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!