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.

On Arriving and Experiencing the Lag

Having only traveled any great distance westwards before, I wasn’t fully prepared for the strange sensation of chasing the night that you get when you travel east.  We had left Heathrow at about 2pm and after only a few hours we were drifting through darkness with only the moon for company. 

Of the journey there is little of note to add,  portly American expats talking baseball and spinning around and diving down over Almaty airport in Kazakhstan a couple of times before being allowed to land in our only stop before Bishkek were the only things of note that happened. 

And so I landed in a country shrouded in mist and stolid bureaucracy.    I handed in my completed Visa and Entry forms at the Consulate and was immediately requested to fill in some more forms with precisely the same details.   I then had to cough up 70 dollars (whether for the government or the pocket of the official I remain unsure) and was visa’d (an impressively shiny one), stamped and unceremoniously spat out into a strange land. 

Fortunately I was spat out only as far as a pretty, friendly, young Russian woman with an A4 piece of paper bearing my name in large curvy letters.  So I found myself at 4 in the morning trundling through the darkness on the way to the city of Bishkek and the London School where I would be lodging and teaching. 

Of the School I can say a little, of the city next to nothing.  This is because the last day has been spent in a half daze of dozing and jetlag (I believe it’s my first experience of it, I can confirm it is rubbish).  So I managed to raise myself long enough to wander through the courtyard and have a look at the small but modern classrooms and cafeteria of the school, but of the rest of the city and country in which I currently abide I maintain the profoundest ignorance.

To discover if I manage to rid myself of this ignorance, dear readers, or if I merely spent the next nine months dozing fitfully you will have to wait for the next installment.