escape

i'm feeling the cold sting of guilt from my blog neglect this morning. my vida loca has gotten even loca-ier lately. my brother is visiting from iraq, my efforts to extend my kazakhstan visa fell through, i thought i was about to leave taraz possibly for forever and so i scheduled all these last minute social engagements, before my plans changed and now i'm just leaving for a relatively short time.

so as it stands, i become an illegal alien at the stroke of midnight when june 1st becomes june 2nd. so i'm running to dubai on the evening of june 1st, where i plan to apply for a new kaz visa to come back ASAP. but alas, this being taraz, AP is not all that S. there are no international flights from this town, so i need to go to almaty. which means a 10 hour train ride this evening, followed by a one day layover in the apple city before i can fly out of here just five hours before my visa expires.

unless i've calculated wrong. man, that would be a bummer. if my visa says it expires on june 1st that means i am still permitted to be in the country on june 1st and i won't become illegal until the 2nd, right? in any case, i guess i'll find out soon!

i'll be in dubai for only a few days, inshallah. for a long time i've wanted to see that city. at the same time, i didn't think it would be my kind of place. so a few days might be just enough time for me. it's sort of like las vegas. for years i wanted to see it, then i did for a long weekend and now i never have to go back. a few days may be all i need to satisfy my curiosity.

plus, i've traveled a bit in the arab world but i've never experienced the super-wealthy/opulent side of arab culture. all the arab lands i've seen so far (tunisia, egypt, syria, lebanon, and the west bank) were pretty poor and struggling (well, except beirut). aside from some gulfi tourists i met in syria and lebanon, i have little experience with the wealthy persian gulf end of arab culture.

and so starting tonight i'm hitting the road. it's strange because for more than five months i have not spent the night anywhere outside of this tiny provincial city. in fact, most of my life here is confined to a 6 block radius from where i stay. it's a very small life. i'm going pretty crazy after being here this long. it will be good to get away, even though it means leaving the two people who i care the most about in the world behind.

kumis-shubat

ever since i arrived here in kazakhstan, i’ve been meaning to taste kumis and shubat, both traditional kazakh drinks. kumis is a mildly-alcoholic fermented beverage made of horse’s milk. shubat is camel’s milk (specifically bactrian camel's milk, as that’s the kind of camel they got in this neck of the woods). when i visited uzbekistan in 2003, i had a sip of uzbek kumis and hated it. but kazakh kumis must be totally different, right? i mean, it being kazakh and not uzbek. i decided before i write off kumis completely, i really should try it again here. and i had never tried shubat. so tasting the two dairy concoctions has been on my to-do list since december.

i didn't get around to it until last week. what took me so long? part of the problem was that while i wanted to try both kumis and shubat, i wasn’t very confident that i would like it. i didn’t want to buy a big container when i only really needed a sip. both are sold in the dairy aisle of the supermarkets here. you just need to look for the carton with a picture of the smiling horse or camel among all the milk cartons with the smiling cows. but the cartons i found were for one liter, too big for my single sip and mrs. noz maintained a strange prejudice against alcoholic horse’s milk. plus, i was told by locals that the store-bought stuff wasn’t real kumis or shubat. the authentic (i.e. unpasteurized) stuff was sold out of yurts in the summer time.

at that time, i never thought i would be around kazakhstan long enough to seeing the yurts go up. but suddenly it's may. a few weeks ago, the yurts started to appear and i still have not escaped kazakhstan. may also brought the arrival of JF, an adventuresome friend, who happens to have a particular interest in exotic dairy products.

so last week, JF and i set out to the nearest yurt to indulge. note the interior is decorated with horse posters, just so you don't forget where the kumis comes from.

she (i.e. the yurt-lady) ladeled out a small bowl of each and set it out on a table with some non (i.e. kazakh flat bread)

(that’s shubat on the left and kumis on the right).

it wasn’t as bad as i thought. shubat was unexpectedly creamy, almost sweet. kumis tasted like milk with a strange, almost vinegary aftertaste and was a little bubbly (from the fermentation). i liked kumis a little better than shubat whereas JF was more into the shubat than the kumis. neither of us got sick, which by itself exceeded my expectations. no doubt that was because of the super-sanitary condition of the recycled soft drink bottles that was used to store it.

the whole adventure set us back a whopping 200 tenge. (at 147 tg/$1 you figure it out). and that also included the kurt that only JF ate. i had tried before, and had already declared it disgusting.

watery hardball

for weeks after kurmanbek bakiyev fled kyrgyzstan and despite promises to open it soon, the government of kazakhstan kept the border with kyrgyzstan closed. kyrgyzstan, a mountainous landlocked country with few resources other than water (the source of a lot of central asian rivers are within kyrgyzstan), was not happy to be cut off from one of its biggest trading partners. so they diverted the talas river, the river that otherwise flows through taraz.

they didn't even divert the river long enough for my tap to stop working before the kazakhs caved and opened the border. if only they had thought of that sooner, mrs. noz might have been saved a ticket to london. (okay, probably not)

rosenbaum peretz

i'm feeling pretty distant from american politics right now, so i haven't commented much on it here. at least not as much as i used to. but i still try to keep up, so i was struck by this bit in a NYT article about rand paul:

But Mr. Paul’s position is complicated. He has emerged as the politician most closely identified with the Tea Party movement. Its adherents are drawn to him because he has come forward as a kind of libertarian originalist, unbending in his anti-government stance.

(emphasis added)

at the beginning of the same article it says:

When Rand Paul, the victor in the Republican Senate primary last week in Kentucky, criticized the Civil Rights Act of 1964, singling out the injustice of non-discriminatory practices it imposed on private businesses, the resulting furor delighted Democrats and unsettled Republicans.

Mr. Paul hastened to state his abhorrence of racism and assert that had he served in the Senate in 1964, he would have voted for the measure.

it looks like he bended to me.

recent news stories that have affected our lives here in a negative way

the death of casey johnson.
the arrest of nanette and michael craver
torry hansen sending artyem saviliev back to russia
the eruption of mount eyjafjallajokul in iceland
the ouster of kurmanbek bakiyev as president of kyrgyzstan

also quite possibly:
the earthquake in haiti
joe sestak's decision to challenge arlen specter in the democratic primary

it's hard to come up with a more random list of news stories.

jesus christ

what an absurdly awful last two weeks that was.

birthers everywhere!

yesterday i had a beer with a pair of meskhetian turks who were birthers. i mean, they weren't birthers in the sense that they thought there was anything wrong with obama being born outside of the u.s., but they did believe it as one of those curious pieces of trivia about the american president. they also thought he was muslim and at least part-arab.

those crazy forwarded email really do get around.

useless things i learned in kazakhstan 9

based on the pathword billboards around town advertising international calling rates, the people of taraz only call the following foreign countries: russia, china, kyrgyzstan, uzbekistan and tajikistan. apparently there aren't enough people calling anywhere else to target them in the ad campaign.

victory day

welcome to upyernoz's "holidays of kazakhstan" blog! at least that's what it feels like these days. and today is victory day.

but you knew that already right? and not just because i wandered into a dress rehearsal a few weeks ago. i also wrote about victory day waaaaay back in ought-six.

so like i was saying, today it's victory day, the day we commemorate kazakhstan's victory over nazi germany. what do they do for victory day in taraz? the same thing they do for every freakin' holiday! (and this is my seventh), they have a big hullaballoo on the central square.

actually there has been a lot of lead-up to this particular holiday. for weeks they've been practicing every morning for today's big performance. which has made a few surreal scenes here in the center of town. a few days ago, i was running some errands and a guy dressed as a nazi SS officer rode past me on a bicycle. also, as victory day approached, i saw more and more old guys walking around town wearing a military uniform with soviet-era medals pinned to their chest. like these guys in the billboard:


or this guy who i saw in the parade crowd this morning:


it's not just the USSR's greatest generation either. earlier in the week our taxi driver sported medals. he was in afghanistan in the early 1980s.

but where was i? oh yes, the parade. the parade began with a vague review of the history of world war two. from the invading nazis:


to floats depicting the battles between germany and the red army:


followed by the victory of the soviet union:


then came mourners for the fallen soviet soldiers (at first i thought the women in black were holding melons. in fact, they were holding helmets with red stars on them, which, i must admit, is more somber than mellons):


then came some dancing (that i didn't get any good pictures of) and then the modern armed forces of kazakhstan marched by:


the modern armed forces thing went on forever. sick of parades yet? good. i think i captured it pretty well. actually, my favorite part was from earlier in the celebration. when the parade route was flanked by soldiers and men in white shirts holding up red flags. except that one of the flag holder couldn't find a plain white shirt, so he wore a white LA raiders shirt instead:

(bigger view)

no primary for me

originally i thought i would be back in plenty of time for the may 17th pennsylvania primary. then i thought i would be back just in time. then i realized there was no way i would make it back in time. but then suddenly a few days ago, i thought i would be back in time after all.

now i'm back to thinking there's no way. and i believe that's my final answer. and after reading the absentee ballot rules it also pretty clear that there's no way i can do that in time either.

if specter beats sestak by a single vote i'm gonna be really pissed.

amusing conspiracy theory of the week

so there's this terrible oil spill in the gulf of mexico that is trashing the coastline and ecosystem of several southern states. plus it's not really a spill, but rather an underwater gush. a spill, like oil coming from a tanker, implies that there is a relatively small amount of oil that is threatening to leak out. what's happening here is the underground oil source is gushing freely into the gulf.

the gush is only happening because people tried to extract oil from the offshore oil fields. so the scope of the disaster poses a real political problem to the "drill baby drill" faction. governor schwarzenegger has already turned against offshore drilling, and other governors who have historically been the biggest proponents of drilling also happen to be from states who will bear the brunt of this disaster.

to take the blame off their beloved offshore drilling, conservative pundits are floating the theory that the disaster was deliberate. that is, rather than being the result of the negligence of the oil company or the inherent risks in offshore extraction, people like rush limbaugh, former bush press secretary dana perino and fox news personality eric bolling are hinting that the gush might have been the result of deliberate sabotage.

but that just shows how stupid they are. isn't offshore drilling just as bad an idea if the gush is due to negligence of sabotage? in this age of terrorism, wouldn't the potential for sabotage be yet another reason that offshore drilling is a really bad idea?

if you're going to come up with a conspiracy theory to suit your political purposes, maybe you should make sure it actually suits your political purposes.

unity day

for much of the world, today is the day to celebrate working people. the u.s. however got uncomfortable with that version of may day when the soviet block embraced it. so it made up its own labor day in early september. after the soviet union crumbled and kazakhstan became independent, it inherited the may 1st holiday but i guess the powers that be decided that ethnic harmony was more important that workers' rights, so today in kazakhstan it's unity day.

what do people do for unity day here in taraz? well, aside from having a long weekend off from work, they go to the central square and watch people in colorful ethnic costumes dance together around a may pole, or at least whatever ethnic costumes they can see over the heads of the people standing in front of them.





we didn’t know which costume went with which ethnic group, but that didn’t stop us from making stuff up. pointing at groups of people and saying "definitely uzbeks", "see them... tatars", and "koreans, no question". the only really obvious ones were the germans, who had some kind of bavarian oompah band play when it was their turn to dance in the center.

then came the parade, it started with more people in colorful ethnic costumes marching past. but then came other, less colorfully dressed people. the local universities made their students march, and kaztelecom made their employees do it as well (so much for labor day...). the ruling party's crew was easy to spot when they went by, chanting "Kazakhstan, nursultan, nur otan!" along with the crowd.

as each group marching was announced by the MC, the crowd yelled "oo-rah! oo-rah!" (russian doesn't really have an "h"). periodically the people would show their excitement by letting go of balloons to sail off into the sky. and so wave after wave of balloons sailed off towards kyrgyzstan. these days those kyrgyz need some cheering up.