Photos from Around Town

I could comment on these images. But for the most part I’d like to believe they can speak for themselves. However if context is needed please do direct all questions to the comment box so I can address them later. 

I'd like to buy a product you say doesn't exist...

I'd like to buy a product you say doesn't exist... This feeling is rather familiar for any tech geek who's recently been to Fry's or a market in Bishkek. The salesperson will try to simultaneously try to sell you something else while informing you - no no this product doesn't exist. If you keep insisting they will reluctantly agree - yes in fact it does, but I don't have it. If you keep talking, somehow it magically comes to be and you end up buying exactly what you wanted. It works everytime. At Fry's it usually means it is one aisle over. In Bishkek one display case to the side. Occasionally they will in fact not have the product you want, but one stall over the competing vendor will.

Once you've found the product which 30 seconds ago did not exist, you will be offered a price. Resist the urge to convert the price into dollars and quickly accept! Whatever the price is - waiting for a few seconds, shaking your head for a moment and then paying will lead to saving roughly 10%. And even then you're not getting the local price. This was made evident when one of the girls in the office mentioned buying a USB cable for 100 com (a little over $2) and then the next day having the vendor say the true cost was only 50 com. Today when we went to buy identical cables we knew to start with 50 com, and of course only paid 40 com. (For those of you trying to convert to western prices $1 = roughly 46 com)

Sadly the act of bartering the price down doesn't work as well at Fry's as it does in Bishkek - but the service and the denial of the existence of the product you want to buy is a common trait it seems. And like geeks everywhere, I thankfully know this and am persistent enough to walk away with the cables I need.

A Blog on Blogging

I get the purpose of blogs – saying something to a wider audience and all that jazz – but these days while I’m simultaneously blogging here, on my photoblog, through video diaries for work, on our company blog, and occasionally through my old blogs (I seem to go through blogs in the same manner one goes through bars of soap – regularly and without much regard to them once I’m done.) I seem to have no clue what exactly I’m meant to be communicating.

Oh god my life is so interesting!

Maybe? Probably not. I’m sure other folks have much more interesting lives. Mine just happens to occasionally change location and those occasions seem a bit more frequent than some. (Though apparently not right now as for some reason I’m still in Bishkek without a clear departure date as I wait for my Kazakh visa extension to come through)

My photos are amazing!

Not really for that one either. Joy of the internet is you can find out just how many more brilliant people there are in the world – even if they aren’t in the same café, bookshop, restaurant or other common spaces with you. I might keep taking photos as a force of habit, and I like my photos in that selfish way that most people do like things they make, but they’re really not impressive enough to merit the “OMG! Look over here!” that is present in so much of shamelessly self promoting webwhorishness. (Proof this blog post is written for my blog and not work – that word would not be acceptable for school children, some of which may in fact read our blog)

My perspective is unique or my actions are interesting!

Once again, in the world wide web of human interactions – not really. In my immediate bubbles, I tend to stick out. But in my immediate bubbles that’s easy to do. Los Altos isn’t that big of a town. Santa Barbara is also a pretty small city. And after that I seem to have ended up in a pretty small company on a pretty big globe. In the grand scheme of things, I’m really not doing much.

My work today was in vain due to an internet café accidently terminating my internet connection 80% of the way in to an upload for a video that took far too long to make given its 1 minute length. And after an hour twenty – 80% was done and then made useless. Followed by returning to the office to log footage, run out of space on a hard drive, discover the disks for our external harddrive seem to be missing, wait on some emails, and attempt to edit footage only to discover it wouldn’t save properly due to the memory problem which can’t be resolved till we find the disks for the harddrives. All in all – I achieved very little. And yet here I am. And somehow when I left home everyone was patting my back and excited for all the things I would do on the road… like data management. Data producing is a thing I’m consistently good at whether through filming and photographing random items, events, happenings etc… but managing that data… oh boy. As anyone who was in my photos shot from 2007 to 2009 can attest – a two year delay in processing can and will occur. (Dear subjects of 365 Faces of the Year – SORRY!!!) On that note, I should probably go to bed soon. I have a long day of random errands (Today’s examples: Film a ride in a rickshaw through a Central Asian city and then paint a pipe black), data management (log said footage, edit into manageable videologs in FinalCut Pro), and other miscellaneous tasks (E-mail the director’s press card scans to Turkish officials to get permission to film, make some tea, call the web designer…)

All in all life continues on what seems like a standard for life living out of an office – scheduled entirely around work. There are definitely cons to having a bedroom across the hall from the main room of the office. Not sure how much longer I’ll be puttering around Bishkek (sometimes literally in the auto-rickshaw, most of the time just doing odds and ends in the office/around town) as there are some logistics holding us back – but I’m hoping we’ll be on the road sooner rather than later as I imagine fall and winter will only slow things down more. And outside of California they seem to have these weird things called seasons. Bizarre I tell you! 

Observations from an Internet Cafe

40% of my YouTube download for TracingTea is done... which means I've got plenty of time waiting here in the Internet cafe on Moscow Street* in Bishkek.

Things I've discovered while waiting.

• American pop music is near universal. Imagine your local top 40 clear channel station at home and the songs it had played to death 6 months ago. That's what's on the radio.
• Google.ru will suggest you change to the version for Google Netherlands before suggesting English.
• Despite being a block away from a mosque where all the women are wearing head scarves and full sleeves - all the girls here in the internet cafe are wearing standard Russian attire (read: showing off their legs, short sleeves, and wearing large diva-esque sunglasses on their heads)
• Duran Duran's Come Undone is perfectly acceptable on the same station as Alejandro and Te Amo.
• Control Shift is the short key to change from typing in Russian to typing in English
• Signs telling you the rules don't work if you're an American and the sign is in Russian... The size 72 font is far less intimidating when I can't read it...
• The Nescafe juice is far less enjoyable than the local apple juice that was in the same case. I can't read the details on the bottle - but pictures of apples on the side helped.
• I hate waiting. 53% loaded now but I'm still waiting on the other 47%. This is why photos > video. It takes less time to take it, less time to edit, less time to upload it, less time to look at it, and at the end you can print and frame it.
• Small children who are younger than 2 are much more interesting than those who are older. If they can't talk, they make funny faces that are much more universal than what could be Russian/Kyrgyz/ or gibberish without me knowing the difference. Also it seems there are many more children here and people are more likely to take their kids out with them than if they were in the States.

I'm bored of writing. Off to Google News to catch up on world affairs while I'm waiting.

*Slight variation if we want to be accurate, but oh well. If you googled this and Gogol Street you'd be within a block of me. I just don't know the other cross road and I don't want to slow the download in the other window by googling it.

A Visit to the Market

Today I got a chance to see where the Kyrgyz do some of their shopping as we went to the market place. A few things I was surprised to see...  The US Army gear... our tax dollars hard at work, being resold by Kyrgyz merchants. Hearing Lady Gaga, Rihanna and Jay-Z in various stalls. Our pop music is everywhere! And the number of Kyrgyz men who upon seeing me with my camera would say the only English they knew, "I LOVE YOU!" Oh dear. They should be prepared to be heartbroken if all it takes is a tourist to attract their attention! 

In my touristy-ness I also broke gender norms by purchasing a hat that is traditionally worn by me, for myself. It was much cooler than what I think of the women's scarves and headpieces so yeah- doing what I do and buying what I liked = gender bending out here. Also bought a canvas backpack for about $7 which I can use when I'm not carrying my computer as my other backpack is electronics central. Together the hat, a postcard and a backpack cost about $9. Very cheap. 

One lady upon seeing me with my camera became very animated and I thought she was angry at me for taking a photo of her stall - and I prepared myself for the worst (being asked to delete the photo) but as Aigul translated, it turns out she was excited that I was taking an interest and she wanted to know where I was from and what I was doing in Bishkek. Then she asked that I take a proper photo of her, which I did. And I quite like it I must say - but I'm not going to post it now as the internet is on the company MacBook and the photos are on my Acer which currently has a dead battery and needs to be charged. But look forward to future posts with photos from the bustling market place.

In an effort to not be redundant...

I don't want to say the same things here as are said and published in the work blog.

But I am posting there as well. In fact today you can see photos of the work we did this afternoon.

I don't know if it's the jet lag, the irregular sleep hours or the odd feeling of waiting that is making me tired - but I am rather tired. Like a caffeine addict having withdraws - except without the addict and withdraws part. And without the caffeine.

I suppose it's partially because I'm not used to not choosing my own schedules. Even with school and work in the past - I got to chose at the beginning of the quarter, when will I be available for work, and when will I fall off the face of the earth. But here because I'm staying in the flat with the office, I'm not exploring on my own due to the language barrier and I'm doing work when it is asked of me - thus I'm no longer choosing my hours. Furthermore because after work I blog for work, organize photos, tweet, edit footage and images etc... it seems the line between working and not is blurred. Whereas at home - when I'm doing work it's clear that I'm working and when I'm at home or out with friends that's clearly my time.

I suppose I should adjust to this sooner rather than later as once we hit the road it will likely be like this only more so.

Though I think the other thing I find odd is not having my car. The lack of self-mobility while being prepared to be on the move makes it very different than when I have the full freedom of movement and the confidence to explore or at least visit my favorite places. Not trying to complain here - just trying to identify where my head is at, and right now it's that sort of odd stagnant feeling. Also wish there was a gym or something around here as even when I'm doing physical activity (carrying equipment, coming and going to the flat on the 4th floor etc..) it's spread through the day and I'd love to be able to do a long work out to exhaust myself to insure I could fall asleep at a normal time. But instead when the night comes I feel stir crazy and am typing away or working on project pieces I couldn't get to during the day.

Oh well. On that stir crazy note, I'm off to bed. If you want to see photos - they're not too impressive but they're up on the TracingTea blog.

Sleepless in Bishkek

Somehow sleepless in Bishkek sounds far less interesting than Sleepless in Seattle, but there you have it. It's nearing 5 am here and I'm awake and feeling restless. I'm sure I'll be exhausted again later, but somehow despite a week out here I've yet to adjust to the local time zone. Or at least I've yet to sleep a proper night's sleep in one go, or without aggressively attacking mosquitoes distracting me from the task of sleep.



I tried to see if I could get some sort of sleep aid to help cope with the jet lag and have found such things are lacking. I was tossing and turning so a few minutes ago decided to just stop the tossing and turning and get up, and upon doing so discovered Rosie was on the computer in the same boat. And apparently the thought of Sleepless in Seattle also occurred to her, so after finishing this first paragraph we laughed at the likemindedness (or cliché-ness perhaps ) of our early morning Bishkek thoughts. Obviously I lack originality at this hour especially - so shall therefore reapply mosquito repellant and try to sleep a bit more before the sun rises and the call to prayer tells me I should be more religious or at least more alert.