Manas

January 15, 2010
Manas AFB, Kyrgyzstan
10:09

It's been a little under 24 hours since I made it to Kyrgyzstan. I may just abbreviate the name of the country because it's really annoying to type.

Anyway, I left Lejeune early evening on Tuesday and the trip lasted almost two days. It was a 3+ hour flight to Canada. I'm forgetting the name of the city the airport was in. It started with a G and is located on an island. We were there for maybe an hour, I bought this strange orange soda I've never had that tasted sort of weird. There wasn't much to see at the airport that was different from an American one. Although, the cigarette packs have pretty hilarious warnings on them. Each one has a different warning which seems like more of a threat. The one that stands out in my head: "Cigarettes will make you impotent! Smoking cigarettes for long periods of time will restrict the blood flow to the penis, which prevents erections." That's nearly verbatim. They were pretty in-your-face, and I was impressed by that. I don't really remember the other ones.

It was a 5+ hour flight to Germany. Leipzig (sp?) to be precise. The airport there limited us to a sort of quarantined military area. I enjoyed that airport, although we almost had a 12+ layover due to the plane being broken down. Luckily, we were there maybe 4 hours.

My first impression of Germany was certainly positive, though. I can only imagine how the rest of the country is if there were refrigerators of individual bottles of beer and cans with pre-mixed Jack & Coke and Bacardi & Coke. Not to mention it seemed like both gift shops had about 1,000 bottles of Absinthe. I was tempted to buy an Absinthe T-Shirt, but I decided to wait till the trip home.

We finally left Germany and had a 6+ hour flight to Kyrgyzstan. It seems like an interesting country. Most of the locals seem to be half Russian and half Chinese by their appearance. They speak Russian as well. The sad thing is that this is probably one of the worst Air Force bases there is, but I still like it better than Camp Lejeune. I had an AMAZING breakfast this morning. When I eat breakfast at Lejeune, I always kill my appetite and don't want to eat anymore. When I started eating here, I wanted to keep eating just because I enjoyed the food so much. I wasn't even that hungry. Another great thing is that the locals working here don't know enough English to be assholes to us like in Lejeune. You'd never guess that a civilian would talk down to, disrespect, or just all-out take for granted a person in the military. That's life on Camp Lejeune. There's absolutely no advantage to doing anything there. Any service offered on Lejeune could probably be done better off base. I'd rather be stationed here then there.

Other than that, there's not a whole lot for me to do. Since I'm considered a "transient" I'm not allowed to leave the base and explore Bishkek, the capital (or capitol?) city. It seems like a cool place to visit, somewhere that a lot of people wouldn't consider. Probably not too crowded or expensive.

I could be here for another hour, or for another week. No one has any idea when we're actually heading out.