20 April 2008

Muy Bueno!

I've written before about the various pick-up strategies that Kyrgyz men employ to try and get me to marry them (or -- more likely -- to become their mistress). Last night, though, I met one who used a truly unique method...
While my friends and I were dancing at a club in the city, this awkward English-speaking Kyrgyz tour guide named Samat took a liking to me. I humor him and dance a slow song middle-school-style with him and then scurry away. An hour later or so, "My Heart Will Go On" starts playing and he reappears and asks me to dance again. I try and say no, but he's kind of pathetic in that mangy-big-eyed-puppy way, so I give in. Turns out he'd shelled out 100 som to dedicate the song to me. After we dance, I extract myself from the situation once again. Maybe 30 minutes later, I'm dancing with the other Volunteers when he comes up and eagerly presses something in my hand. This something turned out to be a Halls cough drop. A HALLS COUGH DROP. This would have been kind of strange in America and, like most other things about life in this place, was even stranger here because Halls cough drops do not exist in Kyrgyzstan.
For the next hour or so, he kept dancing in my periphery, no doubt hoping to lure me away from my American friends. Unfortunately for him, I didn't really find his nerdy, eager-beaver gyrations particularly appealing. I eventually got a friend to pretend to be my boyfriend to my Kyrgyz admirer to back off. Samat understood and, to show that there were no hard feelings, randomly started speaking Spanish (a language nobody here knows), yelling, 'Teresa - muy bueno!' and the like into my fake boyfriend's ear, thus cementing his place in my head as one of the oddest people I've met in a country full of odd people.