The Tajik National Zoo is the Saddest Place on Earth, and Other Stories from the Wasteland.

Last Monday, Joey (one of the other students – also from AU) and I decided to spend our morning at the Tajik National Zoo, since we didn’t have class until 1. We knew that it was on Somoni Avenue, the other main street besides Rudaki, so we jumped on a bus line that Joey was sure would turn down Somoni. It did, and we thought we were all right, until it abruptly turned off of Somoni, onto a mysterious side street. We assumed it was no big deal – that we would just get off wherever it stopped and walk back up to Somoni. Unfortunately, when the bus finally stopped, we were pretty far from the corner, and in a place that didn’t look like somewhere we wanted to walk around… that far from the intersection of Rudaki and Somoni looks much less developed and much more wasteland-ish. So we decided to stick around and stay on the bus, hoping that it would take us back to Rudaki, or someplace we recognized. Unfortunately, it just brought us deeper and deeper into the unknown, so we finally decided to get out and see if we could wait for a bus on the same route going in the opposite direction, which could take us back to Somoni. After waiting a while without seeing a bus go by in either direction, we hopped in a Mashrutka (a van acting as a taxi for as many people as can possibly fit inside) which brought us back to Rudaki, about as far from the zoo as we had originally started. So, abandoning all confidence in public transportation, we set off on foot, and arrived at the zoo about 30 minutes later.

It turns out that we shouldn’t have worried about reaching the zoo with adequate time to look around. Despite the promising entrance – a brightly colored sign, and a man selling actual cotton candy – inside, there were a couple dirt paths, lined with cages, holding exotic animals like rabbits, dogs and goats. One path was completely surrounded by empty cages. We did find some camels, which were actually reasonably exciting: they had a relatively large space to live and run around in, but when we found the jungle cats and large animals exhibit (which our resident director had insisted we see), it was pretty terrible. The cages were about half the size of AU dorm rooms, just large enough for the bears to sit in. There was one wolf that just kept pacing his cage, taking about 8 steps before he had to turn around and go the other direction. We turned a corner and saw kittens (as in, house cats) in cages just mewing and actually climbing the wire of their cage. It was about then that we decided we had had enough, and we left pretty horrified, reminiscing about the DC zoo.

The rest of the week was filled with midterms, which went pretty well – I only had three of them, and they weren’t too difficult… I’m glad they’re done though, so I can go back to my ignorance of the farsi words for “gall bladder” and “past progressive tense”.

On Friday, Jake, our RD, brought us all pumpkins to carve on the takt (which speaking farsi, of course!), which was fun and festive… and now they are decorating the school and the office, so that’s great! Not to mention that he salted and roasted them, and brought them to us for our excursion yesterday, which were delicious, as pumpkin seeds are my favorite seed snack, and one of the many things I have been craving lately, amongst olives (of course), Product 19, and bagels. And the smell of flour…

Our trip yesterday was to a city called Sharitus. It’s about 3 and a half hours away. It has been cold and rainy for the last few days (so much for Dushanbe’s cloudless weather, which I was raving about for the first few weeks here) so several people cancelled at the last minute, leaving us with a lot of extra space in our two cars. The car I was in had only three people in addition to the driver, with the capacity to hold eight. Thrilled, we all stretched out until we stopped unexpectedly and the driver got out to inspect the engine, then suddenly grabbed an empty water bottle and walked down to a nearby river. Apparently, our van had broken down, and it was discovered that it would take several hours to fix. Since we didn’t have that kind of time, we were forced to all squish into the other van, also able to hold 8 people plus driver, but actually holding 10. Much less comfortable, we proceeded to Sharitus, where we stopped to walk around a bazaar while Jake and the driver looked around for a car to hire to drive us back – more comfortably – to Dushanbe. The bazaar was cool, but my interest in bazaars has declined since the third or so one I saw, and also since the temperature dropped considerably. Our next stop was the Khoja Mashhad Madrassa and Mausoleum, which was really cool and beautiful, except that the tour guide who was supposed to meet us wasn’t there, so the historical and cultural significance of it remains a mystery. After that, we headed to Chilichor Chashma (44 Springs), which was also beautiful… we had a nice takt-picnic lunch, and fed lots of huge and ridiculous fish. Apparently, people swim in these springs, but not much at the end of October, when it’s drizzling and cold, so we didn’t hang out there long. When we had had our fill, we headed back to Dushanbe, where we wasted an hour and a half before our monthly American Councils-sponsored dinner. We went to a Chinese restaurant and ate an incredible amount of delicious food. We were all pretty satisfied with the quality of the food, and all went home a little uncomfortably full, sleepy, and happy. Despite the miserable weather, it was a pretty successful day.

Some New News from Dushanbe!

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.

Travels: To the Pamirs and Iskanderkul

Ok. I haven’t posted in a while because I’ve been trekking around the country, and catching up on schoolwork, which means that this will be the longest and most action packed of all my musings and ramblings. Two weeks ago, we took a weeklong trip to the Pamirs – the mountains in the southeast of Tajikistan that line the Afghan border, and it was the most incredible week. I’ll go day by day to try and organize all that happened.

THE PAMIRS

Day 1: September 24. In which we drive to Qalaikumb, but are delayed by dynamite-wielding Iranians.

We left Dushanbe at the crack of 6:00 am, with the expectation that we’d make it to Qalaikumb (our first stopping point) around 4 or 5. The roads were far from excellent but the mountains we were driving through were incredible. We stopped often for photos, and once to pick cotton in a field on the side of the road. Tajik university and high school students often have to leave school for weeks or sometimes months at a time to return to their families’ cotton fields when it’s time to pick it, and education suffers (thanks Intro to IR Research paper for that gem!) When we stopped for lunch, we were told that due to some blasting of mountainside by Iranians for road construction, our route was going to be closed for some time (basically we would be kept waiting for 4 hours). We were given the option of pressing onward and waiting, or turning back to Dushanbe and giving it another go in the morning. We pretty unanimously voted just to forge our way onward despite the delay, so off we went. Not much further into our journey, we met with the Panj river – the Afghan border. Several tourist-y “here is Afghanistan” photos later, we proceeded to follow the river eastward – it was our guide for nearly all of the trip, so most of the photos I have of mountains are actually of Afghanistan, because that’s what you can see from the Tajikistan side. It was really cool to compare the two countries… only a tiny river separates them but the houses are constructed differently, and Tajikistan boasts the electrical wires running all along the roads that Afghanistan does not. When we got to the road closing, we were told not to stray too far – I guess the landmine signs that surrounded the area where we parked our vans made our director nervous. Most of us read books, napped and chatted a bit while we waited for the road to open, and they finally let us through. After traveling across days and weeks and in and out of years, we arrived in Qalaikumb around 8:30, had a late dinner, bought some questionable water and returned to our guesthouse, which was run by some wonderful people. Due to our program director’s habit of lowering all of our Tajikistan expectations, we were thrilled and surprised to find comfortable beds, a western toilet, and a shower with decently warm water. A few of us walked a ways down the road in the dark to see the stars, which were fabulous and incredible, and then we turned in for the night in preparation for another early departure in the morning.

Day 2: September 25. In which we stroll through a park and then wait several hours to eat dinner.

The next day we woke up and were fed a delicious breakfast of nan, chai, and eggs, and then left Qalaikumb for Khurogh. Again, we stopped constantly for picture taking and leg stretching (suffice to say that the vans we were in were a bit cramped). We arrived in Khurogh relatively early – around 5 – and then were led around the city (for lack of a better word). There was a beautiful park that we walked through, and despite it’s small size, it is the capital of the Tajik province Badakhshan, so it was a pretty happening place (OK… not really, but there were shops selling chocolate and water and juice, and who needs anything more, really?). We walked through the park toward an Indian restaurant where we were planning to have dinner, but found that it was closed because it was a Sunday, so we ate instead at another restaurant, operated by a classy hotel chain. We ate outside, on a porch overlooking the river and with a beautiful view of the mountains… it was lovely to watch the sun go down from our table. The service, in classic Tajik style, was lacking, though, which would have been fine, but I was starving and it got chilly once the sun set. It took a good three hours (at least) from the time we sat down to the time we finished, and most of that was spent waiting (to order, to get drinks, to get food, to pay, etc.). As it was getting late, we turned back to the guesthouse, which was also much nicer than we had been directed to expect, though admittedly a bit rustic, and where a few backpackers were starting off their Pamiri adventures (yep… sometimes people backpack through the Pamirs – it’s a thing). Several people came into our room to play cards (one of our three Tajik drivers had learned the game Uno – or “yek,” in Farsi/Tajiki and was quickly becoming a fanatic) and then we all went to bed.

Day 3: September 26. In which we decide to avoid angering Afghan soldiers hiding in the mountains.

In the morning, we were given the day to wander around Khorugh, see the bazaar, visit a Pamiri handicrafts shop, and find lunch (we all ended up back at the same restaurant as the night before). The bazaar was pretty big and exciting, but not too different from the one in Dushanbe (see previous post). I didn’t need anything foodwise – I was pretty well stocked from my trip to the Dushanbe bazaar – but I did need water, so after a look around the bazaar a few people from the group and I went back to the main street, where there were a lot of little stores, searching for water. There was none to be found except in one store – apparently the city’s usual shipment of bottled water was running late, and all the stores had run out. Ok, Tajikistan… When we had located the one store with a stock of water (and exhausted it), we went back to the restaurant for lunch, which took about as long as dinner, but was fun and relaxing and delicious. After lunch, we headed off to Ishkoshim, a small village near the Wakhan Corridor. It wasn’t too long of a drive – only a few hours – and we arrived at our guesthouse with plenty of time to spare. We were early for dinner, so our director suggested we take a walk into town. By that, I mean we walk down a deserted dirt road dotted with one or two shops that was introduced to us as “the main drag” we were walking parallel to the river when we saw that a sort of wall ran down to the bank, and thought we’d walk along it, as close to the river as we could get. We ran into some Tajik kids who followed us, laughing and talking to us, and when we got about two thirds of the way down to the river, our director suggested we ask to make sure it was ok to continue on. They said it was fine, but the Afghan guards in the mountains would probably shoot us if we did. We turned around. When we got back to the road, one of the boys told us there was a cave up in a mountain that we could walk to in about 10 minutes, but there was a bit of a slope. Please consult the photo below for proper translation of “a bit of a slope.” After a harrowing climb up (but before an even more harrowing climb back down, in which I questioned whether I might be able to build a life for myself in the cave so I wouldn’t have to go down), we discovered that the cave was really a hole that the boys had dug to keep the body of a fox. While we were thrilled with the treasure, we told the boys that we needed to return to our guesthouse for dinner, so we said goodbye to them, and returned along the main drag. After dinner, the group made it through half of a Star Wars movie, before falling asleep.

Day 4: September 27. In which we walk into the Wakhan Corridor, and stargaze a lot.

Most of us woke up early (departure at 5) with our director to walk down the road, starting off our journey on foot two hours before the vans, which were going to meet us and pick us up as they caught up to us. The sunrise over the mountains was actually spectacular; you could actually see individual sunrays as they hit each of the mountains… I have never seen anything like it, and there’s no way photos could ever do it justice. As we headed into the Wakhan Corridor, we walked through villages whose language exists only in one village, some spoken by only two or three hundred people, and not at all mutually intelligible with one another. I would love to learn one of them… When the vans reached us, they said it was only another few kilometers to our first scheduled stop of the day – a fort – so we decided to keep on walking, with the result that we walked about 10 miles before 8:30 in the morning. So, success! As we walked, Pakistani mountains came into view, so in most pictures if you can see snowy mountains behind the first set of mountains, they’re in Pakistan. The fort was pretty great (who doesn’t love to climb on rocks?) and outside of it was an Ismaili shrine, which was cool to see. Then, we piled into the vans and drove to fort number 2 of the day, which was much bigger and much cooler. We took a lot of pictures over there, of the group, of Pakistan, of the fort itself… From there, we drove to Langar, where we were spending the night. Even smaller than Ishkoshim, Langar is a barely-there town, and the guesthouse was by far the simplest of our trip, but also my favorite. There were no beds – just a “takt” (a board on the floor) lined with mats and thick, thick blankets, where we all slept side by side. The single light bulb in our room was dimmer than the lights on our phones. Still, the dinner they served us was incredible, the people were friendly and talkative, and the stars outside were unbelievable… They had been getting progressively better as we moved higher into the mountain and away from the lights of the city, but in Langar, I was laying on a hill looking up at the stars and saw more than can possibly exist in the universe. I saw four shooting stars in the space of maybe twenty minutes. Still, the cold eventually forced us inside, so we put on the rest of Star Wars, but I at least fell asleep as soon as it started, and woke up to the credits rolling. It’s ok… I couldn’t follow the first half anyway, so I don’t feel anxious to know what happened.

Day 5: September 28. In which I am the only person on the planet, and also get offered a donkey to carry me up a mountain.

The next day, we woke up early again to do the same kind of walk as the day before, but the vans were going to leave after 4 hours, instead of 2, and the walk would be a strenuous uphill hike. Let there be no beating around the bush when I say I am not an intense hiker. Still, we’d be following the only road up the mountain, and the vans would be traveling the same way, so no matter where I ended up, I would be found. I was quite clear with the director the night before that I would not be hiking strenuously for four hours, and he was cool with that. My plan was to walk a ways, see the sun rise and then find a rock on which to sit and read. As soon as we started walking though, the mountains took my breath away (maybe it was the altitude too…) and I realized that I had very little interest in fighting a losing battle to keep up with the HIKERS of the group, and that I would rather stroll. We were just winding up the mountain, so I very rarely lost sight of them, but I did just kind of walk along on my own. People who know me well might say that I get lonely easily and like to have other people around, but this was actually probably my favorite part of the trip. The mountain was completely deserted, except for the occasional (by which I mean maybe 10 in 4 and a half hours) Tajik passerby wondering what on earth this white girl with unruly red hair was doing wandering around the mountain by herself, and the huge mountains all around me made me feel so tiny and insignificant, but in a wonderfully grounding and amazing way. I actually felt like I was the only person on the planet – I could hear every sound around me. The few people I passed were quick to offer me hot tea, except for one, who offered me a donkey instead, to help with my trek up the mountain. When the vans caught up to me around 9:30, I was not ready to return to civilization, but I was pretty tired. This began our return journey; we were heading back to Khorugh. We got to see camels on the Afghan side, and also some yaks at a Kyrgyz village on the Tajik side. The road was so desolate – everywhere you looked all you could see was dust and dirt and mountain – but it was a beautiful place. There were a couple lakes with the bluest water I’ve ever seen. When we had arrived back in Khrorugh, it was dinner time, so we went to the Indian restaurant we had tried to our first time in Khorugh, which was pretty good… For all of you planning trips to Tajikistan, Khorugh has great food.

Day 6: September 29. In which we return to Qalaikumb, and not too much exciting happens.

We returned from Khorugh to Qalaikumb, doing pretty much in reverse what we had done on Day 2. We got to Qalaikumb relatively early, though, so we had a little time to walk into town (I keep using that phrase… it means almost as little here as it has in the past) before dinner, which was wonderful, and complete with delicious apple tea. After dinner, I watched a movie with a couple other students, stargazed for a bit, and then went to bed.

Day 7: September 30. In which we return to Dushanbe, and it feels like development.

Our director was leading one more early morning walk, but only two of us went with him. The other students and our director both have pretty long legs and walk pretty fast, so at times I was jogging to keep up with them, but what else is new? We walked for a little over an hour and a half before the cars caught up to us, and while the scenery was certainly nothing like in Langar or Ishkoshim, it was still a nice early morning walk. The cars found us and picked us up, and we headed back to Dushanbe, with only a few stops (including one for lunch). We arrived around 4, and I was thrilled to shower and fall into bed at 8:30, for about 13 hours.

ISKANDERKUL

Ha! You thought you were nearing the end, but only of Part 1! Stand up. Stretch. Eat a sandwich. Have a drink of water. If you don’t come back to keep reading, I won’t be upset. Actually, I won’t even know. Be aware, though, that Part 2 is much, much shorter, and full of pretty exclusively relaxation. I even feel relaxed writing about it. Reading it will be a bit like a massage for your brain. I’m going a little crazy… writing about the Pamirs took a lot of my sanity…

Anyway.

This past weekend (October 8 and 9) a group of 6 students went to Iskanderkul, a lake which is (so I’ve heard) north of Dushanbe. We were planning to camp on the shore, hike a lot, have a bonfire, and be really intense. On our way out, we called the company we were going to rent the tents and sleeping bags from, but the number wasn’t working. We were a little concerned, but pressed on, hoping that as we got nearer, we would be able to get in touch with someone. We never did get a hold of them. Luckily, our driver, Zafar, knew someone who worked at a company that rented cabins on the lake, and found him. Unluckily, the company had closed and moved out for the winter, because I guess it gets pretty cold in Iskanderkul, so the tourism season ended last weekend. Luckily (this trip is a bit full of ups and downs), Zafar’s friend was able to get him the key to one of the cabins and willing to let us stay there. The cabin was so, so nice. The rooms had beds with warm blankets, there was a kitchen, and a sort of sunroom all lined with windows, and a porch (though the boards making up it’s floor and the stairs leading from it were more than a little questionable), and it sat just feet from the shore. The view from the porch was gorgeous. Once we had settled in, we headed off to a waterfall – only about 20 minutes’ walk from the house. The mountains we were hiking amongst were beautiful (the Pamirs were awe inspiring and breathtaking and incredible, Iskanderkul is pretty, in a way that they are not) and there was a kind of platform over the waterfall which was cool (but a little frightening) to walk onto.

After spending some time near the waterfall, we turned around and walked back to the cabin for a picnic by the lake. We’d all brought some lunch/snacking food, and we shared: cheese, bread, nutella, a pomegranate, etc. Then we went into the sunroom and sat, chilling and playing cards (mostly Uno and a weird Russian game) for a few hours. When we were sufficiently relaxed, we decided to head out in the opposite direction from the waterfall to “Snake Lake,” where two of our number (not me) jumped off a rock into the very cold lake. The rest of us sat comfortably warm, sunning ourselves on the rock for a while, and then we all returned to the cabin for naps, snacks, and to gather firewood. I spent a lot of time and energy on that firewood, but as soon as the sun went down it got very, very cold, and the prospect of sitting outside (even by a bonfire) became considerably less appealing. Instead, we stayed in the sunroom, playing more cards and chatting, while Zafar ran around the town gathering surprise dinner supplies. He made us a great stew of potatoes, noodles, carrots, an onion and some garlic, and we all dug in. We found a couple forks and spoons, but mostly ate Tajik style: with hands and bread as makeshift utensils. By 9:30, I was exhausted (my bedtime here tends to be around sundown…), but I willed myself to stay awake until 11, when others suggested we turn in. As soon as I got into bed, though, it was so cold that I thought I’d never get to sleep. My last thought as I lost consciousness was “It is very cold in here. It’s conceivable that I won’t wake up.” I did, but I’m very glad we were not in tents.

While we had originally planned another hike for the morning, we were all pretty worn out from our day of relaxing so instead a couple of us walked around the lake after breakfast (more nutella, bread, and cheese) and then left by 10:00, with the hope of getting back to Dushanbe by lunchtime (it’s only about a 2 hour drive). On our way out, about an hour outside of Iskanderkul, we passed a group of people watching from afar what we assumed was a wedding. We got out to see what we could see, but were almost immediately invited (and then dragged) down to the reception of what turned out to be not a wedding, but a circumcision party, and as soon as we arrived we became the center of attention, being offered food, tea, vodka (at 11 am), and asked to dance. One of the guys in the group was then brought up to the front of the reception to give a toast, in farsi, which, if I remember correctly, went something like “Thank you… This is a very big party, very good… A lot of food… thank you” and so on, which was very funny for us, but which the other guests apparently really appreciated. Our driver soon suggested we leave, due to the plethora of drunk men, so we headed out after about an hour, and drove on. We arrived back in Dushanbe with no more shenanigans in the early afternoon, and I spent the rest of the day catching up on some schoolwork.

Phew. Sorry about the length of this. Kudos to anyone who got this far. It was an action-packed couple of weeks, though, and I think it deserved all this attention. On the agenda for the next few days: classes, studying, and recovering from all this travel.

And Life Continues in Tajikistan...

This week I feel pretty settled into my routine… I’m finishing up week 3 of classes and am finding myself pretty much comfortable in Dushanbe these days. Since I have a lot of free mornings, I’ve taken to wandering down to Rudaki Park (about a 20 minutes’ walk from my house, but a little longer if I’m just strolling) and sitting there amongst the fountains and flowers to do my homework. I get a lot of funny stares as I sit in the park alone with a Farsi book open on my lap, but it’s prompted some conversations with local Tajiks about what I’m doing in Dushanbe (and often, why I would choose to leave the United States for 3 months to come here of all places… and when I mention that I want to learn Farsi and can’t go to Iran, it generally turns into a discussion of US-Iranian politics that my Tajiki just can’t keep up with).

Still, I like sitting in Rudaki Park because 1) there are a lot of fountains! and 2) there are a lot of flowers! The park’s really pretty and just full of beautiful buildings and statues (pictures below!) and it’s a great place to sit for the morning… not to mention there’s a great Western-style café nearby that has fantastic iced tea and iced coffee (with real, safe-to-use ice), and wi-fi. For now, it’s great to sit outside in the park, but once winter comes, I might be forced to send my morning study sessions inside the café.

Which brings me to… my host mother, Matluba, wakes up by 5:00 every morning to get breakfast ready. Little host sister Munisa leaves the house for school at 7:00, so they eat breakfast very early. I don’t get the impression that they expect me to get up and eat with them, but I do feel bad if I sleep past 7, because then I just feel like Matluba is waiting on me. Point of story; I’ve been getting up and eating pretty early, and it’s getting pretty cold before 10:00. I usually have to eat breakfast in my cozy AU sweatshirt, but I’m dubious about wintertime meals. There’s not really anywhere inside to eat, but I really can’t imagine that they eat out in the courtyard in freezing weather. On the other hand, a house with no heat (and no two feet of insulation, like my Swiss house) means that the rooms inside tend to be the same temperature as the outdoor courtyard, so maybe I’m wrong. I’m glad, anyway, that it’s cooling off – it’s making covering my shoulders and wearing long skirts as I walk around Dushanbe in the mornings far more bearable.

As far as language, my Farsi is steadily improving… my four intensive Farsi classes (13 hours per week) are certainly helping that, and I now understand nearly everything that goes on in them… for my media class we have to read one news article in Farsi for each class, then summarize it and talk about in class, which was really nearly impossible at first, but is getting much easier! I’m so thrilled with myself when I am able to read a whole legitimate piece of news in Farsi (okay, with some help from Google Translate). My Tajiki is better too, but I can’t really speak it…  I’ve just been kind of throwing some Tajiki words into my Farsi – today in my Farsi Conversation class I accidentally used the Tajiki word for school (Maktab) instead of the Farsi word (Madrassa). Oops. But point of story, I’ve started to understand most of what my host family says to me (minus a few words that they can’t remember in Tajiki so say in Uzbek and/or Russian instead) and I get the general gist of what they say to each other, which is great!

My Tajik afternoons are generally spent at Café Orash, a local café on Rudaki, about 20 minutes from school/19.5 minutes from my house with pretty good snacking food and absolutely the most amazing chocolate ice cream I’ve ever had. =) It’s great and really wonderfully relaxing to just sit at Orash (which has only outdoor seating) doing homework with the other Americans until we head off home for dinner. Then, by the time I get home, I don’t usually have much, or any, work to do, so can spend the evening sitting and drinking tea with Matluba and Munisa (other two host sisters, Guldasta and Galya, have both left to return to their husbands: Galya just up the road and Guldasta in Uzbekistan).

Tomorrow, we are leaving for a weeklong trip to Badakhshan, the province in the Southeast that stradles the Afghan border. We’ll be driving for seven days, several hours a day, through the Pamir mountains down there, stopping occasionally for short hiking/walking trips. In preparation, a couple other Americans and I went to the Bazaar this afternoon to buy some fruit and nuts, since snacks (and at times, lunches) will be scarce once we leave Dushanbe. The Bazaar was pretty cool, I had been there once before, but very briefly, and there were people selling absolutely everything you can imagine: food, clothes, and everything else.

Now I’m just chilling at Orash for a bit, as usual, and really, really excited about the trip!

Some Thoughts on Gender After Two Weeks

Has it really been two weeks? I can’t believe that my first month is more than half over! Time really dragged for the couple days before classes started, but now it’s just flying by – I’m always so busy with schoolwork or vocabulary increasing or tea drinking…

But, having been here for 17 days, I thought I’d talk a bit about gender in Tajikistan. I’ve gotten a lot of questions on that, and thought I’d try to help everyone understand. I’m fascinated by the gender roles in Tajikistan. As in most countries “over here” (Thanks, Shelby Jamerson, for those words), there’s a big divide between what’s expected of women, and what’s expected of men. Unlike many Central Asian countries, though, this divide is definitely more a cultural thing than a legal or even a religious thing. While most women I’ve seen on the street (and in my family) wear headscarves, I haven’t been, and there are definitely some Tajik women who don’t cover their hair either. While they do generally wear traditional Tajik dresses – and I’m hoping to have one made for myself too! – that are nearly floor length, and worn with matching pants underneath, always cover the shoulders and are very often long-sleeved, I’ve been getting the impression that the stares I get as I walk down Rudaki Avenue (the main street in Dushanbe, where nearly everything is located) are more due to my (somewhat wild) red hair and obviously white skin than the fact that my skirt comes only to my knee and that I sometimes give in to the heat and uncover my shoulders. No one – not even my host family, who might be expected to correct any of my cultural faux pas’ – has ever mentioned to me that I might be dressed inappropriately, and I don’t ever feel unsafe on the streets… especially with all the Russians wandering around, who really don’t adhere to Tajiki dress codes at all. =)

Of the women in my family, the oldest daughter works (though I don’t know what she does). She doesn’t live with us, but, as I think I’ve mentioned, she comes by every morning for breakfast to drop off her two young children, and returns for dinner until late at night when she brings her kids home. The second oldest sister used to work (as a secretary, I think) when she and her husband lived in Uzbekistan, but for now, while she is staying with us, she’s at home. The third oldest sister doesn’t work – at least not right now; she’s just had a baby – but she did attend University, so maybe she will work at some point in the future. My youngest sister is only 15, so she’s still in school, but she’s dreaming now of going to the US or to Russia to study fashion after she graduates. My host mother does not work, and, as far as I can tell, spends her days relentlessly cleaning every inch of the house (today, I awoke to her shining my doorknob) and making sure that the food constantly out on the table never gets depleted.

My sister Galya, the one who has just had a baby and has been living with her parents for the past 40 days, but is leaving today to return to her husband’s house, talked to me a lot about being female in Tajikistan on my first night here. She seems to me to be kind of at the mercy of her in-laws, especially her mother-in-law, and of Tajik society. She told me that she didn’t want to get married so young (she was 21 when she married her husband), and she doesn’t feel ready to be a mother, but that society here dictates that women get married in their very early 20’s and have children immediately afterwards. She loves her husband, and they were friends for a long time before they got married, but his family, she says, is quite strict so she doesn’t get to visit her family very often. Once, I came home to find a gaggle of women eating in the courtyard, and Galya introduced them to me as her husband’s family (his mother, sister, and aunt, but not him), and invited me to sit and eat with them, but she herself spent the meal waiting on her in-laws.

On the streets, women keep their eyes down if they are walking alone, and never speak to men they do not know, and vice versa. When we went to the mountains last week, while we were walking along the road, we accidentally ended up in somebody’s yard. A little boy came out of the house and we explained what we were doing. His father came out and introduced himself to and shook the hands of the two guys in our group, but completely ignored Amanda and I. It wasn’t a rude thing, but actually a respectful thing – men would never talk to a strange woman they weren’t interested in starting a relationship with. I also have a host brother who still hasn’t introduced himself to me, but I rarely see him anyway, so that really doesn’t bother me so much anymore.

All that being said, I feel very lucky to be a host daughter in this country, especially with my particular family. My four host sisters and host mother, are together whenever they are home, but from what I can tell, my host father and brother live pretty solitary lives. I don’t know where they go when they are not in the courtyard, but I see my host father and once in a blue moon my host brother for dinner, but beyond that, they never seem to be around. The women also throw lunch parties and have female friends over nearly everyday, and when I come home in the early afternoon, there’s a good chance that a group of women will be gathered around plates and plates of food in the courtyard, eating and gossiping away. The same goes for after we finish a meal in our family – my host brother and father stay at the table until they are finished, then they get up and leave to do manly things on their own, and the women – usually four sisters plus mother plus me, and my little host niece (and nephew too, I guess) – stay at the table for several hours laughing and talking and drinking tea and eating cookies. It’s like playing tea party, but for real, and it’s such a wonderful sense of community that I would probably miss out on if I were a male visitor in the family. While I’m not really getting a sense of what it’s like to be a Tajik woman (I’m not expected to cook or clean, but hopefully once my Tajiki gets better and my being in the kitchen won’t be such a hassle for everyone else, I’ll help cook too), I do feel like I’m getting the best of both worlds.

Independence Day Weekend... Flags, Mountains, and Crashing Weddings.

Well this was my second weekend in Tajikistan, and since last week it was eaten up by orientation stuff, it was really the first, and it lasted three days, because Friday was Independence Day (the twentieth anniversary!), so that’s where I’ll start.

Since we got here, the whole country has been in prep-for-independence-day mode. There are banners all over the city and huge signs with the flag on them, and lots and lots of excitement. We’ve been hearing about this huge, huge military parade, and so we really wanted to go! Most of our host families, though, were like “we’re over it,” so a few of us decided to head out together to watch, early Friday morning – like 8:30 – and I walked down to the Ped Institute (a big bright blue teacher’s college that is the landmark for my street: it’s on the main street of Dushanbe just before I turn off of it) to meet some Americans… and all along Rudaki Avenue was this flag that has been the talk of the town. It’s the longest flag in the world, and it’s over 2 kilometers long, weighs over 800 kilograms and had to be carried by 3000 people. Yep. Tajikistan: we don’t really have an education or sanitation system, but we have the longest flag in the world. Khub, Tajikistan, kheyli khub… It was actually pretty cool, though, like as far as you could see on the main road was just this flag with thousands of people holding it (and later, sitting on it/under it as they got tired of standing). The first part of the parade was military, which was really not that exceptional… picture your average military parade and you’ve pretty much got it. After that, though, were thousands and thousands of people – schoolchildren and teachers all dressed alike, all medical students dressed alike, a bunch of groups of people that we couldn’t quite figure out, and then lots and lots of women wearing traditional Tajik dresses, which was really cool to see, all just marching across the city. After the parade, I went to the Botanical Gardens to meet with my “hamsohbat,” my language partner, who I’m supposed to meet with a couple times a week to see Dushanbe and practice speaking Farsi/Tajiki. They were pretty standard Botanical Gardens… but really, really big, and with a few really beautiful buildings around. I went home for dinner, where my host family was having a party with a bunch of relatives – I’ve asked who they are so many times, and I think I get a different answer everyday – so of course they invited me to join and we ate A LOT. After dinner, my host mom and sisters were just sitting around, talking, and watching a performance on TV for the President. What seemed like all of the students in Tajikistan – including my youngest khahar, Munisa – were dancing in this show, and it was huge and really cool. At the end, there were some fireworks on the TV, and we heard them over our house, so we all ran out into the street to see them. They were the most sparkly fireworks I’ve ever seen, so GREAT! A 2-kilometer flag, and especially sparkly fireworks.

The next day, the Americans went to Varzob, where there are mountains to hike and extremely cold rivers to sit in. We wandered around the mountains for a while, had a GREAT lunch of Osh Palav, the Tajik national dish, which is basically rice with some carrots and tomatoes and beef, amongst other things, in it. After lunch we walked down near the river, and then along the road, just seeing what we found.

Sunday was pretty much a work day for me… I had put off my homework all weekend and I had a lot to do, so I pretty much stayed in the house for most of the day, except for a few hours that I spent in the American Councils office to use the internet. I was sitting in my room, though, and one of my sisters came in and told me that they were going outside to watch part of a wedding, so I went with them, to the house across the street. There was a stretch Hummer parked outside (random, in Dushanbe) all decorated with roses and ribbons, and lots of people running inside the house to the sound of horns, wearing everything from traditional Tajik dresses to Western strapless gowns (but not really so much in between)… Then everyone went inside and it got really quiet for a few minutes, until they all burst out again, this time with the bride in tow. Tajik brides aren’t allowed to smile or show any emotion at all, so she just looked at her feet, led into the Hummer by the groom.

Now it’s Monday, and the week is already looking pretty long… Lots of words to learn and work to do… This weekend one of my sisters is going back to her husband’s house with her son, so we’re having a big send-off party on Saturday, and the women of the house are busy preparing for that, and collecting all of the gifts that people have sent. The house is so full of things for babies… Cribs and cradles and a thousand pairs of baby shoes.

Some Thoughts on Language and Classes

So I’ve gotten a lot of questions about the language in Tajikistan, and thought I’d update and clue you all in. For the past two years at American University, I’ve been studying Iranian Persian, or Farsi. In Tajikistan, most of my classes are Iranian Farsi classes, and that’s how I’m continuing studying that language. In Tajikistan, though, the national language is not Farsi, but Tajiki, another dialect of Persian, which is very similar to Farsi. The biggest difference, besides the Tajik accent and the influence of Russian and Uzbek, which have leant some words to Tajiki, is that Tajiki is written in Cyrillic, instead of the Arabic script that I have come to know and love over the past four semesters. Generally, people here study Farsi in school, and the two languages are related closely enough that most everyone understands it, but the problem that I am coming up against is that my Farsi isn’t good enough to make sense of the Tajik accent and Russian/Uzbek/purely Tajiki words. Also, I can’t really read or write in Cyrillic, so the street signs and shop names stump me. After my first Tajiki lesson on Tuesday, though, I’m improving. I feel somewhat literate now, but it takes me a while, and sometimes I feel five.

A Sign in the Language Center - this is a kinder sign than most, things are rarely printed in English, and often not even in Farsi.

With all of that in mind, at least two of my four host sisters (my chahar khahar!), but probably all of them and my host brother, speak Farsi as well as Tajiki, because they’ve learned it in school, alongside Russian and some English. Most adults, though (my host parents included) speak only Russian and Tajiki, which makes communicating with them much more difficult. Generally, foreigners who come to Tajikistan either are Russian or speak Russian, so when people hear that I’m not Tajik and don’t speak Tajiki, they switch to rapid Russian, when they would have been better off sticking with the Tajiki and slowing it down.

Classes started on Monday, and I like them a lot! If nothing else, I’m glad to have something to occupy my time, because the weekend was dragging a bit. I am taking 5 classes: Mass Media (this one is really interesting; we’ll be reading Persian news articles and talking about them. Hopefully this will expand my vocabulary to include words that I hear on the television every night, and give me the ability to hold a more substantial conversation than “My name is Emily. I am from New Jersey. I have one sister, a cat, and a dog”), Grammar (also useful, but nothing too interesting to note), Tajiki (we only have this class once a week, for a two hour period, but I’m really excited for it! Don’t know how well studying two languages – and two alphabets – at a time will go – it was a bit hard to switch between them!), Conversation (this is my only professor who is Persian and not Tajik, and she spoke a little too fast for me to follow, but it should be helpful to use the language in a classroom for five hours a week), and Reading Literature (this is the same professor as Conversation, and it was much easier to follow her lesson when we were reading along from a text).

The classes are all three or four people, which is really nice, because it gives us all a chance to practice speaking almost individually with the professors, and to basically set the pace for our class. We’re grouped by our language abilities, so in my class we are all pretty much on the same level, and so the professors can really bend over backwards to fill in the gaps in our knowledge. They’ve been pretty willing to veer away from designated lessons to explain things we didn’t know, and they’re careful to make sure that each of us is following the lesson and understands. Even though trying to learn in a Persian-only classroom (we’re actually charged $5 for using English in the school) has been challenging, I can already tell that I am getting better, but I still have trouble catching up if I break my concentration for a second to take a sip of water or write down a word!

On the Door of the School

I’m also going to have a Peer Tutor, a Tajik my age who will practice Farsi with me and show me around the city. It will be nice to have someone around to work with who speaks the language and also knows places to go in Dushanbe!