sunshine, boys chasing girls on horseback, and newspaper hats.
shymkentskoe beer.
plov, glorious plov!
i never thought that this day would come, but it has. there is NO MORE SNOW in kazakhstan! okay, well that's kind of a lie because there is a tiny itty bitty smidge of snow where there had been giant snow banks. but whatever. more or less, the snow is GONE! and it's sunshine-y and warm (15C or 60F) and spring has finally come.
i've just returned from a week and a half long trip to the south, which in a word, was amazing. when i left my site it was just above freezing, so during the day all the snow would melt but then it would refreeze overnight turning my town into a giant ice rink. so i was really glad to escape the cold. i went down to shymkent (big southern city) to meet up with about 70 or so volunteers from all over KZ for a huge nauryz shebang. nauryz is kazakh (and incidentally, persian/uzbek/central asian/etc.) new year, and was on 22 march. anyhow, there are lots of huge festivities in the south where the ethnic kazakh population is bigger.
the nauryz celebrations include eating lots of shashlik (barbecued lamb kebabs with onions) and plov (rice pilaf, aka food of the gods!), drinking lots of shymkent-brand beer, and listening to traditional kazakh music and watching dancers all dolled up in their uber-colorful national costumes. plenty of yurts around to boot. however, the highlight of the festivities were the horse games: horse races, wrestling on horseback, polo played with a headless goat carcass instead of a ball, and my personal favorite, a race where a boy and a girl chase each other on horseback, and if the boy catches the girl he can kiss her but if the girl catches the boy she gets to ride after him with a whip and beat the shit out of him. BRILLIANT. so we were outside all day enjoying the sights and soaking up the sun. it was reminiscent of a college spring break: escaping to warmer climes, drinking lots of beer, and general chilling with fantastic company.
the day after nauryz we wandered around shymkent and hung out and enjoyed more of the glorious glorious sunshine we had been deprived of for so long. i think i got so sunburnt it's like a 3rd degree burn on my chest. nice. anyhow, so i'm sitting at this uzbek plov cafe, enjoying my plov and a good shymkent beer outside with some of the volunteers, and one of my friends says he wants to steal a beer mug. i don't blame him; they're awesome little beer mugs with the shymkent beer logo on them (i'll post pictures when i have 3 extra hours to spare, cause that's how long the uploads take...). so we're planning and scheming how to steal it, and finally we just decide that he has to take the beer mug and run off while we pay the bill. success! he manages to whisk it away unnoticed. on the way back to one of the apartments we were all staying in, we pop into a shop to buy--what else?-- more beer. and so my friend puts his beer bottles and his mug into a plastic bag. as we walk, he whips out the beer mug and shouts, "свободно! (FREE!)" then tragedy strikes: he puts the mug back in the bag, but the bag breaks, and his mug and bottles of beer just go shattering on the pavement, and beer goes EVERYWHERE. if that's not karma, i don't know what is.
this quote from alex pretty much sums up not just the first day down in shymkent but the entire spring break 2008 bonanza: "The first day was spent basically going from outdoor café to outdoor café drinking cold beer, eating delicious plov and shashlik, and hanging out with the other volunteers. But being the cultured individual that I am, I did take a short break from this hedonism to visit the Museum of Repression."
