From the foreign excitement of last week, we have drifted into the equally exciting grandeur of the very local.
In these the waning days of summer, when the nights already getting cold, my stalwart Anne, right here in Naryn, brainstormed the right idea for a very Kyrgyz date: we went to the roadside kymys strip-mall called “40 Yurts” and had a very informed, very esoteric kymys tasting.
This place boasts perhaps 20 kymys stalls, and it was our intention to share a cup from each. We hitchhiked most of the hour way up and back, one leg of it in the cab of a Kazakh big-rig. At our destination, we tasted from six different vendors, and found tastes that ranged from sour to very cheesy (we also found our goal of trying one of each 20 fermented milk varieties, a little, shall we say, ambitious). Nevertheless, It was a palate building exercise in a most peculiar delicacy, and a date that any Kyrgyz could appreciate.
This week also heralded the first of my natural dyes trainings. We started in the hamlet of Birlik, in the far-flung rayon of At Bashy. Making dyes, it turns out, is more about collecting the right materials than about the actual process. While our materials were, at times, less than ideal, we did produce an excellent burgundy from the bitter berries of the barberry bush. Next week, I hope to employ carrots and onion skins to form some brighter, more striking variations.
And with that, folks, an intriguing question from a response last week calls me to take a step back: “What does ol’ Kyrgy Carl know about natural dyes, anyway?”
Well, when it comes to naturally dying organic fibers, I’m as green as a spinach leaf before a boiling cauldron. Instead, for this training, I’ve hired local experts to do the work, and I sit and watch with the rest of the students. My job, thus far, you see, is about making connections; I am introducing these women to trainers with good skills (and footing the bill), and it’s as good a service as any.
And in the mean time, is back to the grunt work of being a foreigner in a strange land. I’m with my host-family again, full time. I spent this afternoon showing my host sister how to kill slugs with salt (they make horrible nests in the pits of pulled carrots, but are then all the easier to kill…). She also told me about her plans for the future, her aims to see the world traveling as a diplomat. For this Kyrgyz teenager, it seems, the sky’s the limit.
And now folks, we’re replacing last week’s foreign celebrity’s with home grown Kyrgyz ones: Rosa Otubaeva. That’s right, Kyrgyzstan’s very own president is coming to Naryn. As it turns out, she went to school here from 2nd to 6th grade, and wants to pay the old spot a visit. She’s also planning to visit some of our very own volunteers: the noble teachers at the American Studies Center. And that means none other than the kymys taster extraordinaire, Anne, from our first paragraph. It doesn’t get, folks, any more Kyrgyz than that.
