Dill, That Under-used Herb

Once of the peculiarities a traveller faces, no matter where where ends up is that of the food in any particular foreign culture.  Kazakhstan is no different.  There's one ingredient that achieves degrees of ubiquity previously unknown to me in any cuisine.  And I come fro the land where a cheeseburger and fries make a healthy meal as long as one eats the pickle.

I speak, as I'm sure you're guessing, of meat.  Meat is everywhere.  It crops up in the most innocuous-seeming of dishes, and the idea of purposely making a main dish of only vegetables that tastes good is quite a foreign concept.  As I mention in my previous posts The Trip of a Lifetime; Planes, Trains, and... pt.1; A First Impression Once Made; To My Anglo-Saxon Hips; and Cavemen, I am a vegan.  I don't eat meat, not even milk or eggs.

When I first arrived in Astana I was put up in a dorm room (also discussed at length in Luxury and Necessity), which did not have its own kitchen.  There was one shared kitchen for each floor, and of course I had only one set of borrowed cutlery and place setting, and no kitchen utensils with which to make anything.  Also, due to the, well I'll call it thorough nature of labor law, human resources and accounting procedure, and banking—let's call them rules—that stipulate that before a foreign worker can get paid she must wade through a sea of paperwork (at least a third of which is duplicates, or just pieces of pater with official stamps and raised seals on them), and further undergo a waiting period determined, I believe, by a complicated calculation involving the length of one's stay in this country multiplied by the degree to which one is in danger of starving if some sort of salary is not soon paid to the now all-but-helpless employee...

What I'm saying is I had nothing to cook with and no money to buy anything with which to cook.  It's common practice, I gather, for foreign employees to work pro bono, as they say, for the first month, while sufficient personal data, DNA, and guarantees of transfer of one's first-born child are gathered to open a bank account here.  I survived with a small amount of money borrowed from a colleague.  Most of my meals were eaten in the university cafeteria.

Which brings me back to the original conundrum.  Meat.

And when it wasn't meat: milk.  Either or both appeared in nearly everything served in the cafeteria.  Rice, dressed salads, and fruit became the staples of my once diverse and protein-rich diet.  And what should appear in nearly every salad and side dish in the kitchen (and for that matter restaurant in the city)?  Ah yes, now we come to the crux of the matter.  Dill.  That (as I used to think) under-used herb. So green.  So innocent.  So pervasive.  I tried a Korean-style salad with rice noodles.  Dill.  I tried a salad with cucumber and tomato.  Dill.  I tried a salad with carrots and cabbage.  Dill.  I tried a salad that had what appeared to be seaweed.  Dill.  In Italian restaurants the pasta dishes (generally the only things I ordered since they were most likely to be, or be adaptable to be, vegan) were topped with dill.  I could even swear—though at this point I may have just been paranoid—that the french fries at the burger places and the vegetable stir-fry at the Chinese restaurants had dill in or on them.

At first I was fascinated.  Perhaps they know something here from which I could learn.  Variety is the spice of life, I told myself.  I decided to embrace the ubiquity of this aromatic little weed.  It's so cheap and so very available, that I looked through my cookbooks and found every recipe I'd ever tried and liked, every recipe I'd passed up because dill was so hard to find back home, and began to cook with dill.  (This is, of course, after I moved from the dorm room into an apartment.)

A few months went by.  I brought lunch to work most days, but still occasionally bought a salad to round it out.  The dill was still everywhere, in everything.

It's been a while since I've cooked with dill.  Or consciously chosen a dish anywhere that I thought might have dill on it.  This little-used, little-known spice, once so spell-binding, had begun to haunt me. Dill pickles, once my favorite part of a sandwich or burger (vegan, of course), no longer had such warm memories.  Worry not, dill, for while I may pass over you at the supermarket or bazaar, you'll live always in my memories.  And in my teeth.  And, of course, in my nightmares.

Necessity and Luxury

This is, as you might have guessed, a continuation of my previous post, Luxury and Necessity.  

So I decided to take a shower (after a thorough cleaning, of course).  It’s been stated by a very reliable source that when traveling through Europe it’s best to bring your own soap.  Whether or not it simply wasn’t used in these countries, or they just didn’t give it away to tourists, no matter how much they paid for their hotel rooms, it was best to carry some on your person lest you find yourself having to send out for it in the middle of a bath.  Unfortunately hot water is not an easily transportable commodity, well, anywhere.  Especially not enough for a shower.  Also unfortunately in this country, they are not overly concerned to inform you when you might otherwise inexplicably run out of, or not have any, hot water.  Or even any water. 

On this day, not many days after I’d arrived, I decided to take a shower before work.  Regardless of my insecurity issues with the toilet, I was generally feeling pretty confident about the shower.  I’d worked out my earlier confidence problems involving the lack of a shower curtain or wall to keep the water in, and the lack of any shelf to hold the soap which you so painstakingly carried throughout your travels.  I was ok with the fact that no matter how much I cleaned there was always dirt on the floor that would stick to my wet, freshly-showered feet (Does this cleaning product clean floors or windows?).  By ok I meant that it happened and I accepted the fact that I could do nothing about it.  By this time I’d also accepted, though with much less aplomb, the fact that if I didn’t buy an elevator card I have to walk up 6 flight of stairs every time I came back to my room. 

Taking a shower though—I may have to pay for my drinking water, but not being able to wash my hair on a daily basis, now that is an injustice I truly cannot abide.  What’s more, it’s the cavalier attitude that everyone takes towards it.  All water in your building turned off indefinitely and without notice—fine; not knowing what kind of meat is in the meat pie in the cafeteria—fine; open manhole cover in the middle of a sidewalk—fine.  Try to cross the street when the sign says don’t walk though—there’s a fine for that too.  In the U.S. if someone had even considered the possibility that they might fall down that open manhole, there'd have been a lawsuit.  It must be some kind of lack of a sense of personal responsibility here.  They just accept it, and don't bother to do anything about it.  Any self-respecting American would've taken some damn initiative by now and found a way to cash in on that example of gross neglect on the part of someone else who doesn't care and is probably much more likely to fall down that hole and need some settlement money.  Well, not everyone can be as free as us.

I arrived in Astana in June.  It was still spring, or late winter, then, but summer also arrived soon after that.  Looking back, I’m not sure why I worried so much about whether or not I got to shower, since any time my Anglo-Saxon blood encounters temperatures above 80 degrees my body to proceeds every last drop of moisture it contains in what I can only interpret as an effort—well-played, I might add—to make me look as much as possible like a stinky, slimy foreigner.

Astana summers and the lack of running water also made me glad I only had 100 pounds of luggage to bring with me when I moved here.  I tried that one out on a dear friend back home, and her first thought was, poor dear, carrying all that luggage around in that heat!  But no, actually it was practically freezing when I got here—it was only just the end of winter then—so that wasn’t such an issue.  Actually, I was glad of the luggage limit because I ended up leaving most of my clothes in the U.S., so at the very least I only seat all over half my worldly possessions.

In the end, though, I can be glad that my unease with the toilet in my dorm room was never combined with any significant water outage.  I could tell another story, of a day when the water at work was shut off for 7 hours with no prior warning.  Our drinking water was bottled, , of course,because you don’t want to drink the tap water; but it wasn’t exactly getting enough to drink that we were worried about that day.

Ahh… luxury, and necessity.

To My Anglo-Saxon Hips

Oh, hello there.  Listen, I know we haven’t always gotten along.   You’ve seen me through some pretty tough times though and, well, I just want you to know:  I’ve always appreciated it.  I haven’t always treated you right, and you’ve let me know.  Loudly.  Clearly.  We’ve had our differences, but we always make it up in the end. 

But can we talk about something serious for a minute?    I feel like there’s so much between us, sometimes; so much we just don’t talk about.  And it hurts me.  And it hurts you.  We’re less productive when we don’t communicate.  We don’t get out and go places.  Things don’t progress as naturally as they should.  So, let’s talk.

We feel, well, downright out of place here sometimes, don’t we?  Can’t compete with the local selection.  When we walk around town, do you feel like people stare?  Is it something we did, or is it just who we are?  We have blond hair—that stands out, for sure—but is it something more?  We walk differently, move differently; it’s as if we displace matter in a way wholly foreign and not understood round here. 

I mean honestly, I feel like the titanic over here.  They float up, and don’t have to worry about the lurking icebergs.  Something’s got to let all those women wear their ridiculous heels through construction sites and on ice without ending up with broken bones.  Are they made of balsa?  Bamboo?  (Does bamboo float?)  What’s that?  Ahh, yes you’re right.  Sailing metaphors probably aren’t much good round here.  Can we talk about trees?  The mighty oak and its deep roots and all that?  I suppose you’re right.  No, no, no, they have trees, just not the big ones. 

I’ve noticed, though, you have gotten thinner since we arrived.  Trying to blend in, eh?  No, sorry, it was just a joke.   A bad joke.  No, I don’t think you need to lose weight; I think you’re perfect just the way you are.  Steady on.  We’ll see this one through too.  You know, when I look at those shoes in store windows, I don’t mean it.  I would never do that to you.  Women here might be able to traipse around in four-inch heels all day, but I just couldn’t put you through that.  We weren’t made for it.  Yes, I miss the hills too.  Can’t run up and down hills in heels, that’s for sure.  Ok, maybe in San Francisco they do.  But we’re not from San Francisco, and we don’t wear heels anyway. 

By the way, are you feeling better now that winter’s here?  The heat does take its toll.  I don’t know about theirs, but this mortal coil is not cut out for arid climes.  I mean, I love sun as much as the next person, but I want sun that smiles at me.  Their summer sun, it frowns, as if it were trying to bore straight through us.  Perhaps if we stay long enough this flesh really will melt.  Yes, yes, I know we only decided to stay here a year.  And yes, I know winter’s supposed to be bad here too, but we’ll get through.  It’s what we were made for, after all.  Yes, all right, next time we’ll pick a temperate climate. 

I know, I know.  We need to look out for the food too.  Yes it is hard to be a vegan here.  Now don’t look at me like that.  We all hurt, when we don’t eat right.  It’s not just you.  Oh, please, don’t bring back the guilt again.  Look, it was a long time ago, and we were young, and, and idealistic maybe… What, are you saying you’d trade it in?  Give up everything we’ve done since, and because of then?  What happened in Newport was, well, unfortunate.  I hurt just as much as you do.  Born to be sailors, we were, but maybe it’s something you have to work up to.  Maybe when we’re rich and famous, then we can buy our own boat and sail round the world.  Yes, yes, far away from landlocked countries. 

Well, I’m glad we had this talk.  Yes, we’ll do yoga more often.  And lay off the sugar.  I’m sure the teeth would appreciate that too.  Yes, they know we’re just overcompensating for other things we can’t have when we do that.  I suppose it doesn’t make them feel any better, though.  Yes, ok, we'll floss more too.  Good night then.  Good talk.