Idiot Club
plus: cat! more cats! more cats??!! and thanksgiving!
A few weeks ago, one of the Bishkek fellows invited me to join her newly formed Idiot Club. Now, I’ve been a lifelong member of my own personal idiot club, but hers sounded like more fun. The idea was that we’d read a page of The Idiot (Dostoyevsky, not the excellent Elif Batuman autofiction version1) in Russian every day.2 This sounded like a great idea. I could read a great piece of literature, improve my Russian, bond with my fellow Idiots, etc.
We made it two days. So far what I know about the plot of The Idiot is that two guys meet on a train. One of them is cold because he doesn’t have a good coat. Maybe we’ll give it another go when winter really sets in.
It snowed the day after my last blog post. My roommate, who grew up in Dubai and went to college in North Carolina, was ecstatic. Christmas music season began immediately. I was pretty pleased myself. The city is beautiful under a blanket of snow, especially with all the trees in my neighborhood.
By the end of the weekend the snow had already melted, and Pearl and I journeyed east to Zhetisu bazaar. Zhetisu is a bit of a different vibe than the Green Bazaar in Almaty’s center. There’s definitely more of a focus on clothes and household goods than food, at least in the parts of it I saw. Some people have their own shops in shipping containers, but plenty of people just have their wares spread out on blankets. Perusing a table of Soviet-era postcards, I heard the unmistakable clamor of other Americans. These Americans actually happened to be people from the consulate that Pearl knew from work, and they happily adopted us into their tour of the bazaar. They are frequent flyers at Zhetisu and had the fur coats and embroidered vests to show for it.
I bought two blazers and a periwinkle wool coat—grand total: 6,000 tenge ($12).
The consulate staffers bought two kittens, and one of them kept them in her coat for the rest of the day. Grand total: 2,000 tenge ($4)
Then we got noodles for lunch at the mall next door. We’ve been making something of a tour of Almaty’s lagmanhanas3 (places that sell the noodle dish I ate every day in my Kyrgyz university’s cafeteria)
Speaking of my Kyrgyz university, Pearl and I made another trip to Bishkek a few weeks ago, where we stayed with two of the Bishkek fellows and hung out with the rest. All of them work at my former school, so it was fun to get the staff perspective. We went to an Indian restaurant that I loved when I lived there, the art museum, and one of the bazaars. It was strange to be back downtown in the parks, by the library where I volunteered on Wednesdays, the tunnels under the busy intersections, the theater where I took several nice naps on school-sponsored trips to the ballet. It felt like I’d never left.
The trip there was uneventful: 6pm bus, midnight arrival, easy border crossings. But when we showed up on Sunday to take the noon bus back, we were informed that the noon bus had broken down, and we’d have to wait for the 2pm. This is the way of things. We invited the American college student hanging around the ticket office to get some lunch.
The new bus station is waaay out of town, and definitely not walkable to anywhere you’d want to go, but there was a Central Asian restaurant in the lot that seemed worth trying. Our new buddy Zach explained that he was on break from his study abroad program in Thailand and had snagged a cheap flight to Almaty knowing nothing about the region, no Russian, no research. He seemed to have managed pretty well—it’s not for nothing that Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan are famous for their hospitality. We tried to do our part, getting him to the new bus on the other side of the border crossing and making sure he didn’t get scammed by taxi drivers on his way to the airport, and sent him on his way.
Other assorted adventures, recalled with the help of my camera roll:
Discovered that maybe I should think about what grammar examples I’m going to use before I get up there
The incident in question Visited Edna and Lu while they were cat-sitting for the largest cat I’ve ever seen
his name is Alex and he did not like me Went to a cat exhibition with Lu and Jillian. They had some crazy looking guys hanging out
Look at his head Went thrift shopping at Jalan Jalan Japan, which is a store that brings all the clothes Japanese people donate to charity to Kazakhstan
Went to the world’s fanciest grocery store trying to track down cornmeal to make cornbread for thanksgiving
Hosted potluck Thanksgiving! Made mac and cheese!4
While I am no longer a Spotify user, I was for most of the year, and my Spotify wrapped revealed that I was in the top 0.04% of Vampire Weekend listeners, aka #8,059 in the world. I’ll hold for applause.
Ate some churros at a Mexican-themed bar
Made a little paper doll at the Almaty Art Museum
Ran into an American guy we know and was asked if we were “helping out with the craft day”
IT WAS AN ALL AGES EVENT
FOR THE RECORD
Got a beautiful bouquet as a gift from my students
Made latkes for a little early Hanukkah vibe
And with that, my first semester in Kazakhstan comes to a close.
I have to say, I’m glad that this program is a full year. It feels like I just got here. It was nice to know, locking my apartment door this morning, suitcase by my side, that I’d be coming back.
Those who have discussed Elif Batuman’s The Idiot with me know that I have a lot to say about Elif Batuman’s The Idiot. Yes, she was a Turkish international student at Harvard in the 1990s but we actually had the exact same freshman year and I will neither explain nor apologize
A daf yomidiot, if you will.
“hana” as far as I can tell, denotes a place where you do something in Kazakh. So a chai-hana is where you drink tea, a lagman-hana is where you eat lagman. For my Arabic/Persian/Turkish speakers out there, guess what a kitap-hana is
So maybe I went cheese shopping on Thanksgiving to make my mac and cheese for our Saturday Friendsgiving and there were two Americans talking behind me in line at the register, but I got a little flustered because I had forgotten to take out my earbuds so my music was really loud and my coat was too hot and I was trying to pay and bag my stuff and take the receipt and there was a really long line behind me etc etc and I meant to turn around and wish them a happy Thanksgiving and instead I turned around and said “Shabbat Shalom.” Then I bolted out of the store. This could happen to anyone. Unfortunately, it did happen to me, now and forever a proud member of the Idiot Club.
I wish I had an Idiot Club. 😘
Happiest of Hannukahs to you.
Once again, my day is made by tales of your exploits!