Bish, Please!

Arriving in Bishkek at 5:10am was awful.  Just awful.  After paying for my 2x-entry visa I was greeted by a wall of greasy, vulturous taxi drivers vying to feast on the fresh meat shipment from Moscow.  One driver in the crowd had a sign that said the name of the hostel I was staying at and I figured it was for me.  So we went to his car in the parking lot and I repeatedly asked him questions trying to trip him up and reveal his game.  I always retained the option of hurling myself out of the door of the Lada if things went south during the ride and screaming, "you have no recourse!" of course.  I always retain that option.  In any case he did drop me off at my guesthouse, a surly 8 year old girl opened the door and led me to a cold bunk that I was to sleep on and provided no sheets or blankets, and I gave the driver a $10 USD because I was feeling generous.  

I was so pleased to be in Kyrgyzstan in late October.  Wouldn't you be?  The weather was delightful, the Tian Shan looked fearful in the distance, and I had 3 weeks off of work due to a technicality and I couldn't be happier.  When I finally woke up from my slumber at around 9am I set off for the town.  At first I had to arrange with the local caretaker, in this case a 10 year old girl, how many nights I would stay and pay up.  I didn't have a great deal of Kyrgyz money (I had none) so I promised to pay later and as collateral offered to help with her English homework.  Her workbook used a lot of contractions, however, which I did not approve of, and she kept insisting that I do the work for her instead.  I said, "Look, I don't know what kind of operation you're running here, but you are never going to learn if I do this English work for you" which was my way of covering up any possible mistake I could make because English is hard and I am glad I never had to learn it.  Just look at the typos in this blog I refuse to retroactively correct.  It's a living testament to how needlessly complex our global lingua anglia is (see what I did there?).

The first thing I did in Bishkek was find batteries.  My camera was from 2006 and still used double A batteries (lolz, I know, right?).  I went to the local GUM store and realized that it didn't open until 10 on a Sunday.   I used this time to look for some coffee and breakfast, which I found in the kiosk right next to the GUM.  I could overhear American English being spoken and after I finished my absolutely atrocious instant coffee I interrupted them to ask if they knew where the Osh Bazaar was. They looked at me in a "Umm, wtf do you think you're doing?" sort of way and said, "We don't know."  I said, "Okay" and assuming it ended there, was about to walk off.  Then one person said, "We're not from here."  Well, yeah.  I mean…yeah.  Of course you're not from here.  Anyway, I wasn't interested but decided to ask, "Oh, where are you from?"  Then they said, "About 30 minutes that way," gesturing in some vague direction.  "Okay" once again I uttered, at this point still not really interested.  "Yeah…we can't tell you where we're from."  Okay NOW I'm interested, but I feigned disinterest and walked away.   I once read a book called The Charm School that someone had left in a campsite fire pit when I was park ranger and it was all about a secret spy training school in the Soviet Union where the instructors where all POW American soldiers who had to teach young spies how to speak and act like Americans.  I assumed there was a Charm School 30 minutes outside Bishkek and these multicultural youths with Californian mall-rat inflections in their tones were recent graduates.  I mean, it's really the only logical explanation.