Two weeksish
Hello everyone,
Sorry I haven’t been in contact with anyone recently, Kyrgyzstan has horrible internet and I’m still working on finding the best connection.
We left BWI right on time and flew to Memphis. Short trip, not much to talk about, then soon after I hopped on a plane to Amsterdam. Everyone around me spoke this strange European language, and they refused to chitchat with me in American, though they could read the Wall Street Journal.
The airport at Amsterdam was really nice, everyone speaks American and they use Dollars. We had a few beers at this authentic Irish pup. They don’t believe in tipping and they love playing bad American music and old IRA songs. I couldn’t help but think of my mother.
Then we flew to Almaty, Kazakhstan. I sat next to a nice Kazakh girl, Nurlugul, who said we could visit her in West Kazakhstan, which we might do. We arrived in Almaty around 5 a.m. local time (6 p.m. EST) and spent a good hour getting our visas. They charged us $30 but the receipt they gave us said they charged us $15. This was my first experience of a government official stealing from me. They didn’t even give me the 5 day visa I asked for. The place is not as awesome as Boядt makes it seem.
We hired a Taxi driver to take us across the border. He was an old man who drove a Benz. He drove us around town and gave us delicious Russian candy. I kept the wrappers, I’ll try to scan them.
We spent the night at a hotel and stayed up all night watching MTV Russia. They were playing reruns of the MTV movie awards that were horribly dubbed. They play one Russian video for every five American, but at least they play music videos. There’s no sort of Black of Hispanic population in this country, but they are all over television. That’s the nice part of my culture being exported, but for the most part it’s annoying seeing “LINKIN PARK” graffiti everywhere.
The toilets here are supper low flow, the toilet paper is like thick party streamers and there’s a little trash can next to the toilet.
Bishkek is awesome. It’s a small city that is completely different than anywhere I’ve ever been, (except Pennsylvania). The pollution is kind of bad, your nose is really a great filter. Everyone drives like a mad man, there’s no wrong side of the road you just drive as fast as you can to get where you need to go. It’s kind of fun, but there are always car accidents.
Stray dogs are everywhere. On occasion you see a rottweiler or a german sheared, and it’s obvious that a westerner left their guard dog on the street. For the most part they keep to themselves, though you can here them fighting at night. They certainly keep the cat population down.
The city doesn’t believe in street lights so most people go home by 9. Taxi’s are cheap but they can tell we’re Americans so they always charge us a lot.
They sell this strange milk everywhere, and everyone likes it. They get it from the kurds when you make cheese, so it’s a really think liquid. Then they bottle it and let it ferment like beer, so it’s carbonated and alcoholic. I’m not really a big fan, but I’ll try to warm up to it.
We live in an apartment that’s near some intersection. They don’t have a postal service so we don’t get tons of junk mail, but I don’t know how to get anything else. I don’t even know how to say my intersection. I just got someone to write it down for me, so if I get lost, I show someone my note pad, and they point me in the right direction.
Everyone AUCA has been extremely helpful. I’m one of 6 Americans there, the rest of the population comes from the neighboring countries. Everyone is beautiful and skinny, it’s kind of strange.
I take classes in English, though I have to help the teacher on occasion because English is her 3rd language.
Everything here is in Russian or Kyrgyz, which is confusing because they use the same alphabet. I’m start private Russian lessons in February, but in the mean time I’ve picked up a little bit to get around.
I really like it here, it’s like nothing I’ve ever imagined. I don’t know what they mean by culture shock, but the worst I’ve experienced was trying to explain to 5 store clerks what a coffee filter is, only to learn that they don’t use those in the country because they aren’t pointlessly wasteful like we are.
