All posts in Kyrgyzstan

  • A Few Specific Muslims I Have Talked To

    Over the course of the last few years, I’ve talked to many Muslim people about faith. For some reason, these are the ones that stand out in my memory for the unexpectedness of what they said, the sincerity of their belief, the difference between my perception of what a Muslim looks like and what they looked like, their personal qualities, or some combination of these things. I’ve tried to write what they said without interpreting it here – although of course the questions that I asked in order to get them to talk more may betray some expectations I may have had.

    Azerbaijan, 2015 – Khalid

    I met Khalid online while in Azerbaijan. We spent a day walking through the old city talking about life in Azerbaijan, life in general. Many people in Azerbaijan are not particularly religious. Khalid was more religious than many – religious enough in any case to feel the need to impress on me fairly early on that “ISIS and people like them are not real Islam.”

    As we were walking through Baku’s old city, he said, “You know, the world is a bit like a video game. Game companies and programmers create video games with certain parameters, and certain rules for winning. I understand that God could have created the world in any way he chose, but he chose this way. So I think that the most important thing about life is to follow the rules of this game, because the rules could be completely different if God had willed it.”

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    Kyrgyzstan, 2016 – Marina

    Marina did my nails at a salon in Bishkek. She was a cheerful ethnically Russian woman originally from Kyrgyzstan, who’d donned a shirt that day which betrayed more than a hint of cleavage.

    “Do you like this job?” I asked her. “Oh yes!” she said. “I love this job. I love making people feel happy and beautiful. It is very interesting and funny for me.”

    “How did you end up doing this job?” I asked.

    “Well,” she said, “I used to live in Dubai. My first ex-husband was Syrian. And I had no job. I was very bored. He said that I would get an education and continue university when I got married to him, but really I was just all the time at home – no education, nothing! And you know, in Dubai you have people to do everything for you so I didn’t even do houseworks. We divorced and I moved back here to where I grew up and got trained to do this job. I’m very happy now doing this.”

    “That’s great.” I said.

    “So where are you from?” she asked.

    “Canada,” I said. “But I actually live in Istanbul with my boyfriend.”

    “Is he Turkish?” she asked.

    “Yes, he is,” I answered.

    “Does his family like you?” she asked. “My second ex-husband was Turkish and his family did not like me.”

    “Oh?” I said. “Why not? Because you weren’t Muslim?”

    “I am Muslim!” she crowed. “I converted before I even married my first husband – and he didn’t even believe in anything, not anything, nothing. He didn’t want me to become a Muslim. But for me being Muslim felt right. My second husband’s family just didn’t like me because I was not Turkish. They wanted to their son a Turkish girl. You must be careful with your boyfriend and his family.”

    “How did you decide to convert to Islam?” I asked.

    “Well,” she said. “It didn’t happen immediately. Actually, it used to be, I used to have a job and on my breaks I would go out behind a mosque… to smoke. And I would hear the call to prayer – you know the call to prayer? And it didn’t happen immediately, but I felt something. I really felt it. And for me religion is something you feel. So I converted. Not everybody understands that religion is something you feel. I tried to explain it to my mother once. I said, “If you named your daughter Ayshe, how would you feel?” And she said, “That name is feel wrong for my daughter.” And I said that if I had a daughter named like “Maria,” or “Anna” I feel myself the same way that “Ayshe” is for her. Then she was understanding me.

    At the end of the pedicure, I asked her if she drank.

    “Of course!” she said. “Yes, of course I drink!”

    “What kind of vodka would you recommend I bring home from Kyrgyzstan?” I asked.

    “They are mostly all nice,” she said. “If you pay a little more, they are better.”

     

    Kyrgyzstan, Ramadan 2016 – Nurdin

    Nurdin was an AirBnB host in his late twenties that I found along the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. Despite being ethnically Kyrgyz (Kyrgyz people are – at least traditionally – Muslims) he was observing his first Ramadan fast. His parents, brother, and sister-in-law were not fasting, so he spent a lot of time in his room until after sunset when he would come and join the rest of us to eat. I didn’t understand he was fasting until I’d been staying at his place for five days already; I invited him to go hiking with me if he wasn’t busy and he apologized for not coming as he didn’t think he could force his body to hike if he wasn’t eating all day.

    “Oh, I’m sorry,” I said. “I hadn’t realized you were observing Ramadan. Of course you shouldn’t go hiking.”

    “Yes,” he said. “Sorry I didn’t tell you, but I just think Ramadan and religion are private things – you do them for yourself, they are between you and God. It is not good to do them only to boast to other people that you’re doing them. You know, here in Kyrgyzstan we have big problems with radicalization these days – these people are not practicing the real Islam, but I want to practice Islam in a good way. So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

    Turkey, 2014 – Ayse

    Ayse was an incongruously kind and patient housekeeper for the first (and last) family I worked with in Turkey. She arrived wearing her hijab every morning, but usually removed it to tie her hair back if the man of the family wasn’t home. One day I tried asking her to help me with something in broken Turkish; she asked if it could wait until after. It was then that I noticed she had her head covered. “Oh sorry,” I said. “Yes, go do your prayers. It’s not urgent.”

    “You know the prayers?!” she asked excitedly. “Do you know Ramadan too?!”

     

  • Gulshada from Osh

    I arrived in Osh, a small city in Southern Kyrygzstan, in the evening. The light fell warmly on the unkempt buildings as my taxi driver whipped me around corners before finally depositing me in front of a grocery store and overcharging me a paltry dollar.

    The owner of the guesthouse I’d booked for that week came to pick me up there. She boasted several gold teeth and a friendly demeanor. The garden of her house, which had received wonderful reviews on Booking.com, smelled strongly of pig shit. I would later learn that it was also infested with cockroaches, and purposely left the bathroom lights on all night so that I wouldn’t see them scurrying out of the way as I marched towards the porcelain throne, my nocturnal bathroom journeys an unpleasant side-effect of eating Kyrgyz watermelon, apparently too early in the season.

    Gulshada’s husband, who spent most of his time working in the garden, spoke Russian with a strange accent. The night I arrived, Gulshada informed me that Osh was part of a traditional Uzbek kingdom and that, because of this, much of the population including her and her husband, was Uzbek. “Now there are fewer Uzbeks than before because there was some fighting between Uzbeks and Kyrgyz people a few years ago,” she said.

    I attributed Gulshada’s husband’s accent to an Uzbek linguistic influence and his slow speech to consideration for my own poor Russian. People in Osh seemed to have a generally tenuous grasp of Russian anyway; one woman at the bazaar didn’t even know her numbers in Russian, only in a language that sounded to me like funny Turkish (the language was definitely Kyrgyz or Uzbek, but I couldn’t tell which one.) So I thought little more of it until Gulshada showed up the next day to see how things were going. I was weighing my options about leaving because of the afore-mentioned cockroaches and pig shit smell, and wondering if it would be worth the hassle to find another hotel and get a refund. I mentioned the cockroaches to Gulshada, who shrugged and said, “They probably walked in from the garden. It’s warm, you know, the door is usually open.” Having not made a decision one way or the other about leaving, I changed the subject.

    “So how did you meet your husband?” I asked. “Oh, she said, “you know, he actually worked for me. And then of course, we fall in love and get married. He’s a good man and he loves my son, even though I had my son with my second husband. He even likes to pretend they look alike. But now he is kind of like a child because he has a brain tumour. Actually, that is why I started running guesthouses. Three years ago it was bad – he forgot everything, he even forgot his name. We took him to the hospital and they said, ‘It’s a brain tumour. There’s nothing we can do so take him home.’ In Kyrgyzstan the hospital system is very bad. So I brought him home and took care of him with natural remedies, and because of that I had to quit my job and I couldn’t work for three years. So because of that I started doing guesthouses. Now he is doing better. He can talk, he can work. But as you probably noticed, he is kind of like a child…”

    I felt a pang of curiosity about whether or not the diagnosis of a brain tumour was correct (is it possible for patients to make that kind of recovery in the event of a brain tumour? Or were the symptoms more consistent with those of a stroke?) This was immediately met with a pang of guilt, and I decided to stay for the remaining few days, pig shit smell and cockroaches or no. Meanwhile, Gulshada sat on the couch and answered her phone, chattering loudly as I sipped kvas and continued feeling slightly guilty about the fact that I come from a place with free socialized healthcare and relatively small number of cockroaches.

    Gulshada hung up.

    “That was my daughter,” she said. “She is feeling stressed out. Her husband is feeling frustrated at work.”

    “Oh,” I said.

    “They live in Bishkek,” Gulshada continued. “And because there are tensions between Uzbek and Kyrgyz people in this country, Uzbek people can get a job but it’s very difficult for them to advance at work. They have to work in low-level positions, because there is fear that if they get some power than something will happen.”

    “That sucks,” I said.

    “Yeah,” said Gulshada. “It’s tough to be Uzbek in Kyrgyzstan.”

  • Kyrgyzstan: Yurts, Russian, and Radicalization Fears and Realities

    As an adolescent, I hated yurts, which smacked of a patronizing variety of poseur-hippie that rubbed me in all the wrong ways. The offensive yurts always seemed to pop up on university campuses, at homeschooling conferences, and random stretches of grass, accompanied by a posse of beckoning dreadlocked evangelists, “Hey, do you want to come and see our yurt? Come inside!”

    It’s not that yurts aren’t cool, it was just that they seemed so cliché.

    With this in mind, it is with a touch of embarrassment that I confess that my greatest goal for my trip to Kyrgyzstan was to, at some point, sleep in a yurt. I knew it was likely to be a tourist yurt, but sleeping in a yurt in Kyrgyzstan makes me less of a poseur than homeschooling-conference hippies, right?

    Maybe not, but people can change.

    Anyway, at an undeniably touristic yurt camp where I stayed, where German tourists flock to bask in the natural glory that are the pastures and mountains of Kyrgyzstan, I fell in with a group of Kyrgyz tourists who, like me, were entirely unused to yurt-living.  They arrived a few hours after I did, and cheerfully plonked themselves beside me in the dining yurt and began chattering.

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    The afore-mentioned dining yurt

    “I slept in a yurt once before actually,” said one of my new buddies. “But it wasn’t as comfortable as these ones. It was a real yurt.”

    “You mean you don’t stay in yurts regularly, not even for vacation?” I asked. “No,” said another girl. “We don’t. We’re from Bishkek.”

    The following night, the same girls regaled me with tales of their daytime activity, a show of traditional horse games and archery. As we ate we watched a young Kyrgyz girl dance to traditional music and then stood while she conducted a “master class” which was supposed to be a way for us to experience Kyrgyz dance, and was definitely a way to make us all look like total idiots. The Kyrgyz women were barely better than me at the moves, which surprised me. I’d thought that they would have at least some background, though movies or a lesson in an elementary school gym class – something. It didn’t appear to be the case.

    We sat down again to munch on cookies and sip tea mixed with jam. The conversation went on in Russian, so I mostly focused on eating because unless I’m being spoken to directly, it’s hard for me to follow. I looked around at them. They comprised a wider variety of ages than I’d first assumed. The youngest girl I met was 15, and the oldest member of the group was in his early thirties.

    “How did you all meet each other?” I asked, as the conversation lulled.

    “Actually,” one explained, “This is a program called Muras and it’s about kochman. In Kyrgyz, kochman means nomad, and this program is about bringing youth who are Kyrgyz but who don’t have their culture anymore to experience the traditional Kyrgyz culture. You know, all Kyrgyz people used to be nomads and live in yurts, but now there are also a lot of people like us who live sedentary lives in Bishkek and speak usually Russian.”

    “Are there any Kyrgyz people who don’t even speak Kyrgyz?” I asked.

    “Yeah, maybe. We go to school in Russian and university in Russian, and maybe there are some parents who speak only Russian at home. In Bishkek, it’s possible. Or people speak Kyrgyz, but not at an academic level. Anyway, with this program we go around Kyrgyzstan for ten days for free, and we see some traditional things like what it is like to live in yurt, riding horses, dances, crafts and things like that. Some of us are writers, bloggers, and journalism students. We take pictures and write about our experience in order to encourage other youth to know more about traditional Kyrgyz culture.”

    “I have another question,” I said. “During the Soviet Union, Kazakh people were forced into collective farming and more or less stopped being nomads. Did that happen in Kyrgyzstan too?”

    “Actually, yes, there are lots of sedentary Kyrgyz people now,” said the woman sitting next to me, a doctoral student called Gulbara. “What usually happens nowadays is that people in the villages have some animals, but instead of taking them to pasture in the summertime they pay another shepherd to take his animals to pasture. So maybe only five people from every village go to live in a yurt in the summer. The rest stay in town and work. A lot of people don’t want to stay in yurts. Moving is expensive, and being in a yurt can be a bit boring.

    Next up was an interview with camp staff, conducted by the journalistically inclined members of the group. The gist of the interview, translated for me later, was that the woman working at her camp loved her job because she saw it as a way to combat the rise of radicalization in Kyrgyzstan. “Why are youth interested in radicalization?” she asked. “Why not be interested in our traditions? That’s why I do what I do.”

    I asked one girl, a journalist called Jibek, about her job outside of this program. “I mostly write about success stories,” she said. “In Russian and sometimes in English.” “Not in Kyrgyz?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Actually, my English is better than my Kyrgyz.”

    At the next meal, I got a question I wasn’t prepared for: “So, what did you know about Kyrgyzstan before coming?”

    I stammered, both because I was expected to answer in Russian because I hadn’t expected the question. “Um, I heard that you have yurts, that you eat a lot of meat, that you used to be a part of the Soviet Union… but you know, North Americans really know nothing about Central Asia. Really nothing. So I can’t say I was raised to think about Kyrgyzstan at all.”

    “Well,” said one of my conversation partners helpfully, “Kyrgyzstan is actually kind of a contradicted country. We are right next to China and we look Asian, but we’re not Chinese. We speak a Turkic language, but we’re not Turkish. Many of us speak Russian and we were part of the Soviet Union, but we’re not Russian either. And we have many different ethnic groups – Kyrgyz, Russian, Uzbek, Muslim Chinese, some Turks and Koreans. And we’re kind of at a strategic location between all of those countries, so everybody wants a piece of the pie – especially China.”

    The next day the group was rejoined by a woman working for UNICEF Kyrgyzstan, and the topic of radicalization came up again. “I work with education and things,” she said, “and some healthcare too. There is a big problem with radicalization in Kyrgyzstan, so we had a measles epidemic recently because of it. There were some people that were telling parents that vaccines weren’t halal, and that’s all it took.”

    It seemed funny to me. Kyrgyzstan seemed utterly different from Turkey; few women were wearing Islamic coverings and I heard the call to prayer drifting from a nearby mosque only rarely. Still, the topic of radicalization had come up twice, and it seemed as though people were talking enough about it that it must have been current.

    I left the yurt camp and my new friends to work for a few days in the nearest large town of Karakol. My homestay host had things to say about radicalization to. “Kyrgyzstan has some very nice, very good traditions and very good things,” he said. “But also some problems. Like radicalization is a big problem. In the south, about 1000 people went to join radical Islamist organizations this year. (Note: I’m just quoting, but this link claims 500.)  It is mostly happening in the south, among young men who are not educated and don’t have anything good to do in their life. Yes, it’s a problem. A very big problem.

    It seemed almost preposterous to me, as on the surface Kyrgyzstan had none of the overt aggressiveness that Turkey sometimes has, particularly when it came to young men. I occasionally got greeted in the street, but nobody touched me or tried to follow me, and most people did not even extend their greeting to flirtation.

    I was standing in line at the airport in Bishkek waiting for my flight to Istanbul when the bombs went off at Ataturk airport. The latest news appears to indicate that one of the bombers was from Kyrgyzstan, so I guess there was something to what everybody seemed to be saying.

    The main gist of the trip, however, was not radicalization but hospitality. And yurts. They were as good as I imagined.

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  • Ramadan in Turkey: Culture Wars and Bülent Ersoy

    It’s Ramadan in Turkey right now, and Istanbul has had a bad month. The first day a bomb went off, killing five police officers. Shortly after, a group of men armed with pipes raided a record store in Cihangir where a number of people were quietly listening to a new Radiohead album and drinking beer. The attackers swore and shouted about how disrespectful it was to drink during Ramadan while beating the attendees. One yelled that hew as going “to burn them inside.” The perpetrators were detained by police but were later released without charges.

    Video of the attack in Cihangir – not graphic.

    Later the same day, Erdogan vowed to rebuild a military barracks on the site of Gezi Park, a plan which sparked nationwide protests in 2013, during which a number of people died. Those protests gave rise to predictions of a Turkish Spring akin to the Arab Springs happening around the same time. This didn’t materialize, but the prodigious force of these protests caused Erdogan to withdraw the proposal to build on Gezi . . . apparently until now.

    The next evening a group of people protesting the attack in Cihangir by standing and drinking in the street were attacked by police, who shot tear gas into the crowd even though the protest was peaceful. Meanwhile, the perpetrators of the original attack haven’t been charged even though one of them was caught on video, and the business owner and business have been evicted by the owner of the building, who is presumably afraid of further repercussions. Then it was announced that the forthcoming Transgender and Gay Pride Parades have been cancelled too over “security fears” during Ramadan as ultra-nationalist youth organization Alperen Hearths threatened violence. The same thing happened last year; the government forbade the parade to go ahead only a few days before it was supposed to take place, even though there is no legal requirement for parade organizers to request government permission. Both this year and last, the parades went ahead anyway and were violently dispersed by police armed with water cannons and rubber bullets. No “ultra-nationalistic organizations” perpetrated violence, except the state of course.

    To finish off this violent layer-cake with judicious sprinkling of powdered wtf, the same day that the Transgender Pride Parade-goers were attacked by police Erdogan and his wife Emine broke their Ramadan fast with none other than Bülent Ersoy. Ersoy, transgender diva extraordinaire, apparently labours under the illusion that she isn’t transgender. And while it may be the desired outcome of the trans movement to obliterate questioning around your identified gender (a more complicated issue that I won’t get into here), the fact that she deems it appropriate to allow her trans compatriots to be teargassed and shot at with rubber bullets while she breaks bread with the man who allows it to happen smacks of a complete divorce from reality. Ersoy is not much of an inspiration (as other people on the internet have called her), simply for the fact that she’s trans and has done what she wants. Everybody tries to do what they want, and the only difference between Ersoy and regular people is that she succeeded at it because she had money and musical success.

    Source: The Guardian

    Source: The Guardian

    Erdogan looks like he just sharted.

    At any rate, I was expecting Ramadan violence. In theory, Ramadan is supposed to be a month of peace, giving to the poor, and understanding what it is like to live with little. For me, Ramadan is mostly an occasion to witness two things: hypocrisy and how the fissures of Turkish society widen each year.

    My first Ramadan in Turkey, I witnessed my employers feast like gluttons each night and sleep all day, while leaving nannies to take care of their children at all times (that’s right – no time off, but you can do that when you employ someone from Nepal because it’s not like they speak Turkish well or know their rights.) My female boss talked constantly about how much she hoped Ramadan would help her lose weight while lamenting how skinny I was compared to her while eating “all the time.” (In fact, I ate less than she did, was significantly taller, and exercised every day. Furthermore, she only fasted for about three days, though she still piously slept the whole day and partied all night. She was delusional.)

    While I’d initially been looking forward to the experience of Ramadan that first summer in Turkey, assuming that the intentions of the holiday lined up with its practice, I quickly changed my tune. When my bosses were awake during the day, they were cranky, abused their children and staff, and talked about how generous they were to the poor. In response, I gorged myself on breakfast every day and drank at every opportunity because, even though I still believed that Ramadan could be observed sincerely, it was all too much to bear.

    Around that same time, Erdogan was in the process of moving from being the prime minister of the country to being the president, and people were questioning his motives. There were rumours that he had cancer for a while, and that the presidency (which was more ceremonial than anything at the time) was a way to live out his political days. There was also speculation that he was doing it to keep his hold on power.

    That summer I went to the gay pride parade in Istanbul, which smacked more of a protest than a party, but went ahead peacefully and relatively safely.

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    People put signs in the gate of the Russian embassy, as Russia was already persecuting gays at the time.

    It was that summer that I began to realize that Turkey was not as stable as it appeared from my vantage point in Canada. Secular friends talked about how much that hated that there were cities in Turkey where it was impossible to buy food during the day during Ramadan, about how they were concerned by how the government was encouraging a return to conservative (ostensibly “Muslim”) values. At the time, it didn’t seem as bad as they said. It wasn’t – and it was.

    I came back to Turkey a year later to an even more polarized political discourse. Secular people bemoaned how many more women were veiled. The government had refused to negotiate with Kurdish militias, restarting a war that had been in a state of détente for a while. And even though I didn’t want to engage in the same kind of judgement that Turkish people seemed happy to throw at each other, I started to understand when I bussed one day through a more conservative area of Istanbul wearing a dress that went up to my neck and down to my knees and was rudely stared at by many of the covered ladies there.

    Though I resisted feeling the same way about “other” people that many of my secular compatriots did, (“I could never have a friend who was veiled!” “You don’t understand Muslims – but I do, and they are bad people!” “Muslims! – followed by an eyeroll. I’m from a Muslim family, I can say that.”) I began to understand the depth of Turkey’s fissures, great canyons of difference that are capitalized on by the government, who caters to the more conservative and anti-Kurdish crowd by promising a more Muslim and more secure state if they can only stay in power.

    In the following months, Turkey began to experience terrorist attacks. The first, which the government, unbelievably, blamed on Kurdish people, targeted Kurdish protesters. The rest were a mixture of ISIS and Kurdish factions, or at least, that’s who claimed them. Whether or not the government was responsible is a question, although as one friend said, “The government created the conditions for these kinds of attacks to exist.”

    This brings us to Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and the best time of year to determine who belongs on which side of the canyon of difference because, at this point, radical Muslims have license to attack secular people for behaving in supposedly “non-Muslim” ways with minimal, if any, repercussions. Furthermore, the cancellation of the Pride Parades because of “Ramadan” helps reinforce the idea that Muslims cannot participate in the Pride movement, that there is an ideology-binary, that you’re either with the government or against it. In reality, one of the women in the above photographs is sporting a hijab, but appears as into the idea of pride as everybody else.

    Turkey is not a stable country by any means, and much of the political manoeuvering has people coming up with wild – or not so wild – conspiracy theories. After the Radiohead attack in Cihangir, a neighbourhood that houses the largest part of Turkey’s expat community, a Turkish friend mused that the neighbourhood was targeted for that reason and that the attackers might have had something to do with the government. “The government has no reason to want expats,” one friend noted, “because expats understand that there’s something better out there. They know that Turkey doesn’t need to accept this kind of treatment.”

    It’s not something I want to believe, but it’s hard to prevent these theories from lodging in your brain. Suddenly, the fact that it takes six months to get a residency permit and that it’s nearly impossible to leave the country during the six months that you’re waiting for your appointment becomes not a symptom of Turkey’s general administrative inefficiency, but a deliberate attempt to keep naysayers out.

    As for the new plans for Gezi Park, they are certainly a provocation and could potentially send Turkey sailing into a civil war. I can just imagine Erdogan a la Nero, except instead of plucking the strings of lyre he’d be plucking the hairs of his moustache (because, how the hell else do you get a moustache to even do that?) and instead of Rome it’s Constantinople. Or Ankara. Or whatever. I’m done with the analogies. I just hope things calm down after Ramadan.

    On a more positive note, here in Kyrgyzstan I stayed at an AirBnB where my host was celebrating Ramadan. My host, a very kind and gentle man and one of my best AirBnB hosts to date, didn’t even tell me that he was celebrating. I only found out after staying at his house for five days.

    “Do you celebrate Ramadan every year?” I asked.

    “No,” he said. “This is actually my first Ramadan. And actually it’s kind of about forgiveness – I mean, not that I’ve done a lot of very bad sins but – um, I don’t know how to express this in English exactly.”

    “Is it sort of like reminding yourself how good God is, compared to you?” I asked.

    “Yes, like this, kind of,” he said. “And anyway, it is not about showing how good you are. You are not supposed to act any differently during Ramadan. You don’t get to be mean to others because you are hungry, and it’s a personal thing so you shouldn’t tell everybody you are fasting.”

    In conclusion, Erdogan doesn’t own Ramadan. He just uses whatever he can to suit his political agenda and allows others to do the same.

  • What the Fog: Horseback Riding in the Mountains in Kyrgyzstan

    The other day I went horseback riding in the mountains. First, I stopped by a yurt for some kumis, a traditional Kyrgyz spring beverage of fermented horse milk. Please note the very cool yurt storage system. This yurt also had a stove and chimney (these are not uncommon yurt accessories).IMG_3718

    Then I got on my horse. He did absolutely nothing that I told him to.
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    Because I was so inexperienced, my guide had to take my horse and attach our two horses with a rope. It was a blow to my ego and, I’m sure, to my horse’s. Fortunately, the guide’s horse did embarrass himself by farting no less than 15 times on the way up the mountain. I had never heard a horse fart before, but here I am today telling you about it.

    My horse responded by seeming to try to get his mouth as close to the source of the farts as possible. My first thought? “That’s disgusting. Like that movie The Human Centipede.” My second thought: “Huh. The equestrian centipede.”

    All I can say is that, when you are climbing up a mountain in Kyrgyzstan in a fog thicker than your Mom and you have unwittingly thought of the most disgusting movie that exists on earth, it pays to be able to distract yourself with a good vocabulary.

    We saw some of the best views in Kyrgyzstan.

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    If you look really closely, you can see a yurt on the right.

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    On the way back, it started pouring rain. We had already been dampened by the fog, but the rain soaked us through. We hightailed it back to the yurt, at which point I learned that being on the back of a trotting horse requires some more supportive undergarments because otherwise it is very painful in the chestal region. The yurt inhabitants quickly stripped me of my shirt and gave me a shapeless cardigan worthy of the finest elderly Kyrgyz lady. There is not much privacy in a yurt, so it was a bit of an undertaking. I was thankful and felt much better.

    I think my guide felt a bit badly to have taken me up when the weather was so bad. I would, however, recommend going horseback riding in Kyrgyzstan when the weather is nice, since from the bottom the mountains look like this.

    IMG_3739I had fun anyway, but if I had the chance to do it over again I would postpone the trip to another day.

  • Cultural Learnings of Kyrgyzstan for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Canada

    The countries Central Asia are the new Timbuktu of the world, a cluster of vaguely exotic locales whose location nobody is exactly sure of – at least, nobody outside of the ex-Soviet Union and maybe Turkey. Sacha Baron Cohen took advantage of this lack of knowledge in his shock humour classic Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, a terrible movie that has, nonetheless, at least put the idea of Central Asia in people’s heads.

    Still, when I told people were I was going I was met with polite nodding or an honest, “actually, I’m not really sure where that is.”

    Well, I’m in Kyrgyzstan, not Kazakhstan, though if you didn’t notice that in the title you wouldn’t be alone. There’s a reason for this change, and it’s not my desire to trick you or hold your lack of knowledge over your head. In fact, I was supposed to be going to Kazakhstan, and would have succeeded if it weren’t for my own stupidity. For you see, I bought a visa to Kazakhstan last year only to be pleasantly surprised when the visa indicated I was eligible to spend 30 days as long as I did it within the next year.

    So I waited 8 months. Finally, I bought a ticket, booked a place to stay, and took the bus to the airport. There was traffic and I arrived late enough to start hyperventilating in line about whether I would actually manage to have them put my baggage on the plane. All in vain as it turned out. I arrived at the counter one minute before the check-in deadline, placed my bag on the conveyor belt, and handed my passport to the check-in agent.

    “Where is your visa to Kazakhstan?” she asked.

    I flipped through the pages of my passport and handed it back to her.

    “But this visa is expired,” she said. “See? February 8, 2016.”

    “No no,” I said with mortifying self-assuredness, “it doesn’t expire until August. See? 08/02/2016.”

    She took a picture of it and made a call. Adem grabbed it to look. “Kate,” he said, “look at this other date. It says 23/06/2015. There is no way you can be right.

    The bizarre calm of accepting fear fulfilled descended over me. Adem and I strolled to the ticket counter in the hopes of cancelling the ticket before the plane took off. While we were there, I booked another ticket to Kyrgyzstan for the following week.

    And that is the story of how I was once almost deported from Kazakhstan, except not really. It’s just the story of a three hundred dollar mistake that motivated me to scarf down a brownie and cry for a bit.

    I arrived in Kyrgyzstan yesterday. The interior of the airport smelled funny, though I couldn’t place the scent. Body odour – of course, a classic – but something else. People pushed towards the customs officials in a line that resembled people waiting for the release of a new iPhone. (A.K.A. NO LINE.) When I was finally able to push my way to the front, I could see that the border officials were wearing hats that made them look like they were from North Korea.

    This is not hyperbole; in fact, if anything the hats were like a hyperbolic version of North Korea army hats. They were green with a wide brim and even an extravagantly sloped top that reached it’s peak at the front of the hat and another, smaller, peak at the back. Affixed to the front of this verdant hat-valley was a large red star brooch flanked by sheaves of wheat, the official symbol of the Soviet Union. On the glass of the passport control booth was a large sign showing a camera with a red line crossed through it; I can only assume this is because Kyrgyzstan does not want the secret of the highly embarrassing and amusing border control hats to get out to the rest of the world.

    The sheaves of wheat were a laughably ironic symbol also; during the Soviet Period, collective farming was imposed on neighbouring Kazakhstan, which had previously been largely nomadic. This resulted in mass starvation, with some sources claiming that 38 percent of the population perished. While this didn’t happen in Kyrgyzstan, the sheaves of wheat still seem an ironic symbol for a country that a. is very close to Kazakhstan and b. has not been a Soviet Republic for 25 years.

    I haven’t had a chance to talk to any Kyrgyz people in any depth yet, but the hats were giving me the feeling that Kyrgyzstan may be a bit nostalgic for the Soviet period.

    As I stood in line mentally besmirching the hats, the man next to me said, “So you are from Canada.”

    “Yes,” I said.

    “Why are you coming to Kyrgyzstan?” He sounded like it thought it was a bit weird. In truth, it did seem weird; in that whole crowd of people, I’d seen only two others who looked like tourists from a place that wasn’t Russia. “Well,” he said, “there are lots of beautiful places. You can go hiking.”

    It was my turn to go up to the border counter. I took a deep breath to stave off laughter at the hat and because somebody had vomited next to the counter and it hadn’t yet been cleaned up.

    The border guard looked at my passport. “You’re from Canada?”

    “Yes.”

    “Do you have a visa?”

    “Canadians don’t need a visa to Kyrgyzstan.”

    He looked for a moment at an sheet of paper pasted to the wall of his cubicle to find out whether I was telling the truth. His eyes didn’t appear to focus on anything, which made me wonder if he had actually managed to find Canada at all. After a few seconds he shrugged. “Okay,” he said, and stamped my passport.

    And that is the story of how I’m pretty sure I held the first Canadian passport that that guy had ever stamped.

    As for Bishkek, so far it is dusty and hot, but reasonably green.

    bishkek bus

    The buses and marshrutkas come in different colours. This is a first for me.

    bishkek movie theatre

    The Bishkek movie theatre.

    IMG_3672

    A literacy poster. This baby’s all like, “I don’t understand words.”

    bishkek fountain pool

    Is this a swimming pool, or is everybody just swimming in a fountain?

    IMG_3677

    Kyrgyzstan is an ostensibly Muslim country but, like in Azerbaijan, few women cover. I also had pork shawarma today and they were doing a roaring trade.