A surreal experience
Today is Friday and the acronym TGIF comes to mind – Thank God It’s Friday!
There’s a corollary that often goes with it: OGIM – Oh God, It’s Monday.
The idea, of course, is that the weekend starts on Friday evening … tomorrow is Saturday: a day of rest and relaxation, sport and parties … followed by a nice easy day (Sunday) in which one can recoup the energy in order to face the onslaught of tasks when the working week begins on Monday.
Actually, I have never really been very fond of these particular phrases …
The weekend is not always a time for rest and relaxation. Here, Friday is usually a busy day for me, and although the pace of life is different over the weekend, (and to be fair, as they say, “a change is as good as a rest”), Saturday and Sunday are just as likely to be filled with work as any other day of the week, (meetings to attend, reports to be read or written … and so on. Also, when we have tourists in country, and as hotels work 24/7/365, I tend to be “on call” at all times.) Even as a schoolteacher back in the UK, although we might not have had classes over the weekend there was always marking and preparation to be done and Rugby matches to supervise.
Although it is true that Monday is usually a hectic day … the start of a new week and everyone wants to make a fresh start on some project or another … emails have arrived over the 2-day weekend and so there is three day’s correspondence to catch up on.
Despite that, Monday is not always the worst day of the week. When I was a student I worked as a barman and it was Tuesdays that I dreaded – and made me feel like exclaiming: OGIT … Oh God it’s Tuesdays. Tuesdays were always the quietest night of the week and we would stand around with nothing to do but “twiddle our thumbs” because there were few “punters”.
As a schoolteacher, it was still a case of OGIT, but it was Thursdays, and in particular Thursday afternoons, and not Tuesdays that I disliked. Thursday mornings dragged on and on … and then afternoon arrived, but there was still Friday to go before the weekend. Everyone was already feeling tired and irascible. To make matters worse, it always seemed as if my worst classes were timetabled for Thursday afternoon.
In some ways, Thursdays still seems to be my “bête noir”. I may not have difficult groups timetabled for the afternoon, but it is still the time when the week seems to drag on and be never ending.
So, I was intrigued a couple of months ago when I received an invitation to join the Bishkek Pétanque Club for the inaugural gathering on a Thursday evening, under the shade of the trees at the back of Revolution Square.
My first question was: “What is Pétanque ?” Google, as usual, came to my rescue and I discovered it was the game which I had known since my schooldays as Boule. I remember how, on school trips to France, I had watched old men playing under trees on the dirt or graveled squares in towns, throwing heavy metal balls, (or boules), the size of apples or oranges at a smaller coloured wooden one. The idea being to get as close to it as possible.
The invitation had come from a Belgian lawyer that I know – we sit on a committee together – and he has started a small club. So, I decided to give it a go and asked some friends to come along with me. It was a pleasant evening, nothing too serious, and I think serious Pétanque players might be horrified at the liberties that we take with the game, but it provided a chance to relax and wind down, to stand around and chat , to meet new people …
One of the interesting things is that almost anyone can play, even if they have no experience. For example, I took along with me were Andrei and Maxim, a couple of the “Baseball kids” … and they have taken a real liking to the game. They’ve even started to play it at home, with stones because we can’t find any sets of boules here in Bishkek. It proved to be such a success that they brought along two of their sisters … People passing by stop and give us a strange look. That has included a couple of cops in a squad car who seemed bemused at what these crazy foreigners were up to. When these by-standers are asked if they would like to have a go, they usually smile and nod eagerly. Some of them are quite good at it. I suppose that one reason for that might be because the Kyrgyz have a similar game played with sheep bones.
It was Ian, a consultant from Yorkshire here for a few days on some sort of mission, who described it as “a surreal experience”. “Surreal” : bizarre or dreamlike. I am not sure if he was thinking about being here in Bishkek, in Central Asia, and playing a quintessentially French game under the trees in a city park, or the fact that the sun had gone down and we were playing by torchlight. At one point, Maxim suggested moving closer to the street so that we would have more light provided by the street lights.
Incidentally, if Ian thought that playing Pétanque in Bishkek was a surreal experience, then he should have been in our backyard about two weeks ago. Walking through the park I had noticed some horse chestnuts lying on the ground and picked up twenty or so. I took them back to the office and we skewered them and threaded shoe laces through them and I introduced them to the English game of “Conkers”. Soon we a small crowd of intrigued neighbours standing around and watching … bemused and befuddled at this strange and incomprehensible game. Tatiana Ivanova, our accountant, managed to wipe the floor with all the opposition and has since been given the nickname Tatiana Terminatora for her prowess.
Surreal or not, thanks to Pétanque, Thursdays no longer carry the connotations of the worst day of the week with the urge to exclaim OGIT!
Bishkek