la-tarasque replied to your post: We...
Jan. 20th, 2018 01:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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la-tarasque replied to your post: We bought Chita hairball medication, administered…
I have a work friend who organised a mission in Kyrgyzstan (goal was gathering palaeoenvironmental data in rather extreme environments) and next year drove through Siberia to go to Mongolia. Would you like me to ask her about practical infos?
Yes, I’d love any info I could find!!
It does at least seem to be a pretty well Internet-connected country, and less unstable than some other -stans we could mention. (Which all seem to have in common being astonishingly beautiful, by the way. You’d think there’d be some indication in America that Afghanistan, which we’ve been dying in for decades now, is actually one of the most starkly beautiful places you could imagine? But no.) (Kyrzygstan specifically seems to be like, if you took all of Switzerland and picked it up and transported it to a much higher elevation in Central Asia, and left the Swiss people out.) (I’m describing it that way to be goofy, it’s not really.)
I’ve had good luck finding the blogs of people who went there with the Peace Corps, but it looks like under pressure from Putin most of the former Soviet republics who had any Peace Corps presence forced them out. Kyrgyzstan was the last to let them remain, but apparently threatened to revoke their visas at one point, which I did see a volunteer mention, and now while nobody says there are no more Peace Corps people there, I can’t find the blogs of this year’s crop; everyone is from 2016 or earlier. Which is *pretty* up to date, but… what happened and are Americans going to have trouble there??
Everyone else is backpackers and Extreme Bikers, which is fine but their blogs are a lot more about their equipment and the sheer, to me, misery, of pushing one’s body that hard. I’ll ride a horse or walk some places, sure, but I don’t see the need to walk the whole distance, you guys. (I hope I get to ride a horse. That would be so great. Still working on getting the dude to take lessons with me.)
Seriously, though, I’ve finally come to the realization that my lifestyle is literally that of a nomad– I work in the city all winter, and then in the summer I set up a yurt on the pasture, I literally do that, I just still commute on top of that. And a lot of the Peace Corps types are like, “wow, outhouse” (flush toilets are common in Kyrgyzstan but the belief that such things are dirty has persisted, so they’re almost always in an outdoor bathroom, which is fine in summer but tends to be chilly in winter) and “wow livestock” and like “oh I had to step over horse poop” and I’m like… that’s… how I live now? I would probably find that charming? also can you imagine a FLUSH outhouse? holy shit luxury, mine’s a bucket full of wood shavings I have to go empty into the Separate Gross Compost Pile every few days.)
(Your picture was not posted)
la-tarasque replied to your post: We bought Chita hairball medication, administered…
I have a work friend who organised a mission in Kyrgyzstan (goal was gathering palaeoenvironmental data in rather extreme environments) and next year drove through Siberia to go to Mongolia. Would you like me to ask her about practical infos?
Yes, I’d love any info I could find!!
It does at least seem to be a pretty well Internet-connected country, and less unstable than some other -stans we could mention. (Which all seem to have in common being astonishingly beautiful, by the way. You’d think there’d be some indication in America that Afghanistan, which we’ve been dying in for decades now, is actually one of the most starkly beautiful places you could imagine? But no.) (Kyrzygstan specifically seems to be like, if you took all of Switzerland and picked it up and transported it to a much higher elevation in Central Asia, and left the Swiss people out.) (I’m describing it that way to be goofy, it’s not really.)
I’ve had good luck finding the blogs of people who went there with the Peace Corps, but it looks like under pressure from Putin most of the former Soviet republics who had any Peace Corps presence forced them out. Kyrgyzstan was the last to let them remain, but apparently threatened to revoke their visas at one point, which I did see a volunteer mention, and now while nobody says there are no more Peace Corps people there, I can’t find the blogs of this year’s crop; everyone is from 2016 or earlier. Which is *pretty* up to date, but… what happened and are Americans going to have trouble there??
Everyone else is backpackers and Extreme Bikers, which is fine but their blogs are a lot more about their equipment and the sheer, to me, misery, of pushing one’s body that hard. I’ll ride a horse or walk some places, sure, but I don’t see the need to walk the whole distance, you guys. (I hope I get to ride a horse. That would be so great. Still working on getting the dude to take lessons with me.)
Seriously, though, I’ve finally come to the realization that my lifestyle is literally that of a nomad– I work in the city all winter, and then in the summer I set up a yurt on the pasture, I literally do that, I just still commute on top of that. And a lot of the Peace Corps types are like, “wow, outhouse” (flush toilets are common in Kyrgyzstan but the belief that such things are dirty has persisted, so they’re almost always in an outdoor bathroom, which is fine in summer but tends to be chilly in winter) and “wow livestock” and like “oh I had to step over horse poop” and I’m like… that’s… how I live now? I would probably find that charming? also can you imagine a FLUSH outhouse? holy shit luxury, mine’s a bucket full of wood shavings I have to go empty into the Separate Gross Compost Pile every few days.)
(Your picture was not posted)
