Это западня (Of Chocolate Wrestling, Bottle Popping and Admiral Ackbar)

      <<What kind of idiot is going to fork out to buy an Admiral Ackbar Mask in Kyrgyzstan?!>>

That's how it all began, some months ago now.  We were having a wander through цум (Tsum = Central Universal Store) a giant department store that sells all kinds of bric-a-brac, including (it turns out) latex masks of Admiral Ackbar from Star Wars.  Not, it must be added, a collection of different Star Wars masks. There was not a whiff of a Darth Vader, Storm Trooper or Chewbacca mask.  No.  Admiral Akbar, alone and proud.

Tsum loves you - as Soviet a piece of architecture as you could want

The obsession began here, but grew when we watched Star Wars dubbed into Russian.  In particular, this scene:

Now in Russian, Admiral Ackbar's cry of 'It's a trap!' is 'Это западня!' (pron. Eta Zapadnya).  This became an in joke in the oh-so-injokey, pressure-cooker of cliqueyness that is London School, with shouts of Это западня being regularly dropped for the slighest of reasons.
But the answer to the conondrum of what idiot would throw away good soms on a bloody great latex monstrosity depicting a minor character in a 40 odd year old sci-fi film would have to wait five months to be answered.  The answer, it turned out, was me.  Yep, I'm the mug.  A wilfully dumb, overpaid Brit buying a dumb, overpriced item for his wilfully dumb, overpaid Brit friend's birthday. 
For May 21st saw a triple birthday celebration in Bishkek, of Kurt Davies, Kirsten Styers and Daniel Mahony and the largest party yet at Kurt/Alice/Laurence/Dillon/a-rolling-stock-of-other-ex-pats apartment.  The place was packed to the rafters.  Although my Ackbar mask for Dan was a pretty damn stupid present, it had some competition in the form of a 3-litre behemoth of Russian Standard Vodka:

A few days later, you find us sitting in Dan's room, supping beers and getting our Это западня on trying the many flavours of Ackbar possible.  Here are our results for your delectation:

                   

                                    

Next day, another birthday party, that of the Keen brothers (Palmer and Dennis) and also the last night out in Kyrgyzstan for that Alabaman stalwart Logan King.  Logan's modus operandi for the night was as follows:

 <<I'm gonna get silly tonight>> 

...and so he did.

 The party was full of new faces, interesting conversation and cheap Kyrgyz champagne.

The exact moment that the night got silly

Around midnight a large party decamped to Chelsea Dance Pub.  Now, I'm no fan of this particualar venue, a great big sweaty shed of a place with a clientele inclined to agro, and I find the idea of a Dance Pub frankly execrable, but it was Logan's last night so off I went.

Chelsea Dance Pub - How do you spell 'copyright infringement' again?

And I must confess there were two rather intriguing sights to be seen that night, 

The first, a massive flaming tower of booze:

The second, some ladies doing a little, light chocolate-wrestling on the dancefloor

...you know, as you do:

The Scene of Battle

I can confirm that Logan, a man of his word, did as much getting silly as possible and rocked in a little after six in the a.m.   Master King, we salute you sir, Bishkek will be a quieter and less colourful town without you.

Of King Charles, The Black Prince and The Game of (Somewhat Smelly) Kings.

It is traditional in most cultures of the world to mourn the dead.  In the case of the Bishkek ex-pat community the dead are any lost souls that have left Bishkek.  As each person takes their leave of the Kyrgyz capital, they are granted a funeral/wake where people come to celebrate their time here and mourn their passing.  At this team of year their are many funerals, a very suicide cult job-lot of corpses being swept away to their respective Ellysia (or Underworld) in great winged hearses.  Today, I would like to mourn a specific member of the glorious dead, his name was King Charles.

Not King Charles of foreshortened head and Oliver Cromwell-baiting fame, this King Charles was a wanderer who has graced many of the world's more obscure corners, his royal chariot a truck, and his court an ever-changing gallery of adventure holidayists.
His arrival in Bishkek was quiet and understated, he was a student of languages seeking to add Russian to his list through diligent, focused labour.  His first evening out with us a week or so later was not quite so quiet and understated. It began with a few beers, followed by a few beers, leading to a few more beers and ended
at a drunken houseparty, with Charlie informing randomers that Dan was his bastard son to a chinese lady.  
Now, every king needs a prince, and the horseradish sauce to King Charles' roast beef dinner was one Edward Charlton-Jones (a.k.a The Black Prince).
My first awareness of Edward's arrival was when Eve said to me; 'Have you met the guy with the voice like an old-fashioned BBC presenter'  and indeed he does have a marvelous fine public-school accent, with all the boyish charm to pull it off.  Hailing from the unbelievably middle England sounding vilalge of Little Hawksley, he studied at Oxford, and is in possesion of  that general all round affability that is the hallmark of the better type of public school boy (for non-Brit readers, in the mad world of British schooling, public schools are decidedly private, fee paying places).  
Soon after their taking up residence in the Students' rooms at London School, the little kitchen of intimacy that characterises the students flat at London School became a place of meeting, fine conversation and something of a gaming den, accompanied by coffee and cake and the occasional cheeky пиво (that's beer to those not in the know)  Shithead was taken on as the game of choice and played unremittingly.  Slowly but surely the game began to accrue extra rules. initially to assuage the gents' concern that they were slacking off work, so the Jack of Silly Words (when it's laid you have to look up a random silly word in Russian and remember it) and the Jack of Remembrance (when it's laid you can challenge anyone to remember any word from the Jack of Silly Words) were introduced.  These extra rules began to gain terrifying momentum to the point where almost every card had some special meaning, and a story built up with cards dedicated to the people around.  Thus, the Queen of Hearts became the Alice card, dedicated to Alice Janvrin, a fine anglo-French rose muchly admired by the gentlemen; everytime the card was laid you had to comment on what a very lovely card it was indeed. 
Both Edward and King Charles managed to combine this joviality and social lubrication with a hefty workload of language learning and a great love of bursting randomly into verse.  These two gloriously came to a head at a school performance evening where both The Black Prince and King Charles himself performed a poem in Russian.

El Rey Carlito en su majestad - leyendo poesia

And why King Charles and the Black Prince?  Well it's simple really.  People at London School seem to soak up nicknames like plant roots soaking up water in a deset after the first rainfall in a year, and as their were two Charles's at the time, they needed to be distinguished.   Well Charlie's natural regal quality dredged up King charles, this going extraordinarily to his head almost instantly, and the logical extention was for Edward to become Prince Edward, hence the Black Pricne.
So there they be, gone but not forgotten. 

p.s. Honorary mention must almost be made of Ceci's death.  On the night of her funeral she was having kidney stone issues and had to leave a few minutes into the party, Making her, as Max Bishkek wryly observed, the only person ever to get up in the middle of her own funeral and walk out.

Of Kazakh Wine, Couchsurfing Parties and The Northwest Passage

Advance Warning: This entry will have precious few photos (at least those taken by me) because some utter swine called Ulanbek (How do I know his name?  All shall be revealed) stole my camera (plus another camera, a phone, an i-pod, a tent bag and two camping stoves, the blaggard) while we were camping in the mountains of the Alamedin valley.



A stock photo of the Alademin Valley - definitely not taken by me



So.  What news from Central Asia?  The previous month has seen the fair denizens of the London School Flats take up Couchsurfing with enthusiasm and aplomb.  The catalyst for this was the arrival into the Bishkek fold of one Alec Forss.  Restless wanderer, mountain man, lover of rollicking Canadian folksongs (of which more later), overenergetic puppy, Alec is many things to many men, but one thing he certainly is is an advocate of couchsurfing.


The Lesser-spotted Alec Forss, in his native mountain habitat.


It's an idea I've been interested in for some time but never been in a position to get fully invovled in.  The idea is gloriously simple, if you have a spare couch (bed, bit of floor, Central Asian floor cushion) you offer it up to weary travellers who msg you to request a place to lay their weary heads for a night or two.  In return, when you are travelling, other gracious hosts give you a place to crash for the night. 
Logan, with his usual all or nothing zest, took to it like white on rice, got signed up, set out his profile page with care and his first surfer accepted within about a day.

My Couch - A pair of Tushuk (floor cushions)

A few days later, surfer number 1 arrived in the form of Ingrid, a gently spoken, dryly humourous Norwegian with a penchant for the classics (she polished off a Jane Austen while she was staying with us)  who was travelling overland through Russia and Central Asia.

Ingrid holding a big ass bird - just 'cuase she can

Her stay proved to be a delight.  She introduced us to some belter Norwegian music including (to Logan's great pleasure) Diamanter og Kirsebær (Diamonds and Cherries) by John Olav Nielson.  A number of fine evenings were spent drinking beer and chatting into the wee small hours, with much badinage and dollops of wry wit  She even managed to get up and check out not one but two bazaars the morning after a binge which wound up around 7 in the am...a true trooper.. 
Our next visitor was Julia from Kazakhstan, a charming computer expert from Almaty who had a few days before hosted our fine friend Edward Charlton-Jones (a former Russian student at London School and gentleman of the highest calibre).

Ta da - The super-charming Julia from Kazakhstan

She arrived bearing gifts of Kazakh chocolate and Kazakh wine (both rather fine actually) and we reciprocated in this cultural exchange by introducing her to the wonder that is Borat. 
Once she realised that it wasn't meant to be an accurate representation of her country, but rather a massive pisstake of Western ignorance about Central Asia and a handy tool for revealing people's prejudices, she laughed along heartilly. 
I think Julia was slightly underwhelmed by her first trip to Kyrgyzstan.  Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan have gone on opposite trajectories since the split of the Soviet Union.  After some initial teething problems, Kazakhstan, rich in oil and natural resources, has flourished with a growing middle class and a shiny ultra-modern new capital city.  In contrast, Kyrgyzstam, which enjoyed artificially high importance during the Soviet era, has suffered from a paucity of natural resources, little arable land and growing poverty, struggling through a series of violent revolutions and venally corrupt regimes.  And Bishkek, although a pleasure to live in, is no grand tourist destination, with few major sights to see and only a sprinkling of museums and attractions.
Nevertheless, she seemed to enjoy herself.  We went out to a really nice traditional Kyrgyz restaurant, and I think she enjoyed the challenge of being in an English-speaking environment.
Bare hours after I bid farewell to Julia, I was hard at work on prep for the next Couchsurfing adventure, London School's first Couchsurfing party.  I cooked up a hearty stew of mince, onions, carrots, white wine, rosemary and thyme in the big party pot ready for the evening's festivities and then pottered off to do some of that teaching malarkay. 
Lessons over, my hopefulness for a big turnout was dashed upon the rocks of adverse weather conditions.  The rain (a rare thing in Kyrgyzstan but proof positive of the old chestnut 'it never rains but ii pours') was bucketing it down so hard that the London School Flats had developed a not inconsiderable moat.   The situation looked grim.
I shouldn't have worried though, a few hours later, and 20 odd portions of stew served,  I'm wending my way through a mass of revellers (I think we had about 35 peeps in total), these included friends, friends of friends and couchsurfers from the Phillipines, Japan, Kyrgyzstan and England; the last of whom, one Iain Webb, ended up becoming London School couchsurfer number three by crashing down on my Tushuk for the night (insert cheap pun of choice here).
The next morning was a (relatively) early rise, a quick cafe lunch at Lola's and then off up into the mountains.
 The plan; three days trekking through and camping in the glorious Alamedin valley to take advantage of the long weekend.   You can just imagine the beautiful views and stunning vistas which we photographed.  Actually, you'll have to just imagine them since all our beggaring cameras were swiped.
The team; myself, Logan King (on a rare foray out of Bishkek into that nature), mountain man Alec Forss (who earned the nickname Billy-goat Forss from Logan due to the way he bounded up a mountainside), a fine Melbourne lady called Katie (who's studying Russian at London School at the mo, whilst setting up the Central Asian Environment Coalition), and our erstwhile couchsurfer/crashee Iain.
The first day we wended our way along the left bank of a river for several miles past yurts and horses, finally scrambling through a good half hour of heavy, thorny vegetation and rocky outcrops, ending in a steep cliff fall over whitewater and no way forward.  We decide to head back to a fire pit we saw about forty minutes back and set up camp for the night
An hour or so later and the tents are set up, a fire is going, a noodly concoction is bubbling away on the stove and a bottle of cognac and cups of vodka and fanta are doing the rounds.
As I was nearing the end of the bottle of cognac (my addition to the even's libations) Iain proposed roasting some bananas over the fire.  Now, anybody worth their salt knows that the best way to cook a banana is to  flambée it in brandy...so that is what we did.  The last of the cognac was poured into a travel pan and we feasted on flambéed bananas (the taste for which I have to thank a Parisian banker in whose house I was a guest a few weeks many summers ago for).  This was followed by open-fire-blackened bananas with chocolate inside (also rather tasty).
And so, well fed and watered, the singing began.  Now, Alec is a huge fan of the Canadian Folksinger Stan Rogers, whose songs were inspired by Canadian History and the daily lives of its working people, particularly those from east coast fishing villages, and Alec's enthusiasm for said artist has spread like a rather tuneful virus amongst the London School flock.
In particular, we have taken to belting out The Northwest Passage, his celebration of the explorers who attempted to discover a northwest sea passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean.
So that is what we did, two Brits, an American and an Aussie, belting out a Canadian folktune about the sea, at the top of our lungs, on a mountainside in Kyrgyzstan (a completely landlocked country). 
This was followed by a 'guess the missing word' quiz convoluted from Iain's bizarre imagination and a 'History of Philosophy' book, and then a limerick making circle.  The things one cooks up to entertain oneself while camping are truly many splendoured.
The next day dawned bright and sunny, which Logan appreciated mightilly.   Everyone else languished in bed untill the sun had pottered off to be replaced by a constant mizzle and mist interspersed with occasional bursts of full-on, lashing-it-down rain.
On an early-morning trip to clear his bowels Logan had dsicovered a series of well worn paths not much higher up the mountainside, so we take one of those routes up the mountainside.  A few minutes in, at a paticularly spectacular view, I note that we've all left our cameras at the camp and wonder whether we should head back and get them.  The collective decision is to keep moving.  What fools we are!
We cross a burn and trudge over pastureland in the persistent mist and mizzle, an experience a little like wandering through a cloud full of cows.  After a few hours the rain grows heavier and we picnic beneath a large slanting boulder for shelter.  The rain still sheeting down, and visibility increasingly low through the fog, we decide to head back to camp.
We return to camp to find that a good deal of small but valuable stuff has been nicked; including cameras, an ipod, mobile phone, a tent bag and, intriguingly, a bag of haribo sweets.  Much swearing ensues.
By this time the ground is a great slurry of mud, but our alcohol supplies were all consumed the previous night, and this kind of bad news needs to be washed away with a bevvy or three, so  me and Iain splodge off on the 2 and a bit hour round trip in search of beer, returning with dusk at our footsteps laden with 9 litres of Kyrgyzstan's very own (bloody awful) beer наше пиво (tip: drink арпа instead, it's miles better)
We arrive in high spirits to find that Logan's tent has flooded and the fire is completely unlightable.  Buggar and indeed buggaration.
Not to be deterred, we decamp to the party tent to feast on a creative mix of raw fruit and veg formed into a four-course menu by some mysterious alchemy of Katie's doing.  The night wended away nicely with beer aplenty, a four second trivia game (once again dredged from the depths of quizmaster Iain's imagination),  plus a hearty second rendition of The Northwest Passage.  The evening was further enlivened by Logan's phone ringing (the reception in the wilderness was surprisingly bloody good).  Who was our mystery caller?  It was the bounder who stole our stuff ringing us to show off his English.  This extended to repeating 'Hello, I am Ulanbek' several times and giggling. 

                                    What a total nobjockey!

And so, the next morning, we made our way back down to the car park and took a taxi back to Bishkek, stopping at the roadside to buy a bottle of fresh kumyz, a traditional Krygyz drink made from fermented mare's milk. 

So, there you have it.  The tale of London School's initiation into the wonderful world of couchsurfing.  In the coming weeks we have at least three more couchsurfers staying, including the return of the legendary Max Bishkek, fresh from his month's volunteering as an English teacher down in Osh.   He will be spending his final days in Kyrgyzstan before returning to normalcy and his dayjob in the Big Smoke that is London, in the guise of a humble couchsurfer.  Stay tuned for the next thrilling instalment of the Bishkek saga.

Of Earthquakes, Opera and Hiking in Sary Chelek



Wanderers in a white land

I feel a judder and then a sensation of motion somewhat akin to being a bit squiffy after one too many glasses of pimms    What has occured?  Is it the lumbering passing of a convoy of trucks along Sovietskaya road below?  No, I have just eperienced my first earthquake, a little brother to the hiedous behemoth which devestated Japan mere days before.  And it is, frankly, a little underwhelming.  Though this does not stop it spooking a few of my students, who inform me, 'this is not a good building to be in.'.  Hhhm, not reassuring news.  But then Iskender (a pleasure to have in the classroom and incidentally a big Chris Rea fan) breaks into a rousing chorus of Bobby McFerin's Don't Worry (Be Happy) and this inexplicably calms everyone down.

- / - \ - / - \ - / - \ - / - \ - / - \ - \ - / - / - \ - / - \ - / -
I feel a judder and then a sensation of motion somewhat akin to being a bit squiffy after one too many glasses of pimms     What has occured?   I've fallen face first into a two foot drift of snow.  That's what's happened.  I've been carearing around in this, disoriented, cod-inebriated  fashion for a good hour now, staggering along behind the rest of the group with my balance all shot to hell.
Perhaps we should backtrack a little.  The trip during which I am tripping is to the mountain lakes of Sary Chelek Biosphere Reserve.  The planning for this trip was extensive, essentially consisting of a phone call to CBT Kyrgyzstan where we were told it was madness to go trekking in Sary Chelek this time of year, that treks there didn't start til May and we'd be damn fools to attempt it.  A phonecall to another rep, who may have been a bit tipsy and suicidally bored at the time, gave a slightly different opinion:

                    <<Come over, it'll be fine!>>

So we headed to a map shop tucked round the corner of the Kyrgyz cartographic institure and clearly signposted with an A4 piece of paper saying 'Maps in English', and purchased a map of Jalal-Abad province in glorious technicolour...

We head eastwords across the plain, traversing the wasteland of Gorgoroth to the very foot of Mt. Doom

Over Gerorgian food (an extremely tasty, spicy stew type cuisne that I'd never encountered before) that night we (we being Dillon 'D-Solid' Cases, my fine co-northeasterner Stuart Colquhan and the newly arrived in town Alec Forss) arrange to meet at 7:30am the following day and get set off nice and early.
I wake up sharpish next morning, brush my teeth, check I've got everything in my backpack.  The doorball rings.  It''s Alec arriving to inform me that although he had brought everything necessary for backpacking with him to Kyrgyzstan, he'd unfortunately forgot to bring a beckpack to put them in, so was going to have to regretfully bow out of this one.
Undettered, I wend my way to the rendezvous point; Stuart and D-Solid's fine abode.  I arrive at the flat at 7:30am prompt; the door is opened by a bleary-eyed, pyjama-d Dillon.  He is not packed and has emails he needs to send.  On the sofa lies a crashed-out Stewart, sporting a sign which says:

                                <<Wake me immediately!>>

This instruction being carried out, he precedes to open his eyes, gaze around and begin swearing volubly, this toxic stream of obscenity carries on unabbated for about an hour.  It transpires that he's been drinking all night, got stuck in the middle of a heated row for which he spent several hours playing peacemaker, and has had approximatley an hour and half's sleep
After a few hours of variously frantic and lackadaisical packing we head off to get essential supplies.  These essentials include oranges (bloody expensive), sausages, goose liver paté and vodka. 
Stuart has realised he's forgetten to bring a hat and gloves, so we stop of at Osh bazaar, which is where we need to go to get taxis anyway.    He disappears into the densely packed throng of stalls while me and D-Solid provide idle amusement to a few pre-pubescent bazaar kids who know two words in English and aren't afraid to use them...repeatedly, repetetively, seemingly endlessly.  After half and hour, Stuart has not returned and we are beginning to get a wee bit concerned.  Five minutes later, he appears with not a glove to be spoken of, with a hat that merely says 'ATTACK' in large letters on it and is a few sizes too small and informs us he has been shaken-down by the police and they've been practising their sleight of hand by slyly pocketing 500 som.
Slightly, but not unduly, deterred we hop a taxi to take us to a the village of Kara Jigatch, where our homestay man is due to pick us up and deliver us to our evenings rest.  It;s a considerable journey and we stop off at a pitstop cafe on the way, where I engage in a fine lagman (a Central Asian dish of thick noodle stew), Stuart has a fine roast chicken and D-Solid ends up with what could best be described as a lump of slightly dried-out spam.

D-Solid, master of concealment

At nightfall, we approach Kara Jigatch.  But something is awry.  Our man is nowhere to be seen, the light is switfly vanishiing, his mobile is swtiched off, we are stood next to a billiard hall and surrounded by boozed up Kyrgyz fellas, a phone call to our man's house confirms his wife doesn't have a damn clue where he is either.  In desparation, we get a taxi to the homestay, and by taxi I mean a beaten-up old banger driven by two drunk Kyrgyz twenty somethings.  They laugh, burst into song, stop to talk to friends, veer erratically around the road; the chance of us getting mugged in the dark, far away from any kind of assistance, seems high.  We are now quite considerably deterred.
But all is well, we arrive and the worries and weariness of our long journey is soothed with broth, bread and steaming hot tea.
Next morning we meet our guide, a becapped and wellington-booted gentlemen called Juma, in the further end of his middle age.  He  tips us a nod, and we wander out of the village up into the mountains

Heading Off

We pass a few little farmsteads and hamlets, some livestock and some bemused cows

Some Bemused Cows

The initial going is not too bad, some inclines but not too steep, some log bridges to cross over streams, a few little fordlets to wade through but generallly nothing too strenuous...

A gnarly old tree - Gnarly!

But then we reach the snow and my coordination goes haywire.   In places two feet deep, every step felt like 10 steps on normal ground, feet sunk into the snow, the tent kept falling off my backpack and I was swaying like an uncoordinated drunk with a wooden leg.  The fact that my other companions, including a man at least a quarter century older than I, seemed to be making light work of it, made me feel like a hobbit struggling up Caradhras whilst Legolas the elf lightfoots it effortlessly over the top of the snow.
As night fell, we were still some 40 minutes short of our chosen destination, but decided to camp by a smaller lake
We set up camp and Juma lit a small fire, whipped out a cooking pot and proceeded to whip-up the kind of stodgy, filling, carb-heavy magic that you need after a hard days trekking.

Dog tired, we roll into bed.  Just as I am beginning to drift off into the realms of the unawake, the rain starts. It proceeds to rain (or snow, or sleat) solidly all night.  At 4am, we awake to find the outer tent area flooded, and our shoes and bags sopping wet.  Buggar!
Morning dawned, crisp and clear, but we ignored it completely and slept on through til 11:30.  When we finally dragged ourselves out of our pit, it was to discover that Juma had miraculously managed to get a good fire going with wet-through, green wood and was warming up some чай (chai = tea).  We also got a good look at the stunning frozen lake we'd glimpsed in the half light; great concentric circles of different thicknesses of ice created swirling patterns over the lake and there was one end where the lake was not frozen, where the water formed a shape that could best be described as a touch phallic

The willy-shaped water

Juma whiled away the breakfast by whittling me a walking cane to try and counterbalance my total inability to stay upright.
We trekked the 40 minutes to the main lake, a stunning great alpine vista of snow-capped mountains and denuded trees still far short of springs first budding.
We sat for some time by the lakeside musing on the transient nature of travelling life.  D. Solid explained to us  his theory that keeping relationships going had been made more complex in the last fifty years or so by two factors; globalisation and feminism.  It is an itriguing theory, which probably has a fair ammount of truth in it, but as he pointed out, more complex doesn't necessarilly mean worse.   We learn from Stuart that one of the former London School teachers, who had a fling with a German girl while living in Bishkek, had just moved to Munich to be with her, having kept contact through a good few of months of him living back in the states.  More difficult indeed, but not impssible.

Stuart Colquhuan - Gentleman Adventurer

Myself - doing that smiling, posing, nonsense

Having taken our heady fill of intelectual debate and emotional ramblings, we equalised the mood somewhat by throwing stones at the lake and prodding it with a big stick.  That done, we took our leave of the grandeur and trundled back to camp.

 

The rest of the day past by with us trying, with fairly limited success, to keep a fire going that Juma had begun and perfected with seeming ease before wandering off to prep the tea.  The evening saw us curled up in the bloody-chilly confines of our tent (thanks for the hot-water bottle mum, you are a lifesaver) playing a game of Texas Hold 'em Poker by the light of a single mobile phone. 

Keeping the home fires burning (just)

The walk back down was a much more gentle affair, with rolling slopes rather than steep inclines, which all went well until I got cramp and shooting pains in my right foot, causing me to exclame every few hobbled steps, like some half-mad, invalid, drill sergeant


Wild Garlic growing by the wayside

                                                                                       We stopped on the way to pick some wild garlic that Juma pointed out on the roadside. The stinging, allium, tartness of the leaves was a great pleasure to taste and D-Solid and Stuart gathered a loud with the intention of making wild garlic soup on their return.

 





Gathering Wild Garlic


Our return leg was no less eventful.  We accepted a sum of 5500 som to take us back to Bishkek, from a village guy who clearly didn't want to go all the way.  Stuart's lack of haggling incensed D-Solid, but I was inclined to be on Stuart's side, we could afford it and this was just some poor village fellow who couldn't afford any extravagances, only essentials.  When we discovered that his 80s monstrosity of a car had tinted windows and a souped up sound system complete with dayglo tweeters and big-ass subwoofers, I felt less positively inclined.  We reached the crossroads town of Tosh Komur and he had a quick chat with another taxi driver who agreed to take us back the rest of the way for the agreed sum.  No rats were sniffed until a moment before the guy sped off, when Stuart jumped out to check the details.  Too late the cry went out!  The guy was no more than a cloud of dust and a burst of dopler-effected Kyrgyz dance music toss.   We had been jipped for a thousand som.  We ended up paying the same ammount, but had to share the taxi with an extra passenger.  Curses were laid on the double dealing swine, the taxi driver was amused at our naivity.  In fact, amused turned out to be his default setting and the rest of the journey back was highly convivial.  That is until, about twenty minutes outside of Bishkek, a chunk of the back of the car fell of with a resounding screach and thud.  We pulled over to the roadside, a cloth was laid on the ground, and the driver borrowed my walking stick to knock the still half-attached lump of vehicle onto the ground and deposited it in the boot (Americans read 'trunk'). Crisis averted, we made our way back to our homes and warm beds, or in my case made my way back to Anton's Bar for a few bevvies.

In other shamelessly unrelated news crudely tagged on the end, I had my first operatic experience in the form of a ticket costing the princely sum of £2.80 to go and see La Traviatta at the Opera and Ballet Theatre.  It was a real pleasure, the opulence of the setting not entirely met by some of the male leads reedy voices. and the chorus being sung in Russian while the leads warbled away in Italian took a bit to get used to.  But the Prima Donna had a cracking voice and the music was stirring and powerful.  I have not the slighest clue how they could be breaking even with the event, as their were four extravagent sets and not that many more people in the audience than were onstage, but it was a ine evening.

So, mountains, mishaps, earthquakes and opera have been the flavours of my last few weeks. 

Of Decadence, Decline and Fall(ing asleep)

The Heavy Duty Bit
For a large majority of the citizenry in Post-Soviet republics, the reality of liberty and free trade have not been the heady explosion of self-determination and consumer shopping spree contentment that early optimism hoped.  The liberalisation of the markets has resulted in a massive flight of capital elsewhere and in a seismic increase in the gap between rich and poor; while a small elite have amassed extraordinary wealth, the masses have had to deal with rising levels of unemployment and underfunded, decaying public services. 
Kyrgyzstan has been hit particularly hard by this shifting post-soviet landscape.   As an important location for  military testing and popular Soviet holiday destination, Kyrgyzstan punched above its weight in the USSR, and the Soviets engaged in construction projects in Kyrgyzstan that the country could not have hoped to have funded on its own.  Many people consider the late 70s and early 80s  to be a heyday for Kyrgyzstan.  In contrast, it is now a small, isolated nation bullied by big bruiser neighbours like Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that have considerably more natural resources and material wealth.
The power vacuum left by the crumbling iron fist of Soviet rule has been quickly filled by organized crime.  Many of the bigwigs in this murky underworld are the same well-placed officials of the former Soviet Republics, and their heirs in oligarchy.  There has been an alarming rise in violent retributive crimes, prostitution, gambling and human trafficking throughout the former Soviet republics.
This is clear enough to see in Bishkek, bookmakers proliferate throughout the centre of town and the city has a swathe of casinos totally out of proportion with its population (even before you consider the low earnings of the average Bishkekian). 
The flow of human cargo from country to country (for forced labour, domestic servitude, commercial sex etc.) is an opportunistic hydra that springs up in one part of the world, drains it of its most precious resource and then disappears when the going gets tough, only to rear another ugly head in some other farflung corner of the Earth.  So the rise in human trafficking from South East Asia in the 70s; was followed in the early 80s by a glut of trafficking from Nigeria, Uganda and Ghana; which neatly sashayed in the mid-late 80s and early nineties into a dip into the Latin American market with large numbers trafficked principally from Brazil, Mexico and the Central American States.  The impact of illegal trafficking was, if not negligible, at the least fairly low in the Soviet Union, but with the collapse in 1991 came a fertile new recruiting ground for modern slavers.  The perfect pool as well, a steady flow of young, strong, attractive, well educated people, in the depths of poverty and buoyed with dreams of The West  fuelled by an influx of Western films, music and television.  It begin in Poland, Romania, Hungary and the then Czechoslovakia, by the mid-90s it had shifted to Bulgaria, Moldova, the Ukraine and Russia.   Most recently the focus has shafted east, with Georgia, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan becoming prime meat markets for traffickers.

None of which was going through my head as I watched dumbfounded whilst a hollering banshee of a woman (who may have been a prostitute) grabbed and tore at the hair of an employee at a private banya, with a khakied up security guy trying to control an raging bull of a man of quite inordiante bulk (who may have been a pimp).  No, my main thoughts ran as follows:

 <<What in the holy fuck is going on, is there anything I can do?  Will doing anything just make the situation worse? will doing anything make my face and body worse?  What kind of quilombo (both literally and figuratively) is this?>>

My questions are answered as the second security guard appears at the door carrying a beating stick, wipes his sweating brow and casually waves us over to our private banya rooms.   Clearly, this is business as usual. 
The layout of our private banya gives a good indication of the wide range of activities catered for, there is a sauna and shower room, a plunge pool, a tv rooom, a full sized Russian Billiards table, a massage table, and two double bedrooms (with convenient wipe-clean plastic covers).
And so, trying to ignore the drama unfolding outside, we get down to the important business of stripping down to a vaguely toga-esque cloth and alternatiely sweating, swigging beer and water and playing the fiendishly difficult game of Russian billiards (take a pool table, make it considerably larger and the pockets significantly smaller, increase the size of the balls and make all but one of them white - its not a game for the light hearted or impatient).  When we emerge from our pit of decadence to pay the bill all is quiet.  Aggresive negotations have clearly been concluded satisfactarally (though to whose satisfaction is an open question).  SNAFU.  To paraphrase a common cliche:

                                    <<T.I.B. - This Is Bishkek.>>

...and its Maximus Bishkekius to play a difficult white (i.e. any of them)

The (Rather More) Light Hearted Bit

There is an Old Chestnut which says that the fall of the Roman Empire was a result of its own growing decadence, the former discipline which allowed it to expand and conquer in all directions became debased in an orgy of alcohol, sexual proclivity and overeating and like an aging general’s belly the muscle and sinew of the Empire became softened with fat.
If this is the case, the Westerner in Kyrgyzstan is in for a fall.  I submit as exhibit A, 'The Logan', a challenge recently witnessed  This herculean event came about when Max noticed that Logan, a man of considerable metabolism, tended to order two full chicken dishes plus rice at our local fast food Chinese place (in the Vefa Centre, our local Turkish run shopping centre/mall and an opulent den of sin and iniquity if ever there was one).  This set off debate between Cole and Max ended in Cole laying down the gauntlet of 'The Logan' to Max: to wit, could they begin with Logan’s favourite instant pot mashed potato and then move on to eat two full Vefa Chinese Chicken in Dough portions, plus fried rice in one sitting.  Logan being a great fan of personal challenges (and ridiculously competitive) decided he would up the ante by doing all this but eating three portions instead of two.  Dan joined in on the action but in a state of some disrepair as he’d been at a party till the wee small hours the night before.   After the General gave an inspirational speech to his aspirant consumers, battle was joined.



The Chief Consumers square up

The master with his disciples

 The waitress taking the 11 orders for a table of 6 gave us all a quite reasonable look of disdain and mild disgust, but soon the food was flowing in true decadent banquet style.

The feast is laid before us

A debauched Roman feast - I think you'll agree the similarities are striking. 

 

                          

The unconscionable overconsumption ended in a merry score draw, with Cole, Max and the master himself all polishing of their supersized meals with aplomb.

Job Done

Sadly, things did not end so well for Dan, who ground to a despondent halt after a pitiful one and quarter portions.

Failure (and last nights alcohol intake) inspire abject despair

And so, bleary eyed and full bellied, the competitors slouched and slothed there way home with a post-competition nap in their sights.

The Fall of Rome - a salutary warning to us all?

p.s. Just in case you think this was going to be a looking-up-one's-nose piece entirely about the oddities, extremeties and excesses of others, here's my addition to the general picture of decadence and depravity.   At about 5 in the morning, having supped a plentiful quanitity of beer over a 9 hour period.  I find myself dog-weary in our friendly, local strip club (I'm painfully aware of the potential hypocrisy of the bookends of this article, but we've chatted with the strippers and they're mostly smiley, happy students training to be police officers and suchlike).   As a parade of scantilly clad girls gyrate in front of me, I do the only reasonable thing, pop myself onto the floor and have a good nap.  Prompting the owner to observe

                                'What is he doing!? Sleeping...ah well, he must be gay.'

Me at my classiest and best.



Of Noraebang 노레방, Spag Bol and Flaming Hot Metal

A variety of Muslim and Chinese sources (dating from the 7th to the 12th Century) describe the Kyrgyz (at that time making their long trek south from the Siberian North, picking up a bit of that their Turkic language and culture along the way) as a race of feirce, nomadic warriors, red-haired, with fair complexions and green-blue eyes.  A long time intermixing with other Central Asian peoples and the not insignificant influence of one Jenghiz Khan and his Mongol cohorts has given the modern Kyrgyz a more typically asiatic appearence, to a European eye superficially like a chinese person, but with a longer face and wider eyes.  
However recent DNA studies show a remarkable genetic legacy of this earlier time, with 63% of modern Kyrgyz men sharing Haplogroup R1a1 (Y-DNA) with Tajiks (64%), Ukrainians (54%), Poles (56%) and even Icelanders (25%). Haplogroup R1a1 (Y-DNA) is believed to be a marker of the Proto-Indo-European language speakers and goes some way towards explaining the distincly Indo-european red hair and green-blue eyes noted by those ancient Chinese and Muslim fellows.
The modern ethnic mix of Krygyzstan is no less intriguing, although predominantly Kyrgyz, there are not insignificant populations of ethnic Russians, Ukranians, Uzbeks, Uyghurs, Dungans and Kazakhs.  As a result of being part of the USSR, where whole populations were routinely dragged halfway across the world with the merest flick of a bureaucrat's pen, Kyrgyzstan now has some ethnicities from even further afield.
This is visible in the fact that there is a German bierkeller in Bishkek called Steinbrau, brewing a range of German biers and run by ethnic Germans who have lived in Bishkek for several generations.
There is also a not inconsiderable Korean population, principally in Bishkek, and I've taught a number of Korean students.  The Story behind this is that in 1937, the Stalin regime, fearing that the Korean community might form a "fifth column" in support of the Japanese who were then occupying Manchuria and Korea just across the borders, ordered a mass deportation of all 36,442 families from Sakhalin, Vladivostok and the Russian Far East to Central Asia, casually shifting a total of some 171,181 people thousands of miles to help prevent them from allying with a nation that they cordially despised.
Which longwinded ethnographic preamble serves to explain how when Ceci was having a little leaving do a few weeks back (to mark the fact she was leaving her job with the UN and going back to Sardinia for two weeks), I found myself enjoying a dish of  비빔밥 (Bibimbap, a sizzling, spicy Korean dish, with rice, meat and veg mixed together with a raw egg) and engaging in a little light 노레방, or as you might know it, Karoake
Although most of the world knows the act of amateur songbirds hollering along rambunctiously to a backing track, preferably out of time and out of tune, by this portmanteau of the Japanese words kara 空 "empty," and ōkesutora オーケストラ "Orchestra", the Koreans have their own word for it, “noraebang” (노레방) which literally means “song room.”.  This alternative term is maybe something to do with the aforementioned fact that Japan and Korea have what could be described as a hate-hate relationship.  Invading someone's country and raping their culture can give you that attitude, just ask the Irish.
And thus, there we were, tucked away in our own private room, with discrete servers popping in from time to time to see if we require a recharging of our glasses, and a large selection of songs in Korean, Russian and English available for us to merrily murder.

Giving it the beans -
growling, purring and hollering some classic 80s rock



Picking them songs
(note the hated Japanese word sneaking in there in the background)


 

Max Bishkek belting out a tune in a commanding baritone.

 

Ala, Ruta and Ceci getting all soulful

 A large part of the joy of the experience comes in the combnination of tinny, midi backing tracks (80s synthesizer distorted guitar sound = priceless) and in the utterly incompatable backing videos.  The pinnacle of this came when Metallica's One, a harrowing thrash-metal account of an incapacitated Vietnam veteran's empty existence and yearning for death, was backed by a natty dance routine performed by some squeeky clean K-pop girls. 

                                               / - / - /          \ - \ - \    

I woke up the next morning with a searing, burning, soar throat and the urge to organise a bit of a gathering.  This came partly from my great enjoyment of playing host, partly because I still don't feel I've got enough use out of my big-ass floor cushions/table cloth/tea set combo, and partly from my continuing quest to get to know the local teachers and get all the ex-pats and locals to get on like one big, sickening, Walton's-esque, happy family.
To this end invitations were liberally spread around and on the saturday afternoon of the party, I found myself in the supermarket, buying the biggest, fat-ass cooking pot they had on offer, and a variety of ingredients including 2 kgs of mince.  The aim of all this to-do was to cook up a monster-sized serving of Spag Bol (or Spaghetti Bolognese if you must), a perculiarly British take on Italian cuisine, basically being a British-style mince stew with nominal pasta and parmesan cheese to give that authentic Italian flavour.  Here's a sample recipe, although the variations are quite considerable.
The fridge packed to bursting with beer, coke and various juices (though, it must be admitted, mostly with beer), and the pot of Spag Bol bubbling away nicely, the first guests began to trickle in; first came Australian Dan, a softly spoken, dryly-witty, geologist; then Logan (American), Alexa (Canadian), Maxton (Scottish), Edward (English), Kurt (another American).  The room was starting to look worryingly anglophone.  Things reached crisis point when two local students arrived, took one look in, hovered at the threshhold looking awkward and left after 5 minutes.  Disaster!  My best-laid plans were in tatters, all had gone awry and the party was going to be the ex-pat scummiest of ex-pat scum parties, with narry a whiff of cultural exchange. 
But my prophesies of doom turn out to be unfounded, a very few moments later, a steady trickle of native teachers begin to arrive to assuage my fears, the prodigal students returned some 20 minutes later bearing gifts, snatches of Russian tongue began to intermingle with the various accentual flavours of English to be heard, then Eve arrived and struck up a conversation in Kyrgyz.  A few hours later, many and varied peeps have arrived, some 20-odd bowls of Spag Bol have been handed out, beverages have been consumed and much mixing and matching of conversational partners has taken place.  I breath a sigh of relief and allow myself to abandon hostly duties, have a tinkle on the ukulele and get down to some solid boozing and chinwagging.

The party in full swing

Slowly the guests meandered off to their beds or to other engagements (Dinara: a mad-as-a-bag-of-badgers, Kazakh party-girl had to potter off to the opening of a GQ/Playboy bar, for example).  In the wee small hours of the morn, the hardcore of peeps that remained decided to take a taxi to the Anti-valentine's metal extravaganza at Metro pub.
We arrive in time to enjoy the dulcet tones of Kyrgyzstan's very own Rammstein cover band.

The Rammstein covers band - tight as a monkey's nuts in a Siberian snowstorm.

Halfway through the set, the securtiy begin to push the crowd back to leave a performing circle vacant for the entry of a pair of Fire-Poiists...

 

Inset appropriate Arthur Brown/Bloodhound Gang/Coal Chamber/Johnny Cash quote here.

I take a moment to ponder the wonder of watching an art/dance with its origins in the Maori culture of New Zealnd, performed to the sounds of an ethnic Russian band performing covers of a German band playing an originally British music inspired by American music with its origins in the meeting of African and European musical cultures; whilst standing in a principally ex-pat bar in the depths of Central Asia. 

Multicultural ponderings over, I headed into the main bar and met a girl from Valencia and a Belgian girl who'd lived in Paraguay, giving me a chance to dust off my extremely rusty Spanish and give it a spin (to triple mix my metaphors)
On our return to the theatre of war, We are greeted enthusiastically by the drummer of the next band up, who reliably informs us that he is the only drummer in Kyrgyzstan who can really do double bass drumming.  And to be fair to him, he was a little machine of steady, hammering power. 

The only band in Kyrgyzstan with a drummer who can
really do that double-bass drumming - apparently.

Once again, we end our tale in the wee hours of the morning that most respectable people never encounter, stumbling out into the cool morning air, all circle-pitted out, drenched in sweat which is probably not exclusively ours and ready to retire to our beds.

                                               / - / - /          \ - \ - \    

 

p.s. I have of late discovered that The Kyrgyz Republic has a very intriguing range of toiletries and general cleansing products which my flatmate Daniel Mahony seems to have a knack of hunting out.  Here are a few examples:



Why bother with dull old mint when
you can have Oak-flavoured mouthwash



 

 

Or how about some beer-flavoured shampoo



And what serendipity that the name of this bleach
is also one of the main things it will be used to clean up.