a no-baby-yet update

True to my word, I have not been doing much worthy of writing about in the past few weeks, so the blog has remained mostly silent except for a bunch of wonderful comments and emails I’ve been getting (thank you all!).

A general update: no baby yet, though I’m having serious daily conversations to let it know that it can come out any time it wants, but now is preferred. I’m anxiously awaiting the day I regain control over the motion of my torso. And the sudden shock of American food products (which I was so excited to gorge on) has left me with higher-than-normal blood pressure, making my midwife sigh and ask me just what have I been eating lately anyway? I won’t turn this post into a diatribe about how difficult it has proven to find ingredients in suburban America that allow me to eat the same way I did in Bishkek (making everything from scratch, food that isn’t as packed with sodium and preservatives, etc), but let’s just say I’m now on a strict diet of stay-the-f**k-away-from-anything-in-a-can.

I’m doing my best to stay in touch with Central Asia-related happenings (since my job sort of depends on it), but the whole 11-hour time difference and seeing world events unfold through a filter of Access Hollywood and local news makes it difficult. Nevertheless, here are various things that caught my attention recently (consider this a Kyrgyz/Kazakh Music Friday replacement for now).

Central Asia loves Gangnam Style, as evidenced by the following two videos:

A scene-by-scene recreation of the original video with Kazakh lyrics by Yerbolat Kudaibergenov. He’s not winning many points on originality, but major props for effort and rewriting the lyrics.

Not quite as impressive, but a group of dancers staged a flash mob-style performance of the song outside of Osh Bazaar recently in Bishkek. Best thing about this video? It was sponsored by a political party in the days leading up to recent city council elections. СДПК ended up winning the most seats, so their unconventional campaign must have worked.

In non-Gangnam Style music news, Eholami has a new music video! Easily their best one, I’d say.

And then in non-music news, the Fall/Winter version of Bishkek Fashion Week took place earlier this month and I was pretty bummed to miss it, but one of the collections that presented at the show, ObbO, recently posted photos of their latest collection on Facebook. Check it out! It’s interesting to see how Kyrgyz designers are taking traditional influences and motifs to create modern-looking fashion.