Open Mic Night in Moscow

by Audrey Murray

  I get him down to 250 som, which is still a whopping $46 U.S. dollars. I want to pay 200 som, or $36.80 US, which is still outrageous, but, I have decided, the price point at which I can retain some semblance of dignity.

  “200,” I say again.

  “Come on, 250 is a fair price,” he says for the tenth time.

  I glance over at my Kazakh and Kyrgyz friends and notice that their eyes appear to be popping out of their heads. Now I can read both facial expressions, and they are ones of horror.

  “You’re arguing about 50 som,” the driver continues, sounding exasperated. “That’s 50 cents in U.S. dollars.”

  That’s when I look down at my converter app, and realize I’ve been converting into Tajikistani som. In Kyrgyzstani som, the original 450 he’d asked me for is $6.50 U.S. The 250 I’ve bargained him down to is $3.63.

  Well, now I know why the women look horrified.

  But I can’t bring myself to admit my mistake. “Fine,” I say coolly. “Your price is acceptable.”

  Out of the three people in the car, the driver speaks the best English. He also seems to have forgiven me for the bargaining fiasco, because he’s explaining how Kazakhs and Kyrgyz communicate.

  “They speak to us in Kazakh,” he says, “and we respond in Kyrgyz.”

  “And everyone can understand each other?” I ask.

  “It’s almost the same language. Like American English and British English.”

  I’m impressed, not only because his linguistic abilities far exceed my own, but also because he’s culturally savvy enough to know that if you want Americans to understand something about another part of the world, you need to give it to us in an analogy that we star in. I wonder what that says about Kyrgyzstan’s economy, that someone fluent in at least five languages is driving a taxi.

  The Kyrgyz girl introduces herself as Nazima and asks me how old I am.

  “I’m twenty-eight,” I say.

  “And you’re traveling alone?”

  I tell her I am.

  Her eyebrows raise. “I’m very afraid for you,” she says. “I’m worried that Bishkek is maybe very dangerous. Please, take my phone number, and call me if you have any problems.”

  Now I’m back to being terrified. Is Kyrgyzstan dangerous?

  When we arrive in Bishkek, I pay the driver the amount he originally asked for and then find myself facing a new conundrum. I don’t have an address for the Airbnb that I booked, and I also booked the wrong nights. I call my host Dmitri, whose Airbnb reviews have all indicated that he’s very nice and is still learning English.

  “Hello, this is Audrey,” I say gravely, hoping my tone will tell the rest of the story.

  “Who?” Dmitri asks.

  “Audrey, from Airbnb.”

  This elicits no response.

  “I’m supposed to stay in your apartment,” I try again.

  There’s a long pause in which Dmitri attempts to grasp the gravity of the situation and/or figure out who I am. “I have many, many apartments,” he replies, finally. “Please, which apartment?”

  Through the magic of Google Translate and an English-speaking bartender, I convey my problem to Dmitri.

  I expect Dmitri to tell me that I’m out of luck, but he doesn’t. Instead, he tells me it’s no problem, and that he’ll put me up in another apartment.

  This is really above and beyond the call of duty, so while I’m waiting for him to come pick me up in his car (!!), I decide to take another look through his Airbnb profile.

  I notice one curious detail: Dmitri has put several people up in apartments that differed from the ones guests had selected on Airbnb. “The apartment was nice,” they all say, “but not the one we booked.”

  Aha! I have found his scam.

  Let’s pause for a moment, and consider all of the people I have suspected of cheating me today:

  -the Kyrgyz girl who helped me buy a ticket to Bishkek

  -the Kazakh woman who helped me enter Kyrgyzstan as a pedestrian, and not as a vehicle

  -the Kyrgyz taxi driver who wanted me to pay $6 for a forty-five-minute taxi ride

  Now let’s tally the people who actually took advantage of me:

  Does that stop me from adding Dmitri to the list of Highly Suspicious Persons Who Are Most Likely Trying to Cheat Me?

  Not at all. Not even when Dmitri calls to tell me that he’s coming to pick me up in his own car to drive me to the other apartment. Not even when he shows up at the bar with his wife. Not even when I notice they are both dressed up in a way that makes me hope that I have not interrupted a date/an important event/their wedding.

  Listen, you don’t understand. Dmitri and his wife are only doing their best to make polite conversation and going out of their way to help me to reel me in for the big con!

  “This apartment is much bigger than the one you booked,” Dmitri says, smiling, as he carries my suitcase into a concrete high-rise apartment building. Dmitri, like most of the men I’ve encountered here, refuses to roll my suitcase. Even after I tell him it rolls, show him how to make it roll, and try to pry it from his hands so I can roll it myself. Instead he prefers to hand-carry my four-foot-long, fifty-pound bag. The effort does make him at least 60 percent more attractive.

  He smiles again as we stuff ourselves into the tiny, decrepit elevator whose shaky ascent makes me wonder if it’s operated by an old man with a rope and pulley.

  “So, this is my brother’s apartment,” Dmitri says as he opens the door to what I can only describe as a Kyrgz gangster palace.

  I booked a tiny studio apartment. The apartment I’m standing in is a freshly renovated, three-bedroom penthouse with a Jacuzzi.

  After Dmitri leaves, I walk around the apartment turning on all the lights. It’s creepy to be in such a big, opulent apartment all by myself.

  And then I stop and have a Moment of Realization. I’ve caught Dmitri at his game! He has tricked me by giving me an apartment that’s too big and too nice.

  Thus satisfied that I’ve discovered the way in which I’ve been cheated, I crawl into bed and sleep more soundly than I have in days.

  The strangest thing about Kyrgyzstan is its 3-dollar coin. (Technically its 3-som coin.) Three feels like such a clunky, uneven denomination that I keep expecting shopkeepers to be unable to make correct change. Other foreigners I meet are equally baffled.

  “I calculated all the different ways that you could make change, and it’s the same as having a 2-euro coin,” a Dutch traveler tells me. “But still! 3! How strange!”

  Kyrgyzstan is less developed than Kazakhstan. Sidewalks crumble underfoot and street fronts are crammed with general stores selling plastic mop buckets next to fans and digital alarm clocks. At night, pedestrians navigate the mostly unlit streets with flashlights. Almaty’s modern bus network, in Bishkek, becomes crowded minibuses I am too intimidated to flag down.

  Cars drive on the right side of the road and have steering wheels on either the right or the left side; the orientation appears to be a matter of personal preference rather than something regulated by law.

  Culturally, Kyrgyzstan feels similar to Kazakhstan. Like the Kazakhs, the Kyrgyz are descended from nomadic herders. Plenty of semi-nomads still pitch yurts in summer pastures and return to houses and apartments for the colder months. Outside of the cities, people use horses as a form of transportation. Women cover their hair and make bright, geometric felt ornamentations for the yurts. The men wear tall, embroidered white hats.

  Over the next few days, multiple Kyrgyz women, upon learning that I’m traveling alone, give me their phone numbers and insist that I call if I have problems, just like Nazima did. This leads me to conclude that Bishkek is potentially at war with something and barricade myself in the gangster palace each night.

  The most memorable number comes one morning when I’m trying to hail a taxi. A car pulls over and I open the door and get in, only to discover that the back seat is already occupied by a very pregnant woman.

  “I’m
sorry!” I yelp, moving to close the door, but the driver and the pregnant woman insist that I stay. The driver says he’ll drop her off first and then take me where I need to go. I agree to this arrangement reluctantly, because my fellow passenger is probably the most pregnant woman I’ve seen who is not actively giving birth.

  The pregnant woman also speaks perfect English. “Here’s my phone number!” she exclaims, after I tell her I’m by myself in Bishkek. “If you have problems, call me anytime.”

  “Thank you,” I say, knowing full well that, even if I’m in the process of being murdered, I will not place a two a.m. phone call to a woman who is possibly ten months pregnant.

  But I’m so touched by her gesture that after she gets out, I try to express my gratitude to the driver. Unfortunately, my terrible Russian makes it difficult to get my point across.

  “Woman good!!!” I tell him. “Inside woman, baby.”

  3

  Riding a Horse in the Mountains of Kyrgyzstan

  Bishkek and Almaty have been great, but to really kick-start my Russian and dive into the “real” Central Asia, I decide I need to get out of the city, ride a horse to a lake in the mountains, and sleep in a yurt.

  Guidebooks have a way of tricking me into thinking I enjoy nature. Maybe that’s because the wilderness descriptions are the one section where writers really get to run wild, which seems to lead some to forget that they’re writing a Lonely Planet and not Leaves of Grass fan fiction.

  “Distantly ringed by a saw-toothed horizon of peaks, the wide-open landscapes of Song-Köl create a giant stage for constant performances of symphonic cloudscapes,” reads the Lonely Planet introduction to a Kyrgyz alpine lake. Wow, I think, I belong outdoors.

  You only have to meet me once to realize that the only times I belong outdoors are during a fire drill and while dining al fresco. I sunburn easily and was once terrorized by a goldfish. But I don’t have anyone around to remind me of that, so I head to Song-Köl.

  “Getting to Song-Köl is a large part of the experience,” Lonely Planet says of the two-day trek to Song-Köl lake from the nearest village, Kochkor, and, indeed, the trip’s highlight is the stunning scenery afforded by the journey through mountains and valleys.

  But for me, the adventure begins when I take a six-hour shared taxi to Kochkor, with a driver who enjoys driving on both sides of the road.

  The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, or, in Kyrgyzstan, a single shared taxi.

  Shared taxis are private cars that charge passengers by the seat and travel pretty much everywhere. They’re generally the most convenient way to get around in Central Asia. Given the region’s communist history, it’s an ironic example of the free market stepping in to satisfy demand that government and official businesses can’t meet.

  Long-distance shared taxis usually congregate outside the long-distance bus stations. While official buses travel the same routes, shared taxis are faster, make fewer stops, and depart more frequently.

  The only downside is, if you’re the first passenger to sign up, as I am now, your fate and departure time are determined by how quickly your driver can sell the other seats in his car.

  My driver is a large man with a boxy sedan whose windshield is spiderwebbed with cracks. I’m watching from inside as he slouches around the parking lot muttering the name of our destination: “Kochkor, Kochkor, Kochkor.” When he gets discouraged, which is often, he stops for a cigarette.

  It’s not a persuasive sales pitch. I want to get out and give him a few tips I’ve picked up from corralling people into stand-up comedy shows. Things like smiling, approaching someone with a clear, confident sales message—“You two look like you could use an adventure! How about Kochkor?”—and fewer smoke breaks.

  A young man slides into the back seat, and our driver’s face appears by my window. “Three children,” the driver says in solemn English. It takes me a moment to realize he’s confusing the words children and people. Meaning he has three seats left to sell.

  I’m reminded of one of my first students in Shanghai, a nineteen-year-old boy who had given himself the English name Kingsley. Kingsley’s father was a wealthy businessman who wanted his son to follow in his footsteps; at nineteen, Kingsley was content to enjoy the life of leisure fate had afforded him. I liked Kingsley, but he was a terrible student. In the six months we worked together, I think he did his homework twice. His English may have even gotten worse. After misunderstanding a story he told me and supplying the wrong vocabulary word, I accidentally taught him to go around telling people that ghosts kept stealing his cell phone. (I’ve lost touch with Kingsley, but I do hope he’s since learned that the word he was looking for was thief.)

  I met Kingsley just after I’d quit my job and moved to Shanghai on a dare. Before that, I’d been working as a consultant in Washington, DC at my first real postcollege job. I hated it, partly because my duties involved periodically flying to rural Michigan to count light bulbs in strangers’ homes, and partly because I felt destined for something greater, the way all twenty-three-year-olds with few tangible skills do.

  Test-prep tutoring in China offered the creative’s dream: a solid paycheck, flexible hours, and ample free time you could theoretically devote to your own projects. (Although in practice, it was sometimes ample free time you could devote to procrastinating and then furiously working once someone held a deadline to your head.)

  I had always wanted to be a writer, but I found I didn’t mind test-prep tutoring. The majority of my students were bright, motivated, thoughtful teenagers, and because we worked one-on-one for months at a time, I got to know them. They taught me about their lives, about China, and about the strange world of Korean boy bands, which all have to disband for a few years while their members complete compulsory military service. Just as I had once memorized the color of Justin Timberlake’s eyes and the details of his childhood, my students rattled off their idols’ favorite foods and the dates they would report for army basic training.

  My students and I also had a common enemy. The more I grew to know and love my tutees, the more I despised the standardized tests they had to take to apply to American schools. Most had worked hard for the chance to be educated abroad, but their acceptance prospects often hinged on how well they scored on poorly designed, outdated exams. My middle-school students, for example, had to memorize all the English words for groups of animals (a gaggle of geese, a coven of crows), along with the words for male and female animals (stallion and mare, boar and sow), and their offspring (calf, kid, joey) to make it through an analogy section that included questions like BEVY: SWAN:: ______: TIGER. Why did boarding schools care about such obscure, arcane terminology? Did they want to make sure students could file an accurate campus security report if they were chased across the lush, sprawling campus by two or more chickens?

  I liked the mechanics of test-prep. I loved breaking down the tests into question types and coming up with tricks to help students boost their scores. I also loved that no boss will hold you to lower professional standards than a fifteen-year-old boy.

  When I moved back to the U.S., I figured that was that. But I left at a time when the Chinese education market was insane. Companies had gotten into the habit of flying “experts” from other countries in for short but intense teaching sprints. Some contracts were rumored to be so lucrative that people were making a living flying back to China a few times a year.

  When an old boss reached out to ask me if I’d like to try, I was initially skeptical. I still wasn’t sure what this whole “settling down” thing was about, but I was pretty sure it did not involve switching continents every two months.

  But I’m also not one to turn out all the lights and pretend I’m not home when opportunity knocks. I pitched it to myself as a way to save cash for Operation Conform to Adulthood in New York, which I was definitely not abandoning! Slowly, I started to wonder if I could take this trip instead.

  The door of the sedan opens and a grandfather gets i
n followed by his granddaughter. “One children,” the driver says.

  Then there are no children, and we are off to Kochkor.

  As soon as we leave the city, I begin to understand why there are so many cracks in the windshield.

  The steering wheel is on the car’s right-hand side, and perhaps for this reason, the driver feels more comfortable driving in the left-hand lane. The problem is that this lane is reserved for oncoming traffic. Each time we barrel toward a head-on collision, the driver swerves into the correct lane at the last minute, lays on his horn, and lights up a cigarette. I momentarily forget to breathe, and then glance back at the other passengers, who all appear unfazed.

  The driver’s preferred cruising speed is 140 kilometers per hour, which I decide not to convert into miles per hour. The car shakes and rattles loudly as we whip around switchbacks and fly over crests of hills, sometimes literally. I try to meditate.

  We reach Kochkor, a small, dusty town hunkered down behind some mountains, in late afternoon. There are no Airbnbs or hotels in Kockhor, and so I’ve arranged to stay in a guest house.

  If you’ve never seen a yurt, picture a tent, but round. The outside is usually a simple pale-colored felt covering, but inside, yurts are intricately decorated. Brightly colored carpets and ornamental hangings customarily cover the walls and floors. An opening in the ceiling lets light in during the day and ventilates smoke from the stove used for cooking and heating at night. Each item serves a purpose and has been designed for maximum portability, from the wall hangings that double as silverware drawers to the frame held together without nails. Yurts traditionally served as the portable homes of Central Asian nomadic herders, who move seasonally between pastures. “Our ancestors had thousands of years to perfect the yurt,” many will tell me in the next few days.

  This yurt is in the driveway of my Kochkor guesthouse. Like bed-and-breakfasts, guesthouses are typically family homes that have been expanded and outfitted so that rooms can be rented out to travelers. This guesthouse belongs to the family of a young Kyrgyz man named Azamat, who has arranged a horse trek to Song-Köl—I will be joining.