots of water on the wood burning stove to heat along with the food, since hot water is used for washing dishes, and, of course, tea. I can always obtain water for laundry using this method as long as I ask for it.

3.Pour hot water into basin. Also add some powdered laundry detergent – which is amusingly named “Barf,” and no I’m not kidding – and find a bar of laundry soap.

4. You will also need a second basin to drop clothes in after you’ve washed them. I prefer to do my laundry standing, rather than squatting on the ground, so I also get a chair to put the laundry basin on.

5. Get washing! Pick up article of clothing and bar of soap, and rub together in the water until article is suitably sudsy. Then swish around in water, and rescrub.

6. Check article for any visible marks, If there are some, then repeat step five. If not, dunk article in soapy water a few times to remove as much suds as possible, then wring out.

7. Drop article in second, empty bucket.

8. Repeat steps five through seven until all laundry is washed.

9. Now it’s time for rinsing! While it’s possible to go fill up buckets of water and bring them back, I find it’s easier to just carry the laundry (and the other bucket, and the chair) over to the spigot.

10. Put all laundry on chair. Rinse out laundry basin, and auxiliary basin, and fill laundry basin with water.

11. Rinse all clothing by taking it from the chair, dunking it in the clean water, wringing it out again, and putting it back into auxiliary basin.

12. You’ll want to dump out the water a few times, as it gets rather cloudy. This is why it’s easier to do all the laundry rinsing near the spigot.

13. Rinse out laundry basin, return it to banya. Return chair to its place.

14. Walk back to the other side of the compound with laundry. Pick up clothespins.

15. Hang all laundry on line. Turn all shirts inside out.

16. For God’s sake don’t drop any of it on the dusty ground or you’ll have to go all the way back to step one. (Or, if you’re me, you’re more likely to just go rinse it off because, seriously, man, I’m not going back to step one. I didn’t get to be where I am today by being a neat freak.) Put back auxiliary basin.

I’d say the whole process takes maybe an hour, depending on how much and what kind of laundry I need to do. It takes longer if a fire needs to be started for hot water. Generally I try and do it once a week, because doing less laundry more often means I take up less space on the laundry lines, and it makes doing the laundry itself less exhausting. I also learned my lesson to never wash my jeans AND my Carhartt’s at the same time, because getting thick denim material appropriately sudsy, then wringing it out, then getting all the suds out, then wringing them out again, is ridiculously tiring. Those fuckers aren’t getting washed more than once a month, and I don’t care if I basically wear them every day.

This time of year, depending on what time I do my laundry, most things will dry within the day, because the sun is so brutal.

It’s not a ridiculously unpleasant chore, I guess, and if all else fails, it’ll probably give me some killer triceps. I have no idea how this works in the winter, though, other than it’s the same story, just outside in subzero temperatures, which might make things considerably more difficult. But I suppose I also won’t be sweating as much in the winter, so it’ll take longer for B.O. in clothes to become as heinously offensive.

It is the one chore that I’m solely responsible for, though, and considering how much work I see my host mother and grandmother doing just to keep the domestic side of things afloat here in Kyrgyzstan, I’m pretty zealous about it. They’ve offered a couple of times just to throw my own things in with the rest of the family’s, but they’ve already got enough laundry to surmount. Besides, while I’m just fine with people doing my laundry when it’s in the Western sense of “throw all of it in the machine,” I don’t know how I feel about my host mother scrubbing at the crotches of my underwear by hand.

I mean, there’s very few processed foods here, so they have to make all the meals by hand. They do buy packaged kasha and macaroni noodles, but they also make noodles themselves a lot of the time, and all the dough for manty and other dumplings has to be made. Water needs to be hauled from one corner of the complex to the food preparation area on the other side. All the vegetables have to be picked from the garden, and the meat has to be killed and cleaned before preparation. After every meal, the dishes have to be washed by hand. Cleaning the house, again, requires elbow grease, as there aren’t vacuums here. Or, at least, this family doesn't have one.

And my host mother has two young children, of eight and ten, so she’s got enough on her plate. Overall, I’m relatively sure that I’m not that much of an added expense – I eat the same foods the family eats, and there’s always an abundance of everything, and other than that, whatever electricity I consume is probably more than covered by the extremely generous stipend that the Peace Corps pays them – and probably the biggest drain I’ve put on them is the fact that I inhabit one of their rooms alone. Despite this, I’d still like to keep the other work that the family does down to a minimum. And doing laundry isn’t THAT bad.

Written Friday, September 19, 2008

If nothing else, my new host family is definitely not as shy as my old one regarding me and chores. While I had to pull espionage-inspired maneuvers to get my old family to let me haul a couple buckets of water from the pump across the compound, today I cooked, swatted flies, and washed about a million dishes with my new one. My new host mother is very gung-ho about cleaning, and thus quite eager to work the newcomer into the (very clean) fold of her family. I can see this possibly becoming an issue, as I tend to be a bit of a clutterbug by nature, but I guess we’ll deal with that when and if it comes up. She has come into my room a couple of times, and I definitely see her check out the state of cleanliness. She’s even commented on it. (“Not bad,” she says, giving me a thumbs-up.)

Even though I did quite a load of housework today, I can’t say I really minded. As I haven’t started work yet, I didn’t really have much else to be doing with myself, anyway. Now, if they start expecting me to do the amount of cooking and cleaning that I did today on a regular basis, well, that’ll be a problem when I actually start working. However, I know that they don’t even do that amount of preparing on a regular day, as they had friends over tonight and thus made the requisite ridiculous amount of food to commemorate the event. They also fed me incredibly well – whenever we made a dish, we ate part of it. And then I had dinner, which was all the food we made over the course of the day at once.

Plus, this is a hilariously easy way to win major brownie points. I don’t mind doing dishes; in fact, it’s one of my preferred cleaning chores in general. It’s not a hard chore, but they laud me like a god due to my apparent washing prowess. In addition, it’s an action that requires very little language skill. After the first couple loads, when it became obvious that it wasn’t off-putting and I was okay with it, they even started calling me “smart” because I could sort the good silver from the everyday. I also developed the monikers “a good woman,” and the ever valued “hard-working.”

Though I think I possess other skills and accomplishments that are probably more impressive than dishwashing, I have to admit that what limited housewifery I can dole out is greeted by such genuine enthusiasm that it can’t be ignored. People here know that I can speak Japanese, and a few even know that I’ve written a thesis (as well as I could explain it, that is), and they know that I’ve only been studying Russian for about two months, yet can hold a semi-decent conversation… but the thing that really gets ‘em is that I actually do know how to use a broom. They get giddy. Holy crap, the American is holding a sponge.

Another advantage to doing dishes and kitchen work is that it means that they’re not adverse to having me in there. At my old host family, the first time I ever touched a kettle (and it was even one of the plug-in electric ones) I had about five people rushing in my direction shouting at me to be careful. I wished that I could have said, “Dude, do you think that the American government would have picked me to come across the world and represent America if I couldn’t boil water?” Here I’ve handled hot oil, so at least they assume I have a minimal degree of culinary competency. This bodes well for when I want to cook for myself. In addition, having to put away plates and utensils also teaches me where such things are when I might want them.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t dislike Kyrgyz cooking, but it's very heavy on the starches and fats. It’s not unusual for me to finish a meal and leave a centimeter of oil floating in the plate. Some other volunteers have gotten soup that was nothing else but some mutton stock with a huge cube of sheep’s fat swimming in it. Probably the most unappetizing thing I’ve been served was at my first host family’s, when they had cow’s legs one day. I admit pretty much total ignorance when it comes to meat: yeah, I buy it from the store, but by the time it gets to me, it’s already in the Styrofoam plate and wrapped in plastic. I thought that “cow’s legs” would just be meat. After all, chicken legs are meat, right?

Wrong. Turns out that cows legs are basically gelatin. I got served a big pile of warm wobbly clear jelly. I tried it, of course, and found that it tasted like meat-flavored Jello. While I can’t say that it was outright bad, the entire thing was just too weird for me, so after the taste, I turned it down. While I think I’m more adventurous than not with food, I did get saddled with the quintessentially American aversion to eating non-muscle based animal matter. I’m not a huge fan of offal, either, though I will choke down heart or liver when it’s served to me, provided it’s not the main course.

And it’s not all bad; borsook, or fried dough, is pretty darn tasty, I love plov, a conglomeration of rice, carrots and meat that’s kind of like chicken-fried rice, the produce here is absolutely to die for, and anything Uzbek or Uzgen inspired also pleases my taste buds. It’s just that I wouldn’t mind reclaiming some control over part of my diet. And while I don’t actively dislike the cuisine here, it’s not like, say, oh, Japan, where part of the reason why I learned the language in the first place was because I liked the food. There, I lived with a host family and the mother did all my cooking with no complaint from me, because I was getting served curry udon, braised fish with red miso sauce, and soba noodles every night. Hell, I even liked breaking open shrimp and sucking out the brains after a while.

In addition, my host mother here works at the bazaar, which means that she leaves the house at about five in the morning and doesn’t get back until threeish. This did not make me incredibly happy when I was here during my site visit, as I ate my breakfast of tea, bread and jam at about seven in the morning, and then didn’t get lunch until around three thirty. With her and the host father at work and the two daughters at school and me also working, I think it would just be easier on all of us if I had a bit of independence in my eating schedule. Ideally, I’d like to have breakfast and lunch on my own, and then eat dinner with the family. Dinner is the main meal anyway, and I know we’ll all be home for it.

This took a little bit of explaining to the mother, since Peace Corps leaves it up to us to decide our eating arrangements. When we meet our host families, there’s a housing contract that’s already been drawn up: you and the host family just sit down, negotiate a price for your lodgings, and sign it. In my case, the mother wrote the price down and I just agreed to it, as it’s ridiculously cheap. I’m paying about thirty dollars a month to live in a fully-furnished room, utilities (well, when there are utilities) included. Not to mention, as I had no idea what my lodgings actually consisted of (whether it was in a house, or an apartment, whether I was getting a room or a guesthouse or multiple rooms or what), I wasn’t in much of a position to bargain. I ended up with a room that’s actually quite nicely furnished. Thirty dollars is pretty much scandalously inexpensive for this.

But I had to explain why I didn’t want to eat the family’s food all the time, and I threw in copious assurances that it was because of my schedule, not because I didn’t love the hell out of Kyrgyz cooking. I still have no idea what I’m paying her… she’s never hosted before, and I don't really have a handle on how much food costs here, as during training the host families provided all meals, and they got a very generous stipend straight from Peace Corps for it. I guess we’ll figure it out.

Anyway, thanks to the spectacular events of today, my new chore is now dishwashing. Apparently I’m taking turns with the oldest daughter on this – she’ll do it for a day, and then I’ll do it. Because today had so much dishwashing involved, she volunteered to take the next two nights. Again, I don’t really mind. If it integrates me in more with the family, it’s worth it.

Written Saturday, September 20, 2008

Had a moderately successful day shopping. I met up with Alex today at about eleven, since he and I live equidistant to Bishkek, only I’m on the west side and he’s east side. Hey, I love having cross-cultural exchanges, but sometimes it’s nice to spend time with people who understand where you’re coming from, right? We first hit up the Peace Corps office for some free internet, and then we meandered over to Osh bazaar, since the two are within walking distance of each other.

There are definite advantages to being so close to Peace Corps HQ. Namely, the free internet and constant access to the library. And while the library seems to be made up mostly of bodice-ripping romance novels and other such sundry nonsense, it’s free material to read in English, and it’s available to me. Furthermore, to Alex and mine’s delight, there is an actual Western-style laundry machine in the resource center. I have no idea how to use it (of course, it would have to be all in German), but I assume that since it’s in the resource center that it’s open for volunteers to use. Of course, there is no dryer, but it wouldn’t be a ridiculous hardship to just carry the damp clothes home and dry them here on the lines. I might take advantage of it during the winter months, when doing laundry will be a total bitch, but I guess we’ll see.

In addition (as if it could get any better) Alex and I found two sleeping bags. A sleeping bag had been an investment I’d been considering before I came here… both for the obvious benefit of being able to travel with one, and because having one during the winter might be nice if it turns out to be freezing ass cold all the time. I had eventually decided against it, because any sleeping bag that appeared to be actually worth having was a several hundred dollar investment.

I was beginning to rethink it, given that the warnings I’m getting about this upcoming winter are just getting more and more dire, but I was leery of having one shipped to me due to the rate of pilferage that occurs in packages. The other option would be just to buy one here, as there are a few retail outlets around Bishkek that sell them, but they’re way out of my Peace Corps budget, about two hundred USD.

We found them under the table, and they were unmarked, so as far as I’m concerned they’re ours. There’s a slight bit of confusion, though, as the free box also unfortunately happens to be the area where people leave stuff to be stored while they’re off doing whatever. Frankly, though, if you leave your shit laying around the freebox area without a label then you’re just asking for it. Besides, who the hell stores nothing but a sleeping bag? Anyway, if I hear tell of anybody bitching about having their sleeping bag taken, I’ll certainly return it, but in the meantime, it’s mine.

Whatever. But the one I picked up is ridiculously nice… it’s from LL Bean, has down feathers, and claims to be good down to twenty degrees. It’s not a real heavy-duty number for sure, but it’ll definitely help out, it came with a compression sack, and it was free. Good enough. I also fished out a few hangers (which I needed) and a clip lamp that I was hoping to use for my bed, as the lighting in my room leaves a bit to be desired, but the thing shorted out when I plugged it in. Oh well. At least I didn’t pay for it.

On the side where I actually paid for things, I picked up a pair of scissors and a pair of slippers. I actually bought a pair of scissors about two weeks ago, but unfortunately set the bag containing them and a couple pairs of socks down in Osh bazaar while I was distracted by bargaining, and they were lost. The slippers were mainly for the sake of my host mother, who is convinced that if I go around barefoot in the house I’m going to die. The ones I picked up aren’t particularly nice – probably their main function is simply elevating my feet off the ground, they’re not very warm, but they were cheap, and at least they’re not completely blinged out. It’s really hard to find clothes or accessories here that lack bling. I heard from another volunteer who said that the locals think that American women dress extremely plainly, and from seeing what most stylish girls here wear, I see why they think that. Everything “for girls” is either glitzy like the 80s had stomach indigestion or frilly like a lacy layer cake. I even think that I dress plainly for the United States… I don’t like ruffles or lace or anything of the ilk, and tend to gravitate towards solid jewel tones and neutrals. Which, well, there aren’t many of here. Or, if they do have them, you bet your bottom som they’ve been bedazzled up.

At any rate, the slippers I picked up are a dark navy blue with a single multicolored butterfly embroidered on the outside of each one. I actually rather like them, which I wasn’t expecting. I figure that I probably will be buying clothes here, so I need to compromise with a little bling. When I was still living at my training site, I bought a long dark “wool” skirt that fit me perfectly and is plain… except for a little diamond broach-like apparatus on the bottom, with four clear rhinestones accenting the points. I could probably easily take it off, but it’s not that offensive and I figure it’s my compromise with the fashion here. You give me straight lines and handsome colors, and I’ll let you bling it out a touch. Fine? Fine. I would never wear it at home, but what passes for “professional” here is also considerably different.

Came home and did an assload of laundry, because I really needed to and they were boiling the water. I will never take a laundry machine for granted again. Doing laundry by hand isn’t all that awful, though, and while it’s extremely time consuming, people also budget out time for it here. When I lived in the States, I most certainly would not have had an entire day to dedicate to doing laundry, as I have to do here, but here people also expect that you’ll need to take the time to do the laundry, so it’s not as much of an inconvenience. I also had an unusually large load this time, as I didn’t do any laundry before I left my training site, and had spilled beer and vodka over an outfit or two when I got sworn in as a volunteer. I even washed the sleeping bag, at the insistence of my host mother.

Written Monday, September 21, 2008

Another day, more shopping. This time I did it alone, since it was mostly for groceries.

I’ve been working out my eating schedule here, and have decided that while I want to have dinner with the family, it’s easier to (and I’d rather) cook for myself for breakfast and lunch. My host mother and father work at the bazaar, so they leave the house about five in the morning and don’t get back until three at the earliest, and then the two daughters and I are all on different school schedules, so attempting to rely on the family to produce lunch at a regular time seems… well, unlikely. Not that they wouldn’t try, of course. But I actually do like to cook, and I appreciate a bit of flexibility in my schedule.

Anyway, I went down to Osh Bazaar, which is an enormous mostly-farmer’s market on the far west side of Bishkek. There’s a matshruka that picks me up straight from my house and goes down to the bazaar, so I hopped it and went down to mingle with the merchants.

Overall, it’s pretty cheap, and there’s quite a bit of variety. We’ll see what it can deliver come winter, but for now it’s a veritable smorgasbord. Nuts, fruit dried and fresh, all kinds of meat, candy, grains, baked breads, oils, spices, dairy products, juice, colas, live chickens… anything, really. There’s also a part that sells hardware and housing goods, as well as a wing that has handbags and clothing. There’s a section with furniture for any room in the house, and one with school and office supplies. On the perimeter of the bazaar are buildings that sell electronics, the best knock-off brands that China can invent. It’s a pretty big place, suffice to say.

After a bit of browsing, I came out of it with a kilo of oats, some golden raisins, vegetable oil, cinnamon, powdered creamer, a roll of plastic bags, Tupperware-esque containers, two flatbreads, and shelled walnuts.

Kind of an eclectic mix, but I had my reasons. My plans for making my own breakfast include homemade granola. That’s right, homemade granola. I’ve realized that since college and coming here, I am becoming more and more of a hippie. I wash my hair with baking soda, don’t wear deodorant, and make my own granola. Uh-huh, what of it? Oh, and I joined the Peace Corps. Funny, that.

Anyway, Peace Corps provided us with a very useful cookbook that is chock full of recipes that can be made with ingredients found here. This is a godsend for multiple reasons, namely that I’ve never cooked in Kyrgyzstan before, and also because, really, I haven’t done that much cooking on my own. Plus, it’s also a guide to what is available in Kyrgyzstan and what is not. Overall, it seems like most of the things I’m used to working with are available here. The big exceptions are condiments like peanut butter and chocolate sauce. In reality, those can be found here and they’re easily available to me due to my proximity to Bishkek, but more on that later.

I suppose one of the latent advantages to this is that I’ll know how to cook any variety of meals from scratch by the time it’s all said and done, because packaged food is virtually unheard of here. I mean, of course they have it (again, more on this later), but it’s expensive and pretty much out of my budget. The cookbook also has instructions on things like how to prepare dried beans, and even how to do self-canning.

Anyway, the oats, walnuts, raisins, oil, and cinnamon were primarily for the purpose of granola. The recipe called for all of these except for the cinnamon, but I like cinnamon and it goes well with honey… which I wasn’t able to purchase at the bazaar.

I was able to find most of the ingredients easily, but for a long while I couldn’t find either honey or oats. After about an hour of canvassing, I left for the Peace Corps office, which is about a twenty minute walk from the bazaar. I needed to get papers proving that I’m a volunteer in order to defer my loans, but I also wanted to take advantage of the internet there.

Sadly, the internet was down, but my program manager found me when I was waiting for my papers and while we were talking, I asked her where the hell I could get oats and honey, as they’re pretty basic ingredients. She said that they should have oats where they sold the other grains, but they were likely in a smaller bag that might have been beyond the counter, so I probably had to ask.

She also told me that the honey at the bazaar was not likely to be good, and that most people bought honey from people they knew in the villages.

I went back to the bazaar to pick up the oats (which I found instantly once I asked… the program manager gave me the word for oats in Russian), and then I headed back out of the bazaar to pick up a streetcar.

I really like the streetcars in Bishkek. The main mode of transport around these parts is the matshrukas, which are kind of like vans that they cram as many people into as possible. If you see a matshruka that’s going where you want to go – there are numbers on the windows and usually a sign that extols the major places it’ll stop by – you wave it down and climb in. There are no stops for matshrukas – you just have to yell at the driver to stop when he nears your destination. This makes for somewhat nervous driving when you’re in a matshruka in an unfamiliar area and you can’t see out the windows because there’s so many damn people in one. Oh, and matshrukas are also kind of notorious for pickpockets, so you also have to be semi-paranoid about your belongings, especially if they’re crowded. And in Bishkek they’re crowded like nowhere else – I’ve sat on the dashboard in one because there was no place to put my feet, and I’ve also ridden one with my torso hanging out the window, canine-style, because I couldn’t pull it in the automobile.

I’ve gotten to the point where I’m more comfortable on them than I used to be, but I have no idea how the hell even the Kyrgyz travel efficiently in unfamiliar places when they don’t know the matshruka routes. Even if a matshruka says it’s going to a major landmark, there’s always the chance that it might actually be making a gigantic loop through a residential area before it gets there. (This, by the way, has happened to me more times than I’d like to admit, where I ended up sitting on the damn thing for like an hour before I got to where I needed to go.)

The streetcars suffer from a similar problem, in that there’s never a schedule posted and there’s no map with their routes anywhere, as far as I know. I only know to ride the ones I ride because somebody told me where they go. (And even then, I had to ride them a couple of times through their loop before I knew when to get off them.) Consequently, you almost never see other foreigners taking the public transportation, because if you’re only here for a short period of time, it’s impossible to figure out and not worth the time to attempt. Also, if you’re on a Western budget, the taxis are criminally cheap. Of course, if you’re on a Peace Corps budget, they’re not, but then again, I (kind of) know how to use the public transportation, so I guess it’s a trade off. If anybody ever needs to know how to get around Bishkek for pennies, I’m your woman. Sort of.

Anyway, I like the streetcars because they’re cheaper than the matshrukas (five instead of eight som), and tend to be less crowded. I always get a seat on one, which is unlike my usual experience on a matshruka, because even if there’s a seat, I usually only get it for about five minutes until an elderly person gets on and I have to give it up. Not that I’m going to begrudge a seventy-year-old woman a seat, but it’s just the principle of the thing. Plus, the streetcars run on a fixed route… they’re actually powered by electric wires that are strung above the streets they run on, and they also stop at fixed bus stops, which means that they don’t stop every five seconds to pick up whoever waves at them from the side of the road. Of course, I got on one once and it caught on fire, but, I mean, that’s what you get for riding a Soviet relic. (The fire got put out, and the streetcar kept running; you know, business as usual.)

So, I hopped the streetcar to travel uptown to the center of Bishkek, where the main attraction is a large department store called TsUM, which is pretty much ridiculously overpriced compared to the bazaars. It does, however, have a far more comprehensive electronics section than the bazaar, and is probably at least marginally more trustworthy quality-wise than at the bazaar, which is its main redeeming point. You can still bargain at it, though, so it’s not 100% Westernized. It’s also the center of town, and happens to be across the street from Bishkek’s, and thus Kyrgyzstan’s, central post office.

There’s not door-to-door mail delivery here like there is in the States (or Japan). Basically, if you want mail, you need to rent a postal box. My village actually does have a post office, but I figure I’ll be going into Bishkek at least weekly, if not biweekly, and I won’t be getting such a large amount of mail that it’ll be busting out of my box if I happen to miss a week. Plus, since all the international mail comes here first before being diverted out around the country, I figure that it’s just easier to go to the source.

It was a bit of an event getting a postal box, considering they spoke no English and my Russian still leaves a bit to be desired. But through pantomime and a lot of patience on both sides, I managed to rent a box for six months. I didn’t have enough money on me to pay out for the full two years, but I assume I can just go in and extend my contract when it gets to be that time. When it had finally all been figured out, the woman went to the back, and came to the counter with a box, which she upended. Out came a huge pile of keys, some with tags, others without. We sorted through the pile, but none produced a key with my box number attached. I can only assume it was one of the many un-tagged keys floating about the pile. She told me to come back Friday, when she’d have a key for it. …we’ll see, I guess.

I’m also planning on opening a bank account next to TsUM, which means I can take care of all of my banking and postal needs in one fell swoop. But I figured I had enough adventure with attempting to do official business in a language I’ve studied for about two months, so I left that for another time.

Anyway, after quasi-setting up my new postal box, I took the walk down to Beta Stores, about thirty minutes. Beta Stores is a huge supermarket, and very expensive compared to the bazaar. It stocks American imports like Hershey’s chocolate sauce, Heinz ketchup, Tabasco sauce, and, of course, peanut butter. (The peanut butter is ShopRite brand, but beggars can’t be choosers. Weirdly, there’s a lot of ShopRite things at Beta, including maple syrup and ketchup. And they all cost about a billion dollars, which is kind of funny, considering it’s the cheap brand in the States.)

All the aforementioned items go for about ten dollars US, which is outrageous by both Kyrgyzstani and American standards. But, I mean, if you’re desperate… fortunately, my mother’s love came through for me in the form of a gigantic container of Jif, so I’m set for a while.

I use Beta Stores when I can’t find what I need at the bazaars, and for things like dairy products, when I don’t trust the bazaars. I don’t want to buy milk at three in the afternoon that’s been sitting in the sun since six in the morning. Refrigeration standards here aren’t exactly up to the par that I was raised with. Namely, at the bazaars, the standard is “none.” I don’t mind paying an extra fifty som for yogurt that won’t kill me.

Plus, I have to admit that it’s nice to spend some time in a Western-style supermarket. I genuinely do like the bazaar – it’s cheap, colorful, and fun. However, I was raised to shop in a place where people don’t shout what they’re selling at you and may or may not be attempting to haggle. In Beta Stores everything is nice and organized on the metal shelves with the bin numbers and firmly priced with stickers. You can get a metal shopping cart with the child’s seat. The fluorescent lights flicker gloomily above – just like home! They have coolers that run on generators when the power goes out. They even have a bakery that stocks Kyrgyz- and Western-style baked goods.

I admit that Beta Stores is kind of relaxing. For about a half hour, I could be in America. And I mean, while I like Kyrgyzstan so far and I clearly love being expatriated… it’s certainly not because I don’t like America. I did get that question a lot when I said that I was going abroad again and was probably going to continue the trend after my service, was whether or not I liked living in America, or even if I didn’t like America at all. I always found that kind of bizarre, given that I’m actually here serving my country. I took the same oath that soldiers, foreign service workers, and the President takes. If I didn’t like America, I wouldn’t be doing Peace Corps. That would be… rather counterintuitive. In reality, I actually think that my experience abroad has made me like my home country more. Before, it was all just “normal.” Now, I know that America is actually a ridiculously weird place, and I kind of like being part of that weirdness.

Anyway, I picked up a container of yogurt and a bottle of honey here, and then left America to hop my matshruka back home.

Back home, they were hauling about a metric ton of coal out back, because we’re not going to have much electricity this winter, and nobody’s interested in freezing to death. I said hello and then went to work making my granola.

It’s surprisingly easy to make. You just mix the honey and oil together and put it in a saucepan to heat, and then mix the nuts and cinnamon and oats in the other. Then, when the oil/honey mixure is warm enough to pour easily, you mix it together.

Then I would have put it in the oven, but the oven ran on electricity and the electricity went out. …oh well. I took a nap instead. No sense getting pissed off at the government because they shut the electricity off because there might not be enough this winter. Uh, right?

The family is extraordinarily interested in everything I do in the kitchen. I’ve wowed them with my dishwashing skills, and when I was making the granola I had an audience. Once the electricity went back on (five hours later, after dinner), I managed to finish toasting my granola, and then I mixed it with the golden raisins.

And all I have to say is… motherfucking success. That’s right, this granola is so tasty that it needs a “motherfucking” to describe it. Adding the cinnamon was a good decision. Tomorrow for breakfast, I am having some COFFEE (not Nescafe, oh no, we’re talking COFFEE), with creamer, and plain yogurt with my Granola Of Victory And Fruitful Life.

Tomorrow is also my first day at work. Hopefully, that’ll go as well as breakfast.