Ahhh, life in kr, definetely not one of convenience....
For instance only about 10% of the households here have a car and if they do have a car its a beater that needs to be worked on everyday. Now considering most people live in villages that are usually not big enough to contain most of the necessary things (a store, internet, post office) and there just isnt enough money to fund mass public transportation, they needed to get creative and so was born the marshruka. At times they are the bain of my existence and at other times they are my best friend. They basically are the public transportation of kr, but they are privately owned by individuals or 'companies'. they look like a VW bus with a camper top (do you know what i mean?) and they hold about 12 people. they run a specific route and pick up and drop off folks along the way, not at specific stops, but really wherever you want. this is nice if you dont want to walk any further than you have to, but the time really adds up after awhile. Last week I was on a marshruka headed from bakia-ata to talas and we picked up a fella on the road, 10 sec someone wanted to get off, 8 sec later someone else wanted to get off, 8 sec. later we picked up someone else. I timed it, in 1.5 minutes we stopped 7 times. the other thing about about marshrukas is that they are all about making a buck. 10-12 people can sit relatively comfortable but they will cram that thing so tightly that you are literally embracing the person standing next to you for support and to allow the 7 new people to get on. but hey its better that walking!
then there's laundry. I assumed that once the temperature dropped as it has that we would make a makeshift clothes line inside in order to dry our clothes....makes perfect sense to me. well, that's where im wrong. i did my laundry 4 days ago and no more than 2 minutes after I brought them outside, they were frozen solid....my pants are still able to stand on their own.
outhouse, freezing temperatures - enough said.
Technically, my house has running water (we have one sink that is hooked up to a hose and we only get cold water). But for some reason it has not been working for awhile and no one can explain to me why. So yesterday Edu (host bro) and i drove 16 kilometers to the river and bucket-by-bucket filled up two five gallon jugs that would last us until the next day. Some have wondered why it had been 20 days since i had bathed and the reason is that it is such a pain in the neck to get the water!
but i'm not complaining, as the coat of dirt grows so does my character....right?