still in Bishkek, but tomorrow morning we will free ourselves from this city. our time here has been nice, i guess, however uninteresting. its a laid back city - some call Bishkek "a glorified village" - but as usual nothing we expected to work out has in fact worked out, so it will be nice to leave and focus on the things that drew us to the country in the first place: mountains, wilderness, nomadic culture, horse treks, yurts, summer pastures and bowls of yogurt.

we spent 3 days at our seminar on transpersonal psychology, and despite being fascinated with the field and the subject material, we decided to drop out of the course. it was much more of a freeform discussion than the lecture-based "training" we had expected. a remarkable collection of impressive people from a wide range of admirable and interesting fields, but the cultural differences proved too great to collaborate sucessfully. as they are unaware of the standards of western academia, it was a pretty loose and unstructured meeting most of the time, instead of a class. the translation (granted, with 3 languages its a formidable task) was not done well. and add to that all the usual annoyances that come with educated people in the developing world - things that from our western point of view can only be perceived as arrogance, long-windedness, disrespect of time management, self-absorption, and overall intellectual masturbation - and it was clear it just wasnt a good use of our time and energy. 9-10 hours a day for an amount of information that could easily have been transmitted to us in 30 minutes, had it been structured and done efficiently.

we left on good graces and paid less than half of the total costs, so we're feeling great about it. tonight we will have the american professor over for dinner at our apartment, feed him some long-awaited vegetables and pick his brain on the field, and will probably learn more in that 2 hour period than we did in the entire course.

in other dissapointing news, the NGO that we had hoped to volunteer with here, turned out to also not be exactly what we were looking for - they do a short hike every weekend, rather than a full-time trekking program. so, with no reason to stay here for 2 1/2 months anymore, we completely overhauled our schedule. the last few days we've been wandering around the city trying to figure out what we're gonna do for the next few months - in particular, after we leave kyrgyzstan early. this took 2 days of travel agents, airline offices, embassies, translators, immigration offices, and (our favorite pasttime) dollar spending.

during our journeys around the city we also planned our next moves here - finding fuel, finding maps, researching trekking routes, beginning to explore the huge network of "community based tourism" that attracted us to kyrgyzstan 2 years ago.......a web of organizations that put you in touch with the local people in the form of homestays, yurtstays, treks, horse treks, guides, porters, cooks, etc. we also went and explored the enormous bazaar and bought the best almonds and apricots we've ever tasted.

bought a ticket from kyrgyzstan to uzbekistan. changed our flight from uzbekistan back to turkey. hired a young student from the american university here to translate for us at the uzbekistan embassy, and after the usual first round of mixed messages, "no, come back later," "you must call for an appointment," "stand in line here and wait," etc that is expected from central asian beurocrats, we finally found ourselves miraculously inside the embassy. they told us some exorbitant amount of US dollars we could pay to get the visa in 5 minutes, and we didnt even look back. done.

now its time get out of here......i still havent had a decent bowl of yogurt.