Having been driving large distances each day for the past 26 days we have finally had a day off, mainly because we needed to fix our broken car and faulty people. After breakfast we all set off to find a mechanic to fix the various problems with our various cars, luckily Osh is neatly organised so we simply headed to the street lined on both sides with various mechanics. I jumped out and headed to a tyre shop to get our puncture repaired. The guy I chose did a good job of smacking the dented rims back into shape and thoroughly investigated the tyre until he found the large hole in the side wall of the tyre. Once it was fixed I rolled it down the street trying to find Chris and the car, the mechanic Chris had ended up at had a check engine symbol as their sign so we were in with a good shot of getting it fixed there. Apparently Chris had shown up in the car and pointed at their sign, then at the light flashing on the dashboard. It was hardly the most complex game of charades we had played but it must have worked as the man was elbow deep in our engine when I arrived. There was also an old woman wondering around our car blessing it with a smoking pot of incense, now that's service you just can't get at home - having written this blog while in Mongolia I can tell you that the blessing did not rid our car of its mechanical demons. The Kyrgyz mechanic had found the loose connection in our central cylinder and carefully taped it back together with duct tape in no time. It was my turn to play charades with the mechanic when it came to asking about the sump guard, so I simply opened the boot and pointed at the sump gaurd then pointed at the underbelly of the car. We moved the car onto the lift and admired all the new dents and scratches on the underside of the car, or battle wounds of a brave soldier as I like to think of it. There was one dent that stood out as most impressive. The oil sump, a normally curved metal hemisphere, now had a huge dent in it - clearly post-event blessing had been to thank the car gods. The sump gaurd was beaten into submission by the mechanic with a large metal mallet until all the huge dents were removed and he could attempt to reattach it. Clearly the mallet had shown its effectiveness against our stubborn sump gaurd as he used it again to hammer bolts through the gaurd and into the metal work. I indicated that I wanted the bolts to be capped with some nuts, so it would last longer than all previous attempts combined. While the mechanic had been doing what he does best, using a massive mallet for any and every task, we chatted to some other customers. One man offered to buy the car and when we politely refused offered to swap for his, I'm not much of a used-car customer but buying cars which are currently sat in a mechanics workshop is hardly a promising sign. Once the mechanic had given up with the mallet and used a pole with the weight of the car being lowered onto it to bend the guard into shape he used a bolt to attach the front end, which made me a happy chappy and we headed back to the hotel.

 

While waiting for the Khan clan to get back from fixing their fuel tank we ventured out to find lunch and had a sub-par plov. Once the Yaris arrived back at the hotel with a boring reliable fuel tank we made a plan to head to the bazaar for a bit of shopping. We had seen lots of people wearing large fabric hats, getting 7 of them was the only thing on our shopping list. Osh's bazaar is apparently the largest in all of Central Asia, and based on my expert knowledge of Central Asian bazaars I probably agree. Chris and Adam opted to relax at the hotel while the rest of us bundled into the Yaris to drive to the bazaar, the drive to the bazaar turned into a drive through the bazaar after "accidentally" going the wrong way down a one way street. For those not down with the Central Asian lingo, a bazaar is basically a covered market and this one was huge. We drove through the mechanics section and parked by the rug sellers before venturing in on foot. The aisle we walked down changed from children's clothing to toys to  electronics and finally fashion, so we had to be on the right track. We walked for 40 minutes without finding a single hat or the end of the bazaar. Suddenly the bazaar gods were smiling upon us as we stumbled upon the hat section with stall after stall of the special fabric hats. We perused the selection at each stall and decided they were all identical so went for one in the middle. After selecting a hat each with slightly different stitching to show our individuality, we managed to barter the price down to pricey $2 per hat and started the long trek back to the rug section.

 

Chris got some good news while we were out at the bazaar, he is now officially uncle Chris. Obviously everyone sends their congratulations to the happy family, even if I am now over a week late with writing this blog. Congratulatory celebrations were required so we decided to go out for a meal and a few drinks in town, and of course we were all going to wear our hats. We walked down to the main street like a collection of morons who had just discovered headwear. We were attracting angry stares from men and laughter from women, so we just assumed it was ridiculously offensive to be wearing their hats. On our walk into town we passed one place that looked to have beer on tap, we couldn't actually tell if it did food but we chose to eat there either way. Catering to stupid tourists wearing your national hats is a tall order, so even if they had an English menu the one we were given was entirely in Cyrillic. We managed to get beer by pointing at the taps, then we were on our own with the food - at least we hoped it was food, or we might end up with a shot of vodka for dinner. We mutually agreed that we would be going in blind and choose something at random. When the waitress came over to take our order she tried to ruin our fun with her technology, luckily there was no  signal so her smart phone was suddenly looking a bit less smart. She beckoned over a short fat child sucking on an ice-cream who introduced himself through a mouth of ice-cream and told us there was fish, now if only we knew which one was fish. We all ordered different items from the menu and settled in to wait. While waiting we noticed a flaw in our otherwise perfect plan, none of us knew what we had ordered so how would we know whose food had arrived. The hats finally came in useful for our new plan, when the food arrived we would all sit head down with hat in hand and if you wanted the dish you could put your hat on your head. The key to the game was you had to eat whatever you chose and couldn't know if the next dish would be better or worse. As we sat around a table heads down the food arrived, and it suddenly became apparent there was a problem with the plan we couldn't account for - the waitress had remembered who had ordered what. Of course we couldn't tell she had remembered as none of us were looking at her or the food she had brought out. There was a good minute of awkwardness as she held food out to James who sat head down ignoring her, clearly waiting for a better dish. Eventually I couldn't take it anymore and put my hat on to make the awkwardness stop. The game had worked we all had a nice meal and left happy, well apart from James who had become the latest to fall ill. The last few remaining healthy people headed back to the hotel where we had a few more beers and watched some of the videos we had recorded. We also found out that the hats were the Kyrgyzstan equivalent of a Scottish Kilt so we hadn't caused an international incident we had mearly looked a bit stupid.