Better Than Fiction 2 by Lonely Planet Page A

curry dinner?
    Even if we went back to Varkala, I would never find out. But I don’t mind. I don’t need to know the answer, and indeed I prefer that so much of what happened there remains unclear. For what is travel if not a confrontation with the mysterious, and why should we assume – or desire – that every mystery will be solved?
FRANCINE PROSE is the author of more than 20 books of fiction and non-fiction. Her most recent is a novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. She is a Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bard College.

Kazakh Flash Mob 2050!
CHRISTINA NICHOL

    ‘N ext Friday, for International Women’s Day,’ Team Leader Franklin told me, ‘we would like you to lead the shooting competition.’
    ‘Shooting?’ I asked him. ‘As in shooting a film?’
    ‘A gun,’ he told me. ‘AK-47.’
    I knew they had a closet full of them. I had heard that the school principal could strip one down in twelve seconds, but only on that day did I learn that the Nazarbayev Intellectual School in Uralsk, Kazakhstan, the school where I was teaching, had a target practice range out in the yard.
    I had already gotten used to the early morning aerobics routine where the students would be required to stand in front of the principal in North Korean-esque military lines and goose step to the pop music that the security guard/DJ chose. And now we were going to start shooting off guns? One definitionof insanity is when meaning starts to break down. That was beginning to happen to me.
    Before coming to Kazakhstan I had looked up Uralsk on Wikipedia. Located in Western Kazakhstan, on the banks of the Ural River, it was supposed to be an agricultural town that bred horses and camels. Unlike the other industrial towns along the northern border with Russia, which produced aluminum, chemical weapons, and Kazakh tractors, this region was famous for its medicinal herbs, and the town’s biggest factory made licorice. They were even supposed to have a women’s felt-making collective. I had come to Kazakhstan because I believed that they, like Kyrgyzstan where I had previously lived, had an ancient folk-telling tradition. I had read that every mountain, spring, and bush across their vast steppe contained a story and that these stories created a kind of a map that had once helped the nomads to navigate across the land. I actually thought that I was going to be living in a yurt, a nomadic round house, where everything was arranged with spiritual intent, in a land where it was virtuous to become one with your horse!
    The Nazarbayev school, funded by and named after the current Kazakh president, claimed to be seeking Western educational reform, and I had fantasized that this could entail creating a digital storytelling curriculum where my students interviewed their grandparents (and the women at the felt-making collective) to learn the stories of the mountains, rivers, and bushes that surrounded them. I had imagined covering the country with story-maps. I believed that remembering these stories was one way to save the world.
    On the eve of my departure to Kazakhstan, my aunt had told me that Thoreau, in the end, believed he hadn’t lived his life extravagantly enough, but that unlike Thoreau, she said, I lived aspiritually extravagant life. Then she gave me some earmuffs and an orange knitted hat with a big flower on the side. I put them both on and said, ‘This could be our tribal custom. I’ll tell them that we reverse them when we get married. “You Kazakhs have your tribal traditions. We Californians have ours.”’
    Then my cousin gave me a bottle of JLo perfume, the bottle shaped like a sexy lady. And so – armed with JLo’s Love and Light Perfume, my knitted hat, and eight photocopies of my favorite song from the musical score of Finlandia , ‘This is my song,’ about how the sky is blue not only in one’s homeland but in every land, which I planned on teaching to my Kazakh students – I had set out to the great Kazakh