Sorry it’s been such a hiatus since my last post – I burned myself out a little with that Pamirs one… These last two weeks have been relatively quiet (as in, no weeklong trips to the Afghan border, though I did spontaneously attend another circumcision party – this is becoming a thing), which has been pretty nice after two action packed weeks, it’s been nice to relax (and go to class, of course!!).
Which is not to say that there’s nothing for me to talk about.
We’ve taken to spending most of our days out on the takt, a kind of platform with a carpet on it, meant for sitting, eating, relaxing, etc., which is in the courtyard one of the buildings of the school. It’s nice that it’s the building where all my classes are… there’s a garden there with vegetables and fruits (pomegranates and persimmons, mostly) for us to enjoy, and a ping-pong table. It’s the building with the language policy (No English. Ever.) which we’ve just been informed will be extremely strictly enforced now, because we’ve been pretty lazy about it lately. It’ll be hard, but I keep telling myself it’s good practice to speak with people whose vocabularies are at the same level as mine (it’s why I spend so much time playing games with my 4ish year old niece and nephew), but I feel a bit silly speaking farsi with Americans.
Last Friday, in my literature class, we took a field trip to the Dushanbe Mosque. We got there just as Friday prayer was ending, and it took a good twenty minutes of a constant stream of people coming out for us to be able to push our way in. It was beautiful in the courtyard, but women aren’t allowed into the actual prayer room, so that was all I got to see.
That night, one of the professors (not one of mine, but as there are only about eleven students in the school, everyone pretty much knows everyone) took us out to dinner, where we each ate half a chicken (it was delicious, and possibly more protein than I’ve had since I arrived in Dushanbe), and toasted (Tajik style, so with a lot of vodka) to pretty much everything: our friends, our host families, Tajikistan, ourselves, the Tajik language, our real families, and on and on, toasting to anything any of us could think of. It was a good time, but a little excessive…
The next day, we went to a couple museums (an archeological museum and an ethnographical museum), which were interesting. I could understand a lot more from our Tajik tour guides there than I had a few weeks before at the Ismaili cultural center that we visited, so I guess my Tajiki comprehension is improving, even if my speaking abilities are still pretty limited to things like “thank you,” “school,” and “how are you,” phrases that are infiltrating my Farsi vocabulary to the point that it takes a lot of thinking now to say those things in Farsi and not Tajiki when I’m in my classes. After the museums, we went to a Tajiki and a Farsi bookstore, which were cool, since most books elsewhere here are in Russian. I didn’t buy anything, but it was fun to see things like Sesame Street and Home Alone in Farsi…
Last week was reasonably uneventful; we’ve got midterms coming up this week, so most free time has been spent memorizing essential Farsi words like “spleen” and some tool that’s used for twisting wires but not pliers, that I don’t know in English. You know, really important things that I’ll probably need to know in Farsi for everyday life.
Yesterday (Saturday), we took a short day trip to Hisor, a town about thirty minutes outside of Dushanbe with a pretty impressive fort, and a museum inside an old madrassa. The fort definitely had the potential to be really cool, but we had possibly the worst weather Tajikistan has ever seen. There was a dust storm, and on top of that it was cold and rainy, so although we climbed to the top of a hill in the fort to see great views overlooking Hisor (and it’s possibly to see back to Dushanbe from there as well), all we could see was dust and clouds. It was still good to get out of the city for an afternoon though… it’s always nice to see more of Tajikistan.
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