Nauryz
My school has two weeks off for Nauryz, the traditional Kazakh New Year, which takes place on the spring equinox instead of the winter solstice. Someone from my school said to me, "The other volunteers we had traveled a lot more." So, always eager to please, I decided to take a trip down south to see how they met the new year in the most Kazakh part of the country.
The first part of the trip was, as always, a train ride, this time twenty eight hours, departing Kokshetau at 6pm Saturday and arriving at Shymkent at midnight between Sunday and Monday. The North always rolls platscar, as what is now becoming a point of pride, and plats was packed with un-ticketed folks this time. After Karaganda the first night the luggage racks were claimed immediately, and all night long I had strangers sitting on my feet. However, maybe because we had a group of four Americans together, nobody was even pressured to give up their spot. We talked a lot, got ourselves beaten badly by an old Kazakh babushka in Jyndy, a local card game, and bought up all the delicious train platform food we could eat. (I'm not being facetious - in the south, the train platform food is the best street food in Kazakhstan. I look forward to it whenever I travel.)
A lot of volunteers had come to Shymkent - one count was about forty - and every region had an apartment rented for them, for a total of four apartments. So mostly our time there was spent in your typical Peace Corps conversations, whether it was in the apartment, at a bar, in a restaurant, or walking down the street. The highlights were:
- Bryan getting his eyebrows singed in the giant green fireball that enveloped the apartment's gas-fueled hot water heater when we were trying to light it the first time without really understanding how it worked,
- The two kegs of beer, complete with a giant electric beer refrigeration device of some sort, that somehow one of the volunteers had gotten for free and which provided disco-less entertainment both nights,
- The fact that it was hot enough for me to get a sunburn, and
- The horse games. We got to see the Kazakh traditional horse games at the Shymkent hippodrome on Nauryz itself, which was just awesome. There were normal races as well as special games. For example, there was horseback wrestling, where two men try to pull each other off their respective horses. There was also Kyz Kuu, which means "Chase the Girl", wherein a girl in traditional dress on a horse tries to outride a boy in traditional dress on a (different) horse. If the boy catches the girl, he gets to kiss her. If he doesn't, she gets to ride with him again past the crowd while beating him with a whip. But the prize was "Kok-par", which is basically polo played with a freshly decapitated sheep carcass. And I mean the whole carcass, the innards and all. Each team tries to reach down from horseback to pick up the carcass and throw it into these giant bins at either side of the field. It was incredible.
After Nauryz, I headed off to Chili, where I have two friends from training. It basically took an entire day to get to Chili from Shymkent although it's only a five hour drive away, partly because I had by that time already forgotten the real meaning of the Kazakh word "kazir", which is inaccurately translated in Kazakh-English dictionaries as meaning "now" (see my earlier post on this subject). One volunteer, a girl who studied Kazakh with me, is living with a Kazakh host family performing all the traditional duties of a Kazakh woman, such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry, in addition to teaching thirty hours at her school. She is one of those quietly awesome volunteers that make you wonder, "could I do that?" and who is visible beloved by all the local people around her. I delivered her 5000 TGZ worth of Kazakh novels from Kokshetau because strangely enough, she can't seem to find Kazakh literature in the South, although Kazakh is much more widely used there. She took me to a great local Nauryz party where I had the best Koje (a traditional Kazakh Nauryz soup) that I've tried yet. After that, I met up with the other volunteer, gave a lesson with him at his school, played football in the courtyard, and tried his special vegetarian "chili-borscht" recipe. (How often do you cook this, I asked. Oh, a couple times a week, he said, and I usually cook enough for a couple days. So basically, you eat this all the time, I said. He paused, looked down, and said, well, yeah. The guy is a vegetarian, and he's making it in Kazakhstan, bless him.) He's also doing great work there. Chili, I think, is a lucky town.
From that I headed for Turkestan, one of the oldest cities in Kazakhstan, and the only place that I've been here that I would call touristy in some respect. (One facet of that was that I got my passport checked, which rarely happens to me outside of trains.) On the train to Turkestan I got invited to sit with some babushkas with literature degrees who wanted to serve me tea and talk about Iraq. Having given them answers that satisfied them and chatted for some time longer, one of them ceremoniously presented me with a little bone that she had been keeping in her purse. "Don't lose it, always protect it!" she said. "It means you are like a son to me now!" I really didn't know what to say. When we arrived at the train station, I helped carry their bags to a taxi and they all kissed me on the cheek before departing.
And suddenly, when I turned around, there was to my surprise another volunteer friend of mine whom I had last seen heading further west from Shymkent to celebrate Nauryz in Araslk. After expressing our astonishment to each other at running into each other accidentally, I asked what he was doing there (and what follows is a paraphrase based on my memory - if you're actually in the know and I get details wrong, well, live with it). "Well, I was in Aralsk waiting for a 3am train to Kyzylorda," he said. "I had gotten to the station around 8pm, and as trains came and went the station would alternately fill up and get empty again. I had been sitting in the station cafe for about five hours - it was about one in the morning - when a very drunk Kazakh man came up to me and demanded money. I refused to give it to him, and after going back and forth for a while, he said that after the next train left the station would be empty, except for me, and he would come back with a bunch of his buddies and 'nobody would ever find me.' So I decided that I had better get on the next train. Since I didn't have less than a 5000 TGZ note on me I couldn't get away with paying less than a 2000 TGZ bribe to the conductor -- there's no way to force him to give you change. I rode the train until I got to someplace else where there were volunteers and where I could catch a train back to Astana, and that ended up being Turkestan."
So I saw Turkestan for a day, had a delicious dinner of beer bread and taco-salad at yet another wonderful volunteer's apartment, and then headed home on the 3am Kokshetau-bound train. And nobody asked me for money in the train station, thank goodness.
The first part of the trip was, as always, a train ride, this time twenty eight hours, departing Kokshetau at 6pm Saturday and arriving at Shymkent at midnight between Sunday and Monday. The North always rolls platscar, as what is now becoming a point of pride, and plats was packed with un-ticketed folks this time. After Karaganda the first night the luggage racks were claimed immediately, and all night long I had strangers sitting on my feet. However, maybe because we had a group of four Americans together, nobody was even pressured to give up their spot. We talked a lot, got ourselves beaten badly by an old Kazakh babushka in Jyndy, a local card game, and bought up all the delicious train platform food we could eat. (I'm not being facetious - in the south, the train platform food is the best street food in Kazakhstan. I look forward to it whenever I travel.)
A lot of volunteers had come to Shymkent - one count was about forty - and every region had an apartment rented for them, for a total of four apartments. So mostly our time there was spent in your typical Peace Corps conversations, whether it was in the apartment, at a bar, in a restaurant, or walking down the street. The highlights were:
- Bryan getting his eyebrows singed in the giant green fireball that enveloped the apartment's gas-fueled hot water heater when we were trying to light it the first time without really understanding how it worked,
- The two kegs of beer, complete with a giant electric beer refrigeration device of some sort, that somehow one of the volunteers had gotten for free and which provided disco-less entertainment both nights,
- The fact that it was hot enough for me to get a sunburn, and
- The horse games. We got to see the Kazakh traditional horse games at the Shymkent hippodrome on Nauryz itself, which was just awesome. There were normal races as well as special games. For example, there was horseback wrestling, where two men try to pull each other off their respective horses. There was also Kyz Kuu, which means "Chase the Girl", wherein a girl in traditional dress on a horse tries to outride a boy in traditional dress on a (different) horse. If the boy catches the girl, he gets to kiss her. If he doesn't, she gets to ride with him again past the crowd while beating him with a whip. But the prize was "Kok-par", which is basically polo played with a freshly decapitated sheep carcass. And I mean the whole carcass, the innards and all. Each team tries to reach down from horseback to pick up the carcass and throw it into these giant bins at either side of the field. It was incredible.
After Nauryz, I headed off to Chili, where I have two friends from training. It basically took an entire day to get to Chili from Shymkent although it's only a five hour drive away, partly because I had by that time already forgotten the real meaning of the Kazakh word "kazir", which is inaccurately translated in Kazakh-English dictionaries as meaning "now" (see my earlier post on this subject). One volunteer, a girl who studied Kazakh with me, is living with a Kazakh host family performing all the traditional duties of a Kazakh woman, such as cleaning, cooking, and laundry, in addition to teaching thirty hours at her school. She is one of those quietly awesome volunteers that make you wonder, "could I do that?" and who is visible beloved by all the local people around her. I delivered her 5000 TGZ worth of Kazakh novels from Kokshetau because strangely enough, she can't seem to find Kazakh literature in the South, although Kazakh is much more widely used there. She took me to a great local Nauryz party where I had the best Koje (a traditional Kazakh Nauryz soup) that I've tried yet. After that, I met up with the other volunteer, gave a lesson with him at his school, played football in the courtyard, and tried his special vegetarian "chili-borscht" recipe. (How often do you cook this, I asked. Oh, a couple times a week, he said, and I usually cook enough for a couple days. So basically, you eat this all the time, I said. He paused, looked down, and said, well, yeah. The guy is a vegetarian, and he's making it in Kazakhstan, bless him.) He's also doing great work there. Chili, I think, is a lucky town.
From that I headed for Turkestan, one of the oldest cities in Kazakhstan, and the only place that I've been here that I would call touristy in some respect. (One facet of that was that I got my passport checked, which rarely happens to me outside of trains.) On the train to Turkestan I got invited to sit with some babushkas with literature degrees who wanted to serve me tea and talk about Iraq. Having given them answers that satisfied them and chatted for some time longer, one of them ceremoniously presented me with a little bone that she had been keeping in her purse. "Don't lose it, always protect it!" she said. "It means you are like a son to me now!" I really didn't know what to say. When we arrived at the train station, I helped carry their bags to a taxi and they all kissed me on the cheek before departing.
And suddenly, when I turned around, there was to my surprise another volunteer friend of mine whom I had last seen heading further west from Shymkent to celebrate Nauryz in Araslk. After expressing our astonishment to each other at running into each other accidentally, I asked what he was doing there (and what follows is a paraphrase based on my memory - if you're actually in the know and I get details wrong, well, live with it). "Well, I was in Aralsk waiting for a 3am train to Kyzylorda," he said. "I had gotten to the station around 8pm, and as trains came and went the station would alternately fill up and get empty again. I had been sitting in the station cafe for about five hours - it was about one in the morning - when a very drunk Kazakh man came up to me and demanded money. I refused to give it to him, and after going back and forth for a while, he said that after the next train left the station would be empty, except for me, and he would come back with a bunch of his buddies and 'nobody would ever find me.' So I decided that I had better get on the next train. Since I didn't have less than a 5000 TGZ note on me I couldn't get away with paying less than a 2000 TGZ bribe to the conductor -- there's no way to force him to give you change. I rode the train until I got to someplace else where there were volunteers and where I could catch a train back to Astana, and that ended up being Turkestan."
So I saw Turkestan for a day, had a delicious dinner of beer bread and taco-salad at yet another wonderful volunteer's apartment, and then headed home on the 3am Kokshetau-bound train. And nobody asked me for money in the train station, thank goodness.
1 Comments:
Wow, no posts for a long time and then bam! I was beginning to worrry something had 'happened' to you, although certainly not being harassed in a train station. I pity the fool or his posse that mixes it up with JKN Ryan ;)
I have only made it through half of what you have posted. I'll have to read the rest later when I'm not being paid to do something else...
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