Migration Patterns

This weekend we went snowboarding.  Bishkek has enormous snowy mountains that come right up to the southern city limits.  Possibly Bob Ross crafted this landscape with his own two hands.

We took up snowboarding last year, since it is about a seventh the cost of doing it in the US.  Together with friends who were also just starting, we rented boards and headed out.  Someone had read an article describing how to snowboard on about.com, and briefed us in the car ride up.  That was the end of our formal education.  These days I snowboard the way old people drive, but I am okay with this.

One of my favorite places to be in Kyrgyzstan is at the top of a mountain.  Maybe your life is different, but I don’t find myself on top of enormous mountains very often.  I spend most of my time either indoors or in cities where I can’t look more than a few yards without seeing some thing.  But at the top of a mountain, you can actually get a sense for how the earth is shaped, and feel yourself fixed to it, like a piece of hay stuck to a gargantuan sheep.  It makes me feel calmer.  I am going to miss this.

We are moving back to the US in two weeks.  We made this decision a few weeks ago, and I had started to list all the reasons why we’re doing this, since we had moved out here intending to spend two years and have decided to call it quits after not even a year.5.   But the task of writing it all down weighed so much that I decided to just throw it off the bus.

The short answer is, we want to be near the highest concentration of people we love, and that is in the northeast United States, so we are going back there.  I understand how lucky we are to have been able to just move out here and support ourselves and try new kinds of work and see new places and snowboard at 2 miles per hour.  But somehow all that doesn’t outweigh the cost of being separated from the people we want to live our lives with.

We’re still jobhunting, in both New York and Boston.  Where we end up moving will depend on which NGO throws more hot cash and bigger signing bonuses at us.

In the meantime, we’re tying off various projects here and making our goodbyes.  I had all these things I meant to write about living here, but I always get waylaid by procrastination, which sneaks up on me and opens its trenchcoat and flashes me on my way to the computer.  Even if I don’t get around to writing all those things down, I have already decided that I will refer to this period as back when I studied martial arts in Asia.

See you soon, perhaps.

---