Up In This Bish

At this point, I was ready to leave Karakul.  Between my passive aggressive host, and the beheadings, and the needlessly intricate door regime, and the recent snowstorm that had engulfed the city, I was ready to take off.  The next morning I wandered down to the marketplace, ate a plate of fresh pelmeni, and walked back to the bus station to await my chariot to Bishkek.  Sometimes there is nothing more fun and psychologically cathartic than plugging in your iPod and zooming across the central Asian steppes in a snowstorm in an old Soviet bus.  Except when it takes forever to leave because someone needs to bring on about 50 burlap sacks full of potatoes and then you get stopped outside Cholpon-Ata by the police who come on and search every male and check every ID and all the baggage.  Normally I'd be all, "Ugh, let's go!" but I did feel safer afterwards knowing that the hat-trick killer was not on the bus. 

Back in the Bish I was pretty determined to visit the Osh Bazaar, eat a final serving of plov, and try that famed Kumyz that everyone just goes nuts for.  So, I popped by the Osh Bazaar and it was closed.  Then I wet for plov in a yurt at the Dordoy Bazaar and it was…atrocious.  If there is one thing I have learned about the arduous journey of plov, it gets much less flavourful and much more tough and muttony as you go north.  This was the case in that yurt in the Dordoy and the only way I could get myself out of the situation was to intermittently shovel spoonfuls of the unpalatable plov into a plastic bag that I always carry around (a little trick I picked up from my grandmother after repeated trips to the Kelowna Mall food court) and when the hostesses returned to ask how my meal was I responded, “delicious!”  Look, I know what you’re thinking, but this food wasn’t very good but the hostesses were so lovely and I was in a yurt, and I there’s a very real chance that while I may not like Kyrgyz-style plov the 5+ million Kyrgyz do so now is not a time to exercise my white male privilege.

After the plov incident I explode the market for exotic spices and kumyz and, let me tell you, kumyz could use a powerpoint presentation or two in marketing.  If someone asked me what a bucket of _____ looked like I would probably direct them to the dairy section of the Dordoy bazaar.  What I ended up buying in bulk, however, was honey.  The old Russian woman selling several variants gave me several soup spoons’ worth of samples until I finally was so overcome with diabetic shock that I just bought whatever this sorceress was selling.  I also got some spices - mainly berberis, chilies, and some variant of cumin - and they were fantastic.  I basically barged into the spice section and screamed, “How do I make plov?!!?!” and everyone immediately bolted to attention to scream at me their own preferred method.  In retrospect, after the Dordoy-yurt-plov-plastiv bag incident, I shouldn’t be asking anyone north of the Ferghana for advice on something so delicate but I wasn’t exactly in buyer’s market so I worked with what I had.