Bishkek, day one.

Rent

Change money

telephone

Milk, bread, eggs

Internet

Blog

Meet Daniel, Jerome and Zhenara later in the day

Call Marisa in Khojand

'How do you say': Narusky pa ___?

Bread: nan, or lepyoshka

Soup: soupe or borscht or lacman or cili

Salad: salaat

How much: eskolka estoy?

All this and the sudden cold of the stairwell at Ulitsa Linaeinaya on a sunny day. Waking up for the first time in Bishkek after a four hour nap following a 4 am arrival at Manas Airport outside of the capital (not only a civilian airport named for the epic hero Manas, but also a key transit site for the US Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Many uniformed soldiers early in the morning coursing through the airport as the rest of us waited with our passports in the visa line.)

Now, the items in my to-do list seem like a quaint picture of how I expected my bachelor's life in Bishkek to proceed - doing the shopping, meeting new friends, connecting with contacts in the area, keeping up with the utilities and setting up my schedule and other details of urban living. However, as I walked into Cafe Express at the corner of Moskovskaya and Sovietskaya Boulevards, Shaarbek ordered me a bowl of soup and a salad ("do you want vodka, also?"), his assistant Sani showed up ("this is Sani - he is tech guy and he can translate for your project") and the whirlwind of life at/with/in relation to B'Art Center and its staff had begun. My cell phone and rent would have to wait.

We jumped in a taxi for 1 Karasaeva Street and when we arrived, several things were happening right away.

Ulitsa Lineinaya

After five weeks in El Salvador this past summer living closely with fifteen students and artists and the handful of townspeople not too busy to show up at our doorstep at six in the morning with philosophical or financial questions on their minds, I was somewhat reluctant to stay, as Shaarbek had suggested, at his or another family's home.


So, when I arrived at Dom 67 Ulitsa Lineinaya at 7:30 on Tuesday morning, I felt these words were the most beautiful ones in the Russian language. Never mind that even when I mastered saying them with nonchalance, not once did a taxi driver recognize this street name (many streets changed names after Soviet de-occupation, but even this street's new name - Togolbai Ata - seemed to bring no results, although one would imagine this street, home to the city's train station, would be universally familiar. Note: learn the Russian word for train!). In my bleary, jetlagged state, I loved every detail of this darkish flat mostly dominated by the bed and populated by rose-printed futon-style sofas. It looked out on a playground, the trash can in the bathroom had an Iranian kitten sticker on it, and most importantly, it had a bed, a big one, which I immediately plowed into for a nap before visiting B'Art for the first time.

A Very Serious Country

In the taxi from the airport to my apartment in Bishkek, the sky changed from dim morning to clear golden morning over fields bordered by short white stucco houses with corrugated tin roofs, often with turquoise or blue painted structural beams carved with leaves or scrolls, or herringboned under the eaves of a roof.



Shaarbek and I discussed the upcoming residency and children's issues in Kyrgyzstan as best we were able, considering the hour. I described the children's design laboratory I was planning, and Shaarbek pointed out landmarks (a former state-supported culture-house, now converted into an adventist church; the many parks of Bishkek once tended by government-employed gardeners, less verdant now, according to Shaarbek, but still lush-looking to me).

Landscape always causes me to think of geopolitics: who's living inside these houses? What are the products of these fields, and where are they going, and who will eat them; or transport them along the "silk road", which looks more and more like a silken net of highways and paths crossing the region; or consume them as part of the ethanol/gas mixture fuelling cross-town taxis, or the abundant road excursions over the 95% of Kyrgyzstan covered by mountain ranges, some of which I would come to know over the next five days?

Shaarbek said that many of these houses were inhabited by partial families, as the parents and older siblings and others tend to go elsewhere to work - to oil-rich Kazakhstan, or Russia, or the United States if they can. Soon I would learn from Chopon, the office manager at B'Art, that traditionally in Kyrgyz culture the youngest brother lives with his parents after he grows up and the rest of his relatives have left the family home. Nonetheless, Shaarbek says in the taxi as we are heading toward Bishkek, "Migration in this country is no joke. This is a very serious country."

The Short Night

After two nights collapsed into one (very brief) airport-studded sleep, I arrived in Bishkek a little late on Tuesday morning, around 5, having jumped over many time zones and through the very big ring of fire that is the visa line that precedes customs in the Bishkek airport. The waiting crowd members arranged themselves by language, commiserating in whatever dialect possible, and I shifted from foot to foot behind Ake, a very kind Swede who explained to me that this was my initiation into life in a former Soviet republic - there was no use getting impatient with the one track-suited man behind the window whose job was to hand-copy the information of hundreds of bleary travellers whose flights all arrived at a god-awful hour of the morning, and stick it into their passports in the form of a Kyrgyz visa for $60. As it turned out, Ake didn't have enough US dollars for his visa, so I lent him $20. A small return on the gift of a Anglophone conversant who knew Kyrgyzstan well - Ake is a programmer who works on mapmaking in Kyrgyzstan. As he explained it, Kyrgyzstan looks like a mapmaker's dream - a complex puzzle of how to map out a place which largely has never been owned, due to its nomadic past. Little did I know, I was soon to be steeped in this mountain-nomadic heritage over the days of the coming week...

AMANDA E SAN FRANCISCO 06SEP09

Tentative Itinerary Amanda Eicher Global Art Lab September 8 - October 8 2009
SFO-Amsterdam: September 6, 3:30 PM
Amsterdam - Istanbul: September 7, 4:20 PM
Istanbul - Bishkek: September 7, 7:50 PM - 4:00 AM September 7

Shaarbek will meet you at airport and take you to your apartment.
The apartment address is:
Ulitsa Lineinaya Dom 67 Apartment 1 Tel 996 312 302203

Wednesday September 30
Global ArtLab Presentations
Lecture Hall, National Museum of Visual Art,
196 Sovietskaya Street, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan

Thursday October 1
Drive from Bishkek to Osh
Transfer to apartment
Group will stay at Tes Guesthouse
Say Boyu 5 Tel 996 322 221548

Friday October 2
Global ArtLab Presentations at National Museum
Saturday October 3
Presentation of Borrowed Kazan at Osh Bazaar

Sunday October 4
Drive from Osh to Khujand

Monday October 5
Global ArtLab Presentations

Tuesday October 6
Drive from Khujand to Dushanbe
Hotel Mercury
Tolstoy 9 Tel 224 4491

Wednesday October 7
Global ArtLab Presentations in Dushanbe

Thursday October 8
5:10 AM Amanda, Jane, Gordon and Fritzie depart Dushanbe
12:30 AM Amanda LV Istanbul ARR SFO 10:52 PM

Dont Worry

Dear Amanda

Yes I will take you from airport.
You have good appartment dont worry. You dont need anything for the bed and something for your sleeping and live. Everything we have here and every things is possible here. We will visit homeless children places and will select right children with interview.
Studio space is waiting for you and me too.
Sincerely yours,
Shaarbek