February is the shortest month of the year, so that might be why it seems like I spent half of it in Kazakhstan with a few stops in Osh along the way.  See, after the office rejected my plans to visit my friends and host family in Tajikistan last summer, I wound up with just shy of two weeks of vacation time with no way to use it but to burn it up before our COS conference, so I saved some of my local money (yes, I am able to save a little bit on an income of $250 a month living in the big city) and went on some adventures.

My first adventure was to Almaty for the 2017 Winter Universiade, the largest multi-sport event in the world after the Olympics.  It was a fantastic and incredible week, with friends visiting from across the globe to compete in a ton of different sports.  I wasn’t there for the whole event, but I spent most of my time watching figure skating, which was actually a really great event that included some of the top skaters in the world.

It was back to work the following week, where I launched a new Business Skills youth group that I’ve been informally calling the Women In Business group.  At the beginning of January, I was talking with a colleague of mine, and the subject of Sheryl Sandberg’s book “Lean In” came up.  Through some of the whimsical networks of being a Harvard alum, I was able to get in touch with some of the amazing team behind the book, and with my colleague we designed a group that is part book club and part skills development, where we explore the challenges that face women in the workplace worldwide and how they can feel empowered to participate in the workforce.

Back to leisure, on the second weekend of February, a bunch of my expat friends here in Osh and I decided to take another trip up to the nearby pass for “skiing,” snow, plov, and the legendary banya.  While none of the skis fit, we were able to rent a bunch of tubes and ride them down the ski run instead, which was arguably more fun and objectively more terrifying.

I continued my adventures around Central Asian bazaars by visiting the Kara-Suu Bazaar, the largest bazaar in Central Asia the following weekend.  Kara-Suu really deserves its own blog post, but for now I’ll say that it’s the coolest and biggest bazaar you’ve never heard of.  It’s not a tourist stop, and even a lot of locals don’t go there. It exists as a hub for the enormous re-export market within Central Asia.  Goods come from China to Kara-Suu, where people buy them and carry them to smaller bazaars in Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and elsewhere in Kyrgyzstan.  Kyrgyz people bring handicrafts from Bishkek to sell to people to take to other bazaars in southern Kyrgyzstan.  Hats and winter coats come from Russia, and of most interest to me, handmade silk comes from Uzbekistan.  I bought a bunch of fabric and took it back to Osh to have some more things made from it.

I also was able to score a deal on a fur hat I had been hoping to get before I left.

But the real excitement came at the end of February, when it was off to Kazakhstan for an adventure with my mom and our friend Jennifer.  We explored Astana, Shymkent, Turkestan, and Almaty, and had some very Kazakhstan experiences along the way.  Stay tuned for a blog post all about our Kazakhstan adventure!