coping mechanisms (or how i learned to stop worrying and love the squat)

So I’ve been here nearly three months, and while there aremany things I’m thrilled to have left behind in the States (student loans, Fox News, the Jonas Brothers), there are a few key elements of American life that I’m seriously missing. But the Peace Corps Kazakhstan experience is, I guess, all about realizing there are two sides to every tenge—for every thing I’m missing about the U.S., there’s usually a Kazakhstani equivalent or substitute with its own perks.

What I miss: Coffee. Instant coffee is to real coffee as Lady Gaga is to Freddie Mercury—it’s an abominable insult. I gave it a shot during some of those early mornings in Pre-Service training, but I basically had to turn it into mud-colored sugar milk to choke it down. Naturally, one of my favorite places in Almaty is 4A Coffee, where not only can you get actual coffee (and the most deliciously melt-y hot chocolate you will ever taste), you can order it in English and play Scrabble while listening to Elton John and chatting with fellow ex-pats. I’d almost consider making the two-hour taxi and twelve-hour train ride back there for one of their chocolate chip mocchachinos, but there's supposedly pretty decent coffee in Shymkent, so I should probably check that out first.

What I’ve Got: Tea. I’ve gotten to the point where, if I don’t have my 6-8 cups of tea a day, I feel slightly unwell—just as my host mom told me I would during training. There's nothing quite as comforting as a hot cup of tea, especially with bread, jam, and a bowl of candy and cookies, which is pretty much how it’s always served here. During training, I drank black tea with the fresh milk from our cow (a mildly terrifying creature that would often block my path and stare me down during early-morning trips to the outhouse), but people in Zhetysai mostly drink green tea, of which I’m a much bigger fan.
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What I Miss: Grocery stores. All the bourgy, Whole Foods-worthy items on my weekly shopping list—like almond butter, free-range chicken, and Maine blueberry jam—are, not surprisingly, not so much findable here (at least, not in a readymade form). And things like expiration dates, grocery carts, and clearly marked prices do, I find, kind of make my shopping trips easier.

What I’ve Got: The bazaar. The bazaar is like your local farmer’s market on some high-grade crack. It’s loud, sprawling, and filled with pretty much anything you could ever want, if you’re willing to seek it out and haggle for it. Someone with ambition could, technically, obtain all the items mentioned above—you can make almond butter with a meat grinder, and you can buy live birds for later consumption, so you could guarantee your meat was free-range. Unless Maine has a way bigger export market than I realized, the jam might be harder to make, but you don’t really need it, since you can find pretty much any other kind of homemade jam—raspberry, strawberry, apricot—on most kitchen tables here.

What I Miss: Toilets. ‘Nuff said.

What I’ve Got: Squat toilets. Not actually the worst thing in the world. I mean, you’re getting a workout, you’re not wasting the three gallons of water you would with flushing, and…no, that’s pretty much all I can come up with. However, I actually ended up choosing a family with a squat toilet over a family with a real, indoor toilet—I sometimes regret this choice when it’s raining/freezing/3 a.m., but it’s tolerable.

What I Miss: Showers. Convenient, quick, and luxurious. Definitely missing being able to hop into the shower whenever I want and get clean in 15 minutes or less—Herbal Essences commercials now fill me with envious rage.

What I’ve Got: The banya. The banya is awesome. It might be more awesome if used more than once or twice a week, but since it actually seems to get you cleaner than the shower, you don’t need to use it quite as often. It's refreshing and, as I'm told every time I use it, extremely good for you. My host dad in training wanted me and another volunteer to start a business building banyas in the States--I'm not sure we could convince Americans to give up their showers, but there might be some kind of luxury, home sauna market.

What I Miss: Bookshops, indie cinemas, Mexican restaurants, Thai restaurants, Japanese restaurants, et cetera. There are no hipster hotspots in Zhetysai, though you can find a lot of this stuff in Almaty. Another slightly disorienting expat hangout in Almaty is the Guinness Bar, where you can drink creamy, creamy Bailey’s, listen to a Kazakh cover band sing Roy Orbison and Elvis Presley hits, and generally wonder if you've stumbled out of Kazakhstan and into some kind of parallel universe.

What I’ve Got: Creative forms of entertainment. My training took place in a village, where a big day out basically consisted of visiting every single magazine in town (we had six), ogling the baby donkey behind school for a while, and making conversation with this one kid on a bike who always followed us home and wanted to talk about sharks. Zhetysai definitely has more to offer—there are a bunch of cafés, a movie theater (though it’s run by the university and only shows a new movie ever few months), a bazaar, a theater, plenty of shops, a few Internet cafés, and a couple of dance clubs. Compared to my training village, it’s New York City—or at least...Pittsburgh.

c-c-can you kazakhstan?

A handy lexicon of some of the terms you might encounter in the jungles of this blog:

Tenge: Kazakhstani currency. Pronounced "ten-gay"--I'll let you come up with your own fun mnemonic for that.
Almaty: The largest city in Kazakhstan--a magical place where you can find Pizza Hut (which I actually never go to, in the States, but it seems to be a kind of Mecca for Peace Corps volunteers), Irish pubs, and pretty sweet malls.
Zhetysai: My assigned town, located in the southernmost part of Kazakhstan--I'm basically in Uzbekistan.
Shymkent: The nearest big city to Zhetysai. So far I've only seen it at 5 a.m. from the backseat of a taxi, but as it's only a couple of hours away and has a bunch of volunteers, I think I'll be getting there fairly often.
Magazine: A small shop, often connected to someone's house or yard, selling toiletries, snacks, and other precious goods.
Banya: A crucial part of Kazakhstani life. Instead of showers, most homes have banyas, which are basically steam rooms where you can sponge bathe by combining hot and cold water in a tub.
Kaz-21: Not, as it may sound, a hot new designer drug, but the abbreviation for my generation of Peace Corps Kazakhstan volunteers. We're the 21st group to serve in the country--the Kaz-20s still have about a year to go, and the Kaz-19s just left.
Katharine Hott McAwesome: Your humble narrator (and supreme guide) to Kazakhstan.