I wake up to the sound of a siren rising urgently up from the street below my apartment. At first I barely recognize it; my brain, still befuddled by sleep, frantically searching my memory for a similar noise in its history to compare this strange high-pitched shreaking to. Finally something clicks, and I identify the vibrant pulsing as a siren. Still struggling to pull my consciousness back from the edge of sleep, I hazily wonder if the siren is police, fire, EMS... Has something happened to someone I know? Is my building on fire? Has there been a shooting? As these questions rush through my foggy mind, like homebound ships desperately trying to reach port ahead of a storm, the siren cuts off abruptly. As my brain struggles valiantly to cope with this new development, the room I am laying in starts to come into focus in the steel gray light of early morning. Wardrobe. Couch. Two ratty old chairs. A small TV in the corner. Suddenly it all makes sense. The odd tones of the siren. The way it ended suddenly. The siren was no emergency warning at all. At least, not an emergency as I would think of it. Rather, it was the modified horn of a
marshrutka, one of the cramped and often crowded mini-buses that serve as the main form of public transportation in Central Asia. Finally the light goes on in my head as the sun slowly stretches its own tendrils of light over the horizon. It is 6 a.m. And I am in Kyrgyzstan.
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