August 20, 2008. Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

A week into our time in Kyrgyzstan, and the first stage (shall we call it "entry"?) is over. We arrived Bishkek in the predawn darkness after 2 full days of exhausting travel, sleeping in airports and trying to quell the persistent dreams of our recently finished canoe trips through Labrador and Quebec. Somehow we found ourselves, on the plane from Istanbul to Bishkek, sitting next to perhaps one of 10 people in Kyrgyzstan that speak english. A 21 year old kid studying at the military academy in Ankara, Turkey, our new friend Nurbek was unlucky enough to get badgered by me all night with questions about his homeland and clueless requests for language lessons. Problem is, you really need to know 2 languages in this country - Russian in the cities and with any other ethnicities, and Kyrgyz in the rural areas, where we really want to spend our time. So, needless to say, Nurbek tried all night to teach me the basics of 2 different languages, and I retained very little of either.

Which is unfortunate, because NOBODY here speaks english and for the first 5 days I would not have argued with you if you told me we were the first Americans to ever visit the country. I mean, I'm used to getting stared at in Asia - let's face it, I'm a weird looking dude even in the States - but the stares here are almost ashamed, guilty ones. There's lots of Russians here, so white skin and height are not at all interesting, but my red hair gives us away immediately. In stark contrast to South and Southeast Asia, where people seem to understand that your presence comes from an interest in their culture, everyone here seems thoroughly confused.

As the sun came up over Bishkek upon our arrival, we decided to leave the city immediately and head for a nearby beach resort town. We learned our lesson last time about entering the developing world, and knew that we needed some calm privacy and a few creature comforts, rather than a big, polluted, expensive, busy city. Kendall and I are convinced that it takes us longer to overcome jet lag than anyone else we know, so we drove the 5 hours through the mountains in a minibus and resigned to a guesthouse room on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kol to recover and bounce gently over the waves of culture shock. Lake Issyk-Kol is an enormous, and of course beautiful, alpine lake in the middle of the Tien Shan mountain range, which contains some of the highest peaks in the world. The lake has been home to some of the most ancient civilizations on the planet, and was a standard stop on a lot of Silk-Road itineraries, as well as for any travelling people in this region for the last 3000 years (nomadic tribes, Mongol warriors, Arab traders, and Chinese armies alike).

But yurts and caravans were hard to imagine, as the beach resort town we settled into was full of Russian and Kazakh tourists. Lots of them. Rich ones, too. The place has become a circus. One day, we walked to the beach through a maze of Kyrgyz trinket shops and restaurants catering to the vodka-crazed Russians, and here's what we saw: a group of Kyrgyz teenagers playing ping-pong with Rod Stewart and Beyonce blasting over the loudspeakers, the most intensely sunburned people we've ever seen (yes, they were still in the sun), a guy running around in a Santa Claus suit, a white camel being paraded around through a maze of bikini and speedo-clad Russians for 50 cent photographs, and a mountain of trash. We turned around to walk back to our room and passed a 250 pound russian woman hiking up her panties after taking a piss in the middle of the public park. It's a strange place.

So, Kendall and I spent 4 days walking around the nearby hills, going to restaurants and pointing at random Russian words to order our meals (surprise! sheep fat!), and barking at one another in the guesthouse room to keep each other awake during the opressive afternoon fatigue that comes with Asian jetlag.

Now we're in Bishkek again, and somehow have found ourselves the proud tenants of an apartment bigger and nicer than anything Kendall and I have ever rented in the States. Expecting to arrive the city and wander around with our backpacks in the heat looking for a guesthouse where we would pay $15-20 a night for a tiny dirty room and access to a fly-infested outhouse, instead we've miraculously ended up in a spotlessly clean flat, in a spotlessly clean building just off the main roads in the center of the city. We have our own fully stocked and functioning kitchen, running water, PLUMBING that works, a large veranda, a spacious bedroom with MATTRESSES, a bathtub.....wow. We even have a huge living room with a tv that gets the olympic channells, which is nice despite the fact that everyone in the former Soviet Union is still unaware that there exist olympic sports other than wrestling, boxing, and weightlifting. We are blown away. It couldnt be safer, more convenient, more comfortable. Theres even a full-size fridge and a bottle of vodka already opened.

Now we've regrouped and will focus for the next 10 days on the transpersonal psychology course we are taking here in Bishkek. Yesterday we met the hosts, a fascinating privately funded reserach institution called the Aigine Cultural Research Center. They are studying the Kyrgyz tribes and cultures ethnographically, with a focus on traditional healers, shamans, rituals, sacred sites, and a sociological view of the country's religious and ethnic diversity.

Funny story about meeting them: we arrived Bishkek on a minibus from the mountain beach resort we had been hiding out in, and hopped on a local bus that we thought would take us to a guesthouse we wanted to try. 20 minutes later we hadn't figured out where to get off and the bus had almost completed the local bus's route of the city. The driver was getting antsy - we weren't following the local bus route we had expected, we weren't oriented, couldn't read the Russian street names, had no idea where to get off, and weren't about to just jump off the bus in the middle of the city and try to figure it out. Finally we interpreted a few backwards N's and R's and put together a couple of Russians street names, oriented ourselves, and immediately got off the bus. We looked up and realized we were not only on the same street as the Aigine Cultural Reserach Center, but literally a half a block from it. Someone upstairs was looking out for us. We found the Center and met all of our contacts for the course. They called the hotels we were hoping to stay at, found out they were all full, and after much deliberation finally remembered a friend of a friend with an empty apartment. The rest is luxurious history.

So, today we meet-and-greet and tomorrow we start out 7 day course. The training will be on "transpersonal psychology," a brand new field of research thats developing in the western world, which kendall has been interested in for some time. Aigine, the Bishkek organization, will be hosting an american professor from the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology (the school in Palo Alto which Kendall has been wanting to go to, and just happens to be within a stone's throw of my brother Bryan's new house). David Luckoff is his name (mildly well known in the academic world, i think) and we feel very lucky to be learning from him. The subject matter looks fascinating.