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Contact Jim: jim@dollarhide.net 5/26/06. May 26th. Quito, Ecuador. 23 Hour Day - June 3rd, From Santo Domingo to Indianola, Miss
June 14th. Kyrgyzstan 5:15 AM Waiting On Ice, Kyrgs, Yurts and The Eye of the Goat. The odd things you discover while traveling in foreign lands. In Kyrgyzstan, they have no ice. Really. None of the shops, street vendors or stores sell ice. Most don’t even sell cold water. So here our production sits, at the hotel front door, waiting on ice from room service. Our camera crew.
We arrived at 5:00 AM yesterday on a overnight flight from Moscow. Kyrgyzstan is an odd place. Very green. Much cleaner than Ecuador or the DR. But it seems the entire country is ZeroScape. They don’t mow the grass, trim, or maintain any landscape, except maybe the roses. There are Thousands of Roses, everywhere you look. And trees. Thousands of very healthy trees in the city – and every tree has the bottom four feet painted white – I guess there are bugs.
Or perhaps the entire country obsesses about their trees the same way I do about my St Augustine lawn. The traffic is less intense than other places we have traveled. But it is apparent the rest of the World runs on Diesel. We should be shooting in Smell-O-Vision. Or maybe NOT. Yesterday we did a tech-scout of Habitat sites and then went to purchase some bead-board at a construction materials market. Weird too. Think of four Home-Depot sized Superstores. But every 10 feet there is a different stall, with an independent vendor. So practically every item you purchase, you have to haggle over the price, and pay for each item separately with the individual vendor. Kyrgyzstan is a former Soviet republic and Bishkek is not a large city. The buildings are all gray and look like many Soviet cities I would guess. Uniformity in color, design and what shall I say – Drab. However there are occasionally architectural standouts. College buildings, libraries, and large government buildings where the design is unique. We are about to arrive at our morning location, so I’ll write more later. 5:15 PM Waiting on Sun Sort of like the weather back in Mississippi. If you don’t like the weather, wait five minutes and it will change. We had a great morning. Between 6 and 10 AM, we did about 8 setups and they all looked great. We went back to the hotel and had a long lunch. Typically on these Habitat projects, we are on-location before sunrise, which might mean getting up at 3:30 AM – and we shoot in the pretty light in the morning and during the mid-day period when the sun is overhead, we go back to the hotel. We go out again in the later afternoon – on this trip, around 5pm, and shoot until 8:30 pm. Again, wanting the low-angle, best light. So this afternoon – well the light is not. Clouds and rain coming in.
Our crew contemplates the changing weather. Another production meeting . . . On other fronts. At lunch, I was informed that we would be the guests at a big feast. They are going to slaughter a goat and bar-b-que it for us. We would be seated at long tables and it would be a celebration. At the height of which, as the highest ranking guest, I would be served the Eye Of The Goat. I’m told it quite an honor to devour the Eye of the Goat in the presence of my hosts. Umm. Weather permitting, we are going up into the Alatoo (color of the sun) mountains tomorrow in search of a meadow where the traditional Kyrgs live in round huts called Yurts. See the snow capped peaks in the photo. |
