Just another manic Monday....

Monday was... interesting. Actually, the bulk of the day was fairly normal for a Monday. Then, at exactly 7:00pm – right as my final class of the day was beginning – the power went out. Not just to The London School, but to the entire city block in which the school is located. All the teachers wandered downstairs, wondering what the protocol might be for such a situation, only to be handed candles inside little plastic cups, and sent back to class. As you know, all of my classes are fairly low-level, and this class was Elementary 4. We’re currently studying the present perfect. After asking as many “Have you ever...” questions I could think of, I then began asking every low-level question I could think of. (We couldn’t really hold class by the dim light of a candle, and I couldn’t find my stellar headlamp flashlight.) Eighty minutes of basic questions was a bit much, but luckily my last class of the day is filled with hilarious, good natured people. It might not have been the best lesson, but at least we laughed a lot. Well, except for the point when I may have begun shouting profanity as my candle caught my plastic cup on fire and melted plastic dripped onto my finger. Yeah. I’ve got quite a pleasant battle scar from that.

Ouch!
Also, yes, I DO have a huge writing callus on my finger.

After class ended, the power was still out in the entire block, which included our apartment building. So, some of the other teachers and I decided to go out for dinner. Jess, who has taught in Korea, had mentioned a Korean restaurant earlier, although when she suggested we dine at a place called Santa Maria, I certainly didn’t connect the two. Yes, we went to a Korean restaurant with the odd name of Santa Maria. I have seriously mixed feelings about this place. I had utterly delicious bibimbap and kimchi which tasted *exactly* like it does in Korea. Nick had scrumptious smelling samgyopsal, which the manager not only cooked, but wrapped up in little lettuce/rice/garlic/gochujang bowls for him as well.

The problems came with the bill. For starters, I had ordered a Baltica 3 (a type of light beer) to go with my meal. I’ve been drinking Baltica 3 pretty regularly since 1999, and I’ve never had trouble ordering it. (Baltica comes in options 1-9, by the way.) However, the waiter somehow was under the mistaken impression that what I wanted was 3 Balticas of some indiscernible number. While I managed to convey that I only wanted ONE beer, when the bill came, I was charged for three. (At least this we managed to get them to remove from the check.) Katie was overcharged for tea, Jess and I were charged for the extra gochujang we’d requested for our bibimbap (not to mention we’d had to pay for kimchi!), and Nick was charged for the extra lettuce he’d asked for. Boo! Additionally, the meal didn’t exactly, shall we say, digest well. And we all know my stomach is pretty well adapted to Korean cuisine by now!

Culinary Catastrophe

I should’ve paid more attention back when I was hanging around Nina Mikhailovna’s kitchen every day. Something she used to make me quite frequently was fried tvorog, which I would eat topped with either jam or honey. Now, perhaps someone who knows what tvorog is can help me explain. I’ve seen it translated as cottage cheese, but it is very much NOT cottage cheese. However, I would say that tvorog has as much in common with normal cheese as does cottage cheese, if that makes sense. Anyway, it’s in the cheese family. A cousin, perhaps. I found a wide selection of tvorog in Ramstor the other day and decided to try my hand at frying some up. (I’m not a big fan of uncooked tvorog.) As far as I remember, Nina M simply used to pour some oil in a pan, drop in the tvorog, and a few minutes later there would be some tasty fried tvorog patties, ready to be smeared with jam or honey.

So, I bought my tvorog...

and my honey...

and tried my best to repeat the process...

Unfortunately, what I got was this:

I smothered it with honey and ate it anyway,
but it was thoroughly unappetizing. Yuck.

Friday and Saturday

Friday night, after a long week of work – and getting paid – we decided to go out for a night on the town. The school’s former students who made us plov last weekend play in a cover band called Cadillac, and one of their frequent venues is a café/bar called Sweet 60s. Sweet 60s is a really nice café, with many choices of Russian, Kyrgyz and Western foods, plenty of booze and a good staff. Cadillac are excellent. They played a lot of classic rock covers mixed in with Red Hot Chili Peppers covers and they covered a few Russian songs too. After a fun evening of yummy food, beer and dancing, I headed home (opting out of the trip to the group’s next destination, a hip hop club – boo).

This is a shot of people dancing. Really.

Saturday morning I got up early (despite my late night the evening before) in order to wander down to the internet café to check my email and make sure my plans for the day were still on. See, back when my AH friends and I went to Siberia, we met this super fabulous girl from Norway named Ina. She is currently in the middle of a two year trek around the globe, and flew into Central Asia just last week, and has been in Bishkek for less than a week. We had planned to meet downtown at noon, do some exploring of the city, and have some dinner and booze. Unfortunately, Saturday was the coldest it had been since my arrival in K-stan. After my short trek to the internet café, I scurried home to double up on my layers. I’d neglected to check weather.com, so I don’t know how cold it was, exactly, but I’d estimate in the -20s C. That’s snotsicle forming territory, and not exactly stellar weather for outdoor adventuring.

Saturday, in addition to the utter chill, found the city of Bishkek covered in a glittering frost. I decided that with my extra layers, it would be fine to walk downtown (despite the fact that this is a thirty minute walk and all...), and as a result, by the time I met up with Ina, I was already pretty damn cold. She had walked in from her hotel, and wasn’t feeling all that warm either. Nonetheless, we set off on a walk around the city. It didn’t last long. It was simply not the weather for aimless wandering without any specific destination in mind. We ended up spending about two hours in Fatboy’s, thawing out, catching up on what we (and our mutual friends) had been up to in the past few years since our first meeting, and chatting about traveling in the Stans. Eventually we decided that it seemed like a good afternoon to return to our respective residences and crawl under the covers. (Even Fatboy’s was feeling a bit of a chill inside.) I took a sardine-packed marshrutka (minivan-taxi) home and immediately snuggled down under my blankets and cats for a four hour nap. (Yes, I know. That’s a bit much, even for me.)

(Today, according to weather.com, is 3F, or -16C, and it feels slightly warmer than yesterday! Hmmm...)

And now for your daily (blah) dose of the utterly random...

This, as should be obvious, is a packet of moist cat food. What might not be obvious to non-Russian speakers is that it is RABBIT flavored. Now, I don’t suppose there is anything wrong with that; after all, rabbits are a perfectly acceptable prey for kitties world wide. However, after watching Vinni Pookh way too many times, the word кролик (rabbit) is, for me, synonymous with Rabbit from Winnie the Pooh. It seems wrong somehow to be feeding кролик to my kitties! They, on the other hand, love it.

Introducing the Som

The som is the unit of currency used here in Kyrgyzstan. The exchange rate varies, but currently 35soms is roughly one dollar. Coins are rarely used at all. I guess they’re in the final stages of being phased out. I have heard that they exist, but that people are usually surprised when they receive coins as change. Paper soms exist in denomination from 500soms, down to half a som. Unfortunately, I didn’t realize this. Somewhere along the way, in a handful of change received at the grocery store or somewhere, I received a bill labeled 50. Not having remembered where I got it, or how much money I was owed when I received it, I simply assumed it was a 50som bill. After all, there ARE 50som bills. What was interesting about this bill, was that it was about half the size of the other bills in my wallet:

If I’d paid closer attention, I might’ve noticed that while the 100som bill spells out жуз сом (one-hundred som), the smaller bills read элуу тыйын, which turns out to mean, essentially, fifty kopeks. There are 100 тыйын per som, apparently. Guess how I came to this stunning realization? Not by intelligently wondering why the wording was different on the different bills and checking my Kyrgyz dictionary, no. Instead, I was leaving the internet café. My bill came to 35soms, and I tried to pay for it with what turned out to be the 50 kopek bill. The woman running the internet café simply gave me a look which conveyed her thought, as clearly as if she had spoken: Are you a complete and total dumbass? I immediately realized that I’d done something wrong, and tried to cover it up by acting as though I’d simply grabbed the wrong bill out of my wallet. I took my 50тыйын bill back and exchanged it for a 100som bill. My change from it contained a legitimate 50som bill, which was the same size as the rest of the bills in my wallet. I went home and immediately rummaged through my Kyrgyz dictionary to confirm what exactly had just happened... sigh.

Here’s a shot of the 500som bill:

And this is a close-up of the mountains which appear on the back of the 100som.
Is it just me, or is that a face? Seriously, I find it a little frightening.

Oh, the "logic"

Every culture has its own logic (or in some cases, "logic"), which often differs greatly from the logic of one's homeland. There are two internet cafes near my apartment. One is about a 3 minute walk away. The other is nicer (and faster!) but it's about a 10 minute walk away. Now, I have a 4 hour break between my morning class and my afternoon classes, so you'd think this time difference wouldn't matter. However, (and this is Jane-logic here) as I prefer to use my 4 hours to check email, eat and (most importantly) nap, I usually opt to head for the closer one.

I arrived there today and was assigned a computer, as usual. I sat down and tried over and over again to get yahoo mail (and then several other sites) to load, but with no success. I realized that other patrons were having similar troubles. Two women who had arrived shortly after me got up and attempted to leave without paying. Their argument was that they came to use the internet, and it wasn't working, why should they pay? (I agreed, although I did so silently.) The fellow manning the place retorted that he had turned on the computer for them, and they had sat in front of it for two minutes - they needed to pay for those two minutes. It wasn't his fault that the internet wasn't working. Eventually they threw down their money in disgust. I left then, too, meekly paying my 3 soms (whatever pittance that amounts to) before trudging 10 minutes to the *other* internet cafe.

What the bloody sodding hell is a jumper anyway?

Here at The London School, not surprisingly, most (probably all, but I don’t know) of our textbooks teach British English. Now in general, I do a LOT of reading, and many of my favorite authors are British. As such, I haven’t had too much trouble assimilating to phrases like “Have you got any biscuits?” (or even “Have you any biscuits?”) instead of “Do you have any cookies?” (although every time a student says “biscuits” I inevitably think the fluffy buttermilk kind), talking about what people do “at the weekend” as opposed to “on the weekend” (or simply “this/last weekend” as we usually say in the American south), and saying sport instead of sports and maths instead of math... but can someone please tell me what the hell a jumper is? See, when I was a kid, a “jumper” was like a dress, but I needed to wear a shirt under it. My childhood jumpers often had tops similar to the top part of overalls, and would’ve been indecent had I not worn a shirt underneath. However, as far as I can tell from our grainy photocopied textbooks, that is very much NOT what the British consider to be a jumper. The British jumper might be a sweater. Or possibly a generic shirt or pullover. All I can tell is that it is some kind of unisex top. I think. I checked my Russian dictionary to see if perhaps it might provide me with a Russian word I recognized, but all I found was джемпер, a simple transliteration of jumper into Russian. My students didn’t know what a джемпер could possibly be either. Bah. So if you know, please feel free to enlighten me.

Gold Toothed Leer

Bektour was a little late meeting me on Sunday, as the snow had rather slowed down transport city-wide. I waited out on the sidewalk before deciding that it was cold and since he knew where I lived, I might as well wait inside. However, before common sense led me to that stellar decision, I had a rather interesting experience. When I emerged onto the snow-covered sidewalk, I saw a middle-aged man who appeared to be waiting either for a bus or for someone. Now lest anyone suggest otherwise, I did not so much as make eye contact with this fellow, and I most certainly didn’t smile at him. In fact, I’d taken very little notice of him until he began crossing the street, headed directly for me. At first I thought that he was simply crossing the street, but no. He grew nearer and nearer, and I steadfastly gazed down the street, as if scanning the bus numbers. Finally, there was no avoiding the man; he was totally up in my personal space. I bit back a rather rude чего? (kind of like rudely saying what the?) and instead gave him a look which I hoped conveyed that thought without me having to open my mouth and possibly expose that I was not a native of Bishkek. Instead of taking the hint and walking away (alas, they never do), he comically imitated my expression, leaned in and leered at me, showing a full set of gold teeth, and covering me with the stale stench of beer. I simply stared back. He then asked me where I was going. I told him firmly and in as best an angry devushka voice as I could muster, Я жду друга. (Now first off, I can’t for the life of me remember if one says жду друга or жду другу, but I suspect that’s somewhat beside the point.) See друг (droog) means a male friend; however, it can also be used to mean boyfriend. I hoped very much that my manner and tone of voice would convey to this man that I was indeed awaiting my boyfriend; he wouldn’t need to know any different. Luckily for me, he took it to mean just that, and with a shrug he stumbled off down the street. Shortly thereafter I decided to wait indoors. Seriously, I’m like catnip for crazy old dudes.

Random photos for your enjoyment

The Ala-Too Mountains, as seen from my classroom window

Ramstor might be evil in its expensiveness, but they sell salsa! Only mild and medium, sadly, but still! It's real salsa! I bought some lavash (the closest thing in Central Asia to a tortilla... very close, actually) and some Kyrgyz cheese and made myself a very authentic quesadilla. Yum!

Bagira has discovered my suitcase atop my wardrobe.

Lucy's a cutie!

Kitty pile!

The worst thing to ever come out of the former Soviet Union

Sure, many negative things emerged from the Soviet Union: abysmal customer service, frightening post offices, hideous architecture from the 1960s onwards... but I remain convinced that the worst holdover from the Soviet Union is the cat pee box. While in the West we developed litter boxes filled with a variety of clumping, odor controlling cat litter, covered litter boxes and even self-flushing litter boxes, the former Soviet Union gives you this horrid contraption:

Pleasant, huh? And I bet you can guess how wonderful this contraption is at odor control. Now there *is* kitty litter to be found here; however, thus far I have only located it in one store at an outrageous price – something like $21 for a mere couple of pounds! I have three cats; at that price, I’d be spending my entire salary on litter. Instead I’ve opted for the following method of odor control:

Ok, so perhaps this isn’t the best solution, but it improves the air quality of my apartment quite substantially. You know, as opposed to raw, uncovered cat pee. Then of course, there is the problem that the cats don’t like to use the box if it has recently been used. They prefer to go outdoors, but I'm not exactly skilled at waking up to let them out in the middle of the night. After several mornings of awakening to a puddle near my front door, I have resorted to this as well:

I really must find some affordable kitty litter, if at all possible. Of course, it it’s anything like the litter I found in Russia, it might very well mix with cat pee to form a cement so solid that it cannot be cleaned out of the box. (Obviously, I have given up on the idea of pretending I don't have cats by keeping the litter box outside. This came about the morning I awoke to discover that my brand new, superfantastic Payless boots sprawled in a puddle of piss. I'm still trying to get the smell out. If anyone wishes to send me a bottle of Out! Pet Stain and Odor Remover, I'd love you forever. Really.)