This morning I found myself being taken back to the Osh Bazaar, my old stomping grounds in Bishkek... the place where I learned to be one with a crowd, to push and to be pushed, to scan a table for what I wanted before some other hand reached in to grab it first, and to barter. Sadly, there is no market around here like the Osh Bazaar, but there is a Christian Book distributors warehouse about ten minutes away, and luckily for me and the other poor seminary and Bible college students around here, this morning was their bi-annual book sale.
In a way, it felt like Black Friday two weeks early. I found myself outside of the building at 6:30 a.m. in a line that at that time had probably 100-150 people in it. You could pick out the regulars to the sale and the newcomers. The newbies had coffee or maybe a purse in their hands. The regulars, however... some had backpacks, some mesh bags, some suitcases, some empty strollers, some boxes, and one even had a garbage can bungeed to a dolly - no joke. At 6:45 a.m. the doors opened and the people flooded in. It was a perfect picture of Christian consumerism. Thousands of books with genres ranging from lexicons to concordances to Christian fiction and everything in between lined tables on two levels of the warehouse. IT WAS CRAZY. And just like at the bazaar, there was often no rhyme or reason to where the books were placed. Other than the fact that several tables were solely Bibles, most were a combination of everything one could imagine to be found at a Christian book store. Thankfully, the crowds were slightly more civilized in their rush to find the books they were looking for than what I often experienced this past year in the bazaar. People were polite and generally patient with one another, but there were some that made you think the world was ending if they did not get the book they were searching for. Quite sad, actually.
So it was a good morning in the Christian version of the Central Asian bookstore bazaar. The best part of the morning, though, was my one purchase from the madness. I bought neither a commentary, nor a lexicon. What I did buy, however, was a brand new, hard to find, world renown box of Dutch Blitz cards. That's right. I now posses a brand new Dutch Blitz deck. And that alone makes the morning time well spent.
haley, we really must teach you how to read someday.
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