.it ain't no fun unless we all get some

The journey back to Kyrgyzstan was fairly uneventful, just long. I had a nine-hour layover in Istanbul that was perfectly primed for me to go out and do some exploring, but I let exhaustion win over the adventuring spirit. I had to buy a visa to go and get my luggage, which was annoyance enough, but at least the airport staff were nice to me. After I grudgingly forked out the 20 dollars for the visa and went to fetch my bags, I was on my way to get one of those airport carts.

I took an obscene amount of luggage back with me – much more than I brought originally. Of course, it’s all full of food and supplies and the like, things that I either can’t get in Kyrgyzstan, like vanilla extract, or are just too expensive for me to buy, like olive oil. And, I mean, I definitely packed to the extreme. One of my bags was overweight, and the other one was pushing it.

But in order to rent the little airport carts in Istanbul, you need Euro coins. I managed to locate some staff that spoke reasonable English to ask what I should do. At first they were telling me that all I had to do was go to a change machine for coins, and I had to spend about five minutes patiently convincing them that even if I did put a dollar bill into a coin machine it would not give me euro coins. And if it did, I would put all my dollars into it, because that would increase my spending money by about twenty-five percent. Exchange rates and all that nonsense.

Eventually, I think they got tired of dealing with me. Or that or they saw the despair well in my eyes when I realized that I’d have to drag all 130 pounds of my luggage to an exchange booth to trade a large-ish denomination dollar bill in for some euro just so I could get one lousy euro to get the cart, and then I’d be stuck with all this euro that has no use in the foreseeable future. I’d have to change it back to dollars or into som, and then I’d lose a ridiculous amount of money in the transaction. They eventually just waved over some dude to unlock a cart for me for free. Score.

And then when I went to check my luggage through again, the check-in lady was unbelievably generous and didn’t charge me overages on my luggage again, even though I was nearly ten kilo over it. Whatever. Never look a gift horse in the mouth, is what I say. Or rather, when somebody cuts you a break you smile and thank them politely, then run as fast as you can in the other direction so they don’t have time to change their minds about it.

After all that, I was standing in front of another currency exchange booth, wondering if I actually wanted to exchange for lira to go out into Istanbul. I really do like Istanbul: I had a blast the few hours I was there when I came to Kyrgyzstan initially. But this time around I was by myself and not with a group of Peace Corps Volunteers, some of whom were bewilderingly well-informed about Istanbul, and others who spoke Turkish. Not to mention, I was exhausted and kept on leaning up against poles to keep myself upright. Not exactly prime shape to be in to go around exploring a city I’m unfamiliar with that speaks a language I don’t know.

While I was debating, this guy comes up and asks if I want to go to the city. He’s got some official airport decals on, but I figure he’s attached to a taxi company somehow. I have an automatic bias about anybody associated with a taxi in any way, shape, or form these days, but I just got my luggage checked through for free and was feeling charitable, so I struck up a conversation with the guy.

I said I wasn’t going to the city yet, and made up something about meeting a friend just so we could evade the whole pressure-sales schtick. He asked how long I was staying in Istanbul, and when my reply was “nine hours,” that got a raised eyebrow and we got into the whole American-working-in-Kyrgyzstan thing. He told me that it was, “quite unusual.”

I said that somebody had to do it.

After that, I decided to hell with it and just went back into the airport where I ate overpriced cheesecake and surfed the free wi-fi for a while. I even fell asleep in one of the large chairs they had at the café I was sitting at. Jet lag for me is a weird thing. I think I do worse when the change is between 6-9 hours, like in Istanbu, rather than when it’s 10-12, like Kyrgyzstan. It’s easier for me to change my internal clock, somehow, if day and night are flipped completely rather than shifted a few hours. Dunno why. At least none of my shit got stolen, but I was kind of sleeping on top of it.

Got back to Bishkek without incident, and I even managed to find a taxi driver that wasn’t a total jerk. He said he’d take me back for 500 som, and I said I’d pay him 400 and he said okay. Done, and done. (Technically, the fair price is 300, but it was four in the morning and raining and I was exhausted and 100 som is about two dollars and fifty cents. Usually I don’t think of som that way because comparing it to dollars is an excellent way to get poor real fast, but to hell with it.)

I got to the Peace Corps office at about 5:30, and then promptly passed out on the resource center couch for approximately four hours before some of my friends burst in to the room with intentions to use the internet and found me instead. Not that I particularly minded. I could have used more sleep, but it was nice to see my fellow batshit crazy Volunteers again.

At any rate, the most interesting thing going on is probably the homeless situation, which is getting more and more ridiculous as it goes. Like most things ‘round these parts.

After I had gone out to buy some minutes for my phone, I called my program manager. I felt a little bad since it’s Saturday, but since I had sent her two emails over my vacation asking questions and had received no answers my qualms with disturbing her weekend weren’t too severe.

When I got a hold of her, I got the surprising news that I didn’t have to move. According to her, she had called my counterpart, who talked to the director. They did a cursory search for some apartments but had come up empty-handed. When that happened, they talked to my host family and convinced them to let me stay until next August.

I greeted this statement with mixed feelings, really. It was nice that I wouldn’t have to move at all, not even within the village, but I didn’t know how I felt about my current host family being guilt tripped. I can only imagine the conversation about if-you-don’t-keep-her-we’re-gonna-lose-her. And while it’s to some extent true, especially if they couldn’t find me an apartment, still. I didn’t know if I wanted to live in a place where I was only there because of outside pressure. It wouldn’t be a comfortable living environment for any of us.

But, whatever. Again, the whole thing about gift horses and such. I figured I would talk to Peace Corps and see about throwing on another 500 som to my rent check, since I’m well under the housing allowance limit for where I live and it might make my host family happier about keeping me. Thus resolved, I went out to lunch with friends in an attempt to stave off the jet lag.

When I got back, I was dragging a heavy rice bag with me. I figured that instead of shelling out a crapton of money on a cab to bring back all of my goodies, I’d just bring them back a trip at a time, which is cheaper. I was struggling with the bag when one of the neighborhood kids walked up and took one end of it, which made it a lot easier to carry and was quite sweet of him.

When we got to my house, my host father came out and laughed at the sight of me and this kid dragging an enormous bag down the road, and then came out and carried the back the rest of the way into my house.

After some cursory talk about how was America and all that, I brought up the fact that my program manager told me that I could live in his house for another year. I wanted to make sure that he was really okay with it… I mean, it is his house. I’ve dealt with a myriad of unreasonable people in country, and my current host family is not one of their number. From what my host father told me when he said I had to move out they merely wanted their space back, which, I mean, is not an unreasonable request. I didn’t want them to be unhappy, both for their sake and mine.

But my host father frowned, and said, “You can stay here until the tenth, remember?”

To which I blinked, and relayed what my program manager had said to me (in likely extremely atrocious Russian; I’m tired and pretty rusty after not having spoken Russian for a month) and he was all like, uh, no.

And I figured that this was just a delightful pickle, that both my sponsoring agency and my school think that I’ve got a place to live when I don’t, so I called my program manager back again. She asked me to put my host father on the phone, which I did.

I understood the gist of the conversation, a part of which seemed to be my program manager saying, “If she moves out, where will she live?” And my host father was all like, “Uh, not really my problem.”

Which… it isn’t. I’ve had people pull that on me before, and I’m not sure if it’s a cultural thing specific to here or not, but I really do hate it when you say you want to have nothing to do with something that isn’t your responsibility, and then the other person gets all upset about it. My old landlady at the house I got kicked out of did the same thing with the monster dog on the premises of the house. She told me she’d get rid of it if I moved in, and then when I moved in she asked where the dog would go if it wasn’t at the house. Um… maybe you should have thought of that before you told me you’d move it?

But I also heard my host father say that the problem has nothing to do with me, which is major points in my favor, considering how the last two places I lived ended less than amicably. At least this way it’s going to be nearly impossible for Peace Corps to claim that there’s something wrong with my attitude, behavior, or lifestyle. The people just want their damn guesthouse back, and that’s all. Wouldn’t matter if I were the world’s gentlest soul or the antichrist.

Once my program manager got off the phone with him, she said she’d call my counterpart again and encouraged me to get in contact with her as well, since I “know the community better.” Well, that may be so, but it’s not going to change the fact that there don’t appear to be apartments available and I’m not going to live with a host family anymore.

Which means one of two things: site change or early termination. I’m not quite in the mood to make that long plane ride back yet, so it’ll likely be site change over ET, provided that Peace Corps doesn’t get their knickers in a twist over it. Not that I can blame Peace Corps for being a little bit exasperated with my tenure as a volunteer thus far, moving-wise. If I change sites it’ll be my third one, which is virtually unheard of. And by “virtually” I mean, “I’ve actually never heard of anybody getting three sites before.” So it would be quite unusual. But, as I said before, I don’t consider myself an unreasonable person, and wanting to live in my own apartment after living four other places closely connected with a host family that ended on terms not of my own volition is not an unreasonable request.

Not that I can fault my program manager for trying to make me feel more empowered about the situation by doing an independent housing search, I suppose. To be honest, I don’t care much either way about it. I need to find a new place to live, and I’ve got a list of demands. I’m definitely empowered about the list of demands. Whether I find the apartment under my own power is moot. I just have to have one. And it’s not really my job to be house-hunting.

But I’ll have to call my counterpart anyway, so I’ll likely bring it up then. As it stands, I’m still not going to work on Monday, since I’ll need to be packing on Monday.

I’m just perplexed as to how my program manager came to believe that I could stay in my house when it’s not the case. Obviously it didn’t have anything to do with her (I’m somewhat jaded with Peace Corps as an organization to be sure, but I can’t believe that my program manager would misle me like that on purpose because it makes no sense), so the confusion must have happened somewhere between my director, my host family, and my counterpart. But… I also have a difficult time believing that, assuming that my host family said that I definitely couldn’t live with them after September 10th, my counterpart/director interpreted that as “Laura can live with them until August!” Maybe there was some sort of ridiculous misunderstanding, but that just seems so unlikely since they were talking about such a simple subject with a yes or no answer attached to it. (“Can Laura still live with you?” “No.” Hell, I could probably still have that conversation in Japanese if I had to.) Either that that my counterpart/director lied to Peace Corps. Which to me is… well, dumb, when you take into consideration that it would all be unmasked after September 10th, when I was still living in the house that my host family expected me to be vacating.

The only other thing I can think of was that my director/counterpart lied to Peace Corps just to smooth things over, but if that's the case then there's a serious lack of forward-thinking. Things would have been all hunky-dory until, well, next Friday.

Wonders never cease. I’m just glad I asked, I guess. And that I didn’t end up spending a crapton of money on a taxi to take all my goodies from America back to a house that I have to be out of by this Friday.

My program manager told me that I shouldn’t think about it right now, in favor of some rest. Which, really, isn’t bad advice if taken as is, but the fact that I don’t know where I’m going to be living come next Friday makes it a little more difficult to take entirely seriously. I’m just glad I’ve never been a highly-strung person. I’d’ve gone bonkers by now.