New Friend

I am so happy right now! I made a new friend from work who is really nice and is almost exactly my age, and she is a Christian. Christians are rare here, and it is such a blessing to make a friend who shares something that is so important to me. She picked me up this evening a little after 6 p.m. and took me to this very modern, very Western style 3-story shop that's like a mall. It had the Gap, Levi Strauss, and other chain stores with clothes at least as expensive as in the U.S., perhaps more. Whew. There was also a big grocery store with all kinds of food, dishes, skin products--all very bright and clean and expensive. It was fun to walk around and enjoy the air conditioning, and most of all, the company. We had such a good time chatting about our families, the places we'd traveled, work, etc.

As far as the shopping goes, I prefer Durdoy b/c of the great deals and the necessity of digging and digging to find great stuff at great prices, but for just a pleasant evening, this complex was great: air conditioning, comfortable places to sit, plenty of room to walk, and, best of all, real cappuccinos!!!! Oh, heaven. Here people drink tea or instant coffee. I have been having hot tea with nothing in it or water in the mornings. If I'm desperate, I'll have some instant coffee--no milk. Having a real espresso drink made with nice coffee was unbelievably nice. The price was about what you'd pay in the U.S.--$3--so for Kyrgyzstan it was incredibly expensive. But it was a lovely, lovely treat.

It's late here, and I'm off to bed, but more later, plus pics.

Pics Around the City

Here are a few pictures that I took, just walking to and from the apartment.

Apartment Building: Below is the building where I am staying. The guest house is on the 7th floor.


View from Bridge: Walking to/from the office, we go across a footbridge over some railroad tracks. This pic shows our apartment building from there.

Treacherous Sidewalks: The sidewalks are really hazardous here, with holes, missing manhole covers, uneven surfaces, flooding, and construction in progress as shown below.

More Sidewalks: This pic is more represtative of the common hazards of sidewalks. Complete destruction due to paused construction projects (pictured above) is fairly rare, but random holes (as shown here) are very common.

Post Office: The post office is incredibly beautiful, with intricate ceilings and a complex mosaic picturing, among other things, people encircling the world with letters in their hands.

Open Square: This big open square is where the Tulip Revolution demonstrations took place in 2005.

Monument: This monument and building are across the street from the square pictured above.

Learning to Read

Well, you'll be pleased to hear that now that I'm 29, I am finally learning my alphabet. :) I am practicing the Russian alphabet and can sound out words now!!! I was studying the alphabet during lunch and then rode back to the apartment in a Mercy Corps car to meet the IT guy, who set up my internet connection from home. On the ride, I was sounding out words and triumphantly shouting words like an elementary school child. I also thought of one of the simplest words I know, which is thank you (sounds like "spah-see bah" in Russian), and phonetically spelled it. After lunch I showed it to Meerim (my teammate), and she changed one letter. Otherwise, it was correct! I was so proud!

So, mama, if you are still working with Cedric, tell him that I feel his pain but that being illiterate is incredibly difficult. I should know. If people give me directions, now I can sound out the street signs to see if I'm on the right street. Otherwise, who knows? Or if people tell me to meet them at Karpinka for drinks, I can read the sign and know if I'm at the right place. Ah, I feel so happy. I'm going to practice my alphabet now like a good girl and listen all weekend to the "learning Russian" CDs that Heidi bought me. Yay!

By popular request: More Photos!

Okay, James, this is for you! ...and everyone else who wants more photos. Enjoy!

Kyrgyz Band: This is the band that we saw on Tuesday. They are very famous in Kyrgyzstan and play traditional music wearing traditional dress. I wish my pics had come out clearer, but it was so dark... Squint and do your best!

Kyrgyz Costumes: This is the clearest photo I got of their outfits, which are colorful and heavily embroidered and topped with wool felt hats.

U.S. and Kyrgyzstan: These are all the players we saw Tuesday: a bluegrass band from Kentucky and a traditional folk music band from Kyrgyzstan. The leader of the bluegrass band tried to be so respectful and formal, but he mispronounced Kyrgyz every time he said it. (He used a soft g instead of hard, so he said "Kerr Jeez") You could see people in the audience cringe. :)

Chandelier: The hall where they performed was the back room in a pub owned by a British guy, and it's where many of the ex-pats hang out. It was a beautiful place, but the performance hall was sooooo hot. We sat streaming with sweat.

Concert Attendees: Several of our group left after the music, but a few of us stayed for a drink. From left to right, we are Adai (the girl who took me to Durdoy), me (your friend/relative/wife), John (one of the interns), Sarah (the third intern), Zhanna (Mercy Corps employee who is very nice), and Asel (another nice Mercy Corps employee).

My Team: This is Meerim, the Mercy Corps employee whom I will work most closely with. She is so nice and speaks English with me and is very patient in communicating. She is also great to work with as far as our duties go b/c so far, she writes things, and I mark them up with questions, suggestions, changes, etc., which can be really annoying to most writers, but she is great about it and welcomes the input.

More photos to come soon. I have several of the area around the apartment, so I'll post those later today or tomorrow. Post comments for me, please! I love hearing from you and don't feel like I'm the only one talking that way. :) Love y'all!

Daily life: Mon. and Tues.

Well, Monday was relatively uneventful except that it was marginally cooler here—thank goodness! Wow, it was nice to have a day that didn’t reach 104 degrees. I walked to work with the other two interns and had a meeting with the woman who is my supervisor here, as well as with Meerim, who is the person I’ll be working with most closely. It was a good day for learning about the current situation here, regarding their information systems, the current design, available information, their goals for a new system, the constraints, and my role in preparing for this new information system.

At lunch, Meerim and Sarah (the intern who rooms with me) and I went to lunch at a nearby outdoor restaurant that reminded me a little of where Idai and I went Sunday. It had the same covered outdoor booths with brightly colored cushions covering the rough wood benches. We had plov, a traditional dish of rice and a few veggies (mostly carrots) and fatty bits of beef (which I scraped to the side). It wasn’t awful, but it wasn’t my favorite dish. It wasn’t too flavorful, but I’ve been told that it’s usually swimming in grease and that the plov we had was “too dry.” I should be thankful; I prefer dry and not too flavorful to swimming in grease. So far my favorite dishes are shashleek (the meat skewers grilled outside, see photo)…

…and logmon, which is a noodle dish with bits of meat and flavorful broth and bits of veggies. I love, love the bread, called leepairshka. They cook it outside in a big clay cylinder with a fire at the bottom. They place a round of dough on a big wooden paddle and wet the top of the dough. Then they put the paddle inside the cylindrical oven and stick the dough to the side of the cylinder. The water they apply first helps it stick. Then when it’s done, they reach into the cylinder with long metal tongs and pull it out. Delicious! A big one (about a foot in diameter) is 40 cents; a little one (about 6 inches in diameter) is 20 cents. I’ll try to get some pics of this soon so you can see.

After work we went home and discovered that I still cannot get online. Bummer. So we made dinner (actually, John, the third intern, made dinner, and Sarah and I washed veggies and tried to help) and then I talked to Tony on Skype using John’s computer.

Tuesday, yesterday, was a good day but very, very hot. I walked to work by myself with no trouble and felt awesome about that. For lunch, we went to what is my favorite restaurant so far and had logmon. Yum. After work we slogged home in the extreme heat to find the electricity off, so we took showers and Sarah and I got dressed up cute. Then we all three met some of our coworkers at a concert. It was an American bluegrass band and then a famous traditional Kyrgyz music band, and then the two played a few songs together. It was loads of fun though the performance hall was boiling hot—closed up and unair conditioned. Afterwards we sat around and had a beer and then hiked home in a big group. By then it was a little after 10 p.m. and had become comfortably warm. Much better… I’ll work on the photos from the concert tonight and get them uploaded tomorrow. Signing off for now…

Visit to Durdoy

Sunday was another busy day. One of my coworkers, Idai, took me to Durdoy Bazaar, and it was so much fun! I’d never seen anything like it, not even Osh Bazaar from the day before. This market was more like a mall, but instead of being a building w/ many shops in it, it was shipping containers piled into walls and rows and covered with a roof. Each ground-floor container is its own little shop. See the pic below.

Inside the market, all kinds of cool, nice, cheap-looking, tacky, classy, fun, pretty, interesting things were sold in these containers. Some containers had A-line skirts of the same basic design in lots of different fabrics hung all up the walls of the container. Some had bras and men’s underwear laid out on tables just outside the container. Some had a little counter across the front of the container, with women standing behind it to hand you skin care products from the rows of shelves behind them, stacked with Russian skin cream, as well as L’Oreal, Garnier, and other Western brands with the labels in Russian. One of the tricky things about Durdoy is that it’s pretty crowded walking along the aisles between containers, and people push past without saying excuse me. They will literally put their hand on your shoulder sometimes and push past you. Also, people come by pushing low metal carts with tall handles. They walk fast, shouting in Russian, and if you don’t jump out of the way, they will run into you. I’m not kidding. I saw an older woman walking and get dinged in the leg by a passing cart, pushed by a young boy who was yelling. I guess if you don’t heed the warning, the cart pushers think you deserve what you get. When I heard yelling, you can believe that I was leaping out of the way like track star. Outside the container building were food stands like at Osh Bazaar. See below.

Even though I’m planning to wait and buy my gifts right before I come home, I did make a small purchase for Heidi. (Not telling; it’s a surprise!) And I also bought myself some new glasses frames. I had been wanting new glasses for a while, but they’re so expensive in the States. My friend Idai has the cutest glasses, and she said I could get a pair at Durdoy. I did, and they were about $9. Idai said please do not be offended, but my current glasses look like I study very much, and these new glasses look like a woman who is not to be messed with, like a woman who likes to go to discos. Well, I must say that I’m more into studying than discos, but I like the new glasses and hope to get lenses made while I’m here. See me posing terribly sexy in the new glasses below.

After the market, Idai, her uncle (who drove us and carried her packages), and I drove out a ways to eat at a restaurant with good shashleek (like shishkabobs). It was a beautiful place, with a courtyard and outdoor booths. I had sheep shashleek and beer with a straw! (Idai said they put a straw in our beers because we are ladies.) Idai’s uncle took a picture of us, and I took pics of the restaurant. See below.

Visit to Osh Bazaar

This weekend was so much fun! On Saturday I woke up at 5 a.m. because it was so hot in my room. I had never been awoken by heat before, but it was pretty bad. So I lay there for a little while and Sarah, the intern who shares my room, also woke from the heat, and we both tried to sleep more but got to talking about what we’d like to do that day and ended up just getting up.

We went to the Osh Bazaar, which is one of the biggest bazaars in Central Asia. There were wooden booths, tables, buckets on the street, and huge counters with all kinds of goods—from used shoes to spices in plastic-lined boxes to animal carcasses to CDs to soap. It was amazing. On our way to the food area, we walked along the edge of streets lined with booths, as people with metal pushcarts and baskets and bags walked through the streets, dodging cars that honked furiously as they continued plowing toward the pedestrians. See all the pics below…

When we got to the food area, we bought a round of delicious, fresh flat-ish bread about a foot in diameter for about 40 cents. We also bought some black pepper, red pepper, cumin, and ginger from a spice booth that had spices mounded up in boxes and topped with a little glass about the size of a shot glass. They would let you pick up the shot glass to smell the spice and see if you wanted it. If you did, then they’d scoop up spice with the glass and pour it into a paper pouch folded out of newspaper. Our four pouches of spice were just less than a dollar. We also bought tomatoes, which just happen to taste like heaven. Wow, these are the best tomatoes ever. We bought 10 good-sized tomatoes for just less than $2, and we were surprised at how expensive they were.  For dinner tonight, I had two tomatoes and a tiny little cucumber cut up and put in a bowl, topped w/ cumin, salt, and black and red pepper. I stirred it all around and ate it with a spoon and then sopped up the spicy tomato juice with a torn bit of that flat bread. Yum. (And, yes, I did wash all the veggies with the anti-bacterial soap I brought; I have also been a freak about using Purell.)

After shopping we went to catch a marshootka, which is a little van that drives a certain route like a public bus. Everyone enters through the passenger door up front and sits if possible or stands or crams in against strangers or the dashboard, depending on how full it is. (On the way to the bazaar, I was leaning up against the dashboard, trying not to crowd the driver.) There are about six rows of seats, two side by side on the driver side and one seat on the other side, separated by a tiny aisle. We found a marshootka with the stop we wanted on the little printed sign in the window. We rode and rode and rode in the great heat: no air conditioning, of course. (I should have said earlier that it’s warm in Bishkek, reaching 104 degrees F the first 3 days I’ve been here.)

We went out into a province on the far western edge of the city, where the road was like a really bad dirt road out in West Texas, plus more big rocks and bumps. There were just a few buildings: big concrete, crumbly buildings surrounded by dirt and rocks. Then our driver finally pulled in to a rocky area with several parked marshootkas and backed in beside the others. Sarah and I looked at each other and started laughing and saying, “Oh, oh!” She leaned forward to the driver and asked in Russian what was up. He had already made the stop we wanted before we got on the marshootka. He said he was taking a break for 40 minutes, and then he’d start the route again and would make that stop. So we got off the marshootka and stood out in the heat for just a second before another marshootka started up, and we got right on. Yay! So we rode it back into the city proper and got off and walked to a restaurant for lunch. We ended up getting three entrees because I didn’t like what I first ordered, plus bread, hot tea, lemon slices, and bottled water. The total for both of us was almost $7, and I was scandalized at paying $3.42 for a meal. It was the most I’ve paid for a meal since I’ve been here.

So then we walked home from there, climbing the 7 flights of stairs, and entering the non-air conditioned apartment streaming w/ sweat. After putting away the food and taking showers, we lay on our beds and read and snoozed for a while. Whew, it was a great day. Then Sarah headed out to meet some friends--she served with the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan a couple of years ago and has friends in the area—and I did my yoga DVD and wrote this blog entry in Word and got the pics ready to post. This weekend I didn't have internet access from the apartment, but I should soon.

Well, I miss all you guys and hope things are great in Seattle/Texas! Think I’ll sign off now and hope to see comments from y’all soon!

First Day at Work

So today was my first full day here, and I walked to the office by myself. By "walked to the office," I mean I went on a walking tour of the whole freaking city before finally finding the office. I tell you, when you can't read the street signs and you've only walked the route once backwards (office to apt, not apt to office) and you're fairly hopeless with directions in your own hometown, walking to work is hard! I started by walking down the 7 flights of stairs to the ground and then trying to remember which direction to walk initially. Unlike the U.S., where buildings are set pretty straight with roads and you usually exit a building and then have to make a left or right decision, here there is a small rocky area around part of the building that serves as a parking lot and then an archway that is kind of a drivethrough and streets curving around the building on several sides, so just heading off in the right direction was a challenge for me.

I ended up walking back up the stairs and asking one of the other interns (who speaks fluent Russian and is familar with the area and generally knows everything but is super nice about it) how to get to the next landmark I remembered. So once he pointed me in the right direction, I walked around the building, down the road a little ways, cut behind the white shack with the red roof, over the white paved area, up some stairs, over a bridge above the railroad tracks, down the stairs, across a big open area, through a park, down 8 blocks, and then down another 3. But that's the short version, when you go directly. I added another mile and a half or so. :)

I'm really excited about the work I'll be doing. Today we had a meeting with the 3 summer interns and the people we'll be working with at Mercy Corps. I'll be working with the microfinance team to identify the types of information they should get from customers so as to offer them the best services and plan for the services they should offer in the future. This microfinance team wants to have a really good picture of the economic health of the country and of individual communities, so I will work with the team to identify the types of information that can be compiled to produce that bigger pictures. It sounds really exciting and cool! The people I'm working with are sharp, sharp and very nice to me. I think that I'll get to do good work here and have a good time doing it. Okay, I'm starting to get tired and droopy again. Think I'll sign off and read a while before bed...

New digs

Here are some pics of the "guest house": basically a 2-bedroom apartment on the 7th floor.

Entry way: drying rack to the left, then open door to the kitchen, then double doors to the living room; doors to the bathroom and bedrooms on the right

Kitchen: pretty wooden cabinets, tiny little stove at the far right and old fashioned, small fridge just outside the image

Bedroom: very small room but bright with huge windows and a comfy bed; each bed is against the far walls, so you can see how small the room is; a wardrobe takes the place of a closet

Living room: big windows and a glass door leading to a balcony; grand curtains, almost bare walls, and clean comfy furniture; a curiously bare-feeling room, but it has wireless internet access!!!!!! Oh, yeah!!!!

Here Safely!

Hey, all, I'm here safely! No problems with customs or visas or anything. A Mercy Corps driver met me at the airport and drove me to the "guest house," which is a nice apartment in a not-so-nice-looking building. (Pics to come soon.) It's a 2-bed, 1-bath place with wood floors and clean white walls--very nice, very clean. Part of the time, I'll share the apt. w/ 2 other people, and most of the time, I'll have it to myself. Am about to head off for a shower and beddie bye. Miss you guys! More from me soon w/ pics!

Off Today!

Well, today I catch a plane to London and from there Bishkek! It has already been quite an experience, just trying to figure out what to take: what's a must and what's totally unnecessary. For those of you who may travel to Bishkek for an extended trip, here's a list of a few things I'm taking:

• small clothesline and clothespins (no electric dryers, so I'll be able to rig something in the apartment to get my clothes dry)


• anti-bacterial dish soap (I don't know how to spell "anti-bacterial" in Russian, so I'm taking some with me)


• Purell (clean hands wherever I go...)


• mosquito netting (for over the bed, just in case the malaria outbreak outside of Bishkek moves into the city)


• sunblock (I expect to do a lot of walking and have been told that sunblock isn't available in Bishkek; don't know if that's true)


• chocolate-covered espresso beans (gifts for the people I'll work with; yay!!!)


• small album with pics of my apartment and the city (to show people there; I've been told that people will want to see where I'm from)


• crisp, brand new U.S. dollars (this is very important, as the money changers will not accept or will offer a much lower exchange rate for bills that do not appear new)

That's not exhaustive, of course, but it's a few of the things that I expect to be really glad to have. As you can see in the pics below, once I started piling stuff up to pack, I realized that it's about 2/3 products and 1/3 clothing. That ratio should be good because I'll be taking the clothes home in 3 months, but the products will be gone or unnecessary, and I will have room for gifts! (very important....) Also, I have one suitcase full of clothes and products and one suitcase that's almost empty. Since I can take two big suitcases, I'm going to do so even if they're not full so I can maximize available gift space for the trip back home. :)

Well, I'll sign off now and finish the last of the packing (a few things in the washer need to dry and make their way into a suitcase). If you know me in real life, then let me say that I'll miss you but would love, love to email with you over the summer. Drop me a line!