Of [nearly] bra burning and early morning champagne

Wednesday, according to our “schedule” the power was supposed to be out from 6pm until midnight. It didn’t go out until 10:45pm, which I didn’t mind so much, but one wonders why they bothered making and disseminating a block by block power outage schedule. Yay, Kyrgyzstan. I was hanging out with my headlamp and numerous candles when I began to smell something (other than a candle) burning. The candle I’d had sitting on my plastic chest of drawers had burned a hole through the top of the chest and had ignited something inside my underwear drawer. Ooops. You’d think that after the Oh, holy shit, the plastic box is burning incident of 2005 I’d have learned to stop placing candles directly onto plastic surfaces, but obviously not. Luckily only one of my green headscarves (of which I have several) burned, and my entire selection of underwear was not lost.

Oooops.

Shortly after that I blew out the candles and went to bed… only to be awoken from my slumber at about 2:30am by a loud Crash! Bang! from directly outside my window, accompanied by a lot of shouting and swearing in Russian. After the crashing, banging and swearing continued for a few more minutes, I dragged myself out of bed to see what the racket was all about. For some reason a crew of five workers had picked that very moment to install a gigantic metal sign (to which billboards can be attached) directly outside my window. This involved large metal objects dangling from a giant, teetering crane, which were being smashed repeatedly (and accidentally) into the trees outside my window amidst much shouting: Come on! Come on! Come on! Sasha! Saaa-shaa! Dammit. Hell. Come on! Stop! Stop! Vanya, help Seryoga! Fuck! Lift it up! Lift it up! Gosha! Come on! Come on! I listened to Sasha, Vanya, Seryoga, Gosha and their foreman (the one doing the bulk of the shouting) crash, bang and curse for a full two hours before they managed to get the thing erected. Then they uncorked a bottle of champagne which they proceeded to drink outside my window before driving away. They left the empty bottle.

The view at 3am

The finished product by daylight.
Not even containing an advertisement, just an empty metal sign. Boo.