Airplane Applause

(Originally posted April 21)

I am traveling this weekend and my first flight was from Bishkek to Almaty. The landing was a bit bumpy and we hit the tarmac twice. This mediocre piloting was rewarded by enthusiastic applause by most of the passengers.

I've never understood this. Why do passengers in many parts of the world ignore perfect landings and clap their hands enthusiastically for bumpy, horrible landings? Last time I landed in Bishkek was one of the worst landings I have ever ...experienced. We hit the runway going way too fast and bounced three times--and I felt the airplane go slightly sideways and, for one quick second, I wondered if we would end up in a bean field at the end of the runway. Of course, the passengers cheered and clapped as if Kyrgyzstan had won the soccer World Cup. "That landing was so bad we should be booing," I told the woman next to me who was applauding with the zeal one would reserve for an extraordinary performance of the London Philharmonic, but she clearly disagreed.

Why do airline passengers in some parts of the world cheer bumpy landings? It strikes me as being like applauding the dentist whose drilling was especially painful or cheering the uninspiring professor whose lecture had made one fall asleep. Are the passengers so glad they made it back to earth alive that they could not contain their enthusiasm that life continues for another day? Or maybe I am misinterpreting the applause and perhaps Central Asians are more ironic and sarcastic than I have previously realized and their clapping is actually brutal mockery of the hapless pilot? Or is the clapping simply aerobic exercise, preparation designed to limber up one's hands up so that bags can be more easily removed from the overhead bins? I simply do not know.

Maybe the answer is that there is simply something wrong with me and my concept of appreciation. Today I felt like applauding because no one cut in front of me in the check-in line at the Bishkek Airport--a shocking thing indeed. I also felt like cheering when no one elbowed their way past me in the boarding line. And the feat that most deserved a full round of applause, in my opinion, was that none of the elderly passengers, myself included, fell down the stairs at the Almaty Airport as we had to descend 25 steep steps with our luggage as we disembarked the plane.

I just hope on my next flight, to Bangkok, we land as softly as a mother putting her baby into the crib for the night, in an airplane wrapped in silence.

Antidotes

I like to eat chicken, perhaps three or four or even five times per week. When it is served to me 13 times in a given week, I have found that I begin to develop strange symptoms. Just the other day I felt the uncontrollable urge to roost on a perch up above the second-floor campus faculty terrace. And last night on YouTube I watched the movie Chicken Run about a half-dozen times.

Even worse, at breakfast this morning I felt an overwhelming urge to eat some of the dozens of kilos of the millet grain that our campus counselor left me when she moved to Khorog last summer. Without even cooking it! But the very worst symptom is the itching I have been having across my head and body. It appears, I have eaten so much chicken that I am beginning to moult.

I was thinking of visiting the doctor to deal with these frightening symptoms of what appears to be "chickenitis," an extremely rare malady one gets when living at high altitudes while simultaneously being fed a diet far too rich in poultry. But here everything seems to be treated with injections and I was not willing to face the needle today, so I had to find a different antidote.

We all know that you can find the answer to everything in Wikipedia and so I did today when I learned that creating a lavish dish you enjoy and devouring it rapidly can instantly cure the effects of chickenitis. So that is I what I did.

You can see that I created a burrito with whole grain rice, black quinoa, minced garlic (that alone cures many things), scrambled eggs with onion, yellow pepper, and smoked Spanish paprika, along with melted American cheese and hand-crafted honey chipotle sauce on top of homemade roti.

And indeed I devoured it rapidly, in all its chicken-less glory. Better yet, I seem to be cured as I don't ever want to see Chicken Run again and my itching instantly disappeared. Now that's something to crow about.

 

Rice-A-Roni

Marooned on the Giant Yellow Spaceship now for 33 consecutive days, I am left at the mercy of the cooks in the dining hall to develop creative and innovative menus. Doesn't happen. This past week, 13 of the 14 lunches and dinners featured chicken--I never thought to serve boiled chicken before dining in our cafeteria and now I know I would never serve boiled fowl to anyone under any circumstance. The variety of starches isn't much better: plain white rice, plain buckwheat, plain mashed potatoes, plain pasta, and plain roasted potatoes, rotated over and over and over again.

This is why I sometimes retreat to the refuge of my apartment to cook up something entirely different. Today, for lunch I cooked up a box of Rice A Roni. When living in the U.S., I would look upon Rice A Roni as a last resort, if I had nothing else at all in my pantry. Rice A Roni would be among the first items I would donate to a food drive, if I were asked to contribute something to those in need. But, here inside the Yellow Spaceship, the box of Rice A Roni I stuffed inside my suitcase last time I visited America feels almost like a gourmet treat a chef possessing two Michelin stars might create.

Rice A Roni was created in the 1950s during that wondrous era in America when the food industry was inventing all sorts of strange novelties to capture the attention of suburban families eager to try out the newest food innovations advertised on that other new innovation: television. This was also the decade when cheese in a spray can, Jell-O, Tang (powdered artificial orange juice), and TV dinners (frozen meals in aluminum trays) were invented. Rice A Roni is a boxed meal with both rice and macaroni, hence the very clever little name. No more would families need to argue about whether to serve rice or macaroni with dinner, when one could have both!!!

Marketing and advertising was also incredibly important for generating sales of these weird Space Age food products. I still remember the catchy song and lyrics from the Rice A Roni ads I heard on almost a daily basis as a kid: "Rice A Roni, the flavor can't be beat. Rice A Roni, The San Francisco Treat!" The song would be accompanied by an animation of a San Francisco cable car zipping across the City by the Bay. Now, I don't know if Rice A Roni was invented in San Francisco, but I can imagine the ad agency that created the Rice A Roni commercials deciding that people across America would be far more likely to purchase a product that had BOTH rice and macaroni if these gullible consumers thought it came from the sophisticated kitchens of that illustrious city. Though I haven't heard the Rice A Roni song in probably 30 years and the product is no longer advertised on TV, you will notice that the cable car remains as the product logo on the front of the box--and the tagline is still on the box too.

What is important is not the history of Rice A Roni. Instead it is the peculiar mixture of slightly overly-crunchy rice and slightly overly-soggy macaroni that matters. In 60 years, The Golden Grain Company still hasn't developed a product or figured out quite the right cooking time where both the Rice and the Roni have the same consistency. Yet, I loved the bowl of fake cheese and fake broccoli, crunchy rice and soggy noodle I devoured this afternoon. When you are marooned inside a Yellow Spaceship: variety, no matter how odd the manifestation, is indeed the spice of life, especially when it harkens back to a day far in the past when the future seemed so promising and limitless.

Unorthodox Easter

(Originally Posted, April 8)

Living as I do in the giant yellow spaceship, I am often oblivious to pretty much everything outside my very narrow sphere of work-related activities. After all, it has now been 26 days since I've had a full off day and I am looking at 13 more days in UCA orbit before I can flee the spaceship and make a run for it.

That's why I was oblivious to the fact that today is Easter. At this point most Americans I know would send me a note on Messenger to see if I might be able to leave the yellow spaceship as soon as possible as it appears I could be suffering from the kind of space/time disorientation syndrome that afflicts astronauts, college students, ER doctors, and binge Netflix watchers, all of whom being groups who don't keep regular, reasonable hours.

Before you send me your worried messages, I can explain. Today actually is Easter--in the Orthodox Christian calendar. Protestants and Catholics celebrate Easter one week earlier because they follow the Gregorian calendar, while the Orthodox church uses the ancient Julian calendar, no longer utilized in the West. I became aware of this discrepancy when some of my Kazakh students came to me to request a place to dye Easter eggs a couple days ago.

So, today I decided to celebrate a second Easter as I had observed Protestant Easter last week by walking near the local mosque and wondering if the Easter message could survive another year of this planet and all its nonsense. But today I could celebrate Orthodox Easter because however I celebrated it, I had nothing to compare it to and so I couldn't become disillusioned when my reality did not meet any possible expectation I might have.

I spent most of Orthodox Easter as my Grandmother Krauss would have spent any holiday: in the kitchen. Why is it I am resembling my grandmother more with each passing day? That's a frightening thought. At least I am not following her practice of clipping K-Mart coupons or saving hundreds of empty yogurt cups for some undisclosed purpose.

I started my cooking Easter, by making an intricate omelet with red peppers, green onions, and three different cheeses. My unorthodox, Orthodox Easter continued with me making chili (so that I could use my red, green, and yellow peppers that were starting to age a bit--another grandmotherly thing to do), and I finished by baking a cornbread. I am not absolutely certain, but I would bet a large sum of money that making chili and cornbread does not represent customary Orthodox tradition.

Fortunately, my unorthodox Easter contained a small moment that has been a part of Orthodox Easter for centuries. The two Kazakh students who had requested a place to dye their eggs knocked on my door, just as I was about to cut into my freshly-baked cornbread. They were holding a platter of beautiful painted eggs and asked me if I wanted one. Indeed, I did.

As I sat and ate my unorthodox meal, I looked at the egg sitting on my table. At that moment the yellow spaceship seemed slightly less confining and I was pleased to realize that, through all my disillusionment, a platter of eggs might just contain a tiny, unexpected hint of the Easter message after all.

Easter

(Originally Posted, April 1)

I always find that my life feels most disoriented on holidays that are celebrated in the West, but not observed in Kyrgyzstan. Today is Easter, and while there are a few churches in Bishkek and throughout the country, the holiday certainly is as visible and evident here in Naryn as a triple rainbow might be.

Pictured is the nearest house of worship to the giant yellow spaceship in which I live. It is an attractive little mosque with a shining gold dome. I have wonder...ed what it looks like inside, but it is not my place, nor is it right, to enter sacred spaces simply to satisfy personal curiosity and so I shall never know what the mosque across the street from where I live looks like, what the sacred feel of it might be.

I have spent the last ten minutes sitting on my dark blue couch, trying to estimate where the nearest church to me might be situated. I think the closest one is a tiny Russian Orthodox chapel, just the other side of Dolon Pass, perhaps 70 kilometers from where I reside. And I'm not sure services are even held there anymore, because in the multitude of times I've driven by the chapel I've never seen any evidence of it ever being used.

What a contrast it is to the previous I place I lived, a town of 10,000 people, where churches seemed to almost outnumber houses. There must have been at least a dozen Baptist churches of various shapes and sizes within 5 kilometers of me in that Arkansan enclave, not even counting all the other kinds of churches present there. Yet I am not confident I could say whether it was that town in Arkansas or this one in Kyrgyzstan that feels more Christian to me, or if the message of Easter feels alive in any place I know.

Perhaps it is because I realize that, yes, tradition matters and observance of our religious beliefs is important, but ultimately Easter, or any religious observance, is alive only in the way it lives in our hearts and in how we take what is in our hearts and how we apply this living message to our lives in the world. The Easter message can have meaning to someone, no matter where a person might be, even if it would take that person a five-day ride in a yak cart to get to the nearest place of worship. Or it can be dead in the middle of a town with twenty five churches.

When I stop typing this post, I will leave my apartment and stand across the street from the mosque with the golden dome, far from any church, and contemplate the message of sacrificing self for the benefit of others that is the cornerstone of the Easter message. Then I will return to my apartment, where are there are no roasted hams, no Easter eggs, or bunnies, or anything resembling my memories of Easter and I will wonder whatever happened to the Easter message, and I will contemplate how the world and me and everything else in between ended up where it is today.