Home again, home again

My time in the states was great. It may have taken a day-and-a-half to get there and two-and-a-half days to get back (the world turns clockwise folks) but all the pain of the London and Istanbul airports was well worth it. To sum it up in a couple words: It was great to be home. I keep telling people that if I went back last year with another year-and-a-half of pain (and moderate joy) left that I most likely wouldn’t be able to come back to Kyrgyzstan. The states and all the people in them were that spectacular. On the minus side resided the television and all its TiVoness. We don’t have TiVo but my sister in Baltimore does and sorry to say it was only moderately thrilling. Sorry Lauren. If we didn’t already have seventy channels in the states TiVo is there to allow you to watch the same forty-five minute show over and over again. It is my theory that TiVo is the birth-child of television’s extreme dullness. Upon my arrival in America it also shocked me that television had become more commercial-filled, stocked with moronic reality shows and ten times as mind-numbingly stupid as before. I missed my Kyrgyz TV. Only two channels with constant fuzz seem like all a growing boy needs.

But luckily I had friends who had not deserted me as distraction from America’s TiVo worship. My friends came down for a weekend and we had a party. Alcohol was involved so it was a good party. It was good to get back with them, play real American pool, and chat it up with those whom I hadn’t seen in two years over a nice frosty beverage. Frosty beverages are, sad to say, few and far between in Kyrgyzstan. I realized that I missed my friends and all the strikingly separate adventures they have had scattered about on the eat coast. The further you get away from living in such close proximity to those dear to you the further you grow apart. That’s life; it’s what human beings naturally do. I do know that I will keep in touch with very few of my friends in the Peace Corps, those living on the lake with me, when we leave Kyrgyzstan. The fact that me and my close friends from the states last knew each other five or six years ago and they keep coming back to me and I to them means that we are real, close friends.

The thing that was coolest about my trip to the states didn’t happen while I was in the states. I am a born and bread American (whatever “bread” means besides a kooshy meal made from flour and yeast) and am “proud” of my country no matter how many horrible problems there are from East to West. The quotes are complicated because there are things I am not proud of like reality shows (they come up again) and Kevin Federline. The coolest thing that happened to me in America happened to me not in America but far above the Atlantic in an airplane. On said airplane traveling from New York to Istanbul I was sitting next to a freaky, on-edge, middle 50’s Turkish guy and his old mother. The freaky, on-edge guy was certainly freaky and on-edge because he was always complaining to the stewardesses in Turkish and did not accept the concept that they were British and therefore understood no Turkish. There was one Turkish-speaking flight attendant but she was usually MIA. The passengers on the airline had all come to a consensus that she was in the bathroom smoking. This Turkish flight attendant could speak English very well but none of the British people knew Turkish because, as you know, British people are lazy and English is a much more popular, “trendy” maybe, language than Turkish. I am not yet finished with my story but there are two facts that you need to know for this story to make some comprehensible sense. When I came through Turkey on my trip over, in September of 2004, I knew no Kyrgyz. The sole fact that should make a light bulb, be it Christmas or flood, come on in your head is the fact that Kyrgyz is from the Turkish language family and, I have heard, is very much like Turkish. Kyrgyz people pick up Turkish fluency like that. Snap your fingers here. It helps to accentuate the story and more deeply bury it in your long-term memory. It’s like English and Spanish although Turkish and Kyrgyz are your weird step-relatives from northern California. I am now above the Atlantic and the freaky guy moves to the right from the middle for a reason that he, and he alone, knows. I am sitting on the left side and this partial Chinese fire drill allows the old woman to sit next to me. When she first talked to me I was nervous. I had never heard spoken Turkish spoken in my direction much less had an old Turkish woman talking at me and expecting a reply. But to my surprise I could understand maybe 50% of what she was saying. When we both got “on the same wavelength,” something that is very important, even in Kyrgyzstan, for comprehension, I could understand her speech and she could understand mine. I was speaking Kyrgyz and she was speaking Turkish and we had no real problems understanding each other. It’s amazing all the information I found out about this lady without even speaking the same language that she did and mine wasn’t even my native language. I acquired her name including the names of her five children and she acquired mine. I have since forgotten all relevant information because the handy digital recorder I had on me at the time and was using to record our conversation was stolen in my summer camp when I got back to Kyrgyzstan; that and I have a really bad memory. But I do remember that she had four sons and one daughter. The son is an architect in New York and the daughter is going to university somewhere in California. The other three sons currently reside in Turkey. All of this information derived from a woman who spoke a different language than I speak with limited proficiency! We told each other about our lives for about an hour. I told her my name was Taylor and I was an English teacher in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan. She though that was pretty cool. She said: chun elebi!

With my patchy memory most activities I engaged in while in the states have faded into the background. I think my memory was patchier because of all the “new” things (two years old) in the states that I had to re-get-used-to. The plethora of sparkling new cars compared with our surplus of mid 70’s cars in Kyrgyzstan, the excess of cell phones that play snatches of Beethoven’s 9th compared with our few MIDI cell phones; I’ve seen ones that MIDIly play “Kung Foo Fighting”. Your surplus of electronic blueberries compared with ours that grow in the ground from seeds. And perhaps strangest is my Kyrgyzstani no-personal-spaceness and having to consciously think when I get on a bus or on a taxi to keep all appendages inside the lines and not sprawled out to and fro on another person’s person. It’s all kosher in Kyrgyzstan but things change when you travel halfway around the world. It seems that America has a lot more stuff in it than Kyrgyzstan as referenced above. Maybe that’s good and maybe that’s bad but America is first and primarily a home to me. All the stuff will take some getting used to but after my two-year excursion in Kyrgyzstan it will be very, very good to be home.

I flew into Manas airport at two in the morning. Then it was waiting in the customs line for what seemed like three hours but I’m sure was more like half of one. I had forgotten this from when I first came over in 2004 and it was certainly no more fun this time. After that came baggage and acquiring my bags; one which was, and still is, MIA. Then after some time I got in a taxi to the tune of twenty-five-hundred som, not exactly cheap, to take me back to the lake. I slept some in the taxi and had what some may call an enjoyable time. I arrived back in Darkan and everything looked different. Who knew that three weeks in the states could so drastically change the other side of the world? After arrival I had a day to wander around in a jet-lagged daze before going to the yearly summer camp my school puts on. Aida, Jenny and Brian were going to show up to help me so at least it wouldn’t be too bad. None of them showed up. I was left with me, all by my lonesome and twenty partially-screaming kids to attempt to teach for two weeks. Some may call my situation bad and I was very tired by the time it was all through but I enjoyed my time on the lake and near a hot spring with my twenty little rug rats. After my camp I came home and slept for a day before going to Brian’s camp. His camp was only four days long and he had lots of help compared with no help that I had so Brian’s camp was not that stressful on me. It was stressful on Brian but it was only four days long. Now I’m taking it easy. I still have nominal work, such as writing this blog, and foreboding work on the horizon (I have to get the things for my resource center) but as my service draws to a close I am remarkably at ease with things.