Happy New Year!

Ok, so I know I’m not posting this on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. I haven’t had the chance to write anything since I got home.

New Year’s here is basically equivalent to American Christmas. People put of trees, give presents, have a Santa Claus-like figure :Grandfather Frost, accompanied by Snegurochka (that’s basically a play on the word ‘sneg’, meaning snow. It usually translates as Snow Maiden.) Actually, the Kyrgyztani government has gone a little Santa Clause-crazy this year, ever since some Scandinavian scientists used data on population distribution, air currents, and time zone differences to determine that if Kyrgyzstan would be the most efficient starting point for Santa’s Christmas-eve flight around the world. There were all kinds of people dressed up as Santa and they government even named a mountain after him.

I spent a fairly quiet Christmas Eve. Tynara’s sister, Chynara, is an administrator at AUCA, and they invited me over to her house. We at a whole lot (Olivie salad—kind of like American potato salad but with carrots and peas and no bacon—and manti—meat dumplings that are featured at almost any Kyrgyz meal) and watched a whole lot of New Year’s specials, most of them transmitted from Moscow.

The only not quiet part was the fireworks. Kyrgyzstan is on the border with China, and fireworks are pretty cheap here. The whole city lit up at 12:00, and the fireworks didn’t start to die down until about two hours after that.

We actually watched those Russian specials until almost 4:00 in the morning. They were still going when I went to sleep (at Chynara’s house—it was too late and too cold to try to find a taxi).

It’s very cold right now. Historically, from about the 26^th of December to about the 5^th of February everything is brutally cold. Besides one exceptionally warm day a couple days ago (I could just barely see my breath), the weather has been following the pattern. Most roads don’t get plowed and the sidewalks are never shoveled, so walking around the city is always an adventure. Most of the shoes men wear are similar in style to American dress shoes—they don’t have much traction on the bottom. In the winter, people skate around as much as they walk.