Tsunayoshi's Journal: Bishkek

So here I am in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan after 30+ hours of airports and plane seats. Got in at 3:30 am local time last night, downed a few beers and some food at the casino bar, and crashed a good couple of hours until 11:00 am local. Now I just need to struggle to remain functional the rest of today (Sunday) so I can get an ok night's rest since tomorrow we start 2 weeks of setting up a WAN/LAN on our project here.

Short summary of the trip:

- I am getting old. Sitting in a plane seat for hours on end now results in my knees aching. I am sure the lack of working out over the last few years has something to do with it.

- Coach/Economy seats SUCK! My last few trips have been either business class (when I had the miles to upgrade) or economy plus on United airlines (coach seat with 6" more legroom). My routing was:
    Arrive 2 hours early
    Norfolk->Dulles via United Express (45 minute flight)
    4.5 hours layover (on purpose, met a friend for lunch)
    Dulles->Munich via Lufthansa
    1 hour layover
    Munich->Istanbul via Lufthansa (arrived over 1 hour late)
    45 min. layover
    Istanbul->Bishkek via Turkish Air

Small cramped seats got REALLY old after the trans-atlantic leg. I had aisles the whole way so could at least stretch one leg out

- Airport: Is Air Conditioning something new? Apparently airports have never heard of it. Norfolk was good, but Munich, Istanbul and Bishkek had us sweating our asses off. My clothes were so ripe I'm surprised they didn't walk away by themselves when I took them off at the hotel. However, I can't complain because the rest of my group did the Norfolk->Dulles route on a later flight than I, and they lost the AC in the plane halfway through the trip.

- Central Asia: Lines do not exist, common courtesy on the street (or anywhere else outside the hotel) does not seem to exist yet. Reminds me of Pakistan from when I was there in the mid-90s. A line is defined as a throng of people all trying to reach the same destination with no order whatsoever. We basically got our sim chips for the mobile phones by blocking the counter so we had exclusive access to the women working the shop. The funniest part was the plane landing. Fasten seatbelt sign still on, after we turned off the runway to taxi to the terminal, about a third of the plane gets out of there seats, grabs there bags from the overheads, and runs to the front of the plane by the door (I had the very last row of the plane so had a great view of this). The whole time the flight attendants, pilots, and pre-programmed voice are all repeating to stay in your seats, it is dangerous to be up, wait till the plane stops, etc... When we got to the terminal, I am sure on purpose, the plane came to a rather abrupt stop that almost sent people flying. Was semi-hilarious.

We were also supposed to be met and picked up from the airport by a driver from the embassy, who was a no-show, so we caravaned by "taxi" to the airport and had to play the hustle game with the drivers when they wanted more than what they said they would do it for. I say taxi in quote because there were no official taxis outside at the hour we arrived, so all the drivers were just groups of guys trying to make some side money. They also kept trying to race each other which was not-cool.

I have to say so far the hotel rocks. The service is excellent, staff completey friendly and the premises is top notch. Could use a bigger gym though, but the saunas and jacuzzis are nice sized. Prices, at least compared to local out in town, are outrageous. Internet to type this out runs .60 cents (USD) a minutes, with a cap of $35 in charges over 24 hours. Then your access is cut off until you sign up again via your web browser. I am only going to get it on my free weekends (today and next weekend), and only then if I can play Warcraft decently from here. I'll have internet at our job site (since I am the one installing it) so can use that for email and my time sheet system. Food for example is $30 USD for breakfast in the hotel. 5 minutes walk down the street is a place called Fat Boys that sells the same breakfast for $3 USD. The water and juice I bought in the market ran me less than $2 and would have been $12-$15 in the hotel. I get $75 per day in per diem for meals and what I don't spend I keep, so I plan to make some money even before the overtime by eating outside the hotel for most of the trip. I need to pay off the $1200 plane tickets that I bought for my mother-in-law to live with us to keep the wife happy while I travel.

Speaking of internet, the country iteslf only has a 6mb pipe coming into it from Kazakhstan, which has a bigger pipe ( I forget how big) that connects to Frankfurt and then into the worldwide circuits. One of our WAN sites is a satellite shot into Tajiksta which might not even be useable beyond email due to latency. We can't test until we get it up later this week when out guys get to that site.

Enough for now, time for Warcraft..yes I am addicted much to the wife's chagrin :-)