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My Russian teacher Jarkin has a quick laugh, a warm heart and patience aplenty. When I balk at the handwriting exercises, she gives me a withering look, exhales dramatically and then sits silently, waiting for me to acquiesce. I do. Every time.

When I rush through my oral exercises, she reaches over and touches my hand. “Laura,” she says imploringly, “be very attentively.”

It is my good fortune that Jarkin has a divining rod to all that is essential in the universe. Be very attentively: isn’t that life’s essence?

The Hand Project

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hand9hand8hand7hand6We are talking ethics in one of the classes I am teaching this semester. There are 11 students in that class, and last week we discussed the symbol of the hand in our differing cultures. Give me your hand in marriage. Raising a hand to swear I will tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me God. The handshake, palmistry, praying, hand holding, hello + goodbye in the same gesture with the hand. Then we created The Hand Project. The idea: Interview people about their ethics, their principles. Engage them in a conversation about what they hold to be true in their deepest center. Then ask them to choose the one principle or value that is most important to their lives and write it on their hand. Any language. A word, phrase or sentence. The students are collecting the images, and in the spring, we will study them for what they might tell us and make an exhibition.

The assignment includes each of the ethics students also participating. Here is what eight of them had to say. From top to bottom: Inna, Asipa, Usha, Batyr, Masha, Lynn, Sergei, Ekaterina.

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The adverbs from the Weather Channel to predict Bishkek‘s temperatures have taken a turn. Cold remains the prevailing adjective. Very cold last week gave way to extremely cold for the weekend. And for tomorrow, the prediction is bitterly cold. What tops bitterly? Outrageously? Dastardly? Ghastly?

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Dateline: Bishkek.

Dinner: bozo and samsa. Bozo is a fermented millet drink that tastes like yogurt mixed with beer. Samsa are phyllo dough triangles with meat, cheese or veggies inside.

The tab: 50 soms.

The life: good.

The beat: goes on.

Snow-Caped Statesmen

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These four are from the Alley of Statesmen in Duboviy Park (Oak Park), which sits across from the American University of Central Asia. The oaks were planted in the late 1800s, and the park’s central axis is lined with busts of poets, writers and orators.

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Prinimat Vannu

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It is the end of my first week of class, and last night I was exhausted. I think it comes from paying so much attention all the time. A new culture, the Russian language all around me, the public expressionlessness of the people on the sidewalks. I am always alert, always noticing, always filing things away. When I get back to my apartment at day’s end, I feel myself unclench a little. I let my mind wander and sift through what the day brought, put some notes in my journal, download and edit images I shot. And then I usually take an epic bath. I’ve a massive bathtub with what so far is an endless supply of hot water. I lie in the tub and get all drifty and pliant. It’s the best therapy I’ve found for living in another country. When I was emailing Emil, my landlord, I asked if there was a bathtub. It would have been a deal breaker.

Lenin Points the Way

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lenin oints the way  It’s about a 10- to 15-minute walk from my rented flat to the university. I head down a half block of Logvinenko and take a right on four-lane Chui Avenue, one of the city’s main arteries. Thick traffic always: taxis, cars, busses, the minivan public transport called marshrutkas. I pass the massive, ornately fenced, white Government House, and just before I come to Ala-Too Square, I step onto the zebra to cross the road; the cars come to an astonishingly consistent and respectful stop when pedestrians are in the zebras.

Across Chui I am in city parks. The traffic sounds muffle. I hit my stride on uncrowded, tree-lined walkways. I walk past the Kyrgyz Dramatic Theater and turn onto Abdymomunov Street where drivers like to come and do spinouts on the ice in the winter.

And then I pass one of a handful of Lenin statues in the city. It’s behind the State Historical Museum, which sits in the city’s main square, Ala-Too. This one is what a statue should be: formidable, commanding, oversized and a wee bit scary. (Another I saw features Lenin’s disembodied head floating about 10 feet up off the ground against a stone slab.) Unlike many former Soviet countries, Kyrgyzstan did not destroy its statuary when Communist rule ended, but they did banish this Lenin statue from center stage in the main square to this more obscure location behind the museum. Lenin the revolutionary, Lenin the tour guide. In this statue he stands with a joyless expression, his coat swirling at his knees, his telltale balding head and goatee. One arm outstretches before him. And if I follow the line of his fingertips, Lenin gestures with an open palm toward  the university. The American University of Central Asia, according to a sign affixed beside the front entrance, was the Headquarters of the Supreme Soviet of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic until 1984.

When people ask why I don’t write fiction, I will tell them this little story. And then I will ask: Why would I spend time making things up when real life pulsates with such delicious absurdities?

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The Circus Building

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Rising like a spaceship from the right angles of the city landscape, I chanced upon the Circus Building today. There were echoes of the Deco District on South Beach with its palette and porthole windows. There were hints of Vegas, of a movie set, of The Jetsons. I blustered my way past the guard in the lobby sitting at a card table in a giant fur hat. Through a swinging lobby door into the interior I wandered unhindered for about an hour, snapping photos and taking in the sweeping vistas of Bishkek.

The Circus building is circa 1976 and designed by a quartet whose first names I have yet to ascertain: L. Segal, V. Shardrin, A. Nezhurin and D. Leontovich. There are similar Circus buildings in other former Soviet countries, most circular, grand and crumbling. Circus entertainment was a highlight of Soviet entertainment and the Bishkek Circus building is still in operation. During my stroll and photo shoot, I tiptoed into the hall to see a handful of performers in tights and spangles. Center stage was a big plastic swimming pool with a stage set inside it like an island. Aerial wires crisscrossed overhead.

–photo courtesy of Architectuul.com

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“Writing and travel seem indivisible to me now. And these trips—the process by which you uproot yourself, pack a bag for some adventure ahead, and hurtle across an ocean to lose yourself, not knowing what lies ahead—become a vital way to break the gravitational pull of your everyday life, in order to pass through some seam that allows you to see the universe in a completely different way, to enter these worlds and stories as a kind of babe in the wild, resonating to every bright color and strange note.”  ~ Michael Paterniti

Men at Work

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The ceremony of the military is an international ballet. The costumes, the orchestrated and precise moves, the focus, the dedication to form. These two are in front of the historical museum in the city’s main square, Ala-Too. At the top of every hour a trio of soldiers struts in precise choreography to perform The Changing of the Guard. They are boys in long coats, white gloves and black tall boots. They carry big guns and wear fuzzy hats. One soldier calls out the moves as these two descend the stairs and a new pair ascends.

If you click on this live webcam trained onto Ala-Too, you are afforded an aerial view of part of the square; the soldiers are in a small enclosure at the base of the large flagpole bearing the red-and-yellow Kyrgyz national flag. The soldiers also have a cameo in Bommalatam, a music video showcasing a jinky set of moves by dancing duo Srikanth and Sneha as they gyrate in front of a buffet of Bishkek monuments. The clip is from Bose, a 1984 Tamil Indian action film.