"Horsin' Around:" A Disney Channel Kazakhstan Original Movie

Being in Kazakhstan is kind of like being pregnant, what with the frequent morning sickness, inevitable weight gain, and sudden, insatiable cravings for normally unappetizing foods. This morning, for example, I was struck with an overwhelming and inexplicable desire for Cinnamon Toast Crunch, which I don’t think I’ve eaten since childhood. (Actually, that’s a total lie—the last time I ate it was probably during the sugar-crazed all-nighters of my last semester at college, when a 2 a.m. bowl was ritual). Other vaguely gross foods I’ve experienced powerful hankerings for lately: Waffle House waffles (with enough butter and syrup to drown an Olympic athlete), Little Debbie Christmas tree cakes, sweet n’ sour chicken, movie popcorn, and Wendy’s fries dipped in a Frosty. (There’s just something about that oily chemical aftertaste...) I’m not sure these are even things I would enjoy eating—I’d probably prefer something leafy and Mexican right now, if I truly had a choice—but I think the withdrawal from a lifetime of eating preservative and additives-laden American food is starting to kick in with a vengeance. It’s like how you never really want McDonald’s fries until you smell them, then some latent switch activates in your brain and you black out, only to come to minutes later with salty lips, grease-smeared hands, and a terrible sense of regret.

Kazakhstan’s major food groups are basically bread, meat, and candy. There’s a lot of fruit in my region, but outside of “tois” (parties held for weddings, birthdays, or, as far as I can tell, the hell of it), it’s not really on most people’s tables. I keep a stash of bananas, apples, and persimmons in my room, since all these items are ridiculously cheap (way less than a dollar a kilo) at the bazaar. I’ve sort of given up on vegetables for the time being—when I move into my own place it’ll probably be worth seeking them out, but for now I just have to consider the sandwiches at my school (which, though they also contain sausage, eggs, ketchup and mayonnaise, do include shredded carrots—sometimes) a healthy life choice. Besides the lack of balanced nutrition, I eat pretty well here. My favorite dish is manti, which are these giant, meat or vegetable-filled dumplings you top with beets, a red pepper-garlic sauce, or sour cream and eat with your hands. They were a hugely popular dish in my training village, where they were usually stuffed with fresh pumpkin and pure magic. The big thing here—besides beshbarmak, which I’ll get to in a second—is plov, which is rice with bits of meat and carrots. It’s actually an Uzbek dish—same with samca, which are these delicious, meat or cheese-filled pastries (think Hot Pockets, except three thousand times better and made with real food)—but we’re only an hour from the border of Uzbekistan, so it’s especially popular and tasty here.

And then there’s beshbarmak. It’s the national dish of Kazakhstan, and consists of huge pieces of meat, fat, carrots, and potatoes, set atop a giant platter of noodles. You eat it with your hands, which—for me, at least—gets out of hand (get it? GET IT?) pretty quickly. The noodles are slippery, the fat is, well, fat, and there usually isn’t a napkin in sight: it’s pretty much impossible to eat in a dignified fashion—which is unfortunate, since the whole time you’re eating it, people are watching you to determine how much you like it and urging you to eat more any time you stop chewing. While the meat—which includes parts of the animal I can’t and probably shouldn’t try to identify—is usually sheep, I have, in fact, had horse meat beshbarmak. (Horse meat is pretty expensive, though, so I haven’t had it too often.) It doesn’t weird me out that much, since I have pretty much the same amount of attachment to horses as I do to cows, and I figure if I choose to eat meat at all, I can’t make too much of a fuss about what animal it’s from. One of my good friends from training loves horses, though: she’s been riding since she was a kid, and had her own horse up until she went into the Peace Corps. So she was really excited to discover her host family had two horses—until I pointed out, in a Debbie Downer does Kazakhstan kind of way, that if these horses hadn’t been mentioned or seen during her two months of living there, they probably weren’t so much pets as…dinner. I’d like to say there was a happy ending to that story, and we freed the horses in some kind of hilarious, climactic sequence involving clever misdirection, a series of increasingly outlandish disguises, and a Miley Cyrus song about girl power, but as we are in the Peace Corps and not a live-action Disney film, that is not so much what happened.

Besides my weird cereal fantasies, I guess the most important news from the last week is that winter has officially arrived. We got our first snow two days ago—it happened during the night, so I didn’t realize it until I was halfway to the outhouse and thought, “I know I don’t have my contacts in, but is the world usually so…fluffy?” It was really pretty—for a couple of hours. Then the sun came out, and Zhetisay became a mud wrestling arena, without any of the fun parts (which really just leaves the mud). We don’t have any sewers, and sidewalks, if they exist, usually run out after twenty or so feet, so the ground more or less liquefies whenever there’s a storm. I can’t decide which is worse—ice or mud—when it comes to slipping, though I kind of feel like the psychological stakes are higher with mud. I’ve taken plenty of spills on the ice, but if I fell into one of these giant, trash and animal feces-filled mud puddles—especially if it was a Monday, and a whole week to get through before my next banya—the emotional damage might be severe. (Maybe the mud here has some kind of healing properties, though—a Kazakhstani mud bath could be yet another service included as part of my post-Peace Corps banya business…) My school is only five minutes away, but with the newly-formed mud rivers blocking my path, getting there is a bit of an adventure. Walking anywhere in Zhetysai really is, though, since roads are not so much rules as suggestions here. You may think, “Oh hey, I’m safe from those speeding cars because I am not on the pavement and am in fact several dozen feet from where the pavement ends,” but you would be wrong about that. Unless you are actually inside a building—preferably a solid iron one—you’re in probably in danger. This is not a phenomenon particular to my site, however: even in Almaty, where there are, allegedly, real and working pedestrian crosswalks, you will find yourself playing the most stressful game of Frogger ever any time you try to get across the street, even if you have legit right-of-way. That little flashing green walking man will not protect you. My strategy is to wait until a bunch of other people are crossing and use them as human shields—I kind of doubt this would be effective were a car really to plow into us, but at least it keeps me from seeing how close to death we’re coming and going into some kind of deer-in-the-headlights paralysis.

So, in summation: the Peace Corps is a two-year pregnancy; I’m already shipping home mud for use in my McBanya franchises; and there's a good chance I'll sacrifice you to the gods of traffic if you cross the road with me--less because I’m concerned for my own survival, and more because I really hate to lose at Frogger.