Dear beautiful people of America,

OK. Although I enjoy acting like a pathetic loser and asking everybody to send me warm clothes all the time, Kazakhstan isn’t even that cold yet. I am a bit worried though, as the Russians keep telling me that our last winter was “a joke”. Ha ha. I thought it was freezing, so shut up. Truth is, thanks to my parents and siblings, I have had plenty of warm clothing to wear (both as a child, and now, as a slightly larger child). I’m actually still trying to figure out what to do with the six goose down parkas and eight pairs of full body long underwear that my Father sent to me last year. For any of you who know my father, you’ll understand that A) I’m not exaggerating with the six parka thing, and B) While thinking about what he’d like to wear in a cold climate, Frank actually bought eight of the red, one piece underwear jumpsuits. The lumberjack ones with the flap on the rear end and the button on each butt cheek. Then he sent them all to me, along with some old tea bags from the kitchen cupboard and a quick reference guide to Corporate Finance. It cost $35.00 American dollars. He sent it all Airmail. And you know what? I wear those long underwear jumpsuits all the time. I revel in their red absurdity (and I’m not alone in this). Unfortunately, I’m not wearing my “jumpy jack” at the moment. Instead, I’m wearing my nicest moth eaten suit jacket and black frayed pants. You see, I’ve just returned from a Russian funeral, and although tempted, I thought better of wearing childish long underwear to the commemoration of a man’s life.

The Funeral

I went. I didn’t know the person that died all that well, but I am a good friend of the man’s daughter (Olga). Apparently he had been some kind of General in the Soviet Army. In the years following Peristroyka he had lost his job for the obvious reasons. This resulted in a bit of a falling out with his family. And no job + no love = much drink. In whispered tones, those present at his funeral told me that he had “a problem with Vodka”. Consider that this man was a General in the Russian Army, and you’ll see that that’s quite an admission. Somehow akin to a squirrel dying from eating too many acorns. Or too much insulation. Or whatever it is squirrels might eat too much of. Anyway, the man was 59 years old, and he died in his sleep. Olga told me that she hated her father, and that she had stopped talking to him years before he died. But he was her father nonetheless, and for some reason I was invited to the poor man’s funeral.

The funeral ceremony took place in this crappy cement apartment building that Olga’s Mother and Father had lived in for more than thirty years. As I walked into this Soviet relic, I couldn’t help but notice that some of the stairs in the stairwell were missing or destroyed. Most of the building’s electrical wiring was fully exposed, drooping exhaustedly from the ceiling like an abandoned spider-web. There was dried vomit on one of the landings. It smelled of wet dirt, cats and mold. On the 5th floor we found the apartment itself, sealed off by two doors (one of them wood, one of them steel). They were both ajar, and as we let ourselves in, we were welcomed by a soft draft of warm body odor. Inside there were little Chinese trinkets here and there, some Russian romance novels on the bookshelf, and a few oil paintings on the wall. Stationed in opposing corners of the largest and only ‘real’ room in the apartment was an old Russian television set and the interned body of Olga’s dead father.

As I stood in the open entrance, b.o and death wafting all about, I unsuccessfully tried to digest the apartment’s morbid decor. All four of the people that I’d come with unhesitatingly took a seat in the chairs lined up around the coffin and I followed, banging my shins on pretty much every chair leg and table corner in the room. As we all settled into our seats, you could hear the soft sound of Olga’s mother sobbing. Further back, deeper down, the ambient sound of children playing outside washed over all of us. Some lazy sunlight crept through the faded curtains, spilling onto the coffin and the painted wooden floor. Olga’s Mother, seated closest to the body, was dressed in a traditional black Russian dress and veil. While she wept, she busily wrapped her dead husband’s head in what looked like a candy bar wrapper. I don’t think it was a candy bar wrapper, but it sure looked like a candy bar wrapper. I usually love candy, but at that moment, I did not love candy as much.

Olga’s father looked cold and blue. He was stationed in his corner, lying stiffly in a Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” type of coffin (all tapered at pentagonal angles). He wore a polyester suit (also Michael Jackson-esque), with dime-store lace and plastic lilacs wrapped all around his body. His arms were crossed on his sagging chest, and in his right hand he clutched some sort of folded paper. As I stared, I wondered how they did that, getting his dead hand to hold a piece of paper like that. I looked closely for wire or glue or something that could possibly make his dead hand grasp that paper so tightly. But I couldn’t see anything. Suddenly I began to feel self conscious and disrespectful for staring. A scolding interior monologue erupted in which I concluded that I was a badperson and that “this” was not funny. I decided that I had to look away from the graspy hand immediately. With a highly inappropriate amount of jerkiness, I turned my head away from the body. Then, trying to cover for my unexplainably sudden head movements, I began looking around the room retardidly. This all only aggravated my sense of disrespect, and soon I was all hot and red and nervous.

Now, somehow frantic, I tried to find something to look at. I settled on the room’s furniture (way to come through in the clutch, ‘mind’). I noticed that on either side of the coffin hung two large flags; one with a hand sown golden cross; the other with a hand sown hammer and sickle. Both flags were made of a patchy red velvet material, which also covered the coffin. The color reminded me of a Sunday school that I had never attended. Olga’s mother lit a candle. Not moving from her seat next to the coffin, she commanded that somebody, anybody, bring her a piece of bread and a glass of water. Olga obeyed, and when she returned, her mother took the bread and water. She gently placed it next to one of the room’s two cracked windows.

Following Olga back to her seat with my eyes, I soon found myself looking at the old man’s face again. His big, gray ears mesmerized me. The absolute stillness of his bushy nose hair was haunting. I decided that, with his brow so deeply furrowed, Olga’s father looked upset. His mouth was making an almost exaggerated clown frown. To me, he had
always seemed like a reasonable man. But as he lay there, dead, I decided that he was maybe not so reasonable. No, I decided, I did not like him. Because who could like a man with such a mean, blue face? But how sad, that it was in this frowny manner that Olga’s father would enter into the kingdom of heaven. Or the prairie meadow of the midget cowboys. Or wherever it was he was going.

I watched the dead body, and I waited. I thought perhaps he would stick out his tongue and give us a little “hook ‘em horns”, Gene Simmons style. Then we could all laugh and it would be ok. But, surprisingly, that didn’t happen. Instead it was just stuffy and creepy in that apartment and I was failing miserably at appreciating the gravity of the situation. All I had ever wanted was to pay my respects to the General without angering him. I just knew I couldn’t handle wrestling with his tortured soul as it possessed my blender or television or fuse box or whatever. I’ve seen Poltergeist. I know the deal.

Finally, thank the Lord, Olga’s boyfriend came over and sat next to me, serving me the distraction I had been praying for. I shook his hand, gave him a little man nod, and he nodded back (like a man). He then asked me for some money. It was, he explained, to help offset the cost of the funeral. I felt relieved, because maybe, with this payment, I could buy my way out of the apartment. I gave Olga’s boyfriend what I had been told was the standard funeral amount: $1.53, plus another $1.05 because I’m an American. Olga’s boyfriend appreciated the gesture and nodded his head in gratitude. For a moment, I thought about complimenting him on the black 1985 Metallica “Master of Puppets” concert t-shirt he was wearing (which highlighted the unforgettable track “Leper Mesiah”) but he was gone before I had a chance. As I stood up and gave Olga a hug, tears ran down her face. I left the apartment soon after.

Now, again, I’ll admit that I am a bad person. But I’m trying to be a better person, see, and I gave an extra $1.05 for the funeral, so what do you want? Besides, I don’t just go to funerals all the time. I’ve been doing other stuff in Kazakhstan, too. Like eating fat and trying to teach Economics and drinking alcohol against my will. And since I’m working in a school, I’m lucky enough to have a little free time in which to discover the many treasures that Central Asia has to offer. So gather round the fire, lil’ chittlins, and listen up while ‘stupid Joe’ waxes eclectic.

Kyrgyzstan:

Ok, so thanks to my fancy new titling scheme, you can pretty much guess that I’m now going to recount my uninteresting trip to Kyrgyzstan. Yeah, I went to Kyrgyzstan, and you didn’t. Want to hear about it? So we hiked over the Kyrgyz/Kazakh border (we being me and some friends, and not you). It was breathtaking and beautiful, and again, you weren’t there. The good parts you can pretty much make up. But I think there is some value in recounting the bad parts. Maybe we’ll start with the worst part. This “part” comes in the form of a “person." See, This One Girl didn’t really understand what she was getting herself into. She thought that our trek was going to be some kind of Sarah Jessica Parker type of thing, whereas I saw it as more of a Hulk Hogan Wrestlemania XIX type of thing. The end result of her gross misinterpretation was that I had to carry most of This One Girl’s stupid crap up and over some of the world’s highest mountains.

Now, I’m not that much of a jerk. Ok, I am, but under normal circumstances, most things are all right with me. However, when you’re hiking long days through rugged places in the middle of the Central Asian Mountains, the last thing you want is to be lugging some whiny ass lady’s mascara and rock collection on your breaking back. There were moments when I
was seriously considering calling in the Delta Force, Chuck Norris style. But I didn’t, because who am I to unleash the Dragon? Instead, I tried my best to ignore This One Girl and the 50 pounds of her belongings strapped to my little body. The ignore approach was largely successful, and it enabled me to appreciate the unfolding beauty of the Tien Shan undeterred. There were dramatic, wind blown vistas high above tree line, crystal blue lakes, piles of rotting trash. We even saw some wild horses. They were dead, but there were still wild and awesome. And, since I was the only one on the trek without a significant other in attendance (read: loser), I got to spend alot of time with our guide. His name was “Idar”.

Idar was a large Kazak man with a geology degree from St. Petersburg University. He wore a pair of teal sweat pants for the whole week that I knew him, and as far as I know, he has been wearing these teal sweat pants his entire life. It was while slogging through a river on our first day out that Idar said, “Foreigners are often saying that I look like ‘Chief’, from the movie”. Hmmm. No idea what you’re talking about, “Chief”. But then I figured it out. It took me a second, but I got it. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest!” I said. Yeah, that was it. He looked like the character ‘Chief’ from the Jack Nicholson movie “One flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”.

With his ill-fitting glacier goggles (no glaciers in sight) and his large, almost Native American features, he was a dead ringer for the character ‘Chief’ (Although it later turned out that some French tourists had initially come to this conclusion, somehow infinitely compromising it’s worth).

So no, I wasn’t on drugs. I really did hike through Kyrgyzstan with this sweat panted, goggle wearing 7 foot Indian. And while the two couples I was hiking with stole away to their tents, “Chief” and I had plenty of time to deconstruct Soviet history and post-cold war politics. As one might expect, my campfire conversations with Idar usually just served as an excuse for him to drink a bottle or two of Kazakhstan’s finest Vodka. He called himself “an alco-naut”, which I thought was pretty creative. As always, it went without saying that we both had to drink, because that’s what “alco-nauts” do. Those are the rules out here. So up there under the stars, somewhere on the border between Kazakhstan and Kyrghyzstan, Idar and I made love. Just kidding. We didn’t make love at all. We did, however, have a pretty long conversation about the movie Police Academy, which is sort of like making love. Idar was especially fond of the unforgettable characters “Hightower” and “Mauser”. Not making this up.

During the days, nursing a bit of a hangover, we all hiked through forests and streams, up and over passes, through little villages. Idar was full of this inexhaustible supply of stories about Hungarian Fishermen and gigantic bears and Soviet history. “On trek just like this” he said, “I went into woods with Gorbachov as my premier, and returned with Boris Yeltsin as President”. “The whole kidnapping, we were near there. I think we might have even passed by. Who knows what we’ll find when out here, or when we get out!”

Quick note here: My Russian, although somewhat improved, is sadly still riding the short bus. All my Idar translations in this text are only approximations of what I think he said. As the artist formerly known as Puff Daddy once quipped, “It's like (they) all be talking funny, I don’t understand the language of people with short money.” In this case, that
language is Russian. Really, though, I suppose it doesn’t matter too much. What mattered here was that, over the course of the trip, old Idar and I had reached some sort of cross-cultural understanding. I think it was mostly along the lines of “I’ll pay you what you think is a lot of money, and you’ll take me up and over those mountains and pretend like you’re my friend”. A pretty good arrangement, all and all. So anyway, after a couple of days of hiking with Idar and crew, we crossed (illegally) into Kyrghyzstan and dropped out of the mountains into the Lake Ysyk-köl valley. This lake, the second largest high-altitude lake in the world (the first being ‘Titti-Kaka’, a.k.a. “poopie pants”), had been home to some of the biggest and best Communist spas in the whole Union. Aside from the Black Sea, it was where the Communist Apparatchiks had come on vacation. Now, a decade after glasnost, the towns lining the lake are in
a pretty sorry state of repair. Old women selling dried fish are all over the place. Some Russian tourists, dragging their snot nosed kids behind them, still make a go at vacationing. But idle cops linger around every corner, looking for foreign tourists to shake down.

So there we were, hiking out of the mountains into this “resort” town. We started off by hailing a minibus, overloading it with all of our stuff, and riding it towards the town of Choppanata. As we rode (with strangers sitting in our laps), toddlers would occasionally teeter across the pot-holed road. Our driver took scant notice. I stared wide-eyed out the dirty window as we sped down that road, weaving our way through the towering
peaks of the Kunget Alatau.

Along the way, Idar pointed out a number of large, dilapidated spas. “This one here costs twenty U.S dollars for one night. Twenty U.S dollars!” he whispered with disbelief. “It’s like the Paxat palace in Almaty”, he said, shaking his head. I was too embarrassed to tell Idar that my parents had just stayed at the “Paxat Palace” (a Hilton hotel) in Almaty when they had come to visit me in June. As a Peace Corps volunteer, I don’t get very much money, so I pretty much have to live on whatever. But the truth is that we’re Americans and the American Dollar goes a long way in the developing world. So when my parents came, they could afford to stay in a comparatively nice hotel. It was a bargain to them, but to Idar, hotels like that represented an incomprehensible waste of money. I wanted to tell Idar that while my parents were staying in this fancy hotel, I had eaten a chicken schwarma (from the “Palace” restaurant) and gotten food poisoning. It was so severe that, while retching into the automatically flushing toilet, I had quietly bargained away my soul to the God of bad schwarmas. I wanted to tell Idar that yes, it did cost $60.00 a night to stay there, but the supposed wealth and luxury of those places was not all that it was cracked up to be. In the end, I just nodded my head quietly as he spoke, trying to somehow convey my disapproval for this $20.00 a night spa, knowing full well that Idar knew I was full of crap.

All in all, we only stayed in Ysyk-köl long enough to unpack our packs, take a public banja, and get a night’s rest. We had stayed one day longer than planned in the mountains, and so the next morning we had to catch a bus to Bishkeck, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.

The bus we ended up catching was big and German, just the way I like ‘em. They had a radio on our big German bus, which made the six-hour ride go a little faster. I suspect I’ll never forget the soft humming of the nearly blind Kazakh woman sitting next to me as Eminem bumped from the bus speakers. “50 million other white rappers emerge……..”. As we rolled into Bishkeck, I was surprised by how similar it looked to Almaty. The wide, yawning boulevards (well suited for military parades) weretextbook Soviet planning. One thing that seemed unique to Bishkeck was that it felt somehow smaller and more Central Asian than the other cities in the area. But I think, more than anything, it was the way the place smelled that will stay with me.

I’m not thinking about one scent like “dog crap” or “vanilla ice cream”, but more like a rainbow of vibrant colors smeared onto a canvas. Or maybe like a rainbow of vibrant smells smeared onto a smell-canvas. Whatever it was “like”, I can tell you this: as you walked along any given side street, you would pick up smells as varied as freshly cut lemon grass, rotting eggs, diesel gasoline, wet animals, barbecued lamb and bleach. Burning plastic also seemed to be particularly prevalent, which somehow then turned into burning lungs. This burning plastic (lung) smell (feeling), is one that I always associate with 8th grade chemistry. That’s where I first “learned” that the inhalation of burning plastic will, in a matter of seconds, give me and everybody I know cancer. But Lance Armstrong had cancer, and he’s won the Tour De France like eight times, so whatever. It’s not about the bike.

As we walked around the city, eventually finding our way to the center, all the kids on the street sort of gathered around us (P.12, 3rd world employment manual). They seemed to know that we were “American”, although I suspect “American” might have been a synonym for “Foreigner”. Everywhere we went we heard “Hello America!”, or sometimes “F#*k you America!”. At first I was playing along, responding with “Yes! F#*k it and F#*k you too, my little friends”, but one of my American traveling companions made me stop. Mind you, this was only after he had been telling me jokes about orphans with Spina Bifida, so keep it to yourself, Jerry Lewis

Anyway, trailed continuously by this group of die-hard street kids, we ended that first evening back in “civilization” by taking a ride on a rusty Ferris wheel. It was a beautiful way to see the jagged, snow-covered peaks hemming the city. But with each rusty revolution, I was sure we were coming closer to some sort of spectacular death. Unfortunately, there was no spectacular death on that night, and there were no disasters. Just a gaggle of rabid street children waiting impatiently for us to get off the Ferris wheel. Peering down from our cage-like compartments as we completed our last
revolution, all we could see was a limply boiling mass of little bodies collected at the ride’s base. By the time we were ready to get off, they were prepped and anxious, just waiting to destroy us. Only now they were armed with little fistfuls of wilting flowers.

As we got off the Ferris wheel, the kids dissected our group of five (two couples and lonely JHB) and targeted me, single loser, as the man most likely to buy some flowers. Good plan guys, I can see we’ve all done our homework here. One could only assume that, since I hadn’t shaved in a little while, the kids were mistaking me for Bruce Springsteen on the cover of “The Wild, The Innocent, & The E Street Shuffle”. But I wasn’t Bruce Springsteen, and I didn’t have any of Bruce Springsteen’s girlfriends, so why would I spend Bruce Springsteen’s money on some crappy flowers? I don’t think so, ladies. Not tonight. So, I decided to just take their flowers out of their dirty little hands and walk away. No money, no compensation. Just me taunting the poor children of Kyrgyzstan. As I sauntered away from the ride and the children, the kids didn’t know what to do. I had just taken them for 110% of their life savings, and it didn’t take the smarter ones long to figure out that a) I was just kidding around with them, and b) If they didn’t get their flowers back, it was going to be a long walk home. So they chased after me, but I ignored them, leading the little rats through the park like some sort of idiot pied piper.

To my chagrin, I could find no cliffs from which to launch the little Kyrgyz lemmings. So I just stopped running and gave the kids their flowers back. I also gave them no money and told them to leave me alone immediately or I would kick them. They all thought that was even funnier than the flower-stealing trick. So did I. It seemed I had finally found some people I could relate to. But now, with my other traveling companions caught up, we
had to get our bearings, as we were on the other, seedier side of the park. It seemed we had stumbled into the middle of a concession area, filled with the smoky smells of barbecued lamb kababs, fried dough and potato dumplings. There was even a gigantic Soviet transport-rig in the concession area, parked sideways on curb. But I couldn’t really smell the rig, and I suppose that was ok, as the rig was not for eating. No, the rig was for movies. You see, on the side of this large war machine was a makeshift movie
screen.

And there was a pretty good-sized group of people huddled around the rig/screen. Old people, young people, couples, children, Russians, Kazakhs, Oigirus, Chinese, Kyrghyz, all of Central Asia seemed to be there.As our little pack got closer to the screen, we caught a glimpse of what they were watching. In Communist fashion, the mayor’s office had decided to show the latest Star Wars movie, right there in the middle of Bishkeck’s central park, for free. This (do I really need to say ‘pirated’?) version was dubbed just poorly enough so that we were able to hear the English dialogue in the background.

Well, rather pleased by our good fortune, we sat down on the ledge of a nearby fountain and enjoyed a little piece of America. As we watched, our little street friends reappeared, and entertained themselves by trying to steal the endless amounts of money rumored to be bursting from our pockets. It was all kind of fun, laughing along with them as they tried to rob us. And as we cheered along with the rest of the crowd, I couldn’t help but notice how well all these people responded to the movie’s emotional queues. They, after all, had not been weaned on Return of the Jedi Super Value meals or Obi Won Kenobi Underoos. This movie, made so far away and with such
a different audience in mind, was perhaps evidence that people aren’t that different after all. Maybe hidden there, somewhere at the heart of that Kyrgyz movie theatre, was a quiet message of hope. A message of universal understanding and brotherhood of Man. I don’t know for sure. But I do know this: I’ll always hate This One Girl.

Ta ta, tee-tee ta. Rest. Rest.

Now honestly, if anything, you’ll have to admit that it’s almost awe inspiring how recklessly I’ve wasted your time here. But maybe it was good for you. Maybe, in some strange way, you needed it.

As a final word, I’ll leave you with this Russian proverb:

“The result of too many nurses is a baby with one eye”.