A good friend of mine from Poland went to Kyrgyzstan for a month of backpacking in the summer of 1993 with her sort of boyfriend.  They loved it.  Absolutely gorgeous and dirt cheap.  The only thing they didn't like was the internal flight.  It was the pilot's birthday and so he, the co-pilot and everyone else in the crew kept on coming out and pouring shots for themselves and the passengers.  To make matters worse the plane wasn't capable of flying above the mountains so it flew between them.

I also wanted to recommend Ryszard Kapuscinski's book 'Kyrgyz on a horse' which recounts his travels in Central Asia in the late sixties but it seems to be the only one of his many books not translated into English.  His book on the Soviet Union - Imperium covers some of the same ground but it is focussed on the disintegrating Soviet empire.  If you haven't read Kapuscinski before I strongly recommend his two best books Shah of Shahs about the Islamic Revolution and Emperor

about Haile Selassie's regime just before it all crashed down.

Not.  Had it once - some ex-Soviets at a party in a Warsaw dorm in the early nineties.  I've always had a 'I'll try anything once' policy for food. Once. Imagine someone adding a bit of alcohol to some very funky yogurt.

" To make matters worse the plane wasn't capable of flying above the mountains so it flew between them."

I briefly pondered flying from Osh to Bishkek. I asked the ticketing agent how the mountains looked and she smiled and said, "you will see them very closely as you fly through them!"

Fuck that, I said. I'll take a twelve hour drive.

drink, it is always difficult in situations like that, where the natives are curious, and open and sharing their lives with you, that it is so difficult to drink. In some places it can be, and often is, taken as an insult. Especially in Georgia. Eeee-yikes! Tamada bada too mucha drinka in Georgia.

to be pretty good.  Granted, I'd been living in Uzbekistan for a year by that point and drinking a lot of homemade kefir...  It just seemed like thin kefir with a kick to me.  

I don't know if I'd trust it outside of Kyrgyzstan or Kazakhstan though.  It might have been better because it was fresh (as fresh as spoiled horse milk could be...)

for several months in the ex-Soviet Union.  Everyone tells me it's much worse than Poland. That's saying something. I remember a few years ago just before Easter showing up for a morning meeting at the Wroclaw historical institute. There was someone I hadn't met.  Hey, Marek - we need to celebrate this, I've got a nice bottle of some Lithuanian vodka I got at the conference last month - time to drink it. Uggh. There went my afternoon plans for the archive.  Most of the time it wasn't that bad, but often enough.  

if I drink I die. That usually did the trick.

But even then, there was this little babushka (she is the mother of a friend of my father's) in Georgia who wouldn't let up. It damn near turned into a fiasco, the whole dinner party had to calm her down. She was so upset that I wouldn't drink a toast in her house, after she cooked such a lovely meal, yadda, yadda, yadda. I left the next day to find a hotel in Tbilisi. I am sure you are aware that insulting Georgians is not a good thing. ;-)

Taiwan! Now THAT was a close call.

I couldn't.  I do drink and some of the people there knew it since I'd been out with them.  I'm just not fond of a half dozen shots at ten in the morning.

"La cabane à sucre" :)

No one can sanely take care of a mapple sugar farm while sober :)

I completely agree with you.

I met a Russian girl in a bar not so long ago. She taught me a kid song about a little birdie drinking vodka but I forgot it ... but not the girl :)

You know what I'm talking about ?

About Vermont, I'm getting pretty far from the subject of the thread but, you know there is a sovereignist movement there ? I've seen some member at a Parti Quebecois congress some years ago . It once was an independant state formed from new-France if I remember well :)

I was offered Kumys in a sort of official, obligatory way. We'd been traveling all day headed towards the Torugart pass into China. It smelled like ick-ick, similar, I thought to a fermented milk the Koreans drink and that my students there tried to make me drink.

Oh well.

Nice to see you around Nathan!

Vermont is one weird state! I was only 15 at the time I lived there and was, well, a little chemically challenged at the time for I was going to a school where the parents basically pay the school a whole lot of money to a.) guarantee their kids graduate and b.) don't get into too much trouble.

Maybe sometime I will tell The Agonistas about the time the whole campus tripped on LSD and freaked out on the trees.

Oh my, that was a long time ago.

In my years it was more ecstasy , affectuously called "E" . Kurt Cobain was dead and we needed something new and "positive".

we were going to those "new" thing called rave, discovered the PLUR, the free love with AIDS background, the industrial, the goa and internet.

You make me nostalgic SP :) At the time I was in a school for "kids with an advantage" , or nerds school. The authorities there have this naive view that because were were brighter than other, they was no need to watch for stuff like drug etc... That just learned me that a school with no drugs does not exist Period. I also learend that putting all the bright people in the same place is not a good idea. Half people actually ends-up well, the other goes crazy wild, become homeless of chief of a biker gang. And most of them went through some phase of depression etc... etc.. etc.. :)