After my trip to Bangkok during the Thai winter, which turned out to be warmer than any summer I’d experienced, I left all my warm-weather clothes with Maggie as I packed a suitcase for winter of the Central Asian variety. Long underwear, two coats, gloves, hat, mittens, sweaters, thick trousers, and no socks not made of wool.
An aside – the damn thief who broke into Maggie’s apartment the day before my departure, stealing all electronics in sight, also made off with all but a few pairs of my underwear. It is proving exceedingly difficult to fill the void left by this jerk in a city where, I’ve learned in a few underwear shopping excursions, women will only wear nylon underwear with cute little sayings like “Don’t hate me cuz…”
So the weather. Here I come to Central Asian winter with two coats, snow boots and wool socks. And what do I find? Half the time it is warmer than a Michigan spring. One day I threw on a layer of long underwear in the chilly hours of the morning only to nearly suffer from heat exhaustion around lunch time. A few days later, I make a snap decision to wear my fleece instead of my wool coat and end up jogging home from school to keep warm. The weather here could be described as unstable.
I think this instability has something to do with this beautiful view from my bedroom window.
There’s been snow on and off as well, rarely staying long enough to be worth looking at. Here is a taste:
The only thing that changes for me when it snows is that I have to lie to my host family, promising to take the marshrutka instead of walking the 30 minutes to school. I tried explaining that I come from a place very close to Canada and can handle an inch of snow. This line of argument has been so far unsuccessful. Everyone thinks it is ridiculous that I enjoy a morning stroll instead of paying 20 cents to pack into a smelly, hot van with 50 of my closest Bishkek friends. It is so packed that you can’t even look out the window to see if you’ve passed your stop. I can understand why my host family is concerned for me. You probably don’t know this, but in Kyrgyzstan, merely walking in the cold can make you terribly ill. So can eating ice-cream and drinking cold water, for that matter. I believe that it has to do with Kyrgyzstan’s unique climate, geographic coordinates and lack of a comprehensive science curriculum. Come to think of it, this can also happen to you in Turkey. In this way, both of these countries are something like the St. Ignace Mystery Spot. The world may never know.
Broken Hopes in Broken Russian in Kochkor
Everyone knows it doesn’t snow in Kochkor. After all, its name means “Go away snow,” or something to that effect, in Kyrgyz. So when someone inquired at the Bishkek branch of Community Based Tourism in Kyrgyzstan, they naturally suggested it as an acceptable mid-March weekend getaway. I set off Saturday morning with Daniel [of “small vodka” fame], Brian and Kristen, three of the American teachers here.
As we drove to Kochkor, we were abuzz in the taxi. Rumor has it that in the villages outside of Bishkek, hardly anyone speaks Russian. We are very concerned that the Kochkor villagers will not be able to understand us when we speak Russian with them. Kristen says her students warned her about travelling to Kochkor without a Kyrgyz speaker. We are indeed concerned. We are indeed excited.
I sit a little taller, knowing that through my knowledge of Turkish and my 2 week stay with a Kyrgyz family, I can say such Kyrgyz phrases as “I’m full,” “May there be good digestion,” “Welcome,” “Since I arrived,” “no,” and “weak tea.” Well, that list ended up being a bit more exhaustive than I had originally intended. Hope you didn’t spend too long reading it; here’s a promise to be more concise in the future. In a nutshell: I am looking forward to being the resident linguist on the trip.
The anticlimax: Of course, we ended up being the only people in town who didn’t speak Russian. Whenever we attempted to communicate, the locals would respond rapid-fire and we would pretend to understand and say “no” if it sounded like a question. Someone who shall be identified only by his out-of-date lens prescription had a conversation in Russian with a sweet young boy who gave us directions into town without realizing the boy had Down’s Syndrome.
Kochkor: Mountains and Snow
The mountains in Kochkor were beautiful – a layering of red, black, brown and white. We arranged for a driver to pick us up at our homestay at 9:30 on Sunday morning, drive us to the mountains, pick us up again a few hours later, and drive us back to Bishkek in the afternoon. I know this sounds decadent in such times of economic crisis, but it really isn’t that much more expensive than taking the dreaded marshrutka, and cuts travel time in half. He showed up at 8:50 itching to get back to Bishkek, and was cross with us the rest of the day.
He dropped us off at the base of the hills and suggested we hike up to some metal thing not too far away which he referred to as the TV tower. He spoke a good deal of English and also asked if we thought Kochkor was a “delight.” Unfortunately, the TV tower was guarded by two particularly astute guard dogs. Luckily, we had a contingency plan to follow the river for awhile and kick dust around on some really big hills.
This is me kicking dust around with layered mountain background:
This is Kristen, probably doing something similar, with big mountain background from the other direction:
This is the picture I am going to send to the Kochkor city council, demanding they change their misleading name:
Do you see those white clumps to the right of the river?
Kochkor, to be continued: a spring holiday, lots of children and my first Kyrgyz souvenir.
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