What Is An Expat?

14 Dec, Saturday:

So after another expensive breakfast, we meander around a bit, and get checked out and ready for our flight down to Karshi. We head to the airport, but to the domestic side, which is smaller. The army of porters sees us a mile off (ok, a few hundred meters) and lines up ready to do some work. Turns out we have additional luggage since one of the guys who went out that morning was unable to get his locker on the plane. It’s a small plane, but more on that later. Anyways, so we have his truck box, and I mean that literally, with us also. The cost for porters is cheap, like a dollar a bag. Baha arranges the “overweight baggage charge” bribe with the airline people. That’s twenty bucks each. And through security we go, straight to the head of the line. Everybody and I mean everybody, sets off the metal detector. I think the only metal I had on me were the zippers on my jacket. So on we go, ready to wait for a bit for our 5:30 PM flight.

I’m going to change subjects for a bit and talk about the national luggage of Uzbekistan. If you are at all familiar with lawn chairs, the kind with the metal frames and that plastic / fabric combo that you actually sit on, then you have seen the basics of the Uzbek baggage. By that, I mean EVERYONE had these bags. I think they go shopping, buy a boatload of the bags, and fly it all home. They look like a stopgap not intended to last more than a few trips. Most of them are taped shut / together. One time we saw this extended family group, and they must have had over 40 of those damn things. It took about a half hour to get all of them inside the terminal. But I tell you what, when they realized they were in front of the wrong desk, they scooted every single one of those bags over to the other desk in about a minute flat.

Ok, back to the story. After an appropriate period of waiting, we shuffle through the door, and onto the waiting unheated bus, which we board and then stand in for an extended period of time while latecomers show up in ones and twos. Off for a nice little ride we go, maybe 400 meters including the wide circle we made turning around from the terminal…to this little teeny tiny corporate jet looking thing.

So we disembark from the bus, and prepare to board the plane through a small ladder in the rear. The interior lights are off for a minute, and it looks like a dark and forbidding cave. What’s in it you ask? Only what you bring with you. Our weapons, need them we will not. The lights come on just as I have gotten into the plane and run into the wall by the door.

And behold! It is even smaller than it appears! I can’t stand up straight as I push by the stacked lawn chair bags into a tiny seat with no headrest. My backpack goes in my lap, since there is no storage under the seats (that’s for feets) and the overhead area isn’t even a bin, but a little area where one might place say, a book or something. It’d need to be a paperback, not hardback. So we get all crammed in this freezing, unheated icebox and sit there for about an hour. I think about sleeping, head forward on backpack like so many times before, but I keep getting distracted by tales of Thailand, from which one guy had just got back from R&R. He is a good storyteller to be sure, but begins to tell that same story a few times over the course of the night. It is also entertaining to see them out de-icing the wings. After about an hour of this, the pilot steps out and mutters something both quick and quiet, which disappoints all non-Americans on the plane. We aren’t disappointed in the same way since we are confused, but that we aren’t flying right now is obvious. So off the plane we go! We stand in the bus for a while and some of our bunch get concerned about the checked baggage. Should we have taken it off? I figure we didn’t put it on, so we don’t take it off. Leroy steps out of the bus to try to get his bag, and is told politely but firmly to get back on the bus. We expect that next time he tries this he will be shot. He doesn’t get off the bus again, so we don’t find out.

As it turns out, Karshi is not the most up to date airport in the world. They don’t have anything to clean snow off the runway with, and as I find out later, this place gets fogged in at the drop of a hat. It gets two flights a day, weather dependant of course. Must be a fun place to work.

Back to the terminal to wait some more. An hour or so later, we find out it will be another hour or so. Then we hop in the aforementioned unheated bus, and back out to the cave that flies through the air. Seriously folks, the lights were on this time, it’s a joke. We weren’t on the plane quite so long this time when the disappointment ripples through the crowd yet again. Back to the terminal to wait some more!

I won’t go into the gory details of how many delays we had, only it was finally decided it’d be decided if it was going to fly again at 2:30AM. That didn’t happen. Ok, wait a couple more hours. Again. Some other flight gets called, and one guy has to wrestle his passed-out partner into a standing position, and finds that his partner is unable to grasp anything, like his briefcase or ticket. Somehow they get him out the door. Again with the waiting. There’s no heat in this terminal, and no longer enough people to generate any heat. The benches are made of fine Soviet steel, guaranteed to leave a waffle print though your jeans. I sleep some, almost out of spite. There is a very drunk prosecutor who asks what the problem is, and if we sign out a complaint they will beat the shit out of them for us. He then goes and sits next to a lady who’s every movement (especially the part where she turns completely away from him) says “go away.” He never even notices. Later, he and a buddy throw up in the sink. Separately, as far as I can tell, because they got both sinks. They boil bacon here instead of frying it. It looks like he had some bacon. I wonder where he got breakfast from, because we are all very hungry. It is not in my plan to eat from the sink though.

Did I mention more waiting? I may have been distracted by the freezing, or the puking. It’s finally decided the plane is going to fly at 5:30AM. It doesn’t, and we knew it wouldn’t, but we are spared the journey back and forth from the plane. Now it’s going to fly at 8:30, but let’s just agree that it didn’t. Finally the decision is made to abort this madness, and we prepare to head back to the hotel. A couple hours later, we leave. Why so long you ask? We had to get the tickets switched, make sure we wouldn’t have to re-bribe for the luggage, that sort of thing. Turns out there is a later flight that they are sure is gonna go this time. We’ve heard that one before, and don’t fall for it. At 11:30 (or possibly later) it does. I was dead asleep at the time, after we barely made it back in time for a tasty delicious break-feast.

Dec 13, Friday:
Good all you can eat breakfast. Thank goodness for expense reports though, because I am here to report to you it was expensive. We hang around the hotel some, and then launch another expedition to the outside, finally getting to the Golden Wing, which is quite crowded. We do a little better here, as my Russian is improving by the minute, but I still have these odd little gaps where I can’t remember a word, and wouldn’t you know it’s usually the most important one of a sentence? A crowd of 4, and then later 2 more, very young and attractive women sit at the table next to us, demonstrating the variety of looks and ethnic types all right there at the same time. Of course, their fashion tastes are even a bit different from the younger American generations, and they smoke like chimneys.

I’m gonna change the subject here a little bit and talk about the women in Tashkent. In a word, they’re beautiful. I’m sure there must be ugly ones, but I think they put them somewhere out of sight, at least until they turn into the little square babushkas of stereotype. That stereotype, by the way, is absolutely steel on target. This area has always been a crossroads of cultures, so you find Russian, Asian, Persian, Turks, and wonderful combinations of those. Exotic features, stunning blonds that seem almost out of place given the general darker hair / features, what a variety of sights to behold! Thank God for LASIK, so that I do not miss anything.

Aside from the women, there isn’t so much to look at. There was a large green domed mosque down the street from the hotel. Down from that is a statue of Timur (also known to the West as Tamerlane) who was big in these parts way back when. He’s got that fire in his eyes, charging forward on his horse. I bet he kicked ass. Just down from there is a boulevard turned into a sort of open air mall crossed with the barkers and food “shops” of a carnival. 6 items in great abundance and variety, not counting the 5 different kinds of food, set out on skewers ready to be cooked at a moment’s notice. It maybe wouldn’t be so bad because it was really cold out, but it’s not something I felt like chancing. Most of the shops don’t have much to sell, and there is a general feeling of sparseness to the shelves. There are quite a few Internet Cafes. Many of the shops have darkly tinted windows and look permanently closed. Some are. Interspersed among these little shoplets are giant apartment buildings, some of which look like they are going to fall apart before your very eyes. It can be hard to tell new construction going up – not that there’s much of that – from old buildings being taken down.

There’s no shortage of folks wanting some money from us. As obvious Westerners we stick out like a sore thumb, and the chant of “dollar, dollar” is often heard, though usually mumbled. The kids are the worst, because they are so persistent and heartrendingly sad-eyed. They’re also pretty damn hard to get rid of. The adults are much better from that perspective as they don’t really seem to care all that much, with little to no tugging at heartstrings action going on. The kids stick to you like glue, especially if someone in your group has taken any pity on them and run up the sucker flag for all to see. They will appear at your side, and meander semi-permanently attached to you wherever you go. That is, until they see the local militia or cops, whereupon they disappear with a surprising suddenness, and reappear with that same surprising suddenness when the “danger” is past. I had one lil’ urchin latch on to me, grabbing me by the arm and not letting go. I removed her hand 30-40 times and it made absolutely no difference. She actually had a hell of a grip, and I suspect she worked out regularly. “Okay, another set of 30-40 arm grabs, ready…exercise!” With an adult, that wouldn’t have even happened, but if so it could be dealt with. What was I gonna do, beat the shit out of this kid? Hey you, smartass in the front row, be quiet, it was a rhetorical question. Anyways, the second you give in to these people, you’ll find an army of clones descending on you wanting the same. Even worse, when the army decides to beat up the one to take whatever you may have given it. So your only hope is to play Mr. Heartless Bastardman and wait for them to get bored and leave. It only works if you are more stubborn than they are. It seems cruel not to help, but often doing so just makes things worse. The world is a shitty place sometimes.

Then you find you’ve been wandering around almost a whole day, and it’s getting dark. Time to leave Gypsy territory, just in case. Public drunkenness is not unknown, and we see two tiny people struggling under the weight of a large, yet happy man. I do not know if the car parked on the sidewalk blocking a shop door is related to him or not. We don’t go through the park with the statue of Timur, just in case it is our ass he would kick. We take a shortcut!

Sorry, but no story there. It was a safe and accurately guessed shortcut. Had you wondering though, didn’t I? AR!

Later back at the hotel, we sit in the other lounge and watch the belly dancer show. That’s right, belly dancing. You have to remember this isn’t southern Russia. To better understand it, consider that if you draw a (not completely straight) line from India to Turkey, Uzbekistan is in the middle. To the lower left is the Persian influence. To the right you have the western reaches of China. And the latecomers to the region, the Russians, are off to the northwest. They are what you refer to as a minority, even though they had ruled this country for the last 150 years or so. Then there was a little jazz type band that played. Not a hotspot, but just sort of a relaxing place to sit and chill. Tomorrow, we’ll catch a flight down to Karshi via puddle jumper.

Dec 12, Thursday:
Still not there yet! So at just past midnight we board the plane for Tashkent, on Uzbekistan Airways. They pack ‘em in like sardines (more on that later) and the average former-USSR citizen has a much more relaxed concept of “personal space.” They’re good at standing in lines, making them as short as possible, and pushing your slow, interfering self when you are in their way. It’s not out of rudeness though, but more of desire to go ahead and get it over with NOW NOW NOW, so they can then WAIT WAIT WAIT. There is a loud argument at the back of the plane over something – do you realize how fast these people jabber when they are not agitated? Thankfully it does not break into an all out scuffle, though that might have been amusing. At 2AMish somewhere over Kerplakistan we are served a meal, which I think was actually the best of all flights. It’s ironic, I tell ya. US-based airlines prefer the concept of the “snack” which may go so far as to be a dry sandwich-on-a-roll thingy, whereas both the Moscow and Tashkent flights were a snack, a drink, shortly thereafter a meal, and a drink, another snack later, and some hot moist towels liberally interspersed throughout. How the hell are you supposed to get any sleep that way?

So after the required flight time eventually we landed, after passing over the outskirts of a city that looks quite poor. It’s a hallmark of countries previously afflicted with communism that they simply do not have any money or resources. They tend to be poorly lit, a bit disheveled, and all drive really small cars. We get to wait in the Passport Control line for I don’t know, 3 maybe 4 days. Maybe it was really only a half hour, but it pales in comparison to the decade we spent waiting for the luggage to show up. Ours must have been in the special “foreigner” compartment because it came out dead last, after 95% of everyone else had already gone through customs and left. I assume we were last, just because I think those 3 people still waiting on their luggage when ours stopped coming out simply never got theirs. By this time Bakhodir (hereafter simply referred to as Baha) the Expediter has showed up. We breeze through customs at this point, load up baggage into the vans (err…the porters did) and depart through lovely downtown Tashkent for the Sheraton. Turns out the Sheraton there is a nicer hotel than Sofitel in Houston was.

Due to the conflicting information from Houston on whether or not we could leave the hotel, of course we did. As some of you may know, your last order trumps previous orders. At some point they softened “don’t” to “don’t go alone.” So we sampled a couple of places on the local economy, where you could eat for about a seventh or eighth of what you’d pay at the Sheraton. Plus, more local chicks wandering around that way! At the hotel, they either worked there, or they …worked there. “Dollar, dollar” takes many forms, and that by any means isn’t meant to disparage the first class of people who worked at the hotel, who were really first class in all ways. Kind, helpful, friendly, typically quite attractive, speak excellent English in addition to Uzbek and Russian. But let’s just say that when fools and their money come to town, other classes of people are more than happy to separate them. So anyways, back to eating on the economy. One of the guys had talked to the concierge about places to eat, and came up with the Golden Chicken, which was not to far down this one street. Except it was actually down another street, explaining why we never ever found it on the first street at all. At some point some of the others tried to ask a local where it was, and he just looked at them like “I don’t understand you, crazy foreigner, leave me alone! No, speaking nonsense slowly and loudly does not help.” Anyways, we eventually figured out that either we were on the wrong street or maybe he’d screwed up and the name was really this Golden River place just up the street a little farther. As we would later find out, it was some of both. The place we wanted was the Golden Wing. So nobody at the Golden River spoke English. In between my poor Russian and a picture menu, we mostly got the idea across.

To switch gears a bit, I realize that some people think everyone either speaks English or can magically understand “us.” The difficulties in getting milk for coffee brought this up. Somebody acted like the waitress had to understand what he meant before I sputtered out the word for milk (food names are so hard to remember!) when it was abundantly clear she could not. This poor girl has these foreigner types come in where only one person can barely speak (hey now, I started to remember stuff quickly though, cut me some slack) the language, and they have to point and nod at things. I thought she did a fine job, and didn’t run away like she should have. I started to be a bit embarrassed by the shades of ugly American that were peeking out. In any case, the food turned out good and we did have a little counting problem somewhere along the line. The bill came to something like 33,000 soum. The soum is the local currency there and quite literally enough means a “sum” of money, and the exchange rate was about 1000 soum to the 1 dollar. We had changed money at the hotel, but nobody had anything bigger than 500 soum notes, which are probably 20% larger than dollars. So imagine if you will having to count out 66 bills to pay for the total check. How embarrassing that was, especially after I thanked her for being so nice, since I knew we were so hard to understand. It was my longest speech yet, too!

After that it was nap time – a couple hours would sure do some good. That was the intent, but when I blinked and five had gone past, I didn’t figure another minute would hurt…and five more hours went on by. Remember, we had been moving for 24 hours and moved forward 12 hours on the clock, arriving at the Sheraton 8ish and having a lunch expedition 11ish AM. Went down that late evening and sat in the lobby / lounge with some other folks. Stayed awake most of the rest of the night, but forced in another hour or two of sleep somehow.

Dec 10, Tuesday:

Come on
Baby don’t you want to go
Back to that same old place
Sweet Home Chicago

So off we go from Houston to Chicago. As we fly north up to the lake and then west towards the airport, I have an eerie sense of familiarity with the place. I have never been to Chicago, but a long time ago as a computer flight simulator geek I flew over it day in and out. With the old Sublogic Flight Simulator – the original, mind you! – your default starting airport was the old one on the west shore of the lake; I think it may have been called Midway? Anyways, it juts out into the lake, and as you go north there is another finger of land pointing east, and just northwest of that are the buildings of downtown. It’s all fairly close together, and in the days when it was just a neat thing to do and not an expression of terroristic hatred, we’d take off and search for the coolest way to hit the buildings.

Anyways, we change planes for London. It’s a nice spacious and largely empty Boeing 777. Those are nice birds, all the amenities, lots of room. I’ve flown one of those at the United simulators in Denver and let me tell you, while the pilots have all kinds of buttons and switches to deal with, the computers make it really easy to fly. (While in the simulator, we got to practice another time-honored Flight Simulator tradition; high speed passes under the Golden Gate Bridge!) It’s a long flight but I managed to sleep some at least. At one point I look over and the guy next to me has seemingly disappeared until I realize he is passed out cold face first into his seat, with his knees and feet on the floor under the seat in front of him. Whatever works, I guess.

Dec 11, Wednesday:
As the sun rises over Old Blighty (above the clouds that is) we do racetracks over the English countryside until they finally decide to let us land. We have to grab our luggage and get over to the Aeroflot counter for the flight to Moscow. It’s only about a two mile journey, but then again it’s entirely possible we just missed it twice, too. (doubt it) So it seems there is some confusion regarding our visas. The problem isn’t Moscow however, but Tashkent. The Russians are fine with us, but if they bring us along and we can’t head on to Uzbekistan, then it costs Aeroflot $5K per passenger. Eventually after much calling back and forth the situation is resolved, and onto the plane we go.

And it is chock full o’ Russkies. Not that you wouldn’t imagine that, flying into Moscow and all. Actually, the interesting thing was that so many were not Russians but a lot of Americans and various different Oriental types. It’s funny to hear the safety instructions and other airplane whatnot in Russian, then in accented English, but they all spoke it well. At one point the stewardess started to spit out the meal choices at me, got this look on her face “I should know better, he doesn’t understand what the hell I am saying, switch to English!” Actually, I could understand her, but only at about 1/3 as fast as she was saying it. See, one aspect of a few other foreign languages is that you should speak as quickly as you possibly can, presumably because you don’t really like the people you are talking to, I guess. And I don’t mean your standard “Northeast Seaboard vs. slow southern drawl” either, but a truly horrendous pace that must completely exhaust you after a paragraph or two. Anyways, it’s difficult knowing that you could actually communicate with these people, but since their English is so damn good, you are afraid to trot out your sloppy badly remember Russian with all its vocabulary gaps.

So we landed in Moscow, can’t say much about Sheremeyetevo-1 except it’s cold, poorly lit, and I may have thrown an extra syllable in there. Hope not. Additionally, we may have gone to -2 first. At any rate, we got into one of them, wandered around for a bit in the duty free area, and went ass around elbow to get to the other airport, since one is for international flights and the other is for domestic. And let’s just add at this point that you can tell the difference between the two. Almost no English is spoken on the domestic side, and there isn’t any heat at all it seems. No sleeve going to the plane, you hop on an unheated bus and drive up to the base of the aircraft. You may hop on a bus and only go 100 yards as well (did that twice.) Must be a control thing.

Houston, Houston means that I’m one day farther from you…

Dec 2 – Monday:
I finish the frenzied preparations, mad packing and leave for Houston. I’d only had about a week from offer to depart date. As we are flying down, I look out the window onto the clouds below. Seeing the shadow of the plane against the clouds, I notice there is a halo of sunlight reflected against the cloudbank. I’ve never seen anything like that before. As we descended into the cloudbank, our shadow gets bigger and bigger, closer and closer to the clouds, but the halo stayed in the same spot and the same size.

So we landed, the Houston airport and all the roads are under massive construction, and we had lengthy briefings that evening, but none of that is really interesting, now is it?

Dec 3-4, Tuesday and Wednesday:
Briefings, Medical (tests, 3 shots, x-rays, hearing – either I have great hearing, or great imagination), getting IDs made…see the aforementioned not really interesting.

Dec 5-6, Thursday and Friday:
Hanging out, waiting for a plane. We were originally set to leave Saturday but some sort of unpleasantness in Turkey put the kibosh on that. Another batch of guys is heading for Djibouti on Saturday. It is a place that maybe half of them can say. Ok, that may not be true. Isn’t it more fun to say you’re going to Da Booty than Jee-booty? J It’s hard to say if it’s a joke or real, and I find that a lot of people really want to ignore that Z in Uzbekistan.

At any rate, as it always happens, the thought of heading off to a foreign land without one last glance at perty Amurrican wimmens is just too much to bear…

Forgot to mention that I got to see some of the better areas of Houston. Halliburton’s medical processing area is in what I generally refer to as the ghetto. Lots of houses were just plain broken down and abandoned. Several looked like the foundation had shifted to the side and everything slipped off at an angle. I remember being very surprised to see amidst all these hovels a two-story shack: it was about as big as a single car garage, and simply had two levels. There’s certainly a disparity of some sort when you have multi-thousand foot square homes, and houses (if I may use the term) that are probably 600-700 square feet total. I’ll take a bigger house, please. Gimme about three years.