Hotel Dostuk is an obvious holdover from a bygone Soviet era if ever there was one. It's a giant monolithic wall of stone which happens to have rooms in it. It's also a shell–formidable on the outside, with presumably little going on within. My first impression of it gave credence to my presumption, as the front doors were in complete disrepair, the lobby was filled with scaffolding, and the elevators were about the size of a bathroom stall (not the handicapped variety). I half expected to have to use a crank to operate the elevator, but once I reached the 9th floor, I stepped out to discover a very nicely kept hallway, and an equally pleasant room. Not as much of a shell as I thought. And the view from my top floor balcony isn't half bad.
My first visit to the FEBC station in Bishkek proved to be a nearly identical experience. Rudi and Janysh led me into an ancient building, with plenty of character (but the lifeless, Communist type of character), through a maze of cold and dark concrete hallways, and up an elevator even smaller and more dilapidated than that of my hotel. Janysh rang the buzzer of the 5th floor office, and we were ushered into a pristinely modern, and very well decorated office with a waiting area, a conference room, a shower and bathroom, and of course, a broadcast studio. The station here in Bishkek is called 'Radio OK', but the English transliteration of the Russian spelling reads 'Paguo OK', and I believe I shall refer to it by that name. After a quick tour of the office, we took the elevator up to the roof and climbed out four floors higher into a network of dishes, towers, and wires. The roof of the Paguo OK building provides an absolutely exquisite 360º view of Bishkek and the mountains to the south. I bored Rudi and Janysh to tears climbing around the roof taking pictures before they dragged me back downstairs.
Rudi's wife Anni had tea and little pastries waiting for us when we sat down in the conference room to chat about our plans for the next few days. I immediately spotted one of my favorite delights; cigarette-shaped wafer cookies with hazelnut or chocolate filling (I refer to them as Pirouettes, because that's the brand name I know them by, but I don't think that's the actual name for the wafers). I eat them by the canister at home. Naturally, I mimed smoking it like a cigarette for a moment before attacking it like a whale attacks plankton. Naturally I didn't expect it to contain peanuts, because back home, it wouldn't. Naturally, when I discovered moments later that it had indeed contained peanuts, I stopped breathing like a normal person and instead spent some quality time over the sink. Some time later, after I had recovered enough to think about leaving the sink, Rudi and Janysh took me back to the hotel where I could recover some more–ideally from the long plane flights, but really, just from the peanuts.
The following morning, I went down to breakfast at the hotel. I knew it was in an adjacent building on the ground floor, but when I stepped into the building where I expected to find some sort of familiar-but-strange-in-a-foreign-sort-of-way, I instead found myself in an empty foyer. I was in a large deserted entryway with several doors which looked to be concealing rooms that were bound to be even larger and more deserted. I stood there for a moment, pondering the prudence of marching headlong into some cold, foreboding, former-Soviet room where I would surely find myself interrupting a KGB interrogation and wind up in an even colder and considerably more foreboding prison. Normally I'd have walked right in, a slave to my sense of adventure, but I wasn't looking for adventure at the moment, I was looking for breakfast. And I wasn't about to face prison without breakfast first. One set of double doors was straight ahead, and more prominent than any other feature of the entryway, because in large embossed text above were hung the words "Arizona Room". Perhaps you can imagine my confusion. I wouldn't expect anything in a former Soviet state to be remotely American, unless devoted to anti-capitalist propaganda, and I could be wrong, but I'm fairly certain that 'arizona' does not translate to 'cafeteria' in Russian. After I waded through the initial flood of incoherent thoughts, I found myself wondering if behind these doors I might find some sort of memorial for the USS Arizona sunk at Pearl Harbor, or more offensively, a celebration of it's sinking. But that would have been before the Cold War, during a time when the USA and USSR weren't at odds, so I put that out of my mind. Next, I wondered if the Arizona Room might be some sort of Russian Area 51 (thinking that Arizona in general is adjacent to New Mexico, where the actual Area 51 lies). After all, Russia is by far the largest country on the planet, and it was even larger before the USSR dissolved, so the odds are good that when the aliens landed, they landed here, and not in the USA, despite what every science fiction movie ever has had to say about it. Finally, I decided to stop wondering what mysteries might lie in the Arizona Room, and I entered the Arizona Room.
Inside the Arizona Room, I found the familiar-but-strange-in-a-foreign-sort-of-way cafeteria I was expecting. It was a dining room with several tables, nicely furnished, all centered around one larger table with plates of food from which to select a meal. I bypassed the cucumbers in some sort of cream sauce, the mixed mystery vegetable platter, the unidentified cheese sitting in a puddle of unidentified cheese juice, and the beets in some sort of beet sauce, instead grabbing a dinner roll even though it wasn't dinner, and a few pieces of salami even though I am not a 4th grader opening his lunchbox. I didn't eat much, partly because I was expecting to get some more food when Rudi came to pick me up, but mostly because I just didn't trust what was available. Continental breakfasts are always suspect when you're on another continent. I wouldn't guess that the hotel is booked up, so I would guess that they'll have plenty of leftovers, even if they can find people who are interested in eating the food I didn't try. I ate quickly and headed back up to my room because I was expecting to be picked up soon. After some time had passed, I got a call from Rudi saying they'd be a little later because Anni wasn't feeling well, and I should find more breakfast on my own. By this time, the continental breakfast which I was no longer interested in was no longer being served, so I walked down the block to the supermarket.
It's amazing how trusting we are of food. Outside the USA, I won't buy something if I don't' know what's in it. I'll eat cooked food from a restaurant, but at the supermarket, I'm wary of everything (even though it's likely that the preservatives and processed chemicals in American food are far worse than the stuff that goes into food elsewhere). Here, the problem is compounded by the fact that the lettering is all Cyrillic, and I can't even sound it out, let alone read it. I almost bought some Muesli, but I wanted it with milk, and I couldn't tell whether the many containers of white liquid I was looking at contained yogurt or horse milk or goat milk or any other substance. I would have no trouble sampling any of these things, but I'm not about to spend money on an entire container before I know whether or not I'll actually consume it. I walked around the supermarket for 10 minutes before I came to the realization that no matter how long I stayed there, I wouldn't buy anything. I headed back up to the room with nothing to hold me over til lunch. God bless dinner rolls and salami.
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