Karina's Dacha!

Karina, my friend and roommate from Stanford is from Kyrgyzstan, and every August, her entire extended family gather at the house that her grandparents built on the shores of lake Issy-Kul, the world's second largest freshwater lake. Of course, knowing this, I couldn't not join her... indeed, the opportunity to visit her was a catalyst for the trip. So we traded one Lada taxi after another as we hurtled from town to town, making our way here.

We arrived yesterday to find a charming beach side resort town, not completely unlike a small village on the Riviera, except for the massive mountains framing the lake on all sides. Issy-Kul is only 60 KM from Almaty, the (former) capital of Kazakhstan, and its oil-rich residents use Issy-Kul as something like a Hampton retreat during the short summer season. The beaches and nightclubs are a fascinating mix of all the races that made up these former soviet republics -- people tracing their ancestry from as far west as European Russia, and as far east as the Siberian far east all today call Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan home. The result is a rainbow of colorings and faces, all happily sporting the latest in Russian fashions and crowding together around the tables and dance floors during their holidays.

Karina's family is largely from Tartar stock, filling a spot somewhere towards the western, Russian end of the spectrum. Her great-grandparents were forcibly moved here from the Tatarsta region of central Russia during the 1920s as a part the collectivization of the soviet empire. Her family were horse breeders, and their expertise was used to build up the largest horse farm in central Asia. Her grandfather managed the farm for a while, and then chose to retire to this pleasant spot in the mountains. Karina's mother and aunts were raised here, and remained here until they moved to the capital city of Bishkek for education. Today, most of the family is in Russia (Karina herself studied and worked there for 13 years before coming to Stanford), but they still make the annual pilgrimage back to Issy-Kul in August.

We arrived to find a veritable feast being prepared, possibly in our honor. The house is simple and charming, reminding me of my family's home on Camano Island. One major difference is the large yurt which is erected in the house's backyard, used for overflow housing and for large meals such as the one we were about to eat. We were pleased to find that Karina's mother had prepared a large meal of a fine lamb stew, which put to rest any fears we had had about the mistreatment of lamb in Kyrgyzstan.