The Roaming Nole: Home Sweet Home

I've had a request to give a tour of what my home and neighborhood were like in Bishkek, so I'll do my best...

In my first post about Bishkek, I mentioned how freaked out I was when I realized how far out of the city my neighborhood was, as well as a little bit about our house, and well... that icky discovery in the bathroom... but let's start from the beginning...

A map of Kyrgyzstan, with the places I spent time in marked. Note Kazakhstan is VERY close to Bishkek.

Here's Bishkek, a little closer... notice how far away from the majority of the city the pin marking my house is?

I wasn't kidding. 5 streets and you hit farmland.

See... I wasn't exaggerating when I said I was living pretty far out there. Only 5 streets away from fields, and nowhere near the city center.

Welcome to my 'hood - Рухий Мурас (Rykhii Muras)

This cute little ass passed our stop regularly, bringing produce to town.

All of the land out here was farmland just 5 years ago. My host parents built our house on their own. I think it's incredibly sweet. One weekend, when my host aunt was babysitting me (yes... I told them I wasn't afraid to spend a weekend alone, that I've lived alone before, and can totally take care of myself, but that whole hospitality thing...), she told me about how they met. It seems like the start to a cheesy rom-com - it was on Independence Day at Panfilov Park. I haven't told you all about that park yet, but really... it's where all the youth go on warm summer nights to go have fun. It's basically an amusement park, but you don't have to pay admission fees to get in, so you can just wander around and enjoy the lights and sounds and buy tickets to whatever attraction interests you. Anyway... It took a few years for them to finally decide to get married, with both of their families pushing them toward it. They married for love. Something that's normal in Western culture, but not always the normal practice in other parts of the world. In Kyrgyzstan, as in Georgia, "bridenapping" is still a very common thing.

I was trying to give y'all a tour, not a history lesson, wasn't I? Sorry... so... where was I?

This house was our marker to get off the Marshrutka.

Yes, our relatively new neighborhood on the outskirts of Bishkek. There's 1 paved road taking you all the way to the fields. At the end is where the marshrutkas and buses line up waiting to start their next run, take a quick break, or grab something at the store. There's a sidewalk on one side of the street, but there are absolutely NO streetlights that far out of the city. All other roads are rough, dusty, gravel roads. Gotta watch where you're walking at all times, or risk spraining an ankle and eating dirt. Needless to say... I never tried to wear heels while I was living out here... or to go for a jog... it would have ended badly...

My host dad playying with Beksul'tan & some neighborhood kids.

Our house is completely finished, and there's a little store next door at the front of the wee complex the neighbors built. The house across the street... not so finished... but there's enough of a roof for the owners to live... in the summer, electricity doesn't really matter that much. There's SO many hours of daylight, and there wouldn't be air conditioning in the house anyway. Most people know how to cook without it as well. What about plumbing you ask? Well... in that area, it's still common, nay smart, to have an outhouse. BELIEVE ME on that one... Things I wish I had discovered sooner... we went for like 2 days without water once... my hair... was so nasty...

My host mom watching my host dad & brother play with neighborhood kids

Our house doesn't look like anything all that special from the outside. Pretty standard. The fence/wall facing the street is a bit decorative, as you can see in this photo. We have a code gate to walk through, and a larger gate next to it for the car to enter the driveway. You walk into the complex, and there's a wee front yard with a tree, and a few plants my host mom put there on the right. Trash is on the left, and eventually my host mom started putting leftover food in that area for the cats that wound up living in the yard... pets are not very common here... animals in the house? Yuck. Vaccines are also pretty expensive (not so much for a foreigner, but for a local, yes), so you do have to worry about strays living in your yard, especially if you have kids, you never know what they have and could pass to your child if they get scratched.

Our wee front yard and stoop

Anyway... the carport is to the left of the house. The stoop is fairly small, but you always have to be sure to leave a pair of sandals out there. Like a normal Muslim household, we don't wear shoes inside. Which I like. I'm a walk around barefoot kind of gal. So, take your shoes off either before or as soon as you go in, and stash them by the door, or put them in your room, and keep a pair by the door for walking around outside, which in the summertime will be every time you want to eat something. As I mentioned in an earlier post, in the summertime, my family eats all meals outside. Why heat up the house more by cooking inside? We've got a separate eating/cooking area out back. Pretty clever, if you ask me.

A bit tight, but well equipped!

So... after you take your shoes off and go inside, there's a little foyer, with shelves to place your shoes, and places to hang your coats, then there's a wee corridor leading to the bathroom, which I didn't take any photos of. Sorry. Besides the rag instead of TP discovery, the bathroom was pretty standard. Toilet, sink, washing machine, and a shower, but not the kind of shower we're used to, this was more like how you buy a whole hot-tub and put it in your house somewhere. You buy the shower unit, and pop it somewhere in your house. You have to step up to get into it, which wouldn't be ideal for the elderly, but it was still nicer than quite a few showers I've experienced in my life.

To the right once you enter the house, is another door (it seems the hall with the bathroom, extra storage room, and the foyer were additions after the house was already finished), once you go through that, you have the kitchen to the left, which as I've said many times, we rarely used while I was there. It did have all of your standard kitchen appliances, a nice fridge, a separate tap for drinking water, and even a proper oven... something I've had to live without since I left... Now and then, if it wasn't too hot out, we'd have some tea and a snack in there, or you'd catch visiting family members lying on the benches, taking a nap, or watching TV, because it was so much cooler on the 1st floor.

Fancy A.F. right?

Straight ahead is the mystery door... I didn't know what was behind it for about a month... I wasn't very big on snooping around, even though I was curious. I sort of always felt like I'd get caught and get in trouble somehow. Well, at first, I thought maybe another family lived behind the mystery door, it was a really nice door to have installed inside the house. Eventually I was invited beyond the mystery door, and what did I learn? There's a formal dining room in there! Like, seriously fancy, can seat at least 20 people with a long table and the nice china, etc. That's also where my family slept at night in the summer. I was really confused for the first few days when I realized that I was the only person sleeping upstairs... I had no clue where everyone else was! Anyway, the first time I was invited in there was for a formal dinner, when family came into town as part of a holiday. After that, my wee host terror began dragging me in there to play at night, if he wasn't in a mood to tear apart my room instead.

Doesn't look uncomfortable at all... better than springs stabbing you.

It may seem weird that the whole family sleeps down there in the summertime to you, but really, it makes sense. It's a lot cooler in that room, because it's on the 1st floor, and doesn't receive much direct sunlight. Plus, in many parts of the world, it's still totally normal for entire families to sleep together until the child has hit puberty, or even later. My wee host sister last year in Batumi slept in bed with her parents, even though she was about 10. That's not because I stole her room, either. That was just normal. So, in traditional Kyrgyz style, thick blankets get laid out on the floor, pillows for heads, and another blanket or sheet on top. Mom, dad, daughter, and son, all sleep together on the floor. Even though I had my own room, and a proper bed, I'm sure they were far more comfortable than me every night.

A stash of traditional, brightly colored, thick Kyrgyz blankets for sleeping.

A nice little nook for the computer, no?

To the right of the mystery door, was a wee den area next to the stairs. A desk with a computer was under the stairs, and opposite the staircase was another couch, sometimes the kids would sit and watch videos on the computer, from there, or play with toys in that area as well. Once you go up the stairs is a big window, one of the few windows in the house that would get direct sunlight. It lit up the second floor landing. You make a left as soon as you get to the top, and the first door you see is my host parent's bedroom, which was mainly just used for storing their clothes in those hot summer months.

Plenty of space to play, or just lounge about!

To the left of that was another door, leading to the living room. Couches, a TV, and plenty of floor space in that room, perfect for slumber parties (my host sister had quite a few with her cousins) or for little Beksul'tan to run rampant in. The last room up there was mine, originally Beka's. It was equipped with a desk, and a ton of those thick Kyrgyz blankets, since that seemed to be the best place to store them, and a normal twin bed. The decor? Kinda perfect for trying to make me feel like a kid again. Brightly colored dolphin sheets, and Disney Princess curtains.

It was actually a pretty comfy bed, Lotso approved!

The view from my window during a RARE sun shower.

From my window, I could pretty much only see the neighbor's house, because the carport was next to my room, but that came in handy at times as well. Now and then, I'd hear my name called from their kitchen, and they would tell me Racha was looking for me, or invite me over for tea and dessert. These were the kind of neighborhood interactions that you think only exist on TV. Just outside of my room was an armoire, in which Beka, my host sister, cleared out some space for me to put my clothes. So... Yeah, that's our quaint little house.

ALWAYS pack extra flipflops!

Outside is where things start to get different from what we're used to... so, head downstairs, put your flipflops on, and walk through the carport (which is where my family's Mercedes was stored) There's a couch at the end of the carport, up against another building. A nice place to sit outside, under cover, to avoid the stifling heat inside. On the left perimeter of the yard was a long building, which I just assumed was storage for a while. in the right far corner is the extra cooking/dining area. The rest of the yard - a beautiful garden. Well... it would be even more beautiful once everything my host mom had planted was ripe. The roses were beautiful from the very beginning though.

I loved walking past these flowers every day!

The backyard as seen from the living room.

That storage shed turned out to not just have storage, as I discovered one day when I was left alone and started snooping. There was also a banya in there. OMG A BANYA!? My dream house will have a banya. Until you've experienced banya, you have no clue how refreshing it is. It's not just a sauna, or a steam room. It's a form of bathing, that stimulates the senses and leaves you feeling relaxed and refreshed. Further back was more storage for wood etc. and then another little building... THAT was where the outhouse was hiding! WHY DIDN'T THEY SHOW ME THAT!? Seriously. The days when we didn't have any water or someone was already in the bathroom when a case of CASE hit, that would have been really nice to know...

The backyard as seen from the carport - the garden and summer kitchen

CAS/E by the way is a gem of a term I learned from a girl I met at my hostel here in Tbilisi. Central Asian Stomach/Evacuations is what she called it. Once you've traveled in Central Asia, you'll understand exactly what that is. Raz walked from Cornwall, England to Istanbul, bought a bike, and has cycle-toured all the way to Bishkek, so she knows all about CAS... I've got to throw a shameless plug out to her blog, and hopefully one day soon, her book. Meeting someone as fearless as her, just further inspired me to keep writing about these adventures, and to find some new ones, because the world really isn't such a big, scary place. So, give Raz's blog a look! She's been to some of the places I've been to, but has definitely had a unique experiences, and a different perspective as well!

You probably don't want to see what it looked like under those floorboards...

And lastly, we come to the extra kitchen, and dining area. Basically, it was a rough storage shed with a microwave and hot plate, and a kettle, with a big hole in the floor, so stuff could be stored underneath... yeah... a hole dug in the ground under the floorboards, not some sort of finished storage room, literally a deep ass hole... So... now you know why a permanent state of traveler's sickness, or CAS took hold... Food storage around these parts, isn't that great. Plus there was just a lot of meat, potatoes, noodles, and fat. CASE was standard. I have a stomach of steel now, I swear. But I digress...

This is where we had most meals, and spent hours of chatting over tea.

Next to the extra kitchen/storage shed was the spare dining room. Really casual, but many hours a night were spent in there, just drinking tea and chatting with my host mom. This is also where the big stove for making large, celebratory meals is located. In the photo, it's on top of the pink tiles. You put the heating elements in one of those doors on the side, and the big pan for cooking is on top of that, in this photo, they have wood covers on them to keep them clean. I never got to see it in action, but that is where dishes like beshbarmak and plov would be made when you're expecting a lot of guests, and as you've seen from that formal dining room, they certainly can accommodate a lot of guests.

One of those days when the hole was handy.

I've mentioned before that the neighborhood was very social. Very much an "it takes a village" kind of environment. I met our neighbors on the first night I was there. I met other people living nearby shortly after, and pretty much everyone recognized me, even if I hadn't met them yet. There was even a big hole in the fence separating our houses, which came in pretty handy a few times, when Racha locked herself out of the yard. It was big enough for an adult to climb through. It also meant that we could just go downstairs and chat through the hole, if we didn't feel like changing out of PJ's and walking around the neighborhood. Evening strolls weren't uncommon, which was really nice. I joined my host dad in playing with other neighbors and kids on the street a few times. I think I even got engaged at one point... I'm not entirely sure that the engagement is broken off, actually...

Overall, once I got used to it, it was a great place, full of great people. It actually came to remind me of where I grew up in New York. On a dirt road, where everyone in the neighborhood knew who I was. Where neighborhood kids played in the streets, and parents socialized. It's a good way to live... I guess I'll always be a bit of a country girl... Hopefully I'll be walking down those dusty roads again in the near future. Now that I've actually pulled off returning to a country that I never thought I'd go back to, I really believe that I will make it back to Bishkek one day. I know it won't be the same, the neighborhood, and my host siblings will all grow, but I can't wait to walk past that yurt, see those mountains, smell that dust again, and smile fondly.