Blogging, blogging.... gone

It’s time to end this blog.
I’m not happy with how it’s developing. I simply don’t have time to live in Kyrgyzstan and to update the blog regularly. Worse, what I write isn’t even particularly interesting. I’ve read what I wrote in the last post: I don’t like it and so I’ve removed it.

It’s easy to say that I should just select the highlights and skip the mundane events but it’s the day-to-day things which show what I’m experiencing here. Learning about and adapting to life in a different culture is what’s interesting for me and, I thought, writing about this makes my blog different from others: there are plenty of other blogs where people just publish their photos with a three-word caption and write about what they think are the exciting parts of their holidays. The entertaining events I’ve experienced here are only interesting as part of the whole; when taken out of context, they just don’t mean anything.

I’ve now had too many complaints that the blog is becoming boring. I don’t know how to make it amusing or interesting without giving the detail but it’s the detail that makes it boring. As someone who struggled to survive five years of engineering’s smothering greyness, accusations that I’ve been contaminated by the dull brown of Communism cut deep.
It will be good to return to the United Kingdom and its unique sense of humour after too long abroad.

Thank you for following this blog and for all the comments, especially Anita, Hana and Joris for helping bring this blog alive and often making me laugh out loud with what you’ve written. A memorial service featuring pints of cheap lager in a seedy Cardiff pub will be held to commiserate the apparent demise of Raw Bacon and Frogman.

This blog is now closed.

blogging break

I won't be online much for the next couple of weeks, so this blog may not be updated for a while. I'll try to write about grandmothers, fake passports, weddings, 'marketing', birthday kisses, horse-whispering and - my favourite - dog fat, when I have time.

Day 18 – nothing goes according to plan.

A great start to the week.
I woke up early for my Russian lesson, knowing deep down that something was going to go wrong. Would Ulan phone me and ask me to cover some classes, or would Olga phone to cancel the lesson?
The phone rang just before eight: it was Ulan. “Ben, I need you to come in. Danny is sick.” I explained that I couldn’t work, because I had a Russian lesson. This wasn’t the answer he wanted to hear. He had a class sitting there without a teacher for 20 minutes already. In the end I gave him the phone number of Olga and told him to sort it out with her while I had a shower.
He phoned back almost immediately to tell me he’d spoken to Olga, and she was going to let him know. I still had serious doubts about my ability to learn Russian in German if neither of us spoke German that well.

The phone rang again. This time it was Olga. Or was it? She sounded different. She asked me if I could manage a different time because 8.30 was no good for her. I was confused: surely Ulan had told her that he needed me to teach? I didn’t mention this, and suggested a later time. Ulan had assured me I only needed to cover one or two lessons this morning. That was ok for her. I asked for her phone number in case I needed to contact her again: it was completely different from the previous number she gave me. Aha! So this was a different person. Ulan then phoned again to make sure I was coming to school. Poor Bolek probably didn’t appreciate all these phone calls so early in the morning

I finally made it to school 45 minutes into the lesson. There were only three students left. After the lesson, still no sign of Danny. Where was the half-French Canadian? Nowhere to be found. Ulan told me he’d spoken to my other potential Russian teacher: her name was Dunya. Danny still wasn’t there, so I had to cover another lesson. Elementary Talking Club, again. The same topics, all over again: What did you do at the weekend? I stayed at home. What, all weekend? Yes. One problem is that for people here the weekend is only one day long. Most schools and universities are apparently open on Saturdays too.
Coaxing more out of them was hard work, but they seemed happy enough with it. “Walking with my friends” seems to be all anybody does here (though with the accent I asked at least four students before I realised that they were saying “walking” and not “working”.) Many of the girls dislike Sundays, because that’s when they have to clean their homes.

After the lesson, still no sign of Danny. Half-French Canadian swine. I’d give him a good kick in his derriere when I saw him. Ulan told me that he’d rearranged my Russian lesson again, this time for 11.40, and because he was suspicious about the Olga-Dunya double entity, he’d phoned both of them and told them to come to the school for an interview.
Lena arrived to talk to Ulan about me signing a contract finally. She left after half an hour, and still no contact had been signed. Next lesson: Elementary Talking Club. The same topics, all over again. I could hardly contain my excitement, but again the students seemed happy enough. We managed to talk for a good 10 minutes about kashka, most of which was spent with me trying to work out what on earth it is. Porridge, apparently. You try describing porridge to someone who doesn’t speak the same language as you and doesn’t even know the word ‘oats,’ and you’ll see how hard it is.

Next: my Russian lesson. Olga didn’t appear, but Dunya did and she seemed to know what she was doing. If I’d found three consecutive lessons of “What do you do in the morning” exciting, this was even more gripping: I didn’t progress beyond three-letter words until near the end of the lesson. “Who is this? This is Mama. Who is this? This is Papa.” But to be fair to Dunya, she seems to be making sure I know the basics in Russian, and I was surprised how thorough she was. Communicating in German wasn’t easy, but I managed to grasp the intricacies of Mama’s and Papa’s names. Russian is not an easy language and I still get confused by some of the letters, so a thorough grounding in the alphabet – both the printed and the hand-written forms – is no bad thing.

Lunch break: home, food, sleep. It’s just like being a student again. Today I didn’t have to teach Little Miss Sunshine, which was a relief.

The afternoon was long. It’s difficult to connect with students when you don’t have a regular timetable, and it’s difficult to prepare for each lesson. My least favourite class is still there at 3.00, and I’m still their least favourite teacher. Lessons from 7.40am till 10pm, with a Russian lesson and a bowl of pasta in between, make it a long day.

Day 17 - a lazy day

After the fun and games of last night, I didn't do much today. My ankle had swollen up even more in protest at yesterday's walk around Bishkek, so today was a day of rest. And after the mammoth post of Day 16, it's good that this one is so short.

... and an educational evening.

At around 7-ish I finally found Ulan at the school. He had been busy, of course, but now he wanted to get some food with me. Instead of going to a restaurant as I’d expected, we went to the supermarket and stocked up on food. Then we went back to my flat where Ulan intended to instruct me in the art of Kyrgyz cooking. Although cooking is traditionally the woman’s role, a real Kyrgyz man should know how to do everything.

We were to cook ‘mini manty,’ or ‘pjelmeny’ (sp?) as they are known. For this we needed hot water, and so I filled the kettle. Ulan then explained that in Kyrgyzstan it’s important to fill the kettle right to the very top: a full kettle is an indication of a full and happy life. To me, a full kettle is one which is going to make the water spill over the top when it boils, getting hot water on the electrical contacts, which probably wasn’t a good idea for my Chinese-made kettle: maybe even the little orange light would stop working. But I decided it wasn’t worth arguing with Ulan, especially if it was just to point out a flaw in his national culture, so I let him fill the kettle to the brim. He did however congratulate me: "You chose a good kettle."

Another important thing in the Kyrgyz home is the knife: this should always be sharp, otherwise it brings shame to the home, especially to the man. My knife – I have just one – was sharp. The deep cut on my little finger from last week was proof of this. So far so good: my kettle was full and my knife was sharp.

Ulan asked me if I had bread; I did, but it turned out to be mouldy, and I was about to put it in the bin when I got my third lesson in Kyrgyz culture: bread is sacred. This is something I’m still not used to, but bread really is considered sacred here. If you can’t appreciate this fact, you’ll be really puzzled when I finally get round to posting about Kyrgyz wedding traditions. Just accept that bread is sacred to Kyrgyz, like cows are sacred to Hindus.

So I couldn’t put the bread in the bin, because it’s sacred. What should I do with it then? Well, you shouldn’t let it go bad in the first place: it’s sacred. Ulan likes to talk, and he has an interesting technique for ensuring that his speech is not interrupted: he asks (and answers) his own questions.
“Bread is sacred. Why? Because when you are hungry, it feeds you. When you have nothing else to eat, you can eat bread. When you have something else to eat, bread will fill your belly. So you can never throw it away. Why? Because bread is sacred.” I suppose it makes sense.

At this point he had to pop back to the school. I then noticed that the kettle had indeed boiled over and Ulan had made a half-hearted attempt to mop it up with the tea-towel before escaping and leaving the problem to me. I disconnected the kettle from the mains and began mopping up, before I realised that the kettle hadn't just boiled over, it was actually leaking. Chinese crap. How can they sell a kettle which isn't waterproof?

When he returned, Ulan soon had to make some phone calls (see? It’s good to have a phone) and left me chopping tomatoes and cucumbers. I then asked him about the strange jar I’d found in one of the cupboards when I’d moved in. It was half-filled with a strange grey substance, a little like dust, and the lid was sealed; I hadn’t risked opening it.
“It’s bread,” explained Ulan. The previous occupant of my flat hadn’t thrown away his breadcrumbs, he’d carefully put them in a jar and never thrown them away. Even when he moved out of the flat, he hadn’t thrown them away.
Then Ulan spotted the end of a roll in my bin. “Is that bread?” he asked, and fished it out of the bin and put it with my mouldy bread. Wondering what his reaction would be, I told him that the kettle leaked. Of course, he didn't say that he'd seen it overflowing and had tried to mop up the water before running away; instead, he agreed it was rather strange, and said: "You didn't choose a good kettle."

The pjelmeny were coming along nicely, the cucumbers and tomatoes had been turned into salad, fresh bread had been stolen from Bolek, a bottle of kymys was in the fridge, tea was brewing, and the tin of sprats opened. Everything was ready, except for one thing: Ulan had to go. “I’ll be back in five minutes. They need me at the school,” he explained.
Quite hungry by this time, I wasn’t too impressed. These were five Kyrgyz minutes and lasted about half an hour.

During this time I had a rather odd phone call. Somebody I didn’t know wanted to speak to me, but she couldn’t speak English. It turned out we could both speak some German, so we managed to communicate. She had been given my phone number by somebody. Who? Somebody I’d never heard of had given somebody else my phone number and now this person wanted to talk to me in faltering German. It took some time to work out that Lena had given her my number – she used a different version of Lena’s name and I had no idea who she was talking about.
Gradually it became clear that this was the girl Lena had found for me as a Russian teacher. Well, good, but it was going to be tough to learn Russian in German, especially as neither of us was fluent in German. We arranged to meet on Monday morning at 8.30.

Ulan returned, and finally we could eat. He’s a fast eater and we were soon finished. Then he suggested showing me Bishkek by night, so off we went.

I had imagined visiting a couple of bars, but instead we just walked around the centre. It was interesting though, especially as after the recent nocturnal attacks I probably wouldn’t have ventured into town alone at night. We did see some drunken violence but not much; it was more interesting to observe the villagers who had come to experience the bright city lights. Street-side stalls cater for their tastes: you can have your photo taken with a landmark in the background, a cheesy border or pattern added to the photo and then printed onto cheap photographic paper; you can pose beside a shiny German car and have your photo taken; you can pose with a live snake and have your photo taken. Street-side karaoke is also popular, as in Ukraine, and small groups of teenagers huddle around the machines, singing along loudly and tunelessly to Kyrgyz pop songs.

Talking about Kyrgyz life, he explained to me that fighting is part of their culture. A man should be able to fight, otherwise he isn’t a real man. He has to be able to defend himself, his horses, his home and his family. (I wondered if this was in order of priority.) “Talk to the male students, ask them what they do in their free time. They’ll all tell you they learn judo or wrestling; they all want to be able to defend themselves. Talk to the girls, none of them fight, but they want to marry a man who can protect them.” It was true, the majority of male teenagers I’d spoken to were all keen in various combative sports, especially judo and wrestling.

With this in mind, I shouldn’t be too surprised that first the cleaning girl and then Danny had been attacked: “If you can’t defend yourself, don’t go out at night,” explained Ulan. "I told Danny many times, 'Don't go out at night', but he didn't believe me."
If you want to go out, don’t go out alone.
The problem is compounded at this time of year by the arrival of fresh new (male) students: young, energetic, away from home for the first time, looking to ‘prove’ themselves in the big city, and bored with their studies. Violence comes naturally to them.
Picture: hooray for my C&B camera.

We also walked past a few statues and monuments, but my Carrot & Bush camera is rubbish at taking photos in poor lighting, so I quickly gave up trying. We also walked along one of the ‘parks’, a long thin stretch of paths and trees separating two roads: it’s a popular place for young couples to meet, though tonight it was occupied by groups of boys and girls, not mixing with each other, and drinking.

Deciding to move on, Ulan began driving somewhere, I assumed home. We passed the Vefa Centre, a shiny new shopping arcade; Ulan had never been in and decided he would like to. Inside, he was clearly more at home than he had been in Osh Bazaar. Everything was modern, with small fashion boutiques and recognisable Western names. We’d even had to pass through security gates to enter the centre; I don’t know why, they weren’t going to stop any bombs or guns because they didn’t even bother about my keys.
Most shops were closed, but Ulan was still happy exploring, until we came to the cinema. When he realised that we hadn’t missed the last film of the evening, he decided we should see it – even though it was in Russian. He phoned his wife using the ticket lady’s phone; yes, she would join us, so he bought three tickets.

The film was due to start in five minutes so I assumed she would come by taxi. Of course I was wrong. We set off to pick her up. Ulan suggested I wait in the book shop, but I knew that this might mean waiting indefinitely and it would be better to stick with Ulan. As we left the Vefa Centre, Ulan commented that although the Centre was Turkish-built, Turkish-owned and Turkish-run, the security guards were all Kyrgyz. “Why? Because nobody here would accept a foreign security guard. How can a foreign person protect something in our country, that’s just wrong. If people here see a Russian or a Turkish security guard, they will wait for him outside, with a gang of their friends, and when he finishes work they will beat him up. It happened a few times, and now all the Turkish companies know to use only Kyrgyz security guards.”

It was a ten-minute drive to Ulan’s house. I waited in the car. Ulan explained that it was a safe neighbourhood: the local gang kept things safe. Criminals kept away because a member of the gang was always ‘on duty’ to protect the area. Ulan was known to be a resident there, so he was safe. If somebody else arrived, the gang member would question him, and if he wasn’t happy with the response, get rid of him. So by and large it’s a safe neighbourhood; occasionally there is violent between the gangs but this is usually pre-arranged and occurs at a ‘neutral’ location.

After waiting for roughly 10 minutes, Ulan returned without his wife. She wasn’t coming after all, but a cousin was instead. The cousin spoke no English.

We arrived back at the cinema in time to miss several minutes of the film. It was in Russian, so I understood nothing. But at the end of each scene Ulan was happy to explain what was going on, so at least I could follow the plot. It was actually a highly entertaining film: a joint US-Russian-Kazakh production, it had a big enough budget to achieve some Hollywood-style special effects, but the Asian influence prevented this from being just another Hollywood action film. The plot may have had a few holes, but if only for the scenery and the images of traditional life in the region it was well worth watching. The basic story is a common theme here: local tribes unite (unwillingly) to repel a foreign invader, usually Mongol. The truth is that throughout much of the history of this region, the Kyrgyz and Kazakh nomadic tribes put more effort into fighting each other than common enemies, with the consequence that invading tribes and nations simply passed through the region on their way to richer destinations.
Picture: view from the Panoram.
After the film, Ulan decided the night was still young and we should visit a bar. Within two minutes he’d changed his mind and decided we should buy some beer and food from a supermarket. Then he wanted to drive to the ‘Panoram’, a place in the mountains from which you have a panoramic view of Bishkek. So far so good: unfortunately he didn’t know the way. It took a long time to find it; when we got there, we ate the food, I drank the beer, and that was that. I got home at 3am and finally went to bed.

Day 16 – Hobbling round Bishkek...

After last night’s beer and pain I didn’t plan on doing much today. A couple of times during the week, Ulan had asked me what I was doing for food. Pasta, I explained. Sometime with chopped Kyrgyz salami, sometimes with tomato sauce, and sometimes with olive oil. He didn’t like the sound of this, but I explained that my priority during lunch breaks was to fill my stomach as quickly as possible and to go to sleep. Unlike most Kyrgyz men, I don’t have a wife at home cooking and cleaning for me.
Keen for me to eat well and to enjoy Kyrgyz food, Ulan said something about feeding me at the weekend, and we arranged to meet at 2pm. I assumed that would mean eating together, sometime in the later afternoon or evening. I was partially correct.

Of course, he didn’t come to my flat at 2pm. I phoned the school to see where he was (see? It’s good to have a phone.) The secretary, who speaks only a little English, told me that he was “absent” and would be back in “one hour”. An hour later I got exactly the same answer – well, I didn’t expect anything else. What to do? With my ankle swelling up like a balloon, there wasn’t much I could do. With the time difference it was too early to go to the pub to watch English football. Bored, I set of to hobble slowly around town. Most of the photos of Bishkek next few posts are from this morning.

Progress around town was slow; my ankle hurt and I should probably have been resting it, and the sun was hot. But it was good to actually do something, to get out of my flat and away from the school, out into daylight.
Picture: walking along the flat streets, it's easy to forget you're in mountain country.

Bishkek is not a beautiful city. It’s pleasant enough with its tree-lined avenues and parks. Once in the past there was an effort to make it ‘the marble city’ and several public buildings and squares are paved with slabs of marble. But the man in Moscow with the idea moved on, the money dried up, and the dream died. And with Bishkek’s air quality, the marble isn’t as pleasing to the eye as it could be. And away from the marble, much of the architecture is Communist: old, grey, crumbling concrete. The Soviets liked their buildings grey on the outside and brown on the inside.

Bishkek seemed surprisingly quiet for a Saturday. I expected to find people enjoying the weekend, but not even the fountains were working. Walking along a rather empty park, I was reflecting how flat Bishkek is; for a country which is more than 85% mountain, it must occupy one of the only flat parts in the country. Turning back to look at where I’d just come from, I was stunned to see mountains towering over the building I’d just photographed. I hadn’t realised they were so close!
Picture: Get far enough away from the buildings to see over them and you see that Kyrgyzstan is not so flat.
Later I went to the Metro pub to see if there would be any football showing. As I walked in, they were just finishing filming for a Kyrgyz pop video. The landlord, from east London, was quite dismissive of the whole thing: he respected Kyrgyz pop even less than British pop. I wondered why he’d settled in Kyrgyzstan: apparently he’d just got tired of being a nomadic IT consultant in Central Asia and decided to settle in Bishkek. Later I spotted him with a rather attractive Kyrgyz girl half his age and wondered if she was the reason why he’d chosen Bishkek or if she was just one of the perks of being a reasonably wealthy foreigner in a developing country. Certainly there are opportunities here if you’re foreign and can offer a girl a short-cut to a wealthier life.

Day 15 - a new flatmate

Start at 7.40. Elementary Talking Club. The same class as on Wednesday and Monday...

It’s good because it means I recognise the faces and they know me (even if I can’t remember their names.) It’s bad because it means I need to think of new things to discuss with them. I hadn’t thought of anything, and neither had they: as far as they’re concerned, that’s my job. They pay to learn here, so they had a good point, but I didn’t have a good idea, which I thought was also a good point. I turned to the board, which was as blank as my mind. I wondered what I was doing in Kyrgyzstan, and decided to ask them. The lesson evolved into a description, with me feeding them the lines, of Kyrgyzstan, and a discussion of what I should visit. It was hard work, but it was quite successful as a lesson.

Next: Elementary Talking Club. I tried the same topic, and it worked ok. Most of this class aren’t interested in constructing sentences, for them it’s enough to blurt out words, so whereas the first class of morning were, with help, making sentences like “You should visit Osh,” or “Issyk-Kul is very beautiful,” with this class I get “Osh!” and "Issyk-Kul. Very beautiful!” They’re just not interested in making complete sentences and teaching them is frustrating.
Another Elementary Talking Club, another guided tour to the sights of Kyrgyzstan. I like this class, but their English is very ‘Elementary’ and so it’s hard work to teach them. But from one simple idea I'd managed to teach three classes.

I overheard Danny describing some kind of accident to some of his students. He’s an emotional man, and opinionated: his world seems to be divided into black and white and he is not short of self-confidence. Later I got the full story, though by this time he’d clearly told it several times and embellished it more with each retelling.

He’d been helping a friend move house the night before and at about 2am they’d decided to get something to eat. Walking along Toktogul Street, a car had swerved to a halt in front of them and three men jumped out. The first, a big man, swung his fist and floored Danny’s friend. He then flattened Danny’s other friend, before fighting with Danny. Of course, Danny wasn’t flattened with one blow – he was telling the story after all – and he grappled with the man. His two friends did nothing to help, nor did the other two men from the car. Danny’s shaved head picked up a lot of cuts when the two of them fell to the ground, and after they both got back to their feet, the big man said “Friend, friend” in Russian and offered his hand for shaking. Confused, Danny reached to shake it, and the man hit him in the head. Then events are a little unclear, but it seems the men got back in their car and drove off. No mugging, no money was taken, this man simply wanted to fight.
Picture: the corner of the street where the attack happened.

This was the second attack in two nights, and both had taken place on Toktogul Street. I decided it might be a good idea to avoid this street, especially tonight, but unfortunately I happen to live on it. Danny was actually attacked at the junction of Toktogul and the street where we work: so that’s the corner I walk past several times a day.

At lunch time I met Bolek and lent him my keys so that he could get his own cut. We ate lunch together: Sharma. It’s like a doner kebab but in a thinner wrapping, rolled up into a parcel, and with rather dry potato chips inside. Two of these cost about a euro and are enough to fill the hole for a few hours. It made a change from the spaghetti I cook most days.

The afternoon lessons were like Wednesday’s. I am noticing a pattern: the classes seem to alternate each day between Grammar and Talking Club. I also noticed another pattern: my 3.00 class are no fun to teach, the 4.20 class lack any enthusiasm for learning, the 5.40 class are great, the 7.00 class don’t think I know enough to teach them, and the 8.30 class, despite my initial reluctance, are a good class.

Back at the flat, Bolek had moved in. He didn’t expect to stay for more than a couple of days and was content to live out of his suitcase. He was very grateful to me for letting him stay, and I wondered if perhaps it wouldn’t be as bad as I’d feared. I’d got used to living alone, but maybe it would be a good thing to have some company.

Picture: my living room, now Bolek's bedroom. Incidentally, the TV works but there is no signal.

We decided to go for a beer. The ‘Metro’ Bar was closing (it was midnight), but eventually we found a Turkish-owned place still open. It wasn’t a bar, it was more of a restaurant, and we ordered kirieshki with our beers. It was good to end the week with a drink, and to swap stories about the countries we’d visited. Poles, unlike Germans, do not bother looking each other in the eye when they say ‘Cheers’. I thought they were like the English: don’t waste valuable drinking time, especially when you have a fresh beer in front of you. But it seems Poles like to make toasts before they drink, so they probably waste even more valuable drinking time than the Germans.

Bolek also told me that he’d learned from a Turk that touching your cups together originated in Ancient Greece. In those days, it was considered bad form to murder a guest in your house, so even your enemy could eat with you, drink with you, and sleep in your house. However, poison was considered an acceptable alternative, so it was not unusual to try to poison your enemy. To prevent this, a guest would knock his wine cup against his host’s, ensuring that some of his wine spilled into his host’s cup. That way if the host tried to poison him he would poison them both.

When we left the bar it was raining outside. We happened to leave at the same time as a group of Kyrgyz people; the girls were very drunk. The boys were initially interested in talking to us, until the girls realised we were European. Then we each had a couple of rather plump drunken Kyrgyz girls hanging on our arms and refusing to let go. The boys were clearly unimpressed by this and stood huddled in a group, obivously trying to work out how to 'win' their girls back. Neither I nor Bolek were remotely interested in the girls or their banal, incoherent conversations, but we couldn’t get rid of them. All the time the rain was pouring down. Eventually one of the boys came and prised their fingers off my arm and pushed me none-too-gently away.

Quite amused by all this, I let Bolek lead the way home. He’s been in Bishkek longer than me and my sense of navigation isn’t too good when I’m sober, let alone after a couple of strong Russian beers. We walked along Toktogul Street, but it seemed deserted in the rain. I hoped this meant we wouldn’t be the vicitims of a third attack, but the streets of Bishkek are barely lit after dark and often you can’t see somebody approaching until they are just in front of you. It also means you can’t see the pavements, which are in worse condition than the roads: uneven due to the oak tree roots, and covered in pot-holes, which obviously creates puddles everywhere. And it was because of this that I became the third victim of Toktogul Street: jumping a large puddle in the dark, I landed on uneven ground and went over on my ankle. Even with my protective beer jacket this hurt like hell and I limped home cold, went, drunk and annoyed.

Day 14 - the end of solitude.

After the entertainment of the night before I was happy to sleep in on Thursday morning. I was woken by the phone: it was Lena with some news for me. Bolek had been asked to move out of the flat where he was staying and they had been unable to find anywhere else for him. As my flat was quite spacious, would I mind him living with me?

I’d already been told by my students that in Kyrgyzstan you home must always be open to friends, guests and relatives. If you find a job in the city, you can expect to have regular visits from your rural relatives who want to see Bishkek (and in countries like Kyrgyzstan, the cousin of your grandfather’s cousin’s nephew’s wife counts as a relative); these visits can last indefinitely. If somebody from a village decides to study in a Bishkek university then they live, like Lena, with a relative there: university courses last about 4 years, so they simply move in with a relative for 4 years. I suppose it’s all part of the tradition of hospitality, and apparently it would be terribly rude to refuse a visit from even a distant relative: you would be ostracised by your whole family.
Picture: the view from my balcony. Actually, the view is usually obscured by net curtains and a mosquite-proof net. But when I move these aside, this is what I can see.

These thoughts went through my mind, and anyway, if Bolek had nowhere to stay, I couldn’t really refuse. I wasn’t happy though, and I explained to Lena that I saw this as a short-term solution and that the Aiesec girls shouldn’t give up trying to find somewhere permanent for him. I didn’t mind giving him a roof for a couple of weeks if necessary, but the thought of someone I’d met just twice moving in with me for the rest of my time in Kyrgyzstan really didn’t appeal to me.

I was considering going back to bed when the doorbell rang. There were several people outside who seemed to want to come in but they didn’t speak English; something about a “home-see”. I liked the sound of that even less than somebody moving in with me, so of course I didn’t let them in. Five minutes later they were still standing outside my door when the phone rang again. It was Aigul, the other secretary from the school. Her aunt, who owns my flat, wants to sell it when I leave, and these people outside my door had come to view the flat. Could I let them in please?

The afternoon passed uneventfully. I taught until 10pm, enjoyed the 5.40 class and the last class of the evening, and didn’t enjoy the 3.00 class. After waiting for my payment, it was to home and to sleep, for my last night in the solitude of my flat. I would write peace and quiet, but I have the noisiest fridge in the world and even closing the three doors separating it from my bed isn’t enough to reduce the buzz. Of course, it could be because the doors in my flat fit so badly that even the strip of (brown) carpet stapled inside the doorframe at head height isn’t enough to keep them closed and I have to wedge one shut with a length of telephone cable and another with a tea-towel.
Picture: the view from my bed. Behind these cupboards lies the kitchen and the epicentre of the humming.

Day 13 - A full day and a party.

Start at 7.40. Elementary Talking Club. The same class as on Monday.
What shall we talk about today, I asked them. Blank faces stared back at me. I had nothing prepared, they had no suggestions. After Monday’s lesson about introductions, I took them on to describing their families. “His name is, her name is, he is and she is.” Riveting stuff.

Another Elementary Talking Club, another discussion about people’s brothers and sisters.
And, in case I needed more practice, I then had another Elementary Talking Club, i.e. another discussion about people’s brothers and sisters. My brain was turning to mush, but I did notice that today’s students were mostly the same as Monday’s. Maybe there is some pattern here.

The morning Intermediate class, who had been the highlight of my Monday morning, were nowhere to be found. Maybe there is no pattern here. As far as I could gather, the class had been disbanded, and the few remaining students moved to different classes at different times of the day. Instead, I had another Elementary Talking Club… Followed by Little Miss Sunshine herself, Selena. The vampire was on form today, explaining that she doesn’t like her neighbours and that she doesn’t like homosexuals. I wonder if she likes anybody; I know she doesn’t like me.

The afternoon classes were like Monday. The 5.40 class were again the only highlight, although the last class of the day, from 8.30 to 10.00, are showing signs of being a good class. It’s hard, I really don’t want to teach them, I don’t want to like them, but they do seem to be a likeable class.

Picture: Some of the local currency, with a $10 note which I was unable to change as it was apparently "too crumpled."

Today was the birthday of one of the girls who works as a secretary, Tanja. There was to be a celebration that evening, but of course Ulan first had to deal with all the students’ problems and pay the staff who weren’t staying, so there was some time to kill. Empty classrooms have a strange feel to them, especially when the cleaning girl stacks all the chairs on the tables so that she can clean the carpets. Today, however, she wasn’t doing this; she was standing alone in an empty room, crying her eyes out. What do you do in a foreign country when you find a girl crying but can’t communicate with her in any way? Nobody else seemed to be particularly concerned, and she managed to indicate to me that she didn’t want any assistance so I sat her in a chair and left her covering her mouth with the dirty towel that hangs by the basin.

Ulan was still busy in his office with a gentleman; he said yes, he knew there was a girl crying, and he would deal with it later.

Gradually it became apparent that she had been walking to the school when she’d been attacked. She’d been hit in the mouth and had her purse stolen; this girl who doesn’t even come up to my shoulder had been mugged by a gang of eight youths just a few minutes’ walk away on Toktogul Street

Ulan was none too pleased by events. The debate was in Russian and Kyrgyz, but there seemed to be some consensus to go after the youths and to teach them a lesson. Danny, the short Canadian teacher with the shaved head, bushy eye-brows and muscle-bound body offered to phone some friends to come and help. Ulan went off alone and returned minutes later with half a dozen teenagers whom I presumed were either students or passers-by he’d rounded up to come and help. I was quite puzzled when instead of setting off to find the attackers, Ulan led them into one of the classrooms. I followed, but Ulan turned to me, muttered something about ‘guarding the doorway’ and disappeared. Assuming this was some misunderstanding I was trying to work out what he’d actually meant when he returned wielding a large kitchen knife and it finally dawned on me that these young men weren’t going to help us, they were the ones who’d attacked the girl.

Up till now the youths had been full of themselves; suddenly they were very scared. Ulan herded them into a corner and some angry words were exchanged and the knife was waved around a bit. The girl was summoned but she could not identify any of them: it seemed the one who’d actually hit her in the mouth and taken her purse had then run off. I never did find out if these were the youths who’d been with him or if they’d just been passing by. Eventually the situation calmed down and Ulan let the boys go.
Picture: the street where I work; note the Kyrgyz and Russian versions of the same street name.

After driving the cleaning girl home, Ulan rejoined us and the ‘party’ finally began. There was beer and kirieshki (like small hard croutons with a strong flavour, they go well with alcohol), and a very sugary birthday cake. I was puzzled why Tanja was celebrating with us in the school, but she seemed happy enough. It was her 18th birthday: legally in Kyrgyzstan this means you can vote, buy cigarettes and alcohol, and get married.
The man I assumed was her boyfriend turned out not to be, though he didn’t try to hide the fact that he would clearly like to be. Instead, Tanja’s boyfriend waited for her in the car –the ‘party’ lasted a good couple of hours and he just sat in the car waiting. I found it odd that she was celebrating with us in the first place, odd that her boyfriend made no effort to join in… in fact, I found the whole situation very odd.
But it was good to relax, to drink some beer, to make jokes and swap stories, and to do something other than just going home, eating and sleeping.

Day 12 – Sunshine all around

Thankfully I didn’t have any morning classes today, so I slept until mid-day. Then it was back to school to teach Selena. What a ray of sunshine that girl is. There’s just no warmth in her. You can tell she spends her free time with her nose in a book; I’ve nothing against that, but it needs to be balanced with some social skills. And some humility, perhaps.
Attempts to go over grammar she thought she already knew were met with impatience and frustration, although any new vocabulary was diligently written down to be committed to memory. Ulan had explained before that it was important to keep the students happy, to be nice to them, and to encourage them. I resisted the urge to tell her what I thought, kept my patience, counted the minutes until the end of the lesson and wondered if I should buy some garlic.

I’m really beginning to hate giving Talking Club lessons to Elementary classes. It’s just no fun, you have to think for them, feed them every single sentence and coax the words out of them. It’s like getting blood out of a stone sometimes. I’m also getting really fed up with having no regular classes, and having no idea of who I’m teaching next. How can I prepare for a lesson if I don’t know who or what I’m teaching until 2 minutes before the class starts? This means I’m trying to make sense of the grammar while I’m teaching it. Do you know how many tenses there are in the English language? I don’t, and to make it worse students from different schools have been told different things, so the arguments range between 12 and 26 tenses, and of course as an Englishman I’m supposed to know exactly how many there are. I haven’t a clue.

The one bright spot in the day was the class at 5.40; they’re Intermediate but this is more due to their grammatical mistakes rather than their lack of knowledge of English, and they are at least prepared to try to speak. I don’t have to feed them the lines: they are the only students which actually ask each other questions instead of waiting for me to ask them individually.

The other classes, however, are hard work. Maybe they’re just not used to me as a teacher. I remember that it took quite a long time to gain the trust of the students in Pakistan, so it would be naïve to expect everything to work smoothly so quickly here. But the chaos of the school, the fact that I rarely teach the same students each day, the fact that I can’t prepare for the lessons, and the fact that all I want to do is sleep, means it’s difficult to build up any kind of rapport with the students.
Picture: my bed. It may not be that comfortable, but I would like to spend more time in it.

10.30, home and finally sleep. All I do is sleep, eat and teach; I’m not seeing anything of Bishkek, let alone Kyrgyzstan. I still sleep badly at night, I don’t eat enough and I’m not enjoying the teaching. I’m not having much fun, and tomorrow I start at 7.40 again.

Day 11, Week 2: A full Monday

In to work at 07.40. Who and what will I be teaching? An Elementary class, Talking Club – of course. That’s a hard way to start the week. These were different classes from Thursday, so I could at least begin without much thinking: “Hello, what is your name?” But in a class with only a few students this needed some padding.

Next class: Elementary Talking Club. Great. “Hello, what is your name….?” the excitement was killing me, but the pen joke still got a chuckle. This was a harder class to teach: many of the students don’t seem to want to speak English, and it’s a struggle to get them to read the words I write on the board: “My name is…….” While I think to mysekf ‘Come on, say it, just say the word I’m pointing to on the board… hello? Anybody home?’ I remembered something a teacher of mine used to say to some of his pupils many years ago: ‘the lights are on, but nobody’s home.” I can understand what he meant.

I’m not helped by the fact that in Russian you say “My name Igor” (i.e. without ‘is’.) The less intelligent students don’t see the point in using the verb so they simply leave it out.
And then another Elementary Talking Club… I did manage to teach one Intermediate class that I’d covered last week, but only three students were there so that was a little odd.

Picture: some of the wall-hangings in the entrance to the school. I'm not sure I teach with love or with courage, and I certainly don't teach people how to fly.

I also had a one-to-one lesson. This was with a charming young lady called Selena: 18 years old, I think, with as much warmth as a stone at the bottom of a pond. As far as I could make out, she had been teaching herself English in addition to what she had learned in school, which meant she had a wide-ranging vocabulary and wide-ranging grammatical mistakes. It’s strange to hear somebody speak English reasonably well and yet with so many very basic errors: the meaning is clear enough but the grammar is appalling. With her warmth and her wit the lesson just flew by: as far as she was concerned her English was nearly good enough to sit the Toefl test and she just needed some extra lessons to refine her knowledge; as far as I was concerned she just needed to suck the blood out of somebody’s neck to revive her personality. She certainly didn't need to be taught how to fly, she could just turn into a bat and fly back to her coffin.

I can’t say I was delighted when I learned I would be teaching her on a daily basis.

Home, lunch, sleep. In the afternoon I had my ‘regular’ classes, or at least my ‘regular’ hours. Ulan sent me to whichever class he thought needed covering. Students were unimpressed at having their regular teacher replaced by somebody who spoke no Russian and I was unimpressed at not having any regular classes to teach. Only my 5.40 class was familiar, and it was nice to walk into a room and to recognise most of the faces.

Picture: since I was asked, here's a photo of my toilet. Note the colour of the carpet.

By the end of the day at 10pm I was exhausted. The good news is that the teachers are paid on a daily basis (so no repeat of my Serbian adventure when they managed to dodge paying me for my 7 weeks of “work”), and even better is that Ulan is grateful for the overtime. With the extra class in the evening (from 8.30 – 10pm), my salary for the day was equal to three days of normal work. The bad thing is that at the end of the day all the teachers have to wait to be paid, but of course first Ulan deals with any students that have questions or problems, so it means sitting and waiting for roughly half an hour when all you want to do is go home and collapse into bed.

Day 10: Issyk-Kul or not Issyk-Kul

The Aiesec girls here had promised to arrange some trips while I was in Kyrgyzstan, and today we were going to Issyk-Kul. This is the huge lake in the north east of the country, the second largest mountain lake in the world (see the second post on this blog, “Kyrgyzstan-ho!”) They would pick me up at 7am and we would make the 4-hour drive; the parents of one of the girls owns a dacha there and we would spend the day picking fruit and relaxing by the lake.

At 7am I was ready, which was perhaps a little foolish but I didn’t want to be late or unprepared for my first trip with them.

By 8am I was drifting back to sleep when they arrived. There had been some complications and now they were in a rush. As we walked and walked I was about to ask “Where’s the car?” when they explained that the complications had involved the car: it wouldn’t start. As a result, we were not going to Issyk-Kul by car, we were going somewhere else by marshrutka. ‘Somewhere else’ meant the mountains to the south of Bishkek and instead of a lazy day picking fruit and sitting by the lake we would have a lazy day of hiking in the mountains. I thought about of my bag which contained quite a lot of things and was quite heavy, and I thought about lugging it around the mountains in the sun, and I thought “Bugger.”

On Sunday mornings the marshrutka aren’t too full and the 40-minute journey didn’t involve any armpits too close to my nose. There were four of us: Bolek, a Pole on a placement to help the fledgling Aiesec Kyrgyzstan find its feet; Eva, the head of Aiesec KG and her German boyfriend whose name I didn’t catch.
The boys were in a similar situation to me: Bolek was carrying his laptop and wasn’t too keen on much hiking either.

We got off the marshrutka in the middle of nowhere. An old woman walked with us a little, jabbering away in Russian, explaining about the properties and health benefits of the various plants and berries we passed. She was a mine of information, but I couldn’t understand a word of it. That probably wasn’t such a bad thing: she insisted we ate some berries which were apparently very healthy, and like many healthy things they tasted pretty foul. A few sentences were translated: “This is good for your eyes. This for your stomach. This for your heart.” I began to suspect she was making it up.

She sent us on our way with a few more berries and we walked along the banks of a river. After crossing a make-shift bridge (see picture above) we came to a yourt. These are the traditional homes of the nomadic Kyrgyz people, and although most of the population has now settled into bricks and mortar, yourts are still in use by some people. This one displayed a single concession to the modern age: instead of natural waterproofing from animal fat, it was covered in a plastic sheet. The occupants were friendly enough, though communication was difficult as they only spoke Kyrgyz and Eva doesn’t know it that well (Eva isn’t Kyrgyz: she’s half-Russian, half-Ukrainian.) They welcomed us into their yourt and let us take photos, but wouldn’t appear in any photograph themselves. They presented us with some apples (twice as big as European ones) and we left before they tried to make us stay for a meal: rural Kyrgyz people possess very little and although their sense of hospitality means they to offer what they have to guests, it’s generally better to make your excuses before they do so.

We climbed the banks near the yourt and found ourselves in an orchard. I wondered if the apples had been pinched from there. Deciding this would be a good place for a picnic, we settled down. The food was simple: bread, cheese, salami, some kind of pickled herring, and tea; simple and good.

All good things come to an end, however, and after we’d decided that hiking was a bad idea and lying in the sun was much better, we were interrupted by a soldier. He spoke no Russian and his Kyrgyz was apparently very unclear, and he and Eva had some communication problems. But his intention was obvious: we had to leave the orchard. He soon had a second soldier backing him up. As we left, I noticed a very grumpy woman standing nearby watching everything. I’d seen her walk past a few minutes earlier, and wondered if she’d reported us to the soldiers. It turned out was half-right: they weren’t soldiers, just boys dressed up as soldiers, and the grumpy woman in the bright pink jacket was their mother and the owner of the orchard.

We walked on, rejoining the river, and came to a more public space. Away from the families playing on the swings, we settled down and soon fell asleep by the river. Much better than hiking.

After venturing into the river – which flows directly from a glacier and was, unsurprisingly, rather cold – we made our way back to the marshrutka stop and from there back to Bishkek.

The afternoon was mine, and it was good to be free. After more flat-cleaning, I decided to venture into town. I had a vague idea of how to get by marshrutka to where I wanted to go, but no idea how to get back again so I would have to walk. I had no idea of distance and not wanting to travel by bus one way only to give myself a walk back of several miles, I decided to walk there and back.

My destination was TsUM, a big department store selling everything from mobile phones to traditional souvenirs. It wasn’t that I wanted to buy a mobile phone or a souvenir, I just needed a destination and reaching this one would mean passing several city landmarks.

I set off, walking past some of the sights from the previous weekend. There was a theatre, a pub, another theatre, the White House… that building over there looked like a theatre too. As it turned out, my flat wasn’t so far from the city centre.

By this time the weather had turned and a storm was coming. The wind picked up and whipped dust and grit into the air. In Bishkek, the streets are lined with oak trees, and at this time of year acorns are ready to drop to the ground. With the wind, they were plummeting earthwards at speed and in numbers. If you’ve even been hit by a high-velocity acorn, you’ll know that it hurts. Chicken Little thought the sky was falling and went to see the king when she was hit by an acorn, and here it looked like the sky really was about to fall, or at least torrential rain. Of course, I had nothing to protect me from the dust, grit, rain or acorns. Neither did the Kyrgyz: the streets were empty apart from outside shops with canopies to protect passers-by from falling acorns.

I eventually made it to TsUM, which had closed half an hour earlier. There was a large samsa (samosa) stall outside; Kyrgyz samse are supposed to be the best in Central Asia. This stall was also closed.
Picture: my bathroom, partially cleaned.

So, back to my flat, through the wind, grit and high-velocity acorns, waiting for the sky to fall. It never did; the rain never fell except for a few drops. Back in the flat with nobody to talk to and nothing to do except cleaning, I remembered that being alone in a foreign country can be rather lonely at times.

Day 9 - Osh Bazaar

Osh is the second city of Kyrgyzstan, located in the south of the country. It has a strong Uzbek influence and people there are apparently more religious than the relaxed northerners. Osh Bazaar is a large market in the east of the Bishkek. It’s popular due to its proximity to the centre (the other main bazaars are outside the city) and for the fresh produce, and there are many Uzbeks and southern Kyrgyz people selling goods there.

Ulan arrived fairly promptly by his standards, and we made the short drive to the bazaar. After the souks of the Middle East and the bazaars of Pakistan I wasn’t about to be overwhelmed by this; the guide book warned of pick-pockets and bag-slashers, and corrupt policemen.
On the way there we stopped at the red traffic lights and Ulan gave a few com (“som”) to a beggar. We chatted about beggars and I explained that in Pakistan beggars in the cities are often organised into gangs, with bosses dictating where they should ‘work’, Ulan couldn’t grasp this concept: “They’re beggars, who’s going to organise them?” He was thoroughly puzzled by the idea of beggars working in gangs. I don’t think he believed me.

After parking the car, we walked towards the bazaar. Pretty soon I was being pushed and elbowed out of the way by people who didn't see the point in walking around me. Ulan explained: “You know ‘personal space’? Here there’s no such thing.” He was right. If somebody is in your way, push them out of it. I thought about the ‘future space’ theory of aeroplane boarding, and wondered if the mathematicians had considered the Osh Bazaar approach of simply shoving everybody out of the way.
Picture: For those of you who can't read Cyrillic - Osh Bazaar.

Looking back, I was a little disappointed with the bazaar. It lacked the vibrancy and colour of other bazaars. Checking my guide book later, the authors had the same complaint. On the other hand, as a place to go to for picking up cheap Chinese products, it can’t be beaten (outside China, at least.)

The purpose of the visit was to get me a kettle and a telephone. Kyrgyz people like their tea (it’s good for the mutton fat, see ‘A Kyrgyz Meal’ below) and Ulan was unhappy that I had no kettle.
Bypassing the fruit and vegetable part of the bazaar we made our way to the ‘technical area’ where electrical items were on sale. There were plenty of kettles to choose from, each with its own peculiarity: lids which didn’t close, on/off buttons fixed to ‘off’, etcetera. I was amazed how they would brazenly try to sell you something which was clearly already broken. I couldn’t understand what they were saying but it sounded like “What do you mean, the lid doesn’t close? Just hit it with a hammer and it’ll be fine. The light doesn’t come on? What do you need a light for, do you make tea in the dark? What’s wrong with you?”

Eventually I settled on a fake ‘Tiffany’ kettle: it looked very solid, the lid closed, the on/off button worked, and the stall-holder even plugged it in to prove that little red light shone when it was switched on. The price was 350 com – about 7 Euros or 5 quid – and the stall-holder refused to haggle (“’Ere Bert, this man won’t haggle!”) I wondered if it was because I was English, or if Ulan just isn’t a natural-born haggler. He’d already confided in me that he didn’t like Osh Bazaar. He’s one of those people who prefers to shop in more civilised surroundings, without Dungans wheelng cartloads of onions or bread pushing you out of the way. But Ulan paid the 350 com and we went to look for a telephone.

This was similar to the kettle stall: a large array of telephones, each of dubious provenance; or, more correctly, clearly Chinese fakes of Western or Japanese brands. Ulan recommended a ‘Panasonic’ one. It brought back memories of the terrible tape player we had in Pakistan, which had multi-coloured disco lights that flashed out of time with the music and chewed up all my favourite tapes. That was a ‘Panasoanic’; on this telephone they’d at least managed to spell the name right.
Picture: Kyrgyz bread (as eaten with kajmak.) One large loaf costs 5 com - about 7p or 10 (Euro)cents.

To my amusement, the woman running the stall insisted on plugging it in to prove that it worked, and she and Ulan stood 2 metres apart trying to have a conversation on the phone while Dungans and Uzbeks pushed their way past.
Again, she refused to haggle, but for 300 com the phone was mine.

Next I needed a belt; with all the teaching and sleeping I’ve not had much time for eating and I’ve lost a little weight since I’ve been here. Those of you who know what happens to me when I travel will know the other reason why I’ve lost a little weight. ;-)
Buying a belt was simple enough, but again, no haggling.

After that Ulan wanted to get me a traditional Kyrgyz hat. There are two main types and I just wanted the plain simple one. White and round, made of felt, and we soon found one which apparently fit me well and they said made me look almost Kyrgyz. I don’t have a photo and I can’t find one online; but I like my hat, and when the weather’s colder I’m even going to wear it.

Back home I spent a happy few hours unpacking my telephone and kettle. My kettle stank of cheap plastic and I really didn’t feel like drinking tea; my telephone worked but I had nobody to phone and nobody knew my number so nobody could phone me. I put on my belt and my hat; it was too hot, so I took off my hat. It was an exciting afternoon. I cleaned the kitchen.
Picture: my kitchen. Clean!

Ulan wanted to have lunch with me and arranged to meet me at the school at 3.00. Of course he wasn’t there at three; or at four; or at five, even though I checked back every now and then. This wasn’t so bad: I managed to catch most of the Everton game on the internet, during which they won the local derby match 3-0. It was a good day and Everton went top of the Premiership, if only temporarily.

Eventually I found Ulan at the school at 8.30; by 9.30 I was still sitting there doing nothing. Finally his wife arrived with home-made manty and we sat in a classroom and ate. Simple food and a simple life; just don’t expect anybody to plan ahead or arrive on time. I gave Ulan and his wife a box of chocolates and a postcard from Jena; this went down surprisingly well.
The bad news was that Ulan needed me to start at 7.40 on Monday morning and that I would be teaching another full day.

Day 8 - end of the week.

The end of the working week, and what can I say?
After yesterday's exertions I slept until some time after 12.00, and then spent the rest of the day teaching until 10pm.

A Russian beer was waiting for me in the fridge at home; it was like any other mediocre European lager, but it still tasted good. I reflected that sleeping in each morning wasn't helping my jetlag, teaching all afternoon and evening wasn't much fun, and that I wasn't seeing much of Bishkek like this, let alone Kyrgyzstan. Was 'culture shock' setting in? I didn't think so; usually it takes a few weeks for me to notice the effects. I was just tired, and frustrated by the lack of pattern to my life: sleepless nights, disjointed lessons, and irregular classes. And, of course, the realisation that I'd been in Kyrgyzstan for a week and seen very little except the outside of a few theatres.
Tomorrow would be another day, however: Ulan had promised to take me to Osh Bazaar.

Above: the road to school. Or from the school, actually, as this photo was taken from the doorway.

Day 7: the first “full-day”

I hoped that working from 7.45am to 8.40pm would be an exception and not a regular thing. I was right, but not for the reasons I thought.
The lessons passed in a slow blur and I by the end of the day I didn’t remember too much about any of them. Each lesson in the morning was Talking Club with Elementary students; each class was really hard work to teach; each lesson began in the same way: “Hello, what is your name?” Sophisticated humour was introduced when, remembering the confusion my name caused in Pakistan, I made very clear that my name was not in any way associated with a writing instrument even though it rhymes with my name. It’s a simple joke but it gets a chuckle every time, and it’s a good way to start a lesson with people possessing a very limited knowledge of English. “Teach a man to fish and you’ll feed him for life,” goes the saying. Make a student laugh and you’ll have his attention for the next 3 minutes.
Picture: jokes can be made of this.

It’s not that the lessons weren’t enjoyable, it was just that I was overwhelmed by all the different names and faces and my sleep-deprived brain couldn’t cope with the endless repetition of “Hello, what is your name?” There were plenty of nationalities: mostly Kyrgyz, plenty of Russians, and the occasional Kazakh and Uzbek, and even a few Tatars. Interestingly, it seems that Jews are considered not to be Russian (and don’t consider themselves to be Russian either) and are a thought of as a separate race. On the other hand, this is the first Muslim country I’ve visited where Jews can openly admit to being Jewish.

After a lunch break it was back to the school for my regular classes. By 8.30 I was exhausted and looking forward to sleeping. Ulan had bad news: he’d taken on extra students and now there were three classrooms full of students waiting to be taught. Apparently he’d told them to come for the lesson but hadn’t expected so many to turn up on the first day; his plan had been to stick them all in one room and teach them himself, but now he had too many students for that. Feeling guilty about letting him down, I and the only other teacher left reluctantly agreed to teach one more class each. The only good thing was that Ulan promised to pay us double for the overtime – my last boss at Carrot & Bush refused to pay me anything for overtime, let alone double, so this made a refreshing change. Working is much easier when your boss isn't a complete arse. The bad news was that this class will now be ‘mine’ and I’ll have to teach them every day – so working from 7.45am to 8.40pm will not be a regular thing because I’ll be working until 10pm instead.

I'm so happy...

And here's one for Joris.
This woman is actually American, not Kyrgyz. When I found this photo it had the caption "I'm so happy, I could shave." The bearded lady in question works in circus in America and presumably if she does shave she would be out of a job, so hopefully logic will overcome her good mood and she will keep the beard. If you're worried, Joris, we may be able to begin an internet petition asking her to keep her beard especially for you. It looks like she doesn't have a fan club yet so perhaps you could start one?

I've been in Kyrgyzstan for four weeks now and I still haven't seen a bearded lady here. I've also found out why there are so many theatres: it's because people here seem to call any kind of indoor public entertainment building a 'theatre' - so a cinema is called a 'movie theatre', and the opera house is also classed as a theatre. I've been inside one movie theatre so far and there were no bearded ladies there. The only bearded lady I can find is in the picture above.

A friend of one of my students is a big Bollywood fan and she fell in love with a Bollywood actor. She was so desperate to meet him that she began stealing from shops to fund her flight to Mumbai. However, she was caught and sent to prison. She sent a letter from her cell to the actor explaining her situation and he has agreed to meet her when she is released from jail. So there's hope for Joris yet.

Day 6 – rush-hour in marshrutka

Difficult or not, today I had to wake up in the morning. Lena was taking me to a friend of hers who had studied in London and was keen to meet me. She also told me to bring my certificate of graduation from University.

This friend was Korean and lived in Sector 12 of Bishkek, so it was a good 35 minutes by marshrutka. I’d heard that these little buses were packed in the mornings, but I wasn’t ready for this. I thought the bus was full and we wouldn’t be getting on, but Lena squeezed in and I ended up perched on the dashboard facing the back of the bus, neck bent because of the roof, and with the driver grumbling that my English bottom, with which his bus was greeting the oncoming traffic, was blocking his view of the wing mirror.

As the marshrutka progressed through the city, a couple of people would get off at each stop only to be replaced by three or four more people. How many people were on board? I tried to count, but couldn’t see far enough to count all the people standing, let alone those sitting. There must have been at least 20, maybe 30 people on board. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if we crashed. I’d be picking shards of glass out of my arse for weeks. Of course, marshrutkas offer a perfect opportunity for pick-pockets, of which there are many in Bishkek, and as an Englishman I was an obvious and easy target. So I tried to protect my pockets, maintain my balance, and keep my backside out of the driver’s way, all at the same time.
I had no idea where Lena was. Had she got off without me noticing? Was I alone on a marshrutka with no idea where I was going, or how to get back? For the time being, there was nothing I could do. I couldn’t even look for her: at the last stop, my T-shirt had got caught in the door, and now I was trapped until the next stop.

Public transport was different in Pakistan. For one thing, they would squeeze four people onto two seats, and had few people standing. Conversely, they would increase the capacity with people hanging onto the sides of the bus, and then double the capacity by putting people on the roof. Another big difference was the segregation. Women would sit at the front of the bus with the driver, or sometime in the back, with four women squeezed onto a bench of two seats, but never with men unless it was a husband or father or something. Bishkek, with its own form of sexual equality, crams as many people onto a bus as possible, regardless of race, gender, size or shape. Equality is a good thing, but maybe a little discrimination against people who haven’t washed for weeks would be better. I’m not calling for anything severe: maybe just a small law stating that they are not allowed onto marshrutkas, and certainly not allowed to stand with arms raised and their fully-loaded armpits pointing directly at my nose. Buses here are just plain buses, without any artwork. In Pakistan they were bigger and covered in gaudy decoration (see picture. I can't find any good photo of a marshrutka.)

As we got further from the centre of Bishkek, more people began to get off, until I could give the driver a free view of his wing mirror, escape the armpits, and push my way down the bus in search of Lena. There she was, sitting serenely on a seat at the back. The front of the bus was still packed with people, the back had no free seats but plenty of free standing room, and with a roof above head height.
Lesson no. 1: get to the back of the marshrutka, unless you really want to greet oncoming traffic with your bottom and bury your nose in someone’s unwashed armpits.

Lena was quite amused by my experiences. She seems to take delight in the fact that I don’t really have a clue what I’m doing here. An old lady prodded me in the leg and said something unintelligible before pushing me out of the way. “She said she needed to get up. You can have her seat,” explained Lena. Why do Russian people sound so aggressive when they’re being nice?

By the time we reached Sector 12, the marshrutka was empty: just me, Lena, and the lingering smell of those armpits. The Korean gentleman worked in an office as a private lawyer based in a modern-looking shopping centre surrounded by crumbling Soviet-era apartment blocks. He was a nice chap, though I found it hard to believe he had lived in London for three years. He still had a very strong Korean accent and it was difficult to understand him. Not having much to say for himself, he showed me photos of his recent wedding, and I realised that the beautiful Kyrgyz girl in the office was actually his wife. She looked about 14 to me, but you can’t get married before you’re 18 in Kyrgyzstan. She was actually 19 years old. I’m not sure if all Kyrgyz lie about their ages or if they just age slowly here, especially when they’re young. In Pakistan, guessing people’s ages was a hit-and-miss affair, because often they didn’t know themselves. Here it seems you guess the age, add five years, and you’re in the right area.

The hidden purpose behind the visit became clear: as a lawyer, Sergei (how many Koreans do you know called Sergei?) could vouch for the translation of my certificate of graduation, which his wife and Lena began translating. As a graduate of Cardiff University, my certificate is bi-lingual, in Welsh and English. Conversely, although I’ve graduated from Cardiff University, I’m not bilingual. The English the girls translated without too much trouble; the Welsh caused some arguments before they gave up.

Now that the rush-hour had passed, the marshrutka ride back into town was less chaotic. I started lessons at 1pm and worked until 8.30. Talking Club with the Intermediate classes was interesting; grammar was often difficult. To make it worse, Ulan asked me to cover some Talking Club classes with Elementary students. That was really tough. How do you have conversations with people who know just a few dozen words in English – and how do you spin it out for a 70-minute lesson? By the end of the day I was again exhausted, and not too happy when Ulan asked me to start at 7.45 the next day: one of the teachers was ill and another was due in court (she’s in the final stages of adopting a Kyrgyz boy as her son) and so he needed me in all day to cover for them.
Home, bed and, eventually, sleep.

Day 5 – teaching begins

My feeling yesterday that the school was a little chaotic was wrong: ‘little’ is an understatement. Ulan wasn’t sure where he wanted me, which classes needed teaching, and which teachers were available. To be fair to him, this does seem to be out of his control. New students arrive every day, other students drop out without warning as they realise that this year they have to focus on their university lectures (in universities in Kyrgyzstan, students must attend their lectures or they are not allowed to sit the exams), and one teacher had come back to work not fully healthy. In a small school like this, each teacher makes up 15% of the staff, so one absentee makes quite a difference.
Having said that, when I ask Ulan which class I’m teaching, his first response is always “What day is it?” and then “What time is it?”
When Ulan isn’t teaching, he’s interviewing prospective pupils, fielding questions from current pupils, and trying to keep his staff happy. The school is his business, its success determines whether or not he earns a living, and he is there from 7.30am until some time after 10.30pm every day, as well as Saturday and often Sunday work too. And he repairs the toilet, which breaks every couple of days.

Without a proper timetable prepared for me, each lesson began with Ulan saying something like: “Take this class. They’re Intermediate. Talking Club. Talk to them, involve them, get to know them, I’ll be with you in 5 minutes.’ These, of course, were five Kyrgyz minutes, which often lasted longer than the lesson itself.
Mostly I was greeted with curiosity from the students. Who was I, where was I from, what was I doing there. And, usually after they'd found out my name, whether I was married. Invariably my reply of 'No' was met with the question "Why not?"

Below: Chenghiz, sitting in the school office. You see? There are people here called Chenghiz.

Naturally, the students enjoy Talking Club more than grammar, and when I tried to teach grammar to one of the “less-able” Intermediate Classes I soon ran into trouble. If a student doesn’t understand the grammar, you can try to explain it. If a student doesn’t speak English well enough to understand the explanation, somebody else in the class can explain it to them. If none of the students speaks English well enough, what do you do?
One class asked me outright: “If you don’t speak Russian, how are you going to teach grammar to us?” [Actually: "You no speak Russian... teach grammar???"] That was a good question. I didn’t have a good answer. They did: “How about we have Talking Club today?” Since it was my second day, I decided this was a very good idea.
I mentioned this problem to Ulan, and he wisely decided not to send me to teach grammar to any more Elementary classes.

At the end of the day I was knackered, but still, sleep took a few hours to come. Jetlag when flying from west to east is meant to be harder to shake off, but I’d been hoping to adjust more quickly than this. If I could fall asleep before midnight, I could get up at a reasonable time and adjusting would be easy. But lying awake until after 3am makes it difficult to wake up in the morning.

Day 4 – A new week, a new school.

Ulan had asked me to come and sit in on some lessons in the afternoon, to get a feel for how the school worked. After another night of sleeping badly, I slept most of the morning; not the best way to recover from jet-lag.

The school is a small one, with just four classrooms. Lessons last one hour and twrnty minutes, beginning at 7.40 in the morning and running until 8.30 at night. Students attend one lesson per day: they go to ‘normal’ school or university or work during the day, and pay to come to this school for additional English lessons. In theory this means the students all come because they want to learn. It also means that teachers have to keep the students happy or else they’ll take their money somewhere else. This makes it very different from the school I taught at in Pakistan, where pupils attended the school all day, wore uniforms, stood up when a teacher entered the room and called the male teachers “sir”. At this school in Bishkek, students are on first-name terms with the teachers.

Writing about the school is a bit difficult. My contract obliges me not to divulge information about the school to outsiders. On the other hand, I still haven’t signed a contract (three weeks after arriving, this sentence is still true.) Talking of other things I haven’t done, nobody has said anything about an HIV/AIDS test, so the test I had done in Germany really does seem to have been a waste of time and money.
There are two kinds of lessons: Grammar, and Talking Club. Their names are pretty self-explanatory. The students are divided into three basic categories: Elementary, Intermediate and Advanced, though there are variations within these.
Picture: The entrance to the school. Note the colour of the carpet.

I’d spent Sunday evening looking over the grammar books. These are American, so the vocabulary includes words like “gotten”, “drop-by”, and “apartment”, the spelling has lots of ‘z’s all over the place in words like “organize’ but a depressing shortage of the letter ‘u’ in words like “color”; of course, there is a strong tendency to boldly split infinitives as much as possible.
[Note for anybody confused: correct spellings/words are: got, flat, organise, colour; and infinitives should not be split.]

The first day of lessons was interesting. Teaching the Elementary classes looked difficult, but Talking Club with the more advanced students looked like it had the potential to be enjoyable. I had the feeling that the school was a little chaotic, but like in other former Soviet countries the school year begins on 1st September, so it was the second day of a new term for everybody. In any case, Kyrgyz people are not the best organised in the world. In fact, they’re probably the least organised people I’ve met. And when it comes to being disorganised, I know what I’m talking about.

On a different subject...

Waiting for the post to upload, I was skimming the news and came across this article:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/5371500.stm
[copy and paste the link if clicking on it doesn't work.]

"Women don't come here so often, and they shouldn't eat testicles," says Nancy solemnly."

Day 3 - more mutton.

Ulan was keen to introduce me to more Kyrgyz food, and the next day we arranged to meet again for dinner. I remembered something he'd said the day before:
"In Kyrgyzstan, breakfast is at about 9am. Dinner is at 2 or 3pm and then supper is at 8.00 or 9pm."
When he told me he'd pick me up at 12.30 to go for a meal, I had my suspicions. After another sleepless night due to jet-lag I was ready by 12.30 and made sure I had enough to do to occupy myself for the next two hours. True to form, Ulan arrived some time after 2pm, with no explanation or apology.

Ulan was accompanied by his wife. Meeting her was a little odd because in Pakistan the only wives I met were over 50 years old. Ulan's wife was young, petite, and heavily pregnant. She didn't say much; I wasn't sure if this was in her nature or in her role as submissive housewife. In Kyrgyz culture there is a very distinct line between the man and the woman, and traditionally the man is involved in manly things like hunting and fighting while the woman does womanly things like raising the family and cooking.
Below: a Russian car. Not much to do with the post, but there are cars like this on the streets here. I can't get the photos off my camera yet and this is all I could find.

In the car, I tactfully raised the topic of punctuality in Germany compared with other countries like, I don't know, Spain, or even Kyrgyzstan, perhaps. Ulan confirmed that yes, people in Kyrgyzstan are not the most punctual in the world.
The reason seems to be that guests can call in at any time so if a relative makes a spontaneous visit to you, you are busy entertaining them and your own plans are put on hold. If this means somebody somewhere else has to wait for you, that's none of your concern. Anyway, the chances are that the person you're meeting is going to be late anyway, so no harm is done. I wondered if this lack of punctuality is connected to the fact that nomadic people probably didn't bother telling the time that accurately. Summer, winter, morning, evening, that's as much as you require. Do you really need to know when it's exactly 3.28pm if you're herding sheep from one pasture to the next?

We drove to the same restaurant as the day before. Partly because Ulan likes it, partly because yesterday they'd run out of the food he'd wanted me to try. Again, the bread and kajmak came; this time Ulan instructed me to break it. Again, omin was performed. Today, the tea arrived promptly, and Ulan's wife took care of the pouring. After yesterday's lesson on seating plans, I noticed that she sat closer to the 'door', giving Ulan the seat further from the waiter's aisle. At this table there was no seat facing the 'door' so I could sit opposite him. Although it didn't give me a seat as an honoured guest, it did make conversation a lot easier.

The food came and I beheld a bowl of manty. This is a very popular dish in Kyrgyzstan: think of ravioli, but much bigger. The filling is a mixture of minced lamb and onion, possibly with a little potato and carrot added too. It tastes similar to Shepherd's Pie without the mashed potato. The casing isn't pasta as we know it in Europe, but I don't know how else to describe it: Kyrgyz pasta, perhaps. It's quite sloppy as it sits in a bowl of meaty juices, and the manty tend to break when you pick them up - of course, traditionally the food here is eaten by hand. One dish is actually called "five fingers" because you dig your hand into a communal plate of rice and scoop a handful into your mouth. Hygiene? What's that? Chopsticks didn't spread this far west from China, and knives and forks didn't spread so far east from Europe. Picking up and trying to eat sloppy manty the size of a tennis ball requires a lot of slurping. After slurping our way through a few hot manty, Ulan ordered some spoons. The manty still tasted good when eaten with spoons, and less slurping was required.
Above: a photo of Uzbek manty. I couldn't find any photos of Kyrgyz manty. Kyrgyz manty are much paler, less wrinkly but much juicier (sloppier) and are not served with salad or slices of melon.

Throughout all this, Ulan's wife plied us with tea, served in small round bowls which you hold by the rim and the thicker porcelain at the bottom to protect your fingers from the heat. I found it a little odd that somebody so pregnant should be taking care of two healthy young men (Ulan is a year older than me); on the other hand, when we'd finished eating, she took advantage of her status as a pregnant woman. She said something to Ulan and he ordered more food for her; "the baby is hungry and wants meat" he explained to me. Then the baby apparently wanted some kebabs, and Ulan ordered kebabs. Then this baby with very specific demands wanted some green tea. His wife wasn't just 'eating for two', she was eating enough for three or four people and I was impressed at how much food she could tuck away.And it was true: the hot tea did wash away most of the mutton fat from the roof of my mouth.

Ulan's wife is not Kyrgyz, but Kazakh. I asked him what language they communicated in. He said it was a mixture. She could understand some English but never spoke any. He said he wasn't so happy speaking in Russian - I wasn't sure if he meant this because he is Kyrgyz and not Russian, or if he isn't so good at Russian after spending most of his life in the US - but they often speak in a mixture of Kazakh and Kyrgyz. And, for a change, they use a little Japanese from time to time; not that they speak much Japanese, but they both seemed to have studied it at some point. So five languages are used in their house.

Her family live in or somewhere near Almaty, a city in the south east of Kazakhstan, about three hours from Bishkek. In Central Asian tradition, the woman follows the man, so if he wants to live in another city, she lives there too. A certain somebody reading this should give serious consideration to adopting some of the wonderful cultural traditions when she comes to visit. ;-) On the other hand, unlike in Pakistan where the bride's parents pay a dowry for the husband to take the girl off their hands, in Kyrgyzstan the husband has to buy the bride from her parents.
There are some interesting marital traditions in Kyrgyzstan, not least the practice of kidnapping the woman you want to marry. I'll talk about them in another post.

A Kyrgyz Meal

The food was cooked at the entrance to the restaurant, with a large grill to one side and some kind of open oven to the other in which bread is cooked. Salads and side-dishes appeared to be prepared indoors. We sat at a table.

This was nothing like in a European restaurant. The table itself was just 18 inches high and surrounded on the floor by thin mattresses which were backed by cushions. The clientele reclined on these mattresses, and the table was at the right height to allow eating at this position. The entire "floor"(mattresses, cushions and table) was raised a couple of feet off the ground. So although people were sitting on the 'floor' they were well above ground level. Noting that everybody else was shoe-less, I took mine off before sitting. Ulan sat opposite and told me I was sitting in the wrong "seat". Making me move further round the table so that I was sitting at 90 degrees to him, he explained the importance of the correct seating plan in Kyrgyz tradition

A nomadic people, for centuries the Kyrgyz and their Kazakh cousins had travelled across the steppe and the mountains, camping each night in yourts ("yoorts"). These are large circular tents made from felt, animal skins and wood, which are cool in the summer and warm in the winter. A circular opening in the peak of the roof allows smoke from the fire in the centre of the yourt to escape and lets fresh air in. Entry is by the single doorway. The warmest seat is therefore the seat furthest from the door and it is in this seat the head of the family, or the guest, sits. This tradition continues today, and so Ulan, as my host, made me sit in what would be the guest's seat, i.e. with the table between me and the aisle along which the waiter walked.

Ulan ordered food: relieved to hear that I was not vegetarian, he ordered some meat dishes, salad, break, soft drinks and tea. The bread soon arrived with a pot of white stuff which looked a little like clotted cream. The bread was circular and leavened, fresh from the oven by the doorway, with a soft crust around the circumference perhaps an inch thick, and then thin and flat in the middle. The "loaf" was about 9 inches in diameter. Ulan tore the bread into peaces, explaining that in Kyrgyz culture although the women take care of the food, tearing the bread is the man's job. The meal then began with omin, an Islamic action in which you pass your hands slowly down across your face as if cleaning it, then rub your hands together as if washing them. This indicates that the meal has begun, the idea being that you have announced to Allah that you are eating, and until you repeat this gesture at the end of the meal to signify that you have finished, your life is effectively paused and you will (hopefully) be free from interruption.
The torn bread was dipped into the white stuff. It was indeed a kind of cream, kajmak ("kaimuk"), which I was familiar with from my time in Serbia. This is a traditional start to the meal in Kyrgyzstan. The bread was good, soft and fresh, and was complemented by the kajmak. Simple food for simple people.

After three quarters of an hour, even Ulan was getting impatient, and asked the waiter when the food would be arriving. “Three minutes” came the reply. These were – naturally – three Kyrgyz minutes, and the food did not arrive for another 20 minutes or so. The tea never made an appearance, but the shashlik kebabs were good. Very good. At the end of the meal, we repeated the omin gesture.

The problem with eating fatty meat like lamb is the after-taste in your mouth. According to my guide, the authors’ number one ‘pet-hate’ of Central Asia is “the taste of congealed mutton fat on the roof of your mouth.” Ulan explained that hot tea helps digest the fat, and presumably it helps get it out of your mouth and into your stomach, but if the waiter never brings the tea you’re left with a layer of fat on the roof of your mouth for the rest of the day.

Day 2 - in Bishkek

My boss here, Ulan, had invited me out for lunch and arranged to pick me up at 12pm. I spent the morning settling in to my flat, and walked around the block to get a feel for the area. Wide, tree-lined streets with what I initially thought were open drains running along the sides, but are actually irrigation channels for the trees. Often the street names are written in Russian and Kyrgyz, both languages in Cyrillic.

12.00 came and went. I was getting hungry. 1.00 came and I decided to make some sandwiches. 2.00 was approaching when Ulan finally arrived. Two hours late, no explanation, no apology, no nothing. Life here is different from life in Germany.

Ulan drove me in his car, and gave me a little tour of Bishkek. "This is Toktugul Street," he explained as we drove along the wide street outside the block of flats I would be calling 'home' for the next two months. "It's a one-way street." I pointed at the white car heading towards us: "What's he doing then?" Ulan looked at me, puzzled, and explained that people don't pay much attention to rules in Kyrgyzstan, especially traffic rules. Another difference from Germany, then.
"If he meets a policeman, he will be stopped. And he will have to pay a bribe."My guided tour continued. Ulan had a description for every third building it seemed. "This is a bank, the Asian Bank. That's a good one. This is a theatre, that's a museum, that's another theatre, and there's a bank..." Bishkek seemed to be full of banks and theatres. "Here's where everybody came for revolution.... that's the statue of Manas..." We passed a pub, more theatres, the Kyrgyz "White House", and dodged in and out of the traffic. Minibuses and minivans, known as marshrutkas, zip around the city, filled to bursting with passengers. A minivan with eight seats will carry eight sitting passengers, plus as many more as the drive can squeeze in, perhaps another 15-20 people, and this is outside of peak travelling hours. Mornings are even worse. Travelling in one is an "interesting" experience. Similar, but different, from Pakistan.

The streets were full of people of different shapes and sizes: Mongolian-looking, Chinese-looking, Korean-looking, Turkish-looking and European-or Russian-looking. I think I'd only seen such a variety of people in London, though here there were no Afro-Caribbeans. Dress codes varied from Uzbek women clad in long traditional dresses and old men wearing pointed white hats, to tracksuit-clad Russian men and Oriental-looking women in short shirts. Knowing that Kyrgyzstan was a Muslim country, I was very surprised by this.
Note for Joris: none of them appeared to be bearded.

The vehicles on the streets ranged from smart German cars to the battered mashrutkas and some old Communist-looking boxes with wheels made from fibreglass and wood. Drivers did observe traffic lights and zebra-crossings most of the time, but were quite happy to nip across if there was a gap between other cars or pedestrians. A brief beep on the horn seemed to indicate "Look out, I'm driving."
Eventually Ulan tired of driving and decided we should go to a restaurant. I was keen on trying some traditional Kyrgyz food, so he took me to a restaurant that served food from the south of the country.