Mother Russia

Usually I'm pretty good at entertaining myself...but some days, the crush of yet another day of nothing gets to me. Today is one of those days. I didn't mean to come check email today...but when the store near my house didn't have the chips I wanted, I figured I might as well hop in a passing car and go to Uzgen (which is 15 minutes away by car). Keep in mind that I could have walked 5 minutes down the street to another store in my village. And to entertain myself on the cab ride over, I took a 5 and a 10 som bill, faced the lady (Booboosara) on the 5 to the man (Kasim) on the 10, and made them make out.

So with my sanity flying out the window, I figure it's as good a time as any to talk about Russia. Most Kyrgyzstanis have a soft spot in their hearts for the former USSR -- economically, at least, things were better here with the support of the Soviet juggernaut. My host father, for example, has a digitized image of Putin as his cell phone screen saver. We watch Russian news nightly. In fact, two days ago, I watched a human interest story about Jeremy Irons and Dennis Hopper's Easy-Rider-esque motorcycle trek across Russia. I'm sitting there, listening to Irons politely asking a Russian peasant lady if he "might come into her house." The lady is aghast, looking for help from the Russian news cameraman and shouting, in Russian, "I don't understand!" I'm pretty sure that these two actors don't have the star power of, say, Bruce Willis or Jean Claude van Damme (the Russians LOVE van Damme)....so this poor lady probably had no idea who the leather-clad, English-speaking men were and even less idea why the hell they were bothering her. Let's hear it for cultural exchange!
So later in the news program, my interest was pricked again by coverage on the flooding in Britain. As I watched the water rush past quaint thatched houses and signs identifying the phenonemon as a "flood," I felt for the Brits, naturally...but was immediately reminded whose news I was watching when the program followed up the flood story with a story about how a province in Russia was able to avoid similar flooding with a state-of-the-art dam. The Cold War hasn't completely thawed...

Man. These chips are delicious. And I just received an invitation to teach at a university in Osh by a random pair of Uzbek people (the woman, surprisingly enough, spoke English quite well). The internet cafe is always an interesting experience.

Here's hoping that a trip to the pool in Osh will revive my mental state...

Let's Get Physical

I've been living in a madhouse for the past few weeks, as all adults (save my sister-in-law and me) fled to the health resort and a multitude of children (various cousins all) arrived. Remind me never to have more than three children. One day, we all went to the health resort for a Sunday afternoon....I thought the ride over was crowded, what with 3 adults, 3 children, 1 teenager, and a baby inside the VW Golf. That is, until the ride back, when we had 5 adults, 4 children, 1 teenager, 1 baby, and 1 unborn fetus crammed inside. Yikes.

My host mom returned (incidentally, the same day that all the extra kids left...coincidence? I think not.) this week, so things have been relatively normal. Except that she has a newfound love of exercise -- she's been doing aerobics and jogging in the mornings at the village stadium. This may not sound all that strange for those of you living in health-obsessed America, but here this is straight out of left field. The average Kyrgyz person (especially women running households and those working in the fields) expends a significant amount of energy simply living his/her daily life -- doing laundry by hand, fetching water, gardening, carrying big loads of stuff from the bazaar, and other such activities take their toll. As a result, the idea that you make yourself extra tired on purpose by exercising seems ludicrous. Runners get lots of quizzical looks and the occasional ferocious canine follower. So to hear my middle-aged, grandmother-to-four host mom go on and on about how she loves to lift weights and wants to drop at least 8 kgs (about 17 pounds) was pretty entertaining. To cap it all off, just as Apa finished her monologue, the kids started doing their versions of push-ups and crunches. The little boy's push-up was particularly awesome -- something like a cross between doing the worm and making a lewd gesture. I love my family.