What I won’t miss

Hello, from America.

I wrote this entry below last month before leaving Bishkek, but dallied before putting it up.  Then we were up in the holiday season, and I felt humbug about posting a list of complaints in the midst of candy cane time.  Like breaking wind during a baby’s christening.

Even though we’ve been back for three weeks, the post that follows is still true for me.  Unlike other times I’ve lived abroad, this time around I no longer felt obligated to be sweepingly positive about every single thing.  In fact, I think that’s kind of a vapid way to view any environment.

Anyway, here’s the bookend to the last post.

What I will not miss:

1.  Stupid folk wisdom that differs from my stupid folk wisdom.  I have zero patience for people telling me I should drink less water after a sweaty workout because it will make me sick.  Or that I should take care to not go barefoot so as to safeguard my (apparently moldering) fertility.  (How do you get pregnant if you AREN’T barefoot?)  But to this day I get nervous wearing socks to bed ever since being told as a child that this could cut off circulation to your feet.  And possibly cause infertility.

2.  Burning trash.  It is common practice here to burn garbage, right on the street corner.  I understand that this is a poor country, and that there isn’t always the money to collect the garbage on a regular basis.  But knowing this does not cancel out the fact that burning garbage smells powerfully noxious. All those plastic bottles, coated containers, lumps of used toilet paper, all on fire and breathing in that smoke, you can practically feel the cancer cells throwing a housewarming party in your lungs.   Once when coming back from the airport I had an unobstructed view across a field of the smoke just rising, rising from mass scale leafburning.  I said to the cab driver pretty smoky today, hunh.  And he goes that’s not smoke, that fog.  And I said there are FLAMES coming out of that dumpster sir only I said it in my head.

3.  Casual racism.  Of course, racism is no good in any form, but the overt kind is more insidious since the person spouting it seems to have taken you for someone who thinks like him.  Which is insulting.  When out in the town of Karakol last winter, I was negotiating the price of a snowmobile ride up a mountain.  I guess my bargaining struck the snowmobiler as slimy; he smiled sourly and told me I was tricky, like a Jew.  When I was worried about possibly having contracted tick-borne encephalitis this summer, my Russian guide yanked her eyelids back and warned me not to go to “these doctors”.

4.  Feeling like a foreigner.  In particular, I find it painful to not understand jokes in Russian.  Every time someone sends up a “I have a joke!”, my heart tightens up, since I know I won’t understand.  And moreover, the people around me will want me to laugh with them.  They’ll look and gauge if I got it or not, and while I’m smiling like a big-time faker, someone will say with this garish grin “See, the white crow said to the crane ‘no kasha for me darling!’”  Everyone is laughing, but I just won’t get it.  This makes me feel unbearably lonely.

5.  Bishkek’s crap graffiti.  I’m sorry, but writing “Tokio Hotel SUPER” freehand on a wall is NOT cutting it.  If I had a pot of superficial international assistance, I would seriously invest in improving the graffiti.  I would bring in some consultants from Queens and pay them $700 a day to conduct seminars on how to do it up right.

6.  The entrenchment of corruption – every shakedown starts with a shake. Your cab gets flagged by the traffic police, the driver gets out, and EVERY TIME, the driver shakes the cop’s hand, often smiles, and then pays the cop money for some make-believe offense.  And then gets back in the car and rails about the crookedness of it all.

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