From Bulgaria to Bishkek

I put this post in chronological order. The stuff from Sofia is first. WeSorry about the lack of photos. I will get those up... eventually.

Silly Stories of Bulgaria
-The Guru-
An elderly man staying several nights at the hostel in Sofia landed the unfortunate bed directly next to the door to the main living room. 1.5 inches of pine separated his resting head and the voices of our hostel’s night scene. The receptionist did her best to beat them but eventually gave in to Jenga’s powerful allure.
He never complained, however. He lay stiff as a board, impossible to tell if he managed to out-sleep the din. He was thin, almost frail, with grey hair and a full if unkept white beard. He looked old, not senile. Perhaps 70. His motions were stiff, abrupt and deliberate especially when he walked and got into and out of his bunk. He never appeared either in pain or at ease. His awkward movements were on account of a chronic deterioration of his nervous control that originated with whip-lash from a joy ride gone wrong at 16.
He was quiet, his social mannerisms mirrored his physical movements. Slow, simple, awkwardly abrupt. None doubted that he had the making of a first-rate guru.
True to form, after a couple days of lingering silently with hunched shoulder on the margins of our little hostel universe, he joined one of the periodic conversations about where someone was going or where they had come from. These most often occur just before dinner as new guests, rested and settled explore the social space of their new home hoping for kindred sprits or at least some good tips about where to go and what to do.
He piped up and all of us, younger and eager to hear from the mysterious man of many years in our midst, piped down to listen, “you know I first went to that area [Iran] in the 1960s. Back then the thing to do was the 3Ks… Kabul, Kathmandu and…” We brainstormed for the final K for a few moments. Despite the formidable knowledge of geography between us, the final K escaped us. I suggested Kashgar even though that area would have likely been a no-go during Mao’s reign. Seeing the wisdom in my incorrect response, the others gladly turned a blind eye to its obvious deficiencies and we turned back to our mentor.
“Yeah, well of course then you could go to all those places you can’t really go today and then back then there was no chance of traveling where you guys are headed [destinations in former Communist Eastern Europe].”
With that he retreated to silence… having been brought to a conversational impasse, we interrogated the elder gentleman for his story.
Canadian, worked for the [Royal Mounted?] Canadian Weather Service before retirement from Yukon to remote posts in BC, traveling his hobby. He takes it in legs of a month to two months, has been everywhere at least once. Living alone he writes an annual 12 page letter to former companions every January.
The next day he approached me suddenly and stood by my bed until I was sure he really wanted to talk to me and stopped reading.
“You know the other day I was thinking about our conversation from the other day.”
“yesterday?”
“Another big difference between traveling then and now is the water. You couldn’tt drink the water most anywhere back then and today it’s good in most everywhere.”
“Yeah, huh.”
“Yup, we always were drinking tea back then. All the time all day long hot tea.”
“That’s a lot of tea.”
“Oh yeah. And of course back then we didn’t talk about human trafficking and other academic stuff. Mostly travelers were burned out drifters that hated talking about booze, sex and weed but couldn’t speak to anything else.”
“Geez.”
“Well, that or ignorant hippies hoping for a spiritual revelation during a two month road trip.”

The guru scoffed at cathedrals. “No thanks. Not another European cathedral.” Long may he runneth.

-Maritime Legal Nicities-
Before I resigned myself to not seeing my visa card until Bishkek I went through a period of agitation which culminated in an anticlimax. I had been wasting money all day calling the US with phone cards in Bulgaria. In Macedonia, relatively cheap phone centers had been the norm but in Bulgaria they were no where to be found, the market for long distance phone calls abandoned to telecom credits usable on company pay phones. Twenty dollars disappeared in 5 or 10 minutes of navigating an automated “customer service” program. Even having memorized the buttons to be pushed, the waste was putting my patience to the test.
I had to make a final call to see if the card could be found in New Jersey and sent on its merry way to Bulgaria. The appointed hour arrived when their offices opened and I put my card in a pay booth and prepared to dial my way to peace of mind. Visa’s first few cues are voice activated. This is meant to make you feel like you are talking to a robot person instead of a machine or something, I don’t know but my memorization of the correct key strokes had to wait until I had passed this first obstacle. I hollered speak to a representative at every pace, volume and accent that I could think of but the connection was just too craptacular. The machine couldn’t get it. This wasted like 4 dollars or something and the idea of spending that money to yell into a phone on a busy street in Bulgaria in English was disheartening. So I quickly packed up my stuff and set off. About 30 seconds and one left hand turn later, I realized that I had left my notebook with the proper numbers at the phone.
I pulled a pretty fancy ambulatory one eighty if we do say so yourself and was surprised to see that my note book was not at the booth. I scanned the crowd. People walking, people waiting to cross the street, bum throwing paper into a dump, people walking… hold up!
The double take confirmed that a grey bearded holy-oversized trench coat man had my not book on a dumpster and was tearing out page after page. I walked over. He backed up surprised to see me, like I caught him kissing my daughter or something. He looked me in the eyes, still gripping the notebook. I looked at the notebook, looked into his eyes. My move. Without the benefit of the vocabulary necessary to artibitrate this dispute I thought it best to default to maritime law. He had clearly salvaged my abandoned vessel.
But he had similarly scrapped all of the irreplaceable information that I needed. I gave the captain a salute in the form of a curt nod and did some salvaging of my own. Papers in hand, he approved of my assessment of the situation. He permitted me to review the gutted book and ensure I had all I needed. He had something to sell to a poor soul in need of half a notebook and I was free to pull out more hairs calling the credit card company.

Munich
The trip to Munich and the first couple of days were spent with intestinal complications. Greg nursed my back to health with the ample nutriciousness of buttermilk cookies. Sweet delicious buttermilk cookies. We went to a sauna built for the Olympic Games and hung out with man an elderly anonymous naked German. Some were good natured and jolly, others demanded silence. Silence in the sauna? Who ever heard of such heresy. So be it Wrinkly German Man, you win this round.
My last day there we played ultimate for hours. It was glorious. I hadn’t moved my body like that in well over a month. I was a little rusty, but it wasn’t embarrassing on account of the relaxed/sloppy nature of the game. After the game we ambled tired, sore and hungry to a outdoor beer house. These places are amazing, they manage to make every day feel like a holiday. They darn well better for 6 Euro per liter of bier. I ate two foot long brats, fries and sourkraut. In short, I was back and better than ever.
My time in Germany was great. It was wonderful to watch CNN, talk with Greg and generally bum around with that ol’ college buddy. Can I call a friend from college an ol’ college buddy only 6 months after graduation?


Bishkek Baby!
My arrival in Bishkek followed two nights of poor sleep: one anxiously awaiting a pre-dawn alarm on Greg’s floor and another in the plane. I walked off the 757 with about a dozen other volunteers. Tellingly, all were plump North Americans going to work for NGOs. Huh.
The airport was well kept but tiny. Two rooms compose the baggage claim. Unfortunately neither contained my bag. I blame New Jersey. I filled out a form and breezed through customs.
Despite the fact that the sun had not risen, I was warmly welcomed to Kyrgyzstan with my very own gaggle of young taxi drivers to pull and prod me to their capital city. Being a fair man, I chose the tallest taxi driver. I got into his unmarked car after repeating my price of 300 som like a brain dead parrot. I got in the passenger seat. At this point my driver and I were graced with the presence of my driver’s friend in the back seat. I knew it would be stimulating conversation as soon as we pulled out of the parking lot as our backseat talker began lamenting Kyrgyzstan’s gas prices which are among the most reasonable in the world. He wanted $40. We had agreed to $8. We haggled and haggled though there was no haggling to be done. The climax of the conversation came when the man in the back said, “You a good guy. We wait all night for you. I shoot you. $40.”
“You will shoot me?!? No! You’re not going to shoot me! And I don’t have $40.”
They exchanged Kyrgyz phrases for a moment and then the man in the back corrected himself, “I sure you! Sorry I sure you!” I think me meant ‘I assure you’ or ‘I am sure of you [being a good guy].’ We had a good laugh. I paid them $12 for the cab ride. Taxis are always an experience.
At my new home I was greeted by Asooloo my 24 year old host-sister and my tossle-headed host-father who goes by Mister Uzbek though he is Kyrgyz and not Uzbek. I slept four hours.
My new home is fittingly constructed of poured concrete, just like all those houses in Albania that I thought so irredeemably silly. It is quite large however, and I curious how they will heat it in the winter. Poorly, I suspect. My area is separated from the rest of family’s living space by a living room that is spacious and sparsely decorated. Judging by the lack of comfy furniture it is also sparsely used. My room is 10’X10’X10’ with a carpet to keep my toes safe from the frigid floor, a table, a single-sized bed and bed end shelf-space. There is also a large window, which is good.
The best part of the house is actually not part of it. The courtyard sports a loud dog and a 50’X25’ garden. They have a friendly cat that looks remarkably similar to my first cat as a four year old. Unlike my missing cat, it is not named “kitty.”
I learned some Kyrgyz words, inconveniently written in cursive Cyrillic. I suppose I have to learn some day. I asked about going to the Alpine Fund but the day of my arrival was the day after Ramadan, a holiday. We piled into the family’s Lada limosine and headed to an uncles place. There a HUGE feast awaited us. I ate as much as I could, everytime I stopped they stopped their Kyrgyz conversation to urge me onward “kooshi! Kooshite! Kooshi!” meaning “Eat! Eat! Eat!” I ate ate until all parties were satisfied with my performance and I was stuffed.
At this point we took some time outside. After a while I noticed another stove going and learned that there was another course. Wily devils, the Kyrgyz after Ramadan. We had eaten perhaps ¼ of the food piled on the table and now we were cooking more. After some polite conversation in Russian the family turned excitedly back to more interesting matters in Kyrgyz. As I was about to lose conciousness, the next course arrived. There was fried rice with meat and, the piece-d’resistance, boiled beef. I got the thigh and the knee.
On our way home I saw a Bactrian camel walking along the road. It can be mine for the price of 300 dollars. Men in small scattered groups conversed along the road, hoping for some short-term work. The water is potable. My family has four working daughters, two are married. My host-padre teaches at a technical university. I think this means I landed a place with an upper-middle class family.

October 25, 2006 - Bishkek
My room has mosquitoes that required swatting last night. They awoke me. I felt rested. It was dark. It was 11:30. I had slept an hour and a half. Damn. Rolling out of bed at 10am after 12 hours in bed was not easy. I woke up later than expected. Damn.
Mr. Uzbek, who is Kyrgyz and my host father, kindly gave up trying to explain how to find the Alpine Fund via public transport and drove me. Arriving at the building I knew I must have written down an old address for there was no Alpine Fund signage in sight. Before me was a excellent of Soviet apartment architecture, designed by Kruschev himself in fact. We asked inside an office. They replied that a couple years ago there was some fund in back but they hadn’t seen any evidence of it in some time. They had moved. Just to be sure we went around back, there the apartment number 16 would be. After a couple of fruitless forages into the apartment block (open to the public courtyard, naturally), I went into the basement of the last door. There was a door with an Alpine Fund sign. By sign I mean piece of paper with “Alpine Fund” and a logo printed on it.
Sean opened the door. Mr. Uzbek who is not Uzbek bid me ado and explained how to get home. Sean handed me a stapled packet including a color map of Bishkek. “It’s from the Hilton.” Aha. “Their information is the best in Bishkek. If you have a question, call the front desk or go visit. They assume anyone with an accent is a high paying customer.”
Yes, Sean is clever. He went to Pacific Lutheran University. If the University of Puget Sound is the Harvard of the Tacoma then PLU is the Harvard of South Tacoma. His fiancé is likewise from PLU. All three volunteers then are residents of Tacoma. The odds, if you are wondering are approximately 132,348,093:3.
He informed me of the Alpine Fund’s woes for a while. I consoled him and reassured him that I, an inexperienced college graduate, would make it all better in six months. Basically the AF has structural problems with organization and consistency. Tellingly, my tenure of 6 months at the Fund is on the long side. Most come for a month or two. Anna and Sean for 4. On the one hand, the AF would not run without these volunteers who give time and effort and get no compensation. On the other hand, by the time most volunteers figure out what to do, it is time for them to go. Hopefully, I will help to systematize the AF so that people can get into the swing faster. Hopefully, the AF can find funding for longer-term volunteers in the future. There is only so much an NGO with a part-time local director and short term volunteers can do. It is unrealistic to ask people to give up more than months without subsidy or compensation. The director position, currently help by the competent and capable Ariana has seen similar troubles. Most directors have lasted not longer than a year. Ariana will be there for a few, but she is putting herself through law school. The end result of all of this is non-existent long-term management. There is almost no record keeping, collaboration, or accounting.
The AF runs on good will. It is enough to keep going but not enough to excel by my first impressions. I will vainly through myself into the ego-grinder. The rest of the day I spent meeting Anna and Sean and dining with them, the director Ariana and her sister. Sean and Anna Take off for Tajikistan tomorrow. This will afford me the opportunity to feel what it’s like to walk into the AF naked. After meeting the President in the states, I have a feel for the long term goals but the day-to-day is still nude. Sean explained to me that it seems a de facto tradition that each volunteer take on a project. Theirs is a scholarship for a very bright kid. If he passes a prep year of school, his financial situation will qualify him for a free ride at most any University in Bishkek, especially the American University (“Harvard of Central Asia”). Ironically, my project will be to kill this system-less system and try to do what Westerners do best. That is, analyze, categorize and, in the pursuit of efficiency, render heart and soul separate from the body.
A side note about Islam in Kyrgyzstan: during dinner the director’s sister (_) spoke about the fact that Kyrgyz are getting more religious, even in liberal secular Bishkek (the liberalist and secularist dern town in Central Asia). The religiosity makes her uncomfortable, “I am for freedom of expression or whatever but stay away from me, you know?” She is pursuing a political science Masters at a local university. Hizb Ut-Tahrir, the international non-violent political Islamist movement is still illegal and underground in Bishkek.
I took public transport and found my house after sloshing around dodgy backstreets/Kruschev apartments for a spell. IN THE DARK. Booyah. Once home I put my Russian to good use during a conversation with host sisters. A fine first day… already it is long and there is much to do for the foreseeable future.