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jacquez45
replied to your post
“deputychairman replied to your post “welp Instagram crashed so bad I…”
Manty are so ducking good…the only thing about Kyrgyz food I got tired of was the same tomato cucumber salad over and over when in season but other than that…mmm.
I’ve seen the tomato cucumber salad but since I’ve been eating in restaurants I get to choose what specifically I order, so I’ve actually not tried it yet. (I did get Judged for not eating a salad at dinner last night. Listen, lady. I do what I want.)
The food’s excellent. I saw a lot of writeups where people were like “eh, they don’t have a lot of vegetables, blah blah” but I’ve yet to object to anything. except the vaguely dusty-flavored juice at breakfast, I don’t know what that was supposed to be. (I still drank it.) I think we’re in luck that it’s late summer so literally everything is in season, there are fruit sellers everywhere.
The other thing that’s incredible is that we went to a nice, fancy-ish place last night, had beers and an appetizer and main dishes, and the entire bill came out to… mmm, about fifteen dollars. Dude kept repeating it to himself as we walked home. “Fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars!” Unreal.
wyomingnot replied to your post
i’ve been in a country where, despite english being taught in the schools, very very few people actually speak it. you get good at miming what you need. :)
It’s a mixed bag here! A lot of times, there’s just no English, and so people rely on gestures and random foreign words– a waiter shyly told me bon appetit, another man said “Hallo!” and made an X with his arms to get my attention and warn me that the museum I was walking toward was closed– I’d just seen him come from the door but I had assumed he was leaving after a visit. (”Hallo” is apparently German for “hey there” as opposed to the friendlier greeting it implies in English.), and we’ve had various warnings and advice offered in a lovely spectrum of European languages. The Russians at lunch did a lot of pointing and like, using the calculator and then pointing to each thing to show how much it was, narrating as they went. The ticket lady at the museum wrote down the number with a pen. But the cellphone store lady let us get about half a shambling sentence into the pre-rehearsed script I’d put together from Google translate, and interrupted to say, “What was it you needed, then?” and conducted nearly the whole affair in quite good English. Except at the end, when she put the printout up onto the counter and said something in Russian, pointing at the X’s that clearly indicated where to sign. She said something to the girl next to her, and the girl next to her laughed and said, “Sign here please”; clearly she’d been confessing to her coworker that she’d forgotten the phrase and the coworker had filled her in. And earlier in the conversation, she’d said something I hadn’t understood the meaning of, and i’d asked her to clarify, and she’d looked a little helpless and just repeated what she’d said, because she clearly didn’t have any other vocabulary to suit the purpose. But it was enough that I could figure it out. So, probably not a fluent social speaker, but a well-studied practical speaker.
I just feel careless and ignorant for not having managed to learn any more of the local language. I mean, I have zero Kyrgyz– rachmat means thanks, and I haven’t even managed to use that. But Russian, I really could have made more of an effort with, and clearly should have. So we’ll see if that proves problematic in future, especially as we go out into the countryside where English is likely much rarer. It probably won’t be the worst, though, because honestly for tourism purposes there’s not a lot you truly have to say.
Dude had been watching various YouTube travel channel things and there was one careless Russian guy who was like “i’m gonna hitchhike to Kyrgyzstan” with zero preparation, and at one point he’s on foot in a very rural area far away from anything, and he’s mispronouncing quite drastically the name of the place he wants to go, and he was complaining because people kept stopping and asking if he was all right like that was a weird thing to do when you see someone obviously foreign wandering alone on foot in an isolated rural area. He did manage to get where he was going and realized once there that he was verbally mangling the name almost entirely beyond recognition, and yet had still gotten there just fine.
So it gives me some hope, except that he was Russian and the only thing I really know how to say in Russian is все xорошо, which according to Duolingo means “everything is ok”. Useful occasionally but not on every occasion, y’know? Anyway.
(Your picture was not posted)
jacquez45
replied to your post
“deputychairman replied to your post “welp Instagram crashed so bad I…”
Manty are so ducking good…the only thing about Kyrgyz food I got tired of was the same tomato cucumber salad over and over when in season but other than that…mmm.
I’ve seen the tomato cucumber salad but since I’ve been eating in restaurants I get to choose what specifically I order, so I’ve actually not tried it yet. (I did get Judged for not eating a salad at dinner last night. Listen, lady. I do what I want.)
The food’s excellent. I saw a lot of writeups where people were like “eh, they don’t have a lot of vegetables, blah blah” but I’ve yet to object to anything. except the vaguely dusty-flavored juice at breakfast, I don’t know what that was supposed to be. (I still drank it.) I think we’re in luck that it’s late summer so literally everything is in season, there are fruit sellers everywhere.
The other thing that’s incredible is that we went to a nice, fancy-ish place last night, had beers and an appetizer and main dishes, and the entire bill came out to… mmm, about fifteen dollars. Dude kept repeating it to himself as we walked home. “Fifteen dollars. Fifteen dollars!” Unreal.
wyomingnot replied to your post
i’ve been in a country where, despite english being taught in the schools, very very few people actually speak it. you get good at miming what you need. :)
It’s a mixed bag here! A lot of times, there’s just no English, and so people rely on gestures and random foreign words– a waiter shyly told me bon appetit, another man said “Hallo!” and made an X with his arms to get my attention and warn me that the museum I was walking toward was closed– I’d just seen him come from the door but I had assumed he was leaving after a visit. (”Hallo” is apparently German for “hey there” as opposed to the friendlier greeting it implies in English.), and we’ve had various warnings and advice offered in a lovely spectrum of European languages. The Russians at lunch did a lot of pointing and like, using the calculator and then pointing to each thing to show how much it was, narrating as they went. The ticket lady at the museum wrote down the number with a pen. But the cellphone store lady let us get about half a shambling sentence into the pre-rehearsed script I’d put together from Google translate, and interrupted to say, “What was it you needed, then?” and conducted nearly the whole affair in quite good English. Except at the end, when she put the printout up onto the counter and said something in Russian, pointing at the X’s that clearly indicated where to sign. She said something to the girl next to her, and the girl next to her laughed and said, “Sign here please”; clearly she’d been confessing to her coworker that she’d forgotten the phrase and the coworker had filled her in. And earlier in the conversation, she’d said something I hadn’t understood the meaning of, and i’d asked her to clarify, and she’d looked a little helpless and just repeated what she’d said, because she clearly didn’t have any other vocabulary to suit the purpose. But it was enough that I could figure it out. So, probably not a fluent social speaker, but a well-studied practical speaker.
I just feel careless and ignorant for not having managed to learn any more of the local language. I mean, I have zero Kyrgyz– rachmat means thanks, and I haven’t even managed to use that. But Russian, I really could have made more of an effort with, and clearly should have. So we’ll see if that proves problematic in future, especially as we go out into the countryside where English is likely much rarer. It probably won’t be the worst, though, because honestly for tourism purposes there’s not a lot you truly have to say.
Dude had been watching various YouTube travel channel things and there was one careless Russian guy who was like “i’m gonna hitchhike to Kyrgyzstan” with zero preparation, and at one point he’s on foot in a very rural area far away from anything, and he’s mispronouncing quite drastically the name of the place he wants to go, and he was complaining because people kept stopping and asking if he was all right like that was a weird thing to do when you see someone obviously foreign wandering alone on foot in an isolated rural area. He did manage to get where he was going and realized once there that he was verbally mangling the name almost entirely beyond recognition, and yet had still gotten there just fine.
So it gives me some hope, except that he was Russian and the only thing I really know how to say in Russian is все xорошо, which according to Duolingo means “everything is ok”. Useful occasionally but not on every occasion, y’know? Anyway.
(Your picture was not posted)
