How to explain the Marine Ball, aka Embassy Prom?
At nearly every post, the Marine Corps are a big part of the community, guarding our facilities 24/7. And each year they hold a fancy dress party to celebrate their founding.
This may come as a surprise to NO ONE who knows me but in my pre-Foreign Service life I didn’t hang out with a lot of enlisted men or women. But in my new life, especially working in the security office, we’re in nearly constant contact.
Last year I had just arrived at post at the time of the Marine Ball and with most of my clothes still en route, I had an excuse to decline. This year, no such excuses. Unwilling to go whole hog, I wore a cocktail style dress I had on hand and didn’t buy a ball gown.
Well damn! Maybe I should’ve made a trip to the Jessica Mcclintock store. I mean, I looked ok but there were women decked out in floor length ball gowns and professional up-dos and men wearing tuxes or military dress uniforms. In addition to some extreme pomp and circumstance, this was one of the most heteronormative experiences I’ve had in a number of years, although a friend told me that isn’t always the case, which made me happy.
I definitely want to support the Marines, who do an often thankless job working god-awful shifts (Thanksgiving, Christmas, midnight to 8 am) but prom isn’t really my scene. So I stayed for a few hours to see the official cake cutting and eat my dinner (I paid $90 for my ticket! Damn straight I’m going to be a member of the clean plate club!) but when dancing started I Irish-goodbyed out of that place.
More up my alley than Embassy Prom was a field trip to the local brewery, owned by Carlsberg and in charge of canning/bottling local beers like Irbis (Snow Leopard). They did this same field trip last year, literally the day before I arrived. I was determined not to miss it this time around, especially since there was a tasting at the end, complete with the favorite local beer snack of kurut cheese balls.
But my favorite autumnal activity of 2019 was an overnight trip to Zharkent, just a few miles from the border with China, to observe a court case.
Zharkent dates way back as a Uighur settlement but was “officially” settled by Tsarist Russia in 1882 as one of the most far-flung outposts of their empire. It was in these early years that the wooden cathedral and mosque were built.
The cathedral is pretty but relatively standard for the area. Much more unique is the mosque, financed by a Uighur merchant and designed by a Chinese architect who may or may not have been executed for his trouble, depending on your faith in local legends.
The front door looks like Islamic architecture throughout Central Asia, albeit made out of wood from the nearby Tien Shan mountains. But then you walk into the courtyard and see the that minaret and the main body of the mosque are gorgeously decorated pagoda-like structures. I’ve seen a lot of mosques and none have looked like this.
In Soviet times, with religious observation hardly encouraged, the mosque was used, according to our tour guide, as a cinema, a stable, and a store, before finally being converted in the 1970s to a museum. Supposedly it was originally built without a single nail but the guide admitted the structure is no longer nail free. Still, gorgeous!
When admiring the giant tree in the mosque’s courtyard we were told if we really wanted to see something, we should see the nearby holy tree, 700 years old and a popular pilgrimage site.
Now, I spend a fair amount of time reassuring people at home that Foreign Service is nothing like Peace Corps. My housing, mail service, internet, bathing opportunities, and a hundred other things are all wildly more predictable these days. But our pilgrimage to see the holy tree is the closest thing I’ve had to a true Peace Corps experience while here. First of all, we didn’t really know where this tree was so every few kilometers we’d have to stop and ask someone if this was the way. The good news is that not a single person said, “what holy tree?” This tree is serious business and everyone knows all about it. But no matter how far we went everyone said it was still a few more kilometers.
Sometimes, because I love discussing quirks of languages even if I am bad at learning them, I will try to teach my polyglot local colleagues a few of the more esoteric English turns of phrase. Somewhere between our fourth and fifth stop for directions I said to my colleague, “do you know the English phrase ‘Wild Goose Chase’?”
But then, our final stop somehow led us to an encounter with the mayor of the local town. The next thing you know, the mayor is personally escorting a representative of the U.S. Government (meaning me! Which is hilarious because you guys–I’m seriously just a secretary!) to the Holy Tree of Auliyeagash.
A quick sightseeing jaunt turned (almost) wild goose chase turned semi-official cross cultural exchange with the mayor? An inordinate amount of importance heaped upon a single American, looked to as the representative of an entire nation? Classic Peace Corps.
The tree shows its age, having had a significant limb lopped off in order to preserve the rest of the tree. Regardless of the state of the main tree, the park is lovely and tranquil, filled with many other trees that are said to be “bowing” to their superior tree. Bits of cloth from visiting pilgrims are tied nearby and the entire trunk is wrapped with a giant white cloth as well.
This is a pretty obscure sight (nary a mention in Lonely Planet Central Asia) but is very important to the locals so I was happy to visit. I only hope I showed the levels of solemnity and appreciation that all my American friends would want from me, official representative of your entire nation.
In Foreign Places 