Day: minus 2. Arlington, VA: waking at 4am to start the time-zone adjustment, zipping odds and ends into suitcases, pawning our groceries off onto the neighbors, returning the rental car, shlepping through the airport with 17 suitcases, boarding the flight to Frankfurt, praying our sleep plan will work, microdosing melatonin.
Day: minus 1; morning, Frankfurt, Germany: lamenting that the sleep plan didn’t work (the oldest kiddo has never slept in planes or cars and apparently never will), hurrying because a 2-hour layover seems like more on paper than in real life, snacking on overpriced pringles and nutella cookies, boarding plane #2: the stay-awake-watch-movies-plane.
Day: minus 1; evening, Istanbul, Turkey: bussing from terminal to terminal, queuing in security, marveling at the over-the-top glamour of IST, checking-in to the “airport hotel,” collapsing 5 people on 2 twin beds for “gotta keep it short” naps, showering, gobbling remarkably delicious feta wraps and baklava, checking-out of the airport hotel: $500 for 7 hours felt like overpaying, praying harder for the sleep plan to work, boarding plane #3.
Day: 0, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, 5am: landing-finally-landing after despairing because kids have been vomiting and diarrhea-ing and not sleeping on the plane, shuffling across the tarmac, crowding in a shuttle with still-vomiting and crying kiddos, waiting 30 minutes longer than every other passenger to be allowed through customs, wrangling 17 suitcases with hawkers selling SIM cards and taxi rides insisting in Russian, spotting our misspelled name on a sign held up by a driver, riding the last 45 minutes to our new home in an exhausted haze.
Day 1: exploring our new palace-house, thanking the Foreign Service for procuring and furnishing it and our social sponsors for stocking it with food and kid plates and internet, sleeping the deep sleep.
Day 2-3: rendezvousing in the marble halls at 3am for jetlagged high-fiving. Cameron: reporting for the first day of work, meeting with VIP’s, filling out endless paperwork, touring the US embassy, being told to go home early (looking like I need to). Family: touring potential schools for kiddos, receiving instant friendship including pizza from other families who kindly comfort: “you poor things! we know. we’ve been there.”
Day 4: racing the Snow Leopard Run half-marathon (which was about conserving my sense of self rather than conserving Snow Leopards), sprinting to the finish to make it sub 2h, shocking my new coworkers for turning up at all, laughing together because when I signed up I’d thought it was NEXT weekend.
Days 5-10: Settling in, unpacking, buying our daily bread from the adorable bread shop that we can see from our front porch, seeing patients and learning what it means to run an embassy health unit, blurring all the briefings together, taking calls and going in on days off, taxiing to new restaurants and shops, walking our new neighborhood, celebrating the best strawberries and almonds we’ve ever tasted.
Days 11-14: carving pumpkins provided by new friends, spending colorful bills as if they’re monopoly money to buy chocolate and a 10kg bag of apples, baking apple pie, dodging cows while jogging, competing in the US Embassy chess tournament (winning 2 and losing 2), mistaking dark dense licorice bread for a giant brownie, wondering when our possessions shipments will arrive, rejoicing over surprise mail from friends and family for whom our hearts are incessantly aching.
(A: 200c / 80 = $2.5)
In the first day here, we realized we’re creating a new home from scratch. We sat down together and determined our priorities, coming up with a “Steineckert Hierarchy of Needs:”
The lesson to us was that we need first and foremost to be connected to each other as a family. And we are! Everything else is coming in time, via new friends or via a repurposed fishing-boat-turned-“cargo”-ship crossing the Caspian Sea.
Love from Bishkek! ♥♥♥