Bikinis in Kyrgyzstan

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Somehow 1000's of Kms from an ocean in the middle of a country famed for pastures and yurts and fermented horse milk there is a bonafide beach resort. In a town on the banks of Issyk-Kul,  ( a huge lake that is the colour of the sea in Greece...postcard perfect green-blue) there are thousands of fat, sunburned people lying under umbrellas,  while their children play with inflatable rings in the water- we felt right at home. The fashion may be a little out of date (sequins and mesh seem to be in), the fauna kind of random (take your picutre with a camel, falcon or one of 2 snakes) and the snacks a little strange,  ( dried fish) but we might as well have been at Wasaga. We spent a couple days lounging in our bikins,  drinking beer on the beach,  and trying to eat our body weight in watermelon (our personal best is 5 kg between us in 1 sitting) . And yes, this is in a muslim country, a muslim country where everyone wears short shorts and drinks beer on the streets. The Russianess is here to stay.

Picture 492
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Back in Bishkek,  we have entered the bureaucratic hell of foreign embassies in foreign countries. After 45 minuets of walking in a 2 block radius trying to locate the Uzbekistan embassy using our badly photocopied lonely planet map,  we found a travel agent who directed us to a travel agent, who directed us to a few more travel agents,  who unanimously informed us the Canada has done something to piss of Uzbekistan,  and it is long and difficult and expensive to get the little sticker that lets you in. Various reports include,  having to book an entire tour for the country and having to have a letter of employment ( if i was employed how would I be able to go to Uzbekistan?) . We have decide that Kazakhstan would be lovely in late August and have applied for that visa...a process which involved going to the embassy...getting a piece of paper to take to a bank, getting a piece of paper to take back to embassy, begging to be allowed back inside ( we were there 5 minutes after the embassy closed due to the fact that there is a big central asian economic conference  on now that necessitated a back road entry to avoid the street lined with 100's of cops) , begging the man to accept our tattered passport photocopies, and begging the man to photocopy our passports after he rejected the torn and dirty copies. We are now rather good at grovelling in Russian. And on that note we have discovered that to travel in the former Soviet union you actaully have to speak Russian..I'm not sure what we were thinking but we arrived without a word of Russian and spent the first few days pointing at things on menus and hoping they wouldn't be goat's heads. Someone how they all seemed to involved meat on grains so it was ok. We can now actually read Cyrillic ( not that we have any idea what we are reading) and understand enough to numbers to know when we are getting ripped off ( which is constantly) . Next goal is to be able to buy stuff from a store without have to point and gesture wildly.