I got a new phone a couple of days ago. Once the service was switched on, I was surprised to find that I already had 8 text messages. The first read:

hope I can find someone

just as good as you were

to me just…………… without

the lies and heartache

This is the last segment of a page-long Been Dumped rant that was split across the half dozen SMSs.

Later that night the phone rang. I answered, and there was a pause on the other end. Then a deep voice ventured, “…Amanda?”

The next day I got a voice mail, possibly left by Barry White himself. The man wants her to be his valentine, aw yeah, and ends the call by sending a kissy-smacky noise down the line.

Last week I got a job.  This fills me with relief.

I am looking forward to Something New, and to having coworkers again.  Bishkek taught me that freelancing is not for me, at least not right now.   I also look forward to having health care again, something besides just Googling symptoms of a brain tumor.

I was back in Central Asia for a quick week-long project in January.  When the plane came in for a landing, everything everywhere was this lightless white.  I felt sort of like I’d been punched in the brain, it felt so bad to be back.  Most of this is a function of the jet lag of crossing 11 time zones; those trips take your mood and hold it underwater until no more bubbles come up.  But a piece of it was real too.

But all that’s over.  We are moving to New York, and to other places after that.

Forward, ho!

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.

I was in the city of Osh this past week.  Osh is the second largest city in Kyrgyzstan, in the south, right up against the border of Uzbekistan.  The feel is completely different from Russified, Soviet Bishkek.  The men wear ethnic hats and long velvety robes, the sun is always shining, and the landscape just some how matches better.  In Osh, you can hear the call to prayer or a herd of sheep bleating, all mingled in with autobody shops and the pumping bazaar.  Plus there’s a sacred mountain, smack in the city center, always popping up, which is somehow reassuring.

Here is a partial list of what I will be sorry to leave.

What I will miss:

1.  Getting to wear thick green eyeshadow to the grocery store, on Monday mornings.  Although I suppose I can keep doing this if we move to New York, depending on which neighborhood.

2.  The bread, the bread, and my special breadmaker, Honeybaby Evro.

3.  The pace.  I have had so much free time here, and it is wonderful.  Just once, just once go try living in a country where there aren’t caffeine jacking stations every three blocks, where the thought of drinking 20 ounces of coffee as your opening move for the day is lunacy.  Take a load off and have some watery green tea over the course of three hours instead.

Although when you have all the time in the world to get something done, it ends up taking all the time in the world.

4.  Pomegranates and persimmons.

5.  The chance to do so many new things:  snowboarding, see Thailand, trail a political protest, rafting, horseriding, hike in a pristine emptiness still fingerprint-free, drink mare’s milk, experience the powerful cleaning effects of that mare’s milk over the course of several days, shiver in a yurt, aikido.

6.  Kyrgyz hats.  The ak-kalpak is phenomenally dashing.

7.   How unselfconsciously people dance here.  Everyone dances, on the first beat; nobody is ever worried about looking stupid.  Fuck you MTV for making our generation worried about DANCING.  Fuck you.

8.  And of course, Kyrgyz people.  They are a lovely, friendly bunch, with A-1 smiles and nomad hospitality.

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.

From USA Today (on the Central Asian beat!):

Swedish engineers have concluded that Santa Claus lives in Kyrgyzstan and must spend no more than 34 microseconds (µs) delivering Christmas presents to each of the world’s 2.5 billion homes with children.

“We estimated that there are 48 people per square kilometer on Earth, and 20 meters between each home. So if Santa leaves from Kyrgyzstan and travels against the Earth’s rotation he has 48 hours to deliver all the presents,” Anders Larsson of Sweco tells AFP.

That’s assuming Rudolph and the other reindeer hurtle through the air at 3,604 miles per second, or 13 million mph.

The researchers concluded that Kyrgysztan was the most efficient spot from which to start the jolly fellow’s global delivery service. Despite this finding, Larsson was eager to avoid angering his Nordic neighbors who claim Father Christmas as one their own. He tells Helsingin Sanomat: “Regardless of what the calculations may indicate, I believe the real Santa Claus come from a place called Korvatunturi in the Finnish Lapland.”

USA TODAY has been unable to confirm the researchers’ calculations. We’ll update this posting if Claus or one of his elves sends us a response before the end of the day.

This from one of the commenters; fantastic imagery:

600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance – this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the same time that Santa reached the fifth house on his trip.

Our aikido teacher is sick, which means that until further notice we have to attend the advanced class.  You will recall that this level makes me want to cry.  Sure enough, half way through Friday’s session I started blocking the scene in which I declare I will never come back to this class again.  It was right around when a newly black-belted old man had me bent into the ground and was upbraiding me for something, smelling of old cheese and pointing my face at his toes which look like pieces of old cheese, that I decided I had had enough.  And that his name was Ded Syr – Grampa Cheese. 

I hope our usual teacher gets well soon.  Maybe he will bounce back if I send him an FTD arrangement, like a teddy bear holding a carnation-filled mug that says “Get Well Beary Soon!”.  Or if I hot glue the FTD teddy bear carnation mug to a Whitman’s Sampler.   Or if I strap the teddy bear and Whitman’s Sampler to the back of a baby panda.  Or if the carnations and candy and baby panda are all delivered to his house in the arms of Patrick Swayze.   And Patrick Swayze lifts my aikido teacher up at the hips and spins him around and shouts “Get well beary soon!” until my aikido teacher is in ecstasy. 

Moving ahead with holiday shopping, guess what Costco.com sells!

Caskets!!

In God’s Care Casket.

I kind of love the holistic consumer approach Costco has taken.  From cradle to grave!   Can you see the ad unfolding?

If only they also sold action plans, redwood seeds, the perfect sass-back, prescription drugs, winning dance-off moves, and children.

For Thanksgiving we went to some friends’ house, people who are sterling hosts who tolerate, say, you trying to demonstrate what you learned in aikido like a drunk kindergartner who just learned how to walk a curb or jump off a couch, and then instead of making a point of checking their watch they’ll actually give you another beer while you somersault into their furniture.

Our contribution to the meal was an apple pie.  Only our oven here, instead of having hundreds of degree settings, just has a knob labeled 1-2-3-4.  And you have to light the oven each time you use it, and when the little buildup of gas ignites with a whoosh! the backdraft blows your match out and flutters your hair.  The fact that we have so little control over the temperature means that each time our pies come out differently, probably how the pilgrim’s pies came out kind of different each time, since we both basically stick the whole thing over an open flame.

Thanksgiving was wonderful.  I did not eat the turkey with my bare hands.

***

At a BBQ this weekend a three year old noticed my tiny tattoo, a dinky little red fish on the inside of my wrist that I bought for $20 in 1995 and is mine forever.  I showed her how the little fish can swim if you tug the skin, and talked about how it can swim up my arm and out my shoulder.  I licked my finger and rubbed at it, to show its permanence.  Which it seems was news to her, that grown ups have tattoos that don’t wash off.  When her excitement about the forever factor reached a certain height, she asked me in a serious voice if I would talk to her mother about permanent tattoos.  In that way that small kids have where they try to be casually persuasive about something that is secretly really important to them.  Next BBQ I think I will bring some Slayer records.

***

This one goes out to all the people looking for some Indian food in Bishkek:  There’s a new stall in Bishkek City (Karpinka between Chui and Ogonbaev) with Indian meals ready-to-eat and packets of spices labeled “HYGIENIC, FLAVOURFUL & TASTY”.   The stall is staffed by a Russian woman who is selectively deaf and no matter how many times you say no bag thanks, no bag thanks, no bag thanks, she will place your purchases in a bag and hand them over with your change.  But yahoo!  Chana masala carnivala!

***

Getting a jump on the holiday shopping season!   Trying to locate online a personal care product that my uncle, a used car salesman living in Las Vegas, has requested.  This is the product description:

• SPF 15
• 4 oz tube
• Made in the USA
• Flammable

FLAMMABLE.  Tattooed vague ovens masala shave balm in a bag thanks!  Happy holidays!

Since getting here we’ve been doing some English conversation practice with a group of Central Asian teenagers who are aiming to nail the TOEFL like a scholarship piñata.

When we started with them last year, OBF and I would prepare a mini-presentation on an edifying topic each week and write on the board in different colored markers and ask them drool-provoking questions on things like early American political philosophy versus absolute monarchism. We kept whining to each other that they didn’t seem interested in what we were talking about, so we stopped trying so hard. By the end of the school year we were just looking for a reaction, so we’d do things like bring in pictures of Duchamp’s “The Fountain” and harvest the guffaws that someone could call a urinal ART. (You westerners so crazy!!!) The intellectual rigor rolled to a stop when one of our final sessions was devoted to discussing UFOs and the Bermuda Triangle while eating chocolate chip cookies.

In short, there will never be a major motion picture about two teachers who finally Reach Their Students by discussing iambic pentameter in rap lyrics, all set in Central Asia.

What’s been surprising to me is how awesome these kids are, and at such an awesome age, because I seem to recall the teenage years as being a real wincefest.  But watching these guys grow and change has totally awakened the cheek-pinching auntie inside me. And the urge to dip inside their wiggling, spring green minds and nudge them this way or that so they think more like me is irresistible.

One of my more slacker classes last year was having them fill in the dialogue for the peerless Qwantz dinosaur comic (premise: same panels, different day).  Tyrannosaurus sized thanks to Ryan North for allowing me to post some of my favorites:

Panel 1:  Hello guys! My name is Dingo I have a good mood!

2: Please talk to me!?!

3: I’m hate people! Dinasours have to be the leaders in the world!    Dino 2:  Bad boy you will pay for it!

4: OK!  Let’s be friends.  Dino 2: Please don’t bit me!  I will not do it anymore.  Please!  Oh I’m very happy.   Yes it’s a good idea!

5:  What a nice day?  Let’s go to the park to play something.   Dino 2: Yes!  OK let’s go!  I think it is a good idea

6:  Good bye my love see you tomorrow!   Your sincirely dinasour bye!

1: Oh, what is it? I need to come closer to understand what is there.

2: O-o-o-o! I found them.  Some people who I am going to eat.

3:  First of all, I will destroy their houses and then I will make “shashlyk” for me and my beautiful hungry wife.  Suisy, I got it.  Let’s have breakfast.

4:  It’s not enough for me.  It was just one family.  I want more John!!!    Little person:  HELP

5:  Don’t desturb me.  Close your mouth.  Why you always hungry?  Dino 2:  Because I am pregnant.  We’ll have a baby, darling!

6:  Ah!  You shoked me.  What the Hell you were waiting for?… Why didn’t you tell me before?

to be continued…

1:  Pizza Pizza who wants pizza?

2:  You!

3: I know you, you are the “monster pizza” company here is my territory get out of here or you’ll die like a trump.  Dino 2: Ha, You don’t know who my brother!  Sam, I’ve got a problem here!

4:  Oh, I didn’t expect that he has a real crazy brother.   Dino 2:  Stop!

5: Yo, you won the battle, but I’ll be back.  And I won’t be alone.  Dino 2:  Always yours

6:  You can’t see me but I can see you

1:  Ha! Ha! Ha! I am a cangsta.  My name is Snoop Dog.

2:  I want to eat somebody.

3: Hi baby I like you.  Dino 2:  Oh no you have broken my house

4:  AAA! Help me S.O.S.   Dino 2:  Stop, Stop.  I will kill you.  I am boy.

5:  Give me back my thinks… I am gangsta, I am gona tell my mam.   Dino 2: Get out until you are alive.

6:  mother help me he hurt me he took my thinks

This last one took a pathbreaking approach to the exercise:

Long time ago there lived two huge dinosaurs, big and small, mother and her son.

One day they were very hungry. They decided to catch some people and eat them.  Big mama moved to the village trying to find a delicious dinner.  Her bady didn’t want to make somebody die, he said “Mom please don’t do it they are alife.”

Mom didn’t want to hear those words, because she was really hungry.  Her son runed, trying to stop her.  “No mom stop, we should eat leaves or insects.”

She stoped and ate her baby.  She was happy and full.

Conclusion:  Don’t say needless word to hungry creature even mother.