Bishkek Day Two

My bathroom smelled worse today than yesterday, which is pretty impressive. So I just ran away from it to eat the free breakfast of the hotel/lodge. The breakfast entailed beet salad, salad olvie (potato salad- the same one Russians and Iranians make), rice, yellow and white, and hard boiled eggs. I just couldn't stomach the spread after the bathroom smell so I had a bit of beet salad and ran away into the city. It felt good to be outside, there was some sunshine and the air was crisp, though the smell of things burning was ever present. Like everywhere, here people get rid of trash by burning it.

I sat in an internet cafe to look for a new hotel, at which I was unsuccessful but during that time I heard something familiar. Iranian farsi...I looked around. A girl at the cafe was speaking on her mobile. "They are everywhere" I thought to myself. I considered speaking to her but didn't. I imagined the conversation "hi you are iranian?
"yup"
"me too"
"cool."
"cool."
"bye."
"bye."

I left in search of the National History Museum, my colleague told me there was a whole floor on Lenin. As I walked I asked a man for the street I was looking for "Chui?"
"Yes Chui"
I was excited, he knew how to speak english. I asked for the museum and a cafe I was looking for. He walked with and showed me where to go. I sort of wanted to bring him with me, to translate, to explain, to guide. We said goodbye. He was kind.

The museum was a big block in the sky. It was huge with nothing around it, no trees, no stairs, just a immense square building with a little door. Lenin was not just on the second floor, Lenin was everywhere. They must have had 200 pictures of him and many of his letters in his handwriting. There were pictures of him with his politburo officials. Then there were these huge bronze murals. The murals either portrayed women, old men, children and strong young men, Russians and Kyrgyz standing unified looking out on to the horizon. Then there were murals of men and women working hard labor, things like welding, building, farming, industrial things.

Then there were war murals some lied dead while others looked like they were trudging on to victory always looking out above the observer. The emotion and detail was very propagandist, I felt like I was supposed to be believing a story but I couldn't really buy it, maybe because it was over and it was now just part of this museum. I guess it had the same immensity in meaning as maybe an Obama statue would have today...

Alongside the murals were maps showing the gradual increase of territory of the Soviet Union. And of course more Lenin. The pictures of him and his advisers looked more like a bunch of eccentric intellectuals and academics rather than scary Russian Soviets ideologues like in the pictures of Stalin's time.

I had lunch at Fatboy cafe the only english language menu I could find. Sitting behind me was an old English man and a Kyrgyz woman who barely spoke english and an Australian man and a Kyrgyz woman who didn't speak.

I then walked to the big shopping center. At one of the crafts stores a Kyrgyz woman that spoke English well asked me if I was happy about Obama. I said yes. She said "Bush kill people. Will Obama kill people?" Man that was a blunt way to talk about it.

I asked her how she felt about the US president. She said she didn't care because they have peace in Kyrgyzstan. Wow.

Then she started to explain that life was much better under the Soviet Union, because, well people had food, shelter and employment. I said what about freedom. She said we don't need freedom, freedom just talking. We don't care because we are used to not having it. We want food and job.