Then I Found 2,050 som!

I arrived in Bishkek at 0135 hrs, local time. By 0515 I was through customs, to my apartment, unpacked, and finally drifting off to sleep as the sun asserted its first rays like a halo behind the mountains to my East.

Somewhere in the night, fatigue caught up with me. I never really adjusted to London time, arriving there at an early hour, staying up for the full day, then sleeping for a solid 12 hours until noon the next day. So the fact that it was 5:00 am in Bishkek, and I hadn't slept much on any of my planes, didn't really phase me. Actually, it was odd, because it's not that I was stuck on NY time (where it was then 3 pm), I just wasn't on any time. I ate small meals at irregular intervals and slept in increments of 2 or 12 hours - no middle ground - for 3+ days. Or what I counted as days - the whole process of marking time got very weird.

In nice, quantitative numbers, here's what it took to get me to Bishkek:
4 subways
2 trains

2 taxis

3 airplanes

Time in-air: 14 hours

Total duration from NYC apt to Bishkek apt: 48 hours
Total sleep: 17 hours

Calendar days: 4 (left late 5/26, arrived early 5/29)

Cross-continental travel really destroys the normality of numbers.

On the plus side, other than the subways (which all mysteriously ran local, one of which because someone threw themselves under a train), I had no complications in my itinerary.

So that's the background on how I got to Bishkek, but it doesn't much address the title of this post. For that, I must pay homage to a college acquaintance, who posited that whenever one is teling a story which turns out to be anticlimactic, or simply in need of a better conclusion, one should insert, "and then I found 5 dollars."

True or not, he held this would redeem the story by not only creating a less mundane finale, but also produce, in the mind of the listeners, a benefit you received, hence your excitement for this story which they, until moments before, thought was useless.

I have found the phrase not especially useful, with the occasion that when I do actually stumble upon money, references to this worn out cliche - when true - amplify the wonder of such a revelation.

So when I was walking to my apartment, and a friend pointed down at a wad of bills in the road totalling some 2,050 som (Kyrgyz currency), US equivalent $50, I had myself a good chuckle.

And a good ending for a first Bishkek blog spent mostly complaining about the near-universal tribulations of long-distance travel.

Thanks, college buddy.

Weber (on the lamb)