Rounding off Bishkek, July 24-26

My last entry about Bishkek was not very positive, to say the least. If the government could check what I’m writing (like in the “good old days”, when they opened and read all mail to other countries!), I would probably have been deported! Like I suspected and was about to find out, things couldn’t continue to be quite that bad…

At least everything except the hotels are cheap. A meal is 1 or 2 US$, a 1 litre bottle of water is 0.25 US$, and enjoying the sun is free! Also, a girl on the other side of the street almost walked into a tree yesterday as she was turning her head to look at me - that did wonders for my self-confidence of course! :-)

But the best thing happened on the afternoon of the 24th. I had been sleeping until noon, and spent a few hours in bed, really somewhat afraid to actually go out after the disastrous day before, when I got a phone call. It was Nargiza, the local coordinator for Habitat here in Bishkek, and she invited me to a party! It turned out that there was a special Habitat team here already working in Bishkek.

They belong to something called an interface group in Edinburgh; a group of people from all religions, some Christians, some muslims, some Buddhists, etc, and just to round it off some non-religious people as well. I didn’t have time to find out the background around that, but probably some government-sponsored project about cultural integration in the UK?

Anyway, their project was about to wrap up, and they were having a barbecue at the building site to celebrate. They had even hired a local band that was playing, so not only did I have a decent meal, I also got to dance a little with the local girls. I was trying to remember the dancing lessons I got from Anna before I left, but somehow it didn’t work as well on grass and dirt as on proper dance floor! :-(

A great time was had by all, and more or less a miracle happened: as I was introducing myself to one of the scots, a voice from behind was saying “pratar du svenska” (do you speak Swedish)? It turned out that the build site manager was trained at the Royal Swedish Institute of Technology, no more than 500 meters from my apartment in Stockholm! It’s indeed a small world, and I’m very much looking forward to meeting Sanjab (which I think he was called…) when I get back to Bishkek again. He wants to practice his Swedish, and there’s only like a billion things about his country that I want to learn from him!

A great time was had by all, but the team was going on a three-day R&R trip to the mountains the day after, and most people wanted to get early to bed, so we finished early. Really early. Like 8 o’clock early! It might have been a religious thing, because the three proclaimed non-religious girls in the team definitely did not want to stop to party, and neither did I!

So, as everyone was going back to their apartments (Habitat rents apartments in different buildings in a block in the southern outskirts of the city for the teams) for packing and rest, I was sent off on a beer run. As I got back to the girl’s apartment, the vodka bottles were out (quite decent vodka btw, even though I am far from an expert), and the party was getting started.

We poured the last vodka eight hours or so later back at the girl’s apartment, after doing a pub crawl in the neighborhood. Or in my case it was more of a pub piggy-back, since one of the girls had hurt her foot and couldn’t walk. I’m just very very glad that they had a spare sofa, so that I could at least get a couple of hours of shut-eye before waving goodbye to the team and going back to sleep at my hotel. I wonder how the girls managed their white-water rafting with a hangover? [sadistic smile]

The rest of yesterday was pretty much spent sleeping, watching TV episodes on my laptop, and blogging. Yes, as you can see, I’ve been writing a lot… And today has been pretty much more of the same. After the team (and with them all the locals I had met as well) left, I did revert back to the same scared-of-doing-anything behavior I had before, but it also gave me an opportunity to think a few things over, and after all this writing and talking to Helena over the phone, I actually feel quite ready for meeting the team and starting the project tomorrow!