EatsWords

Mutton

I’m going to amend my previous post to include an important Central Asian menu option. The three main dishes offered at lunch or dinner are:

1) Noodles with mutton

2) Rice with mutton

3) Mutton on a stick

#3 is shashlyk, a skewer threaded through chunks of meat, usually served on a bed of onions. Shashlyk can be any meat on a skewer - beef, chicken, even pork (which seems odd in Muslim countries). But mutton seems to lie at the heart of everything.

More about food, because I love it so

I realized yesterday that many meal choices on my trip came down to:

1) Noodles with mutton

2) Rice with mutton

Small chaikhanas (tea houses) sometimes have menus, but more often the person waiting on you will just tell you what they have. In addition to these two options, they love to offer shashlyk (meat grilled on a skewer, usually lamb or chicken). And there’s always bread and tea to go with everything.

It’s not really as dire as it sounds, though. Option #1 is laghman, a spicy soup filled with irregularly shaped handmade noodles, dill and/or parsley, and maybe even some veggies. Option #2 is plov, the national dish of Uzbekistan (and several other Central Asian countries under various names). Plov is a greasy mix of rice, shredded carrots boiled to a tasteless mush, and mutton. Occasionally it’s brightened with raisins or nuts. Very occasionally.

With either dish, it’s easy enough for a mostly-vegetarian like me to eat around the chunks of meat. Or, as I did one night, to slip the pieces of mutton in my plov to a small stray kitten who was mewing under my chair. It was a great system: I got to avoid eating the fatty, tough-looking meat; the kitten got some dinner; and the restaurant owner (assuming she didn’t notice my treachery) didn’t have know that I was leaving such delicacies uneaten.

Overall, I preferred laghman to plov, but then again, I’ve always loved noodles. (So much so that when I was about twelve, a friend nicknamed me Noodle.) Sometimes we had other options, like potatoes. One lunch place offered a delicious plate of pan-fried potatoes and veggies. Others leaned more toward the oily and bland. I became a fan of salt, pepper, and the fiendishly spicy paprika that sometimes took the place of black pepper.

One day I got to try a double noodle dish. It’s a specialty in a certain part of Kyrgyzstan, and it was the perfect lunch for a hot July day. The woman serving us sat outside under an umbrella with all sizes of bowls spread out on the table before her. Into each serving bowl went a tangle of the wheat noodles that I was familiar with from eating laghman. Then she took a coarse grater to a large, jiggly, translucent white blob to make - ready for this? - rice noodles!  She added the freshly shaved rice noodles to the wheat noodles and then spooned in ladlefuls of a cold, spicy, vinegary broth. A few chopped spring onions, a choice of fork or chopsticks, and we were ready to eat. It was one of my favorite meals on the trip, and I was sorry not to see it again.

Local food, Kyrgyz style

I just spent two nights camping in Jety-Oguz National Park, a gorgeous expanse of meadow and mountain and canyon centering on a rapidly running river. The road to the canyon crosses the river several times on very basic wooden bridges that, especially when seen from our big orange truck, didn’t inspire confidence. Whether or not because of people’s prayers and crossed fingers, the truck stayed on the narrow, guard-rail-less bridges, and none of the rough-looking structures collapsed.

While in the park, someone decided that we should get a lamb from a shepherd and roast it for dinner. So, one morning, a few bloodthirsty carnivores set off with our Kyrgyz guide to knock on the doors of a few yurts. Most people said that their sheep had already gone up into the hills for the day. (Sheep here graze at incredible altitudes, way up the steep green slopes. Horses, too. Cows seem to stay closer to the bottom of the hills, even wandering through our campsite a few times.) The last family, though they said the same thing, offered to send someone up the mountain to retrieve a sheep. Three o’clock, they said, they would deliver it.

A little after four, when the fire was burning beautifully and the cooks were starting to feel anxious, we saw a man coming down the road on horseback carrying a plastic package. Our delivery horseman had kindly stopped along the way to procure the pink plastic bag for the freshly butchered sheep. We didn’t want to think about how he’d been carrying it beforehand, but it’s easy enough to guess. At the big market in the town of Karakol, I saw a young guy cheerfully walking along with a small carcass in each hand, unwrapped. I mean, this is a country where they play games with headless goat carcasses.

Anyway. I was on cook duty, but I’d taken over the vegetable dishes and refused to have anything to do with the lamb. Apparently, though, the meat cooks had expected to roast the lamb in one piece, and had rigged up a system with our sand mats and wire and metal poles and a grill-like piece of metal. But the creature had been butchered, so they figured something else out. People enjoyed the roasted meat, and I was happy enough to help make tzatziki (there are so, so many cucumbers here, and so much yogurt), pasta salad, and a stew of slow-cooked eggplant, onions, peppers, and white beans. People finished off the lamb yesterday for lunch when we stopped by the side of the road, overlooking the blue, blue waters of Issyk-Kol Lake.

People seem to have developed a taste for local food, though. For tonight - our last night camping on this trip, in Ala-Archa Canyon - I’ve heard that there will be local trout.

The thing is, most of the food here is local. There are grocery stores, but most items are best bought at the open-air markets, where people sit behind mountains of tomatoes, cucumbers, potatoes, apricots, and plums; bins of walnuts, pistachios, apricot kernels (which look and taste a bit like small, slim almonds), dried fruit, and cashews; colorful heaps of spices with small scoops at the ready; and piles of round bread, flattened in the middle, sometimes still warm. The big markets wind on and on, with sections for hardware and auto parts (all spread out on the pavement or on blankets), clothes (hanging in front of tarps), baby chicks and ducklings (the peeping noise from dozens and dozens of tiny, fuzzy birds!), and sweets and biscuits (laid out in bins; take what you want and pay by the kilo).

By the side of the road, you often see mobile beekeepers with colorful boxes of hives on the backs of trucks, selling honey in d old jars, soda bottles, and any container they can find. I’m still hoping to find someone selling the amazing homemade jams we’ve had, sour cherry or apricot or plum. Our guide suggested that we ask at a yurt. That seems to be the way around here.

Yurts. And felt.

So I stayed in a yurt. Or, as our Kyrgyz guide calls them, yurta. Sheep make yurts what they are. (They also make the Kyrgyz diet what it is. One guidebook joked that if there were a Kyrgyz cookbook, every recipe would start with, “First, kill your sheep….”)

The floors are covered in thick felt (often, nowadays, placed over a heavy plastic tarp). The rounded walls are covered in wool. Before plastic, the layer of fat was enough to keep the inside of the yurt dry.  (Now that there is plastic, I felt extra-secure when it rained. I stayed toasty and dry.)  The doors are heavy wool and roll up during the day. The inside is decorated with more felt.

So: felt. We went to a felt-making demonstration at a workshop in a small town. They start with raw wool, freshly shorn, not washed or processed. First they whack the wool with wooden sticks to get out any foreign material, like twigs or whatnot. Then they whack it with thin metal rods, to separate the strands a bit.

On the ground, they lay out a straw mat, kind of like a massive version of a sushi-rolling mat, hand-made on a wooden frame with straw and string. Over the mat, the wool is torn into small wisps and laid in one direction, each wisp overlapping. Then another layer goes down, with the wisps laid in the opposite direction to strengthen the future felt. We just made a small piece - maybe a couple of square feet. And we were given a few colored bits of wool for decoration, so we decided to make a felt abstraction of our truck: an orange rectangle (have I mentioned that the truck is bright orange?), with a little bit of white above for the stripe down its side, and a stripe of blue below to symbolize the river we’d crossed that morning.

(We’d all gotten out of the truck except for the one person driving, taken off our shoes and socks, and waded through a cold, cold, cold, shallow river before the truck gamely went downhill and splashed through the river and navigated the slope on the other side. And got stuck, and got unstuck, and… you get the idea. Rain + mud roads + large truck full of 23 people and their luggage = long journey.)

Anyway. Once the design had been drawn in wispy colorful felt, the woman from the workshop poured hot water over the wool. Then she rolled up the mat tightly, tying it shut with a nifty rope pattern that I hope I can remember. More hot water went over the wool and the mat. Then she started stomping on it, and we started making jokes about stomping on grapes to make wine. Most of us took a turn stomping and dancing on the mat, turning it every so often to make sure it all got compacted. Twenty minutes later, when we were surprisingly tired and embarrassed from losing our balance on the little thing, we unrolled the mat.

Now came time for the soap, rubbed directly on from the bar. The woman - who was young and very cheerful and wore a shirt that said “Girl just want to have fun” (or something similar and almost-correct) - rubbed the soap in with her hands and elbows and forearms, getting the lanolin and dirt and other things out of the felt.  She kept at it for a long time, leading us to believe that she had forearms of steel. Then she washed the felt in cold water, and said that, to do it properly, we should repeat the washing and cold-water rinse several times.

But we had to go, so we headed to the shop, where they sold gorgeous felt slippers and rugs and ornaments (little tiny yurts! and camels! and donkeys!) and hats and bags and all sorts of things. And then we left, taking our wet felt with us.

Kyrgyzstan

Kyrgyzstan is unbelievably beautiful. Almost every place I’ve been here has a backdrop of dark, craggy mountains still covered with snow. We’ve been through dry, scrubby desert; alpine meadows; red canyons; high mountain passes where snow by the road still hasn’t melted.

I spent two nights sleeping in a yurt in a high (10,000 feet above sea level) meadow, green and smooth and grassy, where sheep and cows and compact Kyrgyz horses graze. It’s just above Song-Kul Lake, which - like all lakes in this country, it seems - is a deep blue, even on a cloudy day. The valley lies up a rough track off the main dirt road, which itself follows the lake and cuts between two snow-covered mountain ranges. As we drove between the lake and the mountains, we saw a gathering of horses and people and cars, so we stopped the truck and walked up the hill to investigate.

It was an afternoon of games and contests, mostly on horseback: races, wrestling (where the objective is to knock your opponent of his horse), and the local specialty: a cousin of polo, played with the headless carcass of a goat. Horses cluster together as their riders lean and reach for the prize, and horses and riders fall over and get up again. The winner, sporting a magenta t-shirt, earned a roar from the crowd (sitting on the ground, on horseback, and on donkeys) and kissed the cheeks of a few of the girls in our group. Little boys, some probably only nine or so, sat on horses and donkeys. When we commented on how easily, how fluidly, they rode, our Kyrgyz guide said, “They are born on horseback.”  Most of the boys posed for cameras, grinning and showing off; one, with a dark green hat on, sat solemnly on his horse a little apart from the crowd. Tourists and locals and horses mingled, everyone smiling, grinning, shaking hands, cheering for the winners of each new game.

The yurts are made by hand, with wooden frames supporting woolen walls and felt mats on the floor. The opening at the top opens with a tug of rope to let in the sunshine, and closes again at night to keep us warm. So warm, despite the fact that the temperature dropped nearly to freezing. It rained the second morning, but just up the valley, fresh snow dotted the hills and mountains. If this is July, no wonder they don’t spend the winters up there. Each spring, people drive their livestock - on foot - from the lower villages to their summer territory, bringing their yurts to set up and paying the government a fee per animal for grazing rights. It’s a beatiful, harsh place to live, where water is pumped from the river and no plant larger than grass will grow.

Tashkent

It sounds so romantic: visions of the Silk Road, of khans and mosques and heady trade and history. But really, the city no longer has much to offer.

Today I went to the Chorsu Bazaar, the one thing that any guidebook seems to recommend without hesitation.  Okay, I thought, another bazaar. They’re always interesting: colorful fruits, spices, miscellany.

I have never seen a bazaar like this.

It’s enormous. I got lost in it for hours - literally lost, and I usually have a pretty damn good sense of direction. The bazaar is centered around a gorgeous blue dome, and you can wander around it (truly, around it) for ages, in concentric circles or down diverting lanes, or out into the densely packed stalls under hand-tied cloth overhangs.

The bazaar sells everything you could possibly imagine. Yes, the richly colored plums and cherries and apricots and parsley and dill. Yes, the almonds in their shells, the piles of spices and berries and fresh herbs and root vegetables. But also the little prickly things they use to put patterns in their bread; plastic buckets in primary colors, so perfect for carrying home fruit from the market; toiletries; cosmetics; baby strollers and cribs; water and juice and soda; dresses and shirts and underwear and socks; hair ornaments; neckties; shoes, from dressy leather to plastic conveniences; remote controls; jewelry; everything. Everything.

So it was worth getting lost. Mostly.

The road to Khiva

“I do not remember the last time it rained,” said the man driving me from Bukhara to Khiva. I’d just asked about the rice fields we’d begun to pass, after the pale Kyzylkum Desert had given way to the richer land of the Khorezm region. The river has been low, which makes rice cultivation difficult. Apparently the cotton fields are a huge drain on the region’s water resources, and other aspects of life here are suffering.

I’d been puzzled when the woman helping with my travel arrangements decided to book me a driver for this leg of the trip, but it ended up being a fascinating day. She’d estimated that the drive would take seven hours, but she underestimated my driver. We made it in five and a half.

And that was with a stop for gas, where the cars lined up two and three deep and are then served by young women in green and yellow uniforms wearing their long hair in ponytails.

The road was wide enough for three or four cars, but it rarely had lane markers. There was something amusing about the driver signalling left to pass someone when there was neither a lane nor a third vehicle in sight. Much of the pavement was rough enough to encourage twisting and swerving, if not decelerating. At one point, when we were about to make a right turn, he said, “If we go straight: Turkmenistan, seven kilometers.” How often do you hear that? Apparently, some drivers go straight through, but we went around. It looked cloudy in Turkmenistan.

We discussed Uzbek life. He confirmed what someone had told me a few days ago, that women tend to marry at 18 or 19, and men at 20 or 22. Children live at home until they are married, and the youngest son - even after he marries - will stay in his parents’ home indefinitely. “In Europe, North America,” he said, “work is the first thing, then family. In Uzbekistan, family is the first thing. Then work.”

We talked about tourism. “Before eleven September,” he said, “many Americans come to Uzbekistan. After eleven September, no.” He wondered if Americans are afraid of all the ‘Stans now. He wondered if maybe Americans are traveling less overall. [Distraction and loss of train of thought: a bride in a very poofy dress, surrounded by people looking both festive and hot, just walked by outside the internet cafe window.]

The one stop we made was at the Amu-Darya River, named the Oxus by “Alexander Great,” as my driver called him. A new bridge is under construction, its pilings reaching over halfway across the massive river. For now, the way across is a rickety pontoon bridge, with sometimes absurd vertical gaps for cars to traverse.

Despite the heat, the reckless driving, and the condtion of the road, I was glad for the drive. I like to understand space by passing through a landscape. We saw little desert rodents that reminded me of a cross between gerbils and ferrets. We saw fields of sunflowers. A bus stood by the side of the road, it undercarriage doors lifted to reveal piles and piles of watermelons. At one point we came to an abrupt stop: a donkey had run away from its owner and, in response to shouts and hand claps, was slowly making its way back across the road in front of us. Donkeys seem to be the farm transport of choice around here. One pulled a cart piled high, while a bicycle rider hitched a ride alongside by hanging onto the cart with one hand. In a small village, a man beat his fruit tree with a long, long pole to bring the fruit raining down.

Khiva is another world: the old city surrounded by undulating walls, within which alleys lead past playing children and people carrying buckets of fruit from the market. I walked through the market this morning, just a few rows of people setting down their wares on the pavement outside the city’s eastern gate. The fruits and vegetables are gorgeous: tiny cherries, apricots, and plums; cabbages, tomatoes, purple garlic. Bolts of cloth, hanging vertically; a butcher’s, with two young boys diligently waving away flies. People pushing bicycles or three-wheeled wooden carts. A man fixing a bike in the middle of his stall.

And more mosques and mausoleums, with their turquoise domes and tiled fronts. I climbed a minaret, grateful for the ticket-seller’s advice to watch my head (she wasn’t kidding). And I found a deserted dead-end, in view of a medressa under renovations, where I sat against a bumpy brick wall and read in quiet solitude.

Jewish life in Bukhara

When I mentioned that I would be going to Bukhara, someone - I think it was my mother - said, “Oh, that’s where the Bukhara Jews are from.” Which, of course, makes perfect sense.

So this morning I set out to find the main synagogue. There are two remaining, but one doubles as the community center and seems to be known as the synagogue. I had some trouble finding it since, as it turns out, there’s more than one street in the area called Sarrafon. But a guy selling postcards and things was helpful and tried to guess what I was wandering around looking for, and hit on: “Sinagoga?” One more block down, and I turned down a slightly less narrow alley; thirty or so meters in, I saw it: number 20, on the right-hand side, Bukharan-style double doors held tight by a heavy padlock. Two signs confirmed that it was the synagogue, but there wasn’t much to see from the street. Still, I took a couple of pictures of the door and the signs, wanting some memento of Bukharan Jewry.

I tried again later in the afternoon. Still locked.

So I set out to find the Jewish cemetery. It wasn’t far from my hotel, though the walk felt longer in the bright mid-afternoon sunshine and dusty heat. A sign in Hebrew, Russian (or Uzbek?), and English was affixed to a wall next to an open gate. I walked in, past a few scraggly fruit trees, past a padlocked metal box for donations, past a little house or office with the door ajar, past a tiny van with one wheel removed. Next to the van, against the outer wall of the house, someone had leaned several blank gravestones, one a Star of David, another an irregular curving shape, the others various shapes of quadrangles.

The cemetery was dry, rocky, neglected. Many of the oldest stones were flat, horizontal markers, their writing (if there had ever been any) erased by weather and time. The oldest ones were a shock to someone used to North American Jewish cemeteries: polished stone, often a heavy horizontal slab topped by a vertical component, usually with a mix of Hebrew and Cyrillic characters, often with an image of the deceased engraved in startling detail. One woman, presumably a singer, gestured lavishly with a microphone in hand. Others stared solemnly or wore half-smiles. One reminded me of the guy who wanted to be my tour guide at the Ark this morning. One was only a child: he had died at the age of three. Some also had Stars of David or menorahs or other Jewish imagery carved into the stones. In one section, most of the graves were surrounded by white-painted metal-railed fences. Artificial flowers offered a rare dot of color; on one grave, the plastic green stems had been secured with transparent tape, which had weathered to a gray translucence.

Later on, after more aimless wandering (which is the perfect thing to do in Bukhara), I decided to eat dinner at Lyabi-Hauz, the main square surrounding a (square) pool with fountains and 700-year-old mulberry trees. When I got to the square, I realized I was right by the synagogue again. So, once more, I headed down Sarrafon Street. The synagogue’s carved wooden doors were shut, but the padlock was gone. I stood there, trying to figure out if I could just push open the heavy doors, when I heard a friendly shout from down the road. A man with more gold teeth than white had broken off his conversation and was coming towards me. With gestures, we established that I wanted to see the synagogue, and he wanted to show me the synagogue.

So we opened the heavy doors and found ourselves in a small uncovered courtyard, with a menorah painted on one wall. Tall windows looked into the sanctuary, to the left, and a smaller room stood to the right. He first opened the door to the right. It wasn’t a formal sanctuary, as far as I could tell, but there was a small bima or podium near the center of the room. At the back was a picture of a white-bearded man; my host explained that this was the rabbi. We quickly established that he only spoke Russian and Uzbek (I’d hoped we could speak Hebrew together), but he spoke anyway, cheerfully and loudly. Perhaps this room is used for classes, or for very small services?

The sanctuary was simple but lovely, white and wood and pale blue, with the bima at the center. White lace hid the women’s gallery upstairs. A string of Israeli flags hung in an arc from the front of the women’s gallery. The seating was unusual: small tables, a few chairs at each one, surrounded the perimeter of the room. Convenient for leaning books on, I imagine, or for study.

At the back of the room was a bookshelf full of prayer books; on the wall was a photo montage, mostly of older bearded men. I couldn’t tell if my host was saying that these were the people who have left Bukhara for Israel, Europe, North America, and elsewhere, or if these were the few that remain. At one point, I’ve read, the town had eight synagogues.

When I left, thanking my host and folding up some sum for the donation box, I said, “Shalom.” He replied, “Shalom.” His kindness, his warmth, his eagerness to show me the little synagogue and my eagerness to see it, and that final, familiar word of greeting, moved me to tears.

Tidbits of travel

It’s impossible to do justice to the buildings I’ve seen here, especially until I can upload some photos.  So for now, I’ll offer a few snapshots of my trip.

1. I chatted with a guy this morning who spent almost a year in Columbus, OH as an exchange student. I tried to picture this nice young high school student in Ohio and introducing himself as coming from Uzbekistan.  Even I’ve never been to Columbus, and I’m American.

2. Speaking of “American”: it’s a word I almost never use. I associate it with George Bush and unironic patriotism and all sorts of disagreeable things. But here, one of the first questions people ask me - sometimes the first or even only question - is, “Where are you from?” And the answer they understand is “America.”  Most people are surprised. Some are excited, or fascinated, or tell me about a relative who lived there. The father or grandfather of the guy in #1 gave me a four-side Uzbek skullcap as a gift. It was so kind of him.

3. Unpotable water smells funny. Every place I’ve been to where the tap water is undrinkable, the water has smelled funny. Which means that showering smells funny, which means that it’s hard to feel entirely clean. As a side note, there is a brand of soap here called “fax.”  I wonder if they think a fax machine blows bubbles or something.

4. The bread here (called “non”) is round, with a shiny, crispy crust and a nice chewy inside. They tend to serve it cut into wedges, or at least into quarters, since the loaves are all way more than a person could eat in one sitting. Anyway, they seem to take the shininess very seriously. People who sell non tend to carry it in stacks, usually with a tea towel between hand and bread, and I often see them taking one end of the towel and carefully polishing the top of the bread.

5. Drinking a pot of green tea at every meal is not helping with my plan to cut back on caffeine. They drink tea out of little bowls here, the same bowls that, for example, my yogurt was served in at breakfast this morning.  Tea is so important that they even served it on the train from Tashkent to Samarkand. I don’t think it would fly in North America to serve hot liquids in shallow ceramic bowls aboard a moving train.