Back from Bishkek

Oof. I am back from Bishkek. This was not a particularly fun trip, mostly administrative.

Bishkek is underrated as cities go. The architecture may be drab, but it's quite a lively city, full of bistros and markets and tree-lined parks. It may suffer from cold winters, and it may not be the best place to go walking after dark, but the same could be said about Detroit. And it's typically a great place to lay low after an operation in Kazakhstan, but this time around it was straight to Bishkek and back. And I was hoping to stay at the Hyatt, but as usual, the "budget didn't allow for that". So instead I stayed with Aigul.

Aigul runs the safehouse in Bishkek, away from downtown but close to the Osh Market. She takes care of the few of us who drop by, and in turn she's well taken care of, at least by Kyrgyz standards. There are some fine looking women in Bishkek; Aigul's not one of them. But she'll cook you up mutton shashlyk with shorpo and kumis that'll put that Cold Cut Trio at Subway to shame.

Unfortunately, it's April, and that's a little too early for kumis. So instead I suffered through some rotgut arak that damn near burned a hole in my throat. Last month the locals decided to stage their own revolution and took over government buildings and the TV station. "Viva la Revolution" I guess. But when the Georgians and Ukranians revolted, at least they picked one color and stuck with it. The Krygyzstanis weren't nearly that organized... they fought over whether it was yellow or pink or something else. Personally, I think "Pink Revolution" sounds like the title of a Cosmo article, or maybe a Beatles album. At any rate, this development has suddenly thrust a country of goatherders into the world spotlight for a while, so I stopped in to make sure our interests were in order.

And, as expected, everything was status quo. Which meant flying from Seattle to New York to Moscow to Bishkek, then back again, with two weeks of nonsense in between. So right now I'm just going to relax and watch the Mariners beat up on Texas. I was thinking of heading down to QFC to get some Rainier, but I'm far too tired to leave the house.