Summer's End feat. Central Asia

National History Museum, Chisinau.

Lots of updates this time, it’s hard to know where to begin! I’m writing from the US again, I’m back home for a few weeks waiting for my French work visa to come through before moving to Rennes. To begin this entry I’ll have to rewind the clock to July or so – it’s amazing how much has happened in the past six weeks.

E'li, Israel.

The end of July was a mixture of work at the lab and an exciting trip to Israel, for a family reunion. The reason for it was the 30^th yahrzeit (anniversary of a date of death) for my great-grandfather so a pretty large proportion of his descendants all came to Jerusalem for a gravesite ceremony, myself included. I decided to travel on an interesting (read: inexpensive) path to get there, with a 25-hour layover in…. Chișinău, Moldova! In case you’re not sure, Moldova is in Eastern Europe just off the Black Sea, nestled between Romania and the Ukraine. So somehow I ended up in this country and had culture shock proper when trying to get to my Airbnb – it ended up working out but the language barrier was pretty formidable. The official language is Romanian, which is a Romance language which was kind of similar to Italian and Spanish but it was still pretty difficult to communicate, and very few people spoke any English at all. As far as Chișinău goes: it was an interesting city, very inexpensive, and I learned a fair amount of Moldovan history which is actually pretty fascinating, but I can’t say it would be my city of choice. Moldova is one of the poorest countries in Europe and Chișinău in particular was subjected to a lot of damage in World War II and hasn’t recovered perfectly. Being a part of the Soviet Union, it was rebuilt with classic Soviet architecture, which is to say a lot of utilitarian rectangular box-like buildings which are unavoidably unattractive. Culturally there was plenty going on in the city, but it wasn’t the most accessible to outsiders, for sure. But it was an interesting experience.

Tour de France, from Place de la Concorde, Paris.

Anyway, the trip onward to Israel was great, and I spent a really amazing week meeting up with friends and family and crisscrossing the entire country. It’s always a pleasure to be back there, and Middle Eastern food was a fantastic change of pace. I brought back some chocolate and halva to the lab in Paris and I think it was well-appreciated. Anyway the beginning of August was essentially a race to wrap up my projects in lab, which actually managed to provide decent results. I also spent a huge amount of the end of summer rock climbing (since that was essentially how I made friends in France), but I did overdo it in the end and learned my limit for how many times I can climb in a week. It all ended a little too quickly in Paris – but I was thrilled with the very end of my stay because I ended up being able to shadow an abdominal surgery group at the Robert-Debré hospital. I saw a pediatric pancreaticoduodenectomy which was a really impressive surgery and it was good to have some sort of link to medicine, especially with having deferred med school for my year. I also got to enjoy a great trip to the modern art museum, and I was thrilled to catch the finish of the Tour de France in Paris and see the swarm of cyclist circling the Place de la Concorde and the Champs-Élysées.

Almaty, Kazakhstan.

Finally, on August 9, I left Paris for my exciting couple of weeks in central Asia! First stop: Almaty, Kazakhstan. If I had culture shock in Moldova, it was nothing compared to Kazakhstan. But I will say, there was much more English than I expected there, particularly from the young people. It was by no means great, but there was something, which I found really impressive. For most of daily life though over there, everything is in Russian. Kazakh as a language was pretty repressed by the Soviet government, so everyone there speaks Russian, most more fluently than Kazakh which is nothing at all like Russian (it’s a Turkic language, actually, not an Indo-European one). I learned the Cyrillic alphabet a couple of years ago so I actually managed alright with reading signs and menus (there are a fair amount of cognates between Russian and French), but my spoken Russian is obviously awful and I worked with the absolute bare minimum. Traveling around central Asia is particularly challenging because the public transport consists of a complicated bus system that is not really very easy to keep track of. In Almaty there is actually a metro which runs exceptionally well, and is quite impressive, but that’s the exception, not the rule. In Astana it’s only buses, and across Kyrgyzstan it’s a system of minibuses called marshrutkas, or as someone there called them, “capsules of death,” which gives some perspective on what taking one was like. Needless to say the easiest way around is by taxi which is generally about a dollar or two to cross the city, so very affordable. The marshrutkas are like ten cents but I value my life at more than ninety cents so the choice was pretty simple. The problem with taxis though is you have to say where you’re going and haggle a little in Russian which was a daily challenge and got pretty exhausting after a while.

Astana, Kazakhstan

I flew to Astana (the Kazakh capital) to meet my friend Jean-Philippe who was an excellent travel buddy throughout this whole experience, and we traversed the central Asia together from Astana. It’s a bizarre city – it’s a planned capital that’s been around for only twenty years, and it’s essentially the playpen of the president/dictator Nursultan Nazarbayev. Everything is enormous there – Kazakhstan has a taste for largeness. It’s a fascinating place to wander through but even before seeing the countryside you know that Astana is not indicative of the country as a whole. It’s a testament to money in the hands of the few at the expense of the many, and while walking past gilded towers and domes and mansions is pleasant to the eye, it’s a bit less so for your sense of morality.

Train snapshot feat. rarely-observed glasses

After a couple days exploring Astana, we caught our highly-anticipated train to Almaty, which took twenty-five hours and longitudinally traversed the entire Kazakh steppe. We took a first-class compartment which was awful accommodation by any measure (which makes me terrified for what second- and third-class accommodations must have been), with very little space, very little privacy, and very little comfort. The toilet was a hole onto the railroad tracks and could therefore only be used when the train was in motion, which was surprisingly little of the time. The train trip was quite the adventure, punctuated by random people entering the compartment and asking unintelligible questions to us in Russian, or giving us random watermelons, or offering us salted fish from the local towns along the way. One of the most surprising things for me was how all of these random villagers just boarded the train every time it stopped and entered our compartment to offer us food, and how people used the railroad tracks as a thoroughfare for themselves, their merchandise, and their animals (seeing cows, sheep, and goats wandering along the tracks was a pretty common occurrence). A bit different from America.

Anyway, we finally arrived in Almaty and spent a couple of days there to recover and do some touring around. Somehow, I got locked in my own bedroom (I swear it wasn’t my fault) and the door proved to be unopenable from both the inside and the outside, so the challenge of the evening was how to explain to the Airbnb landlord in Russian what was going on. The solution to this problem ended up being that I spent the night locked in this room and a guy came the next morning with power tools to break down the door to let me out – like, what? Not an experience I was expecting, but there you have it. And I managed to escape so all’s well that ends well. We finally left Almaty for Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, which was accomplished by taking an inter-city marshrutka, a six-hour drive for about $5 per person (you do get a lot for your money over there). The border crossing was stressful because of the language barrier and I ended up getting my dates mixed up and had the wrong exit visa stamped in my passport, which was also pretty anxiety-inducing during this time but it ended up not being a problem in the end, luckily, though it was a totally unnecessary contributor to the stress of the experience.

 

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

But regardless, we arrived in Bishkek and spent a day exploring there and getting situated before heading out to the mountains. In central Asia, the cities are not really the main attraction – the countryside is, and Kyrgyzstan most of all because it’s the most mountainous of the “-stan” countries. About 90% of Kyrgyzstan is mountainous, occupying the Tien Shan range, so that is the place to go. We picked a smaller mountain lake called Song-Kul as our destination, mostly because the larger lake Issyk Kul is much more touristy and isn’t actually in the mountains. We seriously underestimated how crazy Kyrgyz drivers are, and how sketchy their police system is (bribery is the common way to get out of traffic tickets), and how poorly maintained the mountain roads are, so we ended up hiring a driver to bring us the seven hours out to Song-Kul, which proved to be one of the smartest decisions we made because he expertly traversed hours of tough mountain roads and successfully forded through two rivers (I low-key feared for my life each time). Anyway we finally made it to a yurt camp in the middle of nowhere which was home for two nights – and when I say the middle of nowhere, I truly mean it. This place was off a dirt road that half the time did not exist, and was three hours from the nearest town, Kochkor, which was another four hours from the nearest actual city (Bishkek), which was six hours from the big city and cultural capital of the region (Almaty), which itself exists in a desert of nothingness, 2000 miles from Beijing and 2500 miles from Moscow. In this far-flung corner of the Tien Shan, I was 7000 miles from Colorado, a full twelve time zones away, which placed me squarely at the opposite end of the world and the farthest-removed from civilization I have ever been in my entire life.

Yurt Camp, Song-Kul, Kyrgyzstan

…A great place to catch Giardia. If you’re unfamiliar, best to keep it that way – it’s a nasty parasite that comes from bad water and enjoys infecting your intestines, which unfortunately happened to me on this trip and has made the past couple of weeks uncomfortable. We made the big mistake of running out of water up there (rookie mistake) and learned to regret it. Good times. But regardless, it was a spectacular place, with breathtaking views and natural beauty to rival the incredible sights I’ve seen in Iceland and in Colorado – the mountains are always indescribable. It has to be seen to be believed. We spent our time there hiking, horseback-riding, and chatting with the other travelers there, which represented a pretty international bunch. All of the traveling groups there stayed in their own yurts, which are moveable structures made from wood and wool (imagine a mountain version of a teepee or igloo). It was definitely a cool experience, filled with the very-strange local foods (the most bizarre of which was fermented horse milk). Being a vegetarian there was not easy, by the way. I requested to make things vegetarian for me, and they told me they did, but I have some suspicions that there might have been meat in the broth. I’m trying to live in ignorance but I really don’t think my definition and standards of vegetarianism translated well over there. However I tried to do the best that I could and I’d like to think that I could take their answers (and meals) at face value.

Conquering the Tien Shan

Anyway, we finally left Song-Kul and made it back to Bishkek (thankfully), spent an evening recovering, and then made it to Almaty again, spent another evening recovering, and then finally fled the country for good on the 20^th, arriving back to Paris that evening. That was when the Giardiasis was in full swing so I can’t say I enjoyed the return so much – I was mostly just struggling to stay on top of things and stay hydrated and not miss my flight the next day because at that point I was really anxious to get back to America where I could finally get some rest and some sanity. I did manage to survive my trans-Atlantic and my North American flights, and made it back to Washington DC last Tuesday, where I have thankfully had more than enough opportunity to rest up and feel better. I surrendered my passport to the French consulate last week so I’m at their mercy before I can leave the country again, now that I’m feeling better I’m hoping to travel around the States a little. I’ve got a trip to Colorado planned for this week and Boston for next weekend so I’m keeping myself busy, and I’ve really been enjoying having some free time again to get my mind and my affairs together here.

So, to conclude this mega-entry – I can safely say that this past “hopping” has been probably the most formidable and adventurous one I’ve ever done, and I’ve come away from it with both good and bad. I think I’m done with the really crazy travels certainly for the short-term (I’ve finally had my fill), and I’m relishing being back in the West and having the amenities that I’d kind of taken for granted. It’s certainly opened my eyes to much of the rest of the world, and my interactions that traversed the language barrier were all very revealing. But for now, I’m happy to be back at home (and very happy to be reunited with the cat!), and I’m super excited to be seeing friends and family again on this side of the coast.

 

The Tien Shan Mountains, Kyrgyzstan.

Silver Spring, Maryland, USA; 28 August 2018.