I spent the last couple days in Kazakhstan for work, at the Alatau Sanatorium.  I think of sanatoriums as a place where the wealthy go to recuperate from nervous breakdowns, or to lay on lounge chairs taking the waters as they wait for their TB to go into remission.  This one is a grand old Soviet complex, still highly regarded as a place to convalesce from just about anything, including everyday life.  Although, as an American, creaky resort hotels in the off-season, with long dimly lit corridors absent of people, conjure up unavoidable redrumredrum associations.

There was a pharmaceutical exhibition going on in the hotel.  On the way to breakfast one morning, the hallway opened on to a festival of drug advertising.  Two tall wafer-thin women in black minidresses and beauty pageant sashes offered glasses of champagne to the breakfast crowd.  Near an advertisement for Candida treatment featuring a foxy redhead, people were in a frenzy to collect those pharmaceutical trinkets, like chubby ergonomic pens printed with pill names.  I scored a new bookmark advertising a pimple cream for Russian speaking teenagers.

My colleague had a birthday at the end of the workweek, so we celebrated the last night in the classic way, by drinking like it was our job.  We occupied a room and everyone brought modest contributions to the table:  a banana, some candies, a small package of chips, some cheese, a can of olives, plus the collection of booze bits left over from previous celebrations:  a couple of half-drunk bottles of vodka, some vermouth, some syrupy wine.

It’s been a while since I’ve been to a proper FSU drink-up celebration, with hours of toasting, snacking, smoking, and drinking into the early hours.  For a chunk of the world not known for its friendliness, this is truly their shining hour, gathered around the table, everyone so so earnest and unafraid to turn their hearts inside out in the wash of drink.   I clumsled my way through a birthday toast, working myself into a sentimental pitch, my eyes practically turning Anime and leaking tears.  Dear friends, a toast to international friendship!

The next morning I had a grand mal hangover, but was still doing better than the guy who showed up to breakfast holding a handkerchief to his face where his eye was swollen over.  I wanted to ask What the hell happened? but my Russian tank was at E and I knew all I would have been able to come up with would have been “DUUuhhhh……eeeeee…..?”   So I managed a little “me too brother” smile and went back to the task at hand, faith in the healing power of dairy fats, of putting as much into my stomach as it would allow.

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