Crossing Continents

I’m writting from Bishkek, Kyrgyztan, where I’ve been in or around for the past two weeks. I’ve had an amazing time here, partly because the country is full of wonderful warm people and incredibly diverse and beautiful scenery, but mostly because of a small group of fellow travelers who have blown me away with just how cool people can be.

In roughly the order I’ve met them, I’ve spent the last two-three weeks with people matching the following descriptions:

Emily, a sea kayak instructor in Alaska during the summer, and snowboard instructer in Montana during the winter, who didn’t even mind that I stole her bed in Amritsar and let me tag along with her and her friend Nora for basically their entire trip. A Middlebury Alumna, who is much more diligent about blogging than I.

Nora, peace corps volunteer, who’s been living in Kazakhstan for the past two years, and didn’t even heistate to invite me back to her host family’s home and let me stay two nights after meeting me and Emily at the airport at 4 in morning. She also speaks fluent russian and very good kazakh, which is a life safer in the part of the world.

Bruno, a wonderful Frenchman from the south of France who designes outdoor equipment and brought his paraglider everwhere with him. In the mornings, during our trekking, he would walk two hours up the side of the mountain and jump off of it and glide down gracefully. He let me try it out, but I wasn’t very good. He’s traveling from France to New Zealand without taking any planes. AWESOME DUDE!!

Lynne, an Australian girl with whom I’ve had some of the best conversations I’ve had, not just on this trip, but over the last couple years. She did her BA in “Artificial Intelligence” and is eventually going to do a PhD in “Complex Systems.” For now she’s traveling to England by way of a 7 month english teaching stint in Chengdu and backpacking to Portugal for a music festival.

Boris and Thiboux (sp?), two Belgian dudes who bought a van in Belgium and drove it here. They ran out of money though, so they sold their van and are now making their way to Mongolia, where they’re going to buy some horses and try to make it through China. Boris is a vet and interested in coming to the Fletcher School to take his practice International, and was the other third of the ruthless jesse-lynne-boris conversation triangle. Thiboux read a lot of literature and kept us all honest.

Pauline, a delightfuly French girl from Paris who studied abroad at Sarah Lawrence and spent a summer living in the same shitty illegal loft building in Brooklyn that I did, before returning to Paris where she’s finishing her MA in finance at Siences Po. She’s also studying acting at one of the best acting studios in France.

Unfortunately, all of these people have somehow managed to escape Bishkek’s gravity field and moved on to bigger and better things, leaving me with nothing to do in Bishkek but wait for my visas and update my blog. Now If I can manage to put down the mutton shashylk, watermellon, poppy seed ice-cream bars covered in chocolate and sunflower seeds, and fermented horse milk, long enough to string two coherent thoughts together, hopefully you all will have some new reading material. Here goes…