Kerbenanza

What's happening, readers of my blog? I just got back from a weekend trip to Kerben, the coldest place on earth. Our friends live there and always complain about having no visitors (Kerben is basically IN Uzbekistan). It was awesome, though, because we arrived after our four hour taxi ride to find Jungle Juice prepared and Mario Brothers on the Chinese Nintendo knock-off. So we played some video games and waited for our other friends, Liz and Victoria, to arrive from Osh. They had to sit in a marshuka for basically an entire day over bumpy-ass roads and along treacherous cliffs. It sucks. I know because I just sat in the same marshuka for five hours on the way back. We went to Kerben because beautiful mountain vistas were promised and, going along with these mountain vistas, awesome sledding. So, on Saturday morning, we set out with two circa-1750 sleds complete with metal runners and plank wood seats for the best sledding known to man. We walked for two miles through thigh-deep snow (this is not a joke) pulling those damn metal sleds and contemplating death the entire way: "If we got stuck here, how would we shelter ourselves through the night? What would we eat?" Someone decided that I would get eaten first, but they had no arguments to back that up. "Does this remind anyone of a death-march?" Sean said, falling into a snowdrift chest-high. "If you fall here, you die here!" Kyle shouted from the lead. He wasn't pulling a sled. After an hour, we finally made it to a slope. Rob was the first to try the sled out. He started at the top of the hill - we waited, tense with anticipation. The sled began to move, the runners cutting smoothly into the snows upper-crust. It was kind of like art, kind of like nature at its finest. But then, because the sled had metal runners and a plank wood seat, it sunk into the snow (knee-deep snow) and Rob fell off. I think that the sled covered a total distance of three feet. To be quite honest, the sledding sucked, but I like to call our trek a "snow hike," which has a much nobler sound to it. "Snow hike." If you say it really slow and dramatically, it kind of has a ring, huh? But anyway, Kyle and Rob's friends made us fresh lagman last night, which was delicious and then we all pretty much passed-out. It was a good weekend that could only have been topped-off by almost being left by the marshuka in God-knows-where-town in the middle of the mountains while you are peeing. This almost happened to me and would have been terrible today, but probably pretty funny in about five years. Well, I'm pretty tired from our adventures at the Kerbenanza and must return to, as Kyle so aptly put it, "The Sucktopolis of Kyrgyzstan," otherwise known as Bazar-Korgon. Please stay posted for next week's update and more adventures from Kyrgyzstan.