Historic Khujand

We took a trip to the north of Tajikistan for the first part of last week, to the city of Khujand. Dan and his colleague were going for work, and it seemed like a good (who knows, maybe already the last?) chance to tag along under such circumstances (hotel room paid for, ground transportation already planned and covered, etc.) and see something new.

So Anya and I got up early on Monday morning and went to the domestic terminal with the guys, sat in the chilly waiting hall, let ourselves be bussed out to the plane -- a frighteningly ancient (1970s vintage?) prop plane, an An-24 I guess. But the flight took only 50 minutes, so we didn't have too long to sit there and wonder how it was that this plane was flying so successfully.

The trip as a whole was a lot of fun, but it does make me marvel at the difference between traveling with a pre-schooler and either traveling alone or with someone older than about 8. It's just funny how slow you move, how much less you do each day (especially when a handful of prime hours are spent inside for napping!), but also what a different perspective you get on everything you see and experience on a trip where your main companion is 3.

As we've done in other provincial cities in the former Soviet Union, we stayed in the hotel's luxury suite -- not exactly the Four Seasons, but not too shabby nonetheless. Two rooms, one of which had a crazy contemporary sofa set with accessory pillows -- 1 round, 1 star-shaped -- that entertained Anya half of the time we were there. About a 100-degree curve of plate glass windows in the corner of the room, covered with curtains that entertained Anya for the other half of the time we were there. A jacuzzi tub that leaked and didn't have the water pressure to fill it in our lifetime. (Similar to another provincial hotel experience in Khabarovsk, Russia.) No honor bar, but a plates of dried apricots and a plate of pistachios left in the fridge (undoubtedly by another guest, but who's to say, really?). A big screen plasma TV that got Russian music videos and BBC World. What more could you really want?

The first day was cloudy but no precipitation. We checked in after our midmorning arrival and headed in our separate directions: Dan and colleague to work meetings, Anya and I to explore the town. Hotel Vatan was located really centrally, just a 5 minute walk to Khujandi Theater and the Sugd regional history museum. We used the clear weather to explore outside, since we'd heard the next 2 days would bring rain and/or snow. We forced ourselves to stop after a snack of several "healthy cookies" and get outside, walking past the theater and north along the "alley" park leading up to the Syr Darya river. Stopped at a park bench to have a mandarin orange and pick up some leaves. Strolled up to the river while singing several verses of "Old MacDonald Had a Farm."

Turned to admire the defunct Leninobod hotel building and what is billed as the largest Lenin statue in Central Asia (from afar). Turned along the river and up Lenin Boulevard to look for a cafe for lunch. Found a cafe in the Youth Palace (Dvorets molodezhi or Qasri javonon) where we had noodle soup, a breaded cutlet, and green tea. Got along famously with the friendly waitress, who addressed us in Russian but with the funny addition of a markedly northern Tajik question suffix tacked onto her sentences. This was also the lunch where Anya learned to love green tea out of Central Asian piyola teacups (the ones that are just like little bowls, without handles).

Then headed back to the hotel for a little bit of play and a nap!

And essentially that is where the sightseeing ends on any particular day, since Anya generally sleeps from 2-4:30, and by that time the sun is going down already. We went out for dinner with a friend from Dushanbe who was also in town and, as they say in the Madeline book, "that's all there is, there isn't any more."

On Day 2 we were planning to go with Dan and colleague an hour's drive away to the nearby city of Istaravshan, another city with over two thousand years of history behind it and reportedly a really interesting place to see, but since it was raining and we move so slow (and it wasn't clear how we'd get back midday for the nap), we decided to take it easy and remain in Khujand proper.

The highlight of the day was the regional history museum. This is a prime example of what I mean by the amazingly different perspective you get when your traveling companion is a 3-year-old. Anya's favorite part was the section where the floor was made of plexiglass and in the 3 or 4 inch space beneath it was basically a model of an archeological dig: sand and shards of pottery, pieces of wooden beams, gold coins, metal vessels and old shoes, etc. We spent a long time there trying to guess what the various artifacts were. So much time that I couldn't drag her away to look at anything else and finally got bored of it myself. So with some difficulty I bundled us out the door and across the square to another cafe for some homemade pelmeni (tushbera in Tajik; basically meat-filled dumplings), more green tea, and the very tasty Khujandi kulcha (small round flatbread bread loaves made with a touch more oil than regular Tajik naan).

Day 3 it did snow -- wet and sloppy. After much cajoling I talked Anya into going out of the hotel for a shopping trip to find the teapot that she claimed Bear needed to have for a birthday present. We stopped in all the toy stores between Hotel Vatan and the main market square of the city, admiring all the fun things on offer.

It seemed to me like there was more mid-level consumer-oriented commerce in Khujand, and these stores were a good example. I guess we don't spend a lot of time seeking this stuff out in Dushanbe, when we're not on vacation, but it still seems to me like in Dushanbe you either have bazaar-based commerce and items that are pretty cheaply made and sold, or you have super-fancy storefronts where you wonder who on earth really shops there. In Khujand I saw a lot more middle-of-the-road shops (and even well made commercial signs all over the place, very consumer-oriented) that seemed to hold things that people really want and can afford to buy.

We had a lot of fun looking at a flock of birds in the bazaar square and then tramped around the inside of the bazaar for a bit, me trying to surreptitiously buy a small collection of trinkets to serve as the small gifts in a makeshift Advent calendar once we got home. Along the way we finally found the child's umbrella that Anya has actually been suggesting that we buy her for over a month now -- the first thing she has so specifically asked for in her life -- and the plastic tea set for Bear. Then we hopped in a taxi and made it back to one of the more famous restaurants in town (Zaituna) in time to share Khujandi rice plov (raisins and dried currants seemed to me to be the difference in the north) and more green tea with Dan and his colleague.

A nap and some packing later and we were on the road to the airport. By the time we got through check-in it was driving snow outside, and I was somewhat concerned about the flight, despite the fact that we could see from the airport waiting hall that we would be flying in a newer and more substantial Boeing this time. But I guess they make this flight several times a day and often in snow, so it actually turned out very smoothly, thanks to Tajik Air's pilot. Made it back home to Dushanbe in time for a book and bedtime!

Cornuccopia

Reporting in here at the close of a long, relaxing weekend that started with a classic all-American Turkey Day, continued with a day off of preschool due to local swine flu concerns, kept on going with Tajikistan's idiosyncratic celebration of Eid al-Adha on Saturday (one day later than the rest of the Muslim world -- and here they call it Qurban). After a rainy Saturday Eid, we had a glorious, sunny Sunday with a fancy breakfast and a walk in the Botanical Gardens. And today, Tajikistan's public holiday in honor of Eid, the 3 of us took our first long drive of the season, into Takob valley for a romp in the snow!

Thanksgiving was a real delight -- a buffet laden with a bounty of dishes at the home of our good friends, shared with a bunch of other good friends. Several kinds of stuffing, a corn pudding, a beef fillet, gravies both meat-based and vegetarian, baked sweet potatoes topped with golden-brown marshmallows, and two cranberry sauces. All of that was accompanied by the meat carved off a 23-pound monster of a Butterball turkey, which was shipped into Central Asia via Bishkek (Manas Air Base), detoured through Tashkent, and then afforded a special US Embassy escort to Dushanbe (frosty relations between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan make the connection much less realistic than it ought to be).

We were the ones responsible for the bird. Since I guess up to now I'd never been solely responsible for the turkey on Thanksgiving, I was a little nervous about how it would turn out. Least daunting of all was the roasting: receiving the fully frozen bird on Monday and given a defrosting schedule of 4 pounds per day in the fridge didn't get us quite all the way to Thursday. A cold water bath for the turkey on Wednesday evening got us the remainder of the way to thawed.

Prep on Thursday morning, despite Dan's protests, and roasting pan into the oven at 10:45AM still had us scrambling at a quarter to 5 to get the turkey to our hosts' house in an attempt to stick to the projected 5pm call to table. We sat down late, but I think we were not the only reason, and anyway, the freely flowing wine and "White Ladies" (something involving enough lemon juice to mask the taste of gin) and blue-cheese stuffed dates kept the rest of the other guests at bay almost the whole time.

And then there was dessert! So many pies, let me see if I can remember: apple, sweet potato, two pumpkins (one with "vodka crust"), chocolate pecan.... and something else I'm forgetting. As well as turkey-shaped sugar cookies, thanks to the smallest of our hosts.

It was a great holiday in Dushanbe!

It Speaks! It's Alive!

Whew, what a breather!

Yes, I know -- I actually was reminded that someone reads this blog when a couple of people asked what the story was, why I hadn't updated in a long while.

I guess real life got in the way.

Update since the end of September:

• Finally unloaded the many tasks associated with being sole organizer of Anya's preschool onto a small collective of my fellow parents. (This is where it started to feel again like I actually had a real life, I think.)

• Took time to walk. As in, walking Anya to sadik almost every day, instead of driving. (The location we moved to at the start of September is much closer to home than the previous location.) She sits in her stroller and I do a fast walk for about a half hour to get a bit of exercise -- and after dropping her off I often walk back on my own, with or without the arm weights of groceries or produce from the bazaar.
  
  We started out walking on city streets, meandering eastward and then south. We were having a nice time coming into more contact with neighbors and other people around the broader neighborhood who we were starting to encounter every day. But then I was reminded of how close we are to the Botanical Gardens, which allows us to flip that L and walk straight south, through the northern gate, admire a few yolochkas (fir trees, or Christmas trees, in 3-year-old parlance) and say a few salaams to the ladies sweeping up the leaves. Then we hang a left just past the old beat-up orangerie and head eastward, out the main gate, past the medical complex and over toward sadik. It takes us just over 25 minutes with the smooth paths and no traffic to avoid in the BG, and it's such a peaceful, beautiful walk, especially with all of the improvements they've made in the past 6-9 months (lots of beautifully carved wooden pavilions like the one below).

• Started reading and writing again, felt a creative surge and got some recognition from the outside (accepted to write a chapter in an edited volume). Got back into the library, found some good material and am finally beginning to write about Tajikistan -- malaria in the 1930s-50s.

• Had a birthday. Realized that 2 years shy of 40 feels kind of old.

• Took a vacation to South Africa with Anya and Dan -- had a great time, seeing old friends, making stews, riding trains, eating and imbibing all the good things we can't find in Dushanbe. (And pledged to take my morning walks to the next level when I started to feel like a pig after all that eating.)

• Celebrated Halloween with a small platypus. Three seems to be the year of really understanding and fully participating in experiences like birthdays and long distance trips and holidays. Complete with the understanding of what a candy bag is and how smooth those chocolate-peanut butter Halloween "eyeballs" go down.

• Got bitten by the football bug. (OK, loosely defined; see below.) The parents of the older expat kids who go to one of the international primary schools here organized a family sports day on Tajikistan's Constitution Day, in early November. We all had the day off from work and school, so they rented a football field at the main sports complex in town and invited nearly everyone we've ever caught a glimpse of in the international community. It was a classic autumn day, great for chasing a ball or a kite and taking a break now and then for a snack on the bleachers. Kicking and throwing a ball around is apparently another activity we don't do often enough, but after this Anya's been talking a lot about playing football and even trying to recreate the fun (unfortunately, more often than not, in the house).

• Met the start of fall with a shiver. The only downside to a vacation from Dushanbe to the southern hemisphere in mid- to late fall is that you miss some of the best weather of the year in Tajikistan. And then you leave the summery weather down under and return to a house that has been empty for 2 weeks, right at the point when it starts to get downright chilly. It took a few days for our heat to come on and take root -- and of course by then the weather had warmed up again. Now we are decidedly into sweater and boots and tights weather. The house is warm, but there is often frost on the Botanical Garden plants, and on sunny mornings a steam rises off of those plants that are getting the direct rays. And yet again the electricity has started to get sketchy -- one thing to be thankful for is our generator.

All in all, maybe a break was what I needed -- I figure anyone who cares enough to read this has faith that I'll come back. And here I am.

Tajik Progress

Ҳоло ман бе шумо мехоҳам дар бораи забони тоҷикӣ гап занам. Ё нависам. Ана дар ҳақиқат фарқ дорад? Дар ҳақиқат дорад, лекин барои ман инҷо муҳим нист. Ман мехоҳам нақл кунам, ки ман нӯҳ моҳ забони тоҷикӣро меомузам, кӯшиш мекунам гап занам...

OK, so I continue to try to learn Tajik, taking private lessons two hours per week since right about the start of this year, or about nine months. I continue most of the time to feel as though I am making glacial-speed progress if I'm moving forward at all, although every now and then I feel some positive energy that allows me to think that maybe I actually am getting somewhere.

I always need to remind myself, I have after all studied Russian on and off, in and out of the classroom, since first beginning it in 1988 -- for twenty-one years! I can't expect, er, Dushanbe to be built in one day, right?

I think part of the difficulty is the variation and lack of standardization in Tajik. Especially if Russian is the yardstick, Tajik is really much different: the regions of Tajikistan are so separate, and you're constantly hearing how different from one another in culture and dialect the north and south are.

The written language and the spoken language are pretty far apart from one another, too -- not unlike in Farsi, but this pair with its own Tajik idiosyncrasies. You can't learn everything of course, so I guess if anything I'm trying to build up some basic ability in spoken Tajik, and then I also try to read some twentieth-century non-fiction (hoping that maybe in this coming year I can hobble through a few newspapers and journals) with my teacher.

Still, it's frustrating -- and I know that ironically part of the reason I don't make faster progress in Tajik is that I do speak Russian fairly comfortably, if not always totally fluently. In any of the interactions where I'd otherwise be forced to practice my Tajik and barely muddle through that way, the most obvious answer from the point of view of efficiency is to just switch into (or, really, remain speaking) Russian. Why speak like a 3-year-old (and that is being very generous to me, or very insulting to a 3-year-old Tajik), when I can speak pretty much from my own stage of mental development in Russian?

The one exception remains the bazaar.
















This is why I'm so reluctant to ask someone else to take over our routine shopping: I could ask the housekeeper to get things for us, or the odd-jobs guy we are considering hiring since our friends and his employers left Dushanbe... But if I did that, I'd never practice my Tajik outside of class!

Just this weekend, for instance, my visit to the bustling pre-Eid Barakat bazaar was a fun little chance to see the sellers I regularly buy from and practice a little Tajik. (For some reason I chose the Saturday before Eid to set out to out the Green Market again after a long absence, despite oaths that I would avoid it and the parking hell that reigns on the streets surrounding the market. I could tell several blocks before the bazaar itself that this was a bad idea and luckily was able to turn and escape all of the mishigas. I guess what had inspired me go was the news from along the expat grapevine that avocadoes and limes had been available from one of the sellers. My friends bought the guy's entire stock, but I was tempted to see what other goodies I was missing out on. I think post-Eid I am going to try to go once every couple of weeks... In any case, the Barakat pavilion interior in the photo here was from earlier this summer, on a very empty weekday afternoon.)

At Barakat, the older lady who sells chakka (thick, pasty, tart Tajik yogurt) just inside the pavilion greeted me warmly after my absence (with the traffic torn up and redirected in this part of downtown, I haven't gotten to Barakat as often as I used to). We had the typical greeting exchange, asking after each other's health, and then she sold me my usual 2-somoni handful of chakka, and invited me to her house for Eid on Monday. I did what I hope is an acceptable way of not actually accepting the invitation, smiling, thanking her but stopping short of saying I would come. At least this is what I have been doing about once a day with our next-door neighbor ever since we arrived, in response to his everyday invitations of "coming by" and having plov or tea.

The homely potato-carrot-and-onion seller I go to at the bazaar was also happy to see me. He is actually the brother of the usual guy, but normally they are there working their stand together. Originally I chanced upon the brother who wasn't there today, who at least in my experience seems to be the front man of the operation. To my surprise, he came out with shockingly good English the first time I bought my taters from him (surely choosing to do that because it is clear from about 5 miles away that I am not local -- the really naive ones must think I'm Russian). With this pair of brothers, I usually try to speak Tajik to them and the one brother tries to speak English back to me, as a kind of equal exchange. Today the English-speaker was gone, but the brother who apparently has just the typical Tajik and Russian greeted me with a crooked smile and tried to explain to me everything about fasting for Ramadan (like I hadn't already gotten used to the concept for the past month, but whatever -- it's about the cultural exchange, not about the content, much of the time...).

Then I went to the only melon seller on the side of the pavilion where I was (Barakat was a mess of pre-Eid shoppers too, I wasn't going to traipse around any more than I had to), and here I was out of my element and didn't have anyone familiar to go to. These melon guys immediately started out in Russian, which on the one hand I speak better, but on the other already feels to me like I'm down a few chips in the bargaining process and I have to work to clamber back uphill. Unfortunately I think I got a jacked-up Eid-eve price on my sweet melon -- not necessarily because I'm a foreigner, but it probably didn't help matters.

All that really matters is that I had a pleasant, relatively quick, shopping trip, re-connected a bit with my bazaar peeps, and ensured we'd eat at least one last melon before the season ends. And, as an added bonus, the sellers assured me that I was buying the sweetest melon of the bunch: "guaranteed to do wonders for a lady's figure!" I think they stopped just short of offering a "one-time special price" just for me.

Dispatches From a Tangem

Real messages received on my cellphone from the workaday commute on board a variety of Dushanbe marshrutkas (and sometimes regular buses):

"Tajik dude next to me on bus has barn door wide open."
Sent: 12-May-2009 17:33:01

"Ride home is always so annoying. Bus just stands still waiting for passengers. %$#^&?! barker on bus keeps yelling '8 bus! 8 bus to the airport!' as if no one in %?$*#^! Zarafshon has seen a *&%$!?@ 8 bus before."
Sent: 19-June-2009 18:48:19

"On new marshrutka. Crazy direction. We'll see if I make it."
Sent: 25-June-2009 18:41:28

"Marshrutka just got pulled over. Great."
Sent: 30-June-2009 18:56:11

"Tajik transport trifecta: woman with 6 kids on her lap (paid only 1 Somoni), loud terrible Tajik pop, and old dude spitting nos on the floor."
[Editor's note: I believe this one was hypothetical, in an SMS contest to see who could think of the best Tajik transport trifecta.]
Sent: 6-Aug-2009 08:18:33

"My marshrutka driver is 14. Scary."
Sent: 2-Sept-2009 08:18:48

"Very stinky woman next to me on marshrutka. Glad to know funk knows no gender boundaries."
Sent: 2-Sept-2009 18:14:17

"Marshrutka ran out of gas. Tajik. Driver had extra RC cola bottle of gas in back. Even more Tajik."
Sent: 4-Sept-2009 08:16:47

Change in the Air

I fear the change of seasons is near! Already we have cooler mornings and evenings (very comfortable now), and cloudy skies in the dark evening (beautiful with the moon, a "ghostly galleon" on the waves of fluff up there, which has given us some enjoyable chances to admire the night sky and try to explain the moon to Anya). This morning we woke up to an already-drying rain-spattered courtyard. Only the second rain we have witnessed since sometime in June, when it stopped.

My own personal yardstick for the end of summer is the anticipated End of the Melons. I don't know when this is going to come, but I'm bracing myself. The sweet torpedo-shaped yellow Persian melons have been my absolute favorite part of summer in Dushanbe, and the way they laze about in huge piles on the roadside or in entire sections of every bazaar is such an amusing part of the season for me. It was during the last week of June that they appeared, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, and although they are still plentiful, I am dreading their disappearance. The only potential silver lining to this loss is the arrival of the persimmons, which I missed last year because of our October arrival and my general lack of experience with this fruit.

Fruit and veg was generally the highlight of the season, from my point of view: soft-ripe, deep red tomatoes and bright green hot peppers that made a delicious version of Mexican salsa fresca together with the ubiquitous cilantro, regular onions and lemon juice instead of lime. Fuzzy peaches. Anya's new favorite: green grapes, although it is my deep disappointment that Central Asia has not discovered the seedless variety. (I have been advised that if you seek out the especially small grapes at the bazaar, that these are essentially and accidentally seedless. Will have to try it out, although I'm already used to halving them, scooping out the 3-4 seeds inside, and giving them to Anya, who gobbles them up quicker than I can complete each step on the assembly line.) Sweet little apricots, both orange and yellow. Those long-passed cherries of the late spring. There was honestly so much that I didn't even take advantage of the berries, which generally are only sold in the central Green Market here, and I can't manage to go there unless there is a very essential need, because parking there is a terror and when you go to that market there is a documented change in the space-time continuum that requires that you lose 2 hours of your life and never get it back.

Luckily the fall will still bring us good things, and cooler temps, so that we can get back into the yard more. And right about now is when those ziploc bags and tupperware containers need to come out -- I still have not learned to can, but we need to use the modern equivalent shortcuts to make sure we can enjoy some of the fruits of the warm season throughout the winter!

Tursunzoda Torn Up

One of the downsides of getting back and forth to sadik during the week these days is the fact that one of the important north-south arteries in the older section of town is all torn up for some thus-far not-totally-comprehensible construction project.

(Actually, the irony here is that, not only did they block traffic along that artery, Tursunzoda Street, for a good part of July, only to open it now to slow, partially hindered movement, they also now in August decided to major work on the real main north-south artery in this section of town, Rudaki Avenue. It's city planning at its best, here in Dushanbe.)

The thing about driving up and down Tursunzoda that depresses me, though, is not that for a good portion traffic slows to a sometimes one-lane trickle over gravel and dirt and around large construction vehicles. (It doesn't look so bad for instance in the first picture here, but on a weekday morning right now traffic has to pick its way slowly through a lot of debris and activity.) What really bothers me is the treeless moonscape they have created where a slightly lazy, tree-lined secondary street once extended.

This at right is what the street used to look like, and in its northern stretches, nearer to our house, (so far) still looks like.

But in the section closer to the center of town they have uprooted the huge old trees that lined the road, apparently in order to refurbish the gutters and, some are saying but who really knows, to widen the actual roadway.

This below is actually not Tursunzoda itself but a smaller street, one of the only ones that ran all the way through to join the two parallel north-south avenues of this part of town, and therefore was actually a very useful street until they completely blocked traffic on it, too. It was also a nicely shaded street before, one that led part of the way to sadik and was pleasant to walk on to run an errand in that neighborhood.

This summer in Dushanbe has really taught me the value of trees in a place like this, even beyond all the more fundamental reasons that any rational person knows they are important and shouldn't just be chopped down without good reason. In a place that typically sees 40 to (luckily not this summer) 45 degrees C (105-115F) yet is quite dry, and where average homes are rarely equipped with air conditioners, shade is an extremely important factor. More generally, of course, one of the charming aesthetic aspects of Dushanbe (and it's not like it's dripping with those, although it is much better in that regard than Vladivostok) is its tree-lined avenues.

I don't know who made the decision to destroy so many old trees, and I doubt he's got an effective plan to replace them with equivalents. I just feel so sorry for the people who live in these neighborhoods, whose houses and walks to the bus stop or corner store are all of a sudden depleted of the shade that surely made them bearable -- maybe even pleasant -- in summer.

Of course, then whoever is overseeing the construction project apparently just lets the trees and root structures sit in the street, and neighborhood people then pillage the wood for their own purposes or to sell. One speculation about the tree part of the project that I've heard several times is that the wood was just worth more out of the ground than in the form of a tree. But by that measure, and by typical Central Asian logic, someone much higher up on the food-chain than Dilshod-on-the-street ought to be making the profit off of the trees. And maybe they are -- maybe the bulk of the trees destroyed were taken away to build fancy dachas or to floor new mansions, and we just see the bits and pieces left to the neighborhood to hack up and use or sell.

Back to School, Back to Work

Sadik began on Monday; today was the end of week 1 following summer vacation 2009. And they went back not a day too soon.

Not that I'm really seriously complaining, and I realize that surviving a 1 month break is nothing compared to steering an older, more bore-able kid through a typical American summer. (Although, on the plus side, I imagine there are all sorts of interesting activities to keep one busy through the summer in US school districts that we are lacking here.)

It was fun to spend a bunch more time with Anya, apart from the fact that during the latter three weeks of July she apparently lost all interest in the potty training we had done so well on from March to June. (Amazing! In June she makes it through multiple long road trip days in the car without an accident, and by late July we are struggling to keep our wet-undie count under 5 per day?!)

And apart from the fact that Anya somehow found her inner whiner, and that some little (yes, truly little, but feisty!) protest demon sprouted inside of her, too.

I don't know whether it was "just a stage" that happened to coincide with summer vacation, but remarkably all of that protest crying and angry refusal to go to bed on time really seem to have vanished just in this first week back. She starts each morning saying "it's not time for sadik," but she clearly is having a ball back with her friends and some new kids who've joined our little group this season.

For me, though, the fact that I've gained time to direct my attention elsewhere hasn't yet really translated into getting much of what I want to get done done. Unfortunately the organizer of our little informal preschool decided spontaneously (and partially due to a grave misunderstanding that I was unable, despite strenuous attempts, to disabuse her of) to give up her role as Dear Leader, which meant that I, as her helper and the mother of what appears to have been the only sadik family remaining in Dushanbe at the time, was left holding the bag.

I'm hoping that my time spent this week on sadik bookkeeping, new student recruitment, and house-hunting (on top of everything, preschool's homeless as of Aug. 30) won't repeat itself anytime soon -- that this is just me on the up-slope of the learning curve and investing some time up front in solving problems that, once out of the way, shouldn't deserve attention again for a while. And I damn well intend to gather all my fellow parents very soon to let them know that I'm not going to be the sole organizer -- that's not what I bargained for! Recalling how ready parents were last year to even attend a meeting, let alone take on small administrative tasks, I know this is going to be an uphill battle. But I'm hoping we can come to some sort of solution that takes the full burden off of me, since putting Anya in daycare only to have all of my "me" time sucked up by volunteer work to keep that daycare running isn't my idea of a fair trade!

First Road Trip of August 09

Somehow we don't seem to have taken nearly any pictures nor gone on any drives over the course of July. I'm not sure how that happened, since summer is the time in Dushanbe when people tend to escape the heat of the city for the cool of the river valleys outside of town. I guess we can chalk it up to an extremely full social calendar here in the city, from the weekend of July 4th all the way down to last weekend, as the US ambassador to Tajikistan prepared for the end of her posting here.

This weekend we took our first drive out to the east of Dushanbe (or at least Anya and I did -- Dan had been a few times, to visit the dam at Nurek and to see Gharm, in Rasht Valley). We went in neither of those directions, though, instead going up the smallest road that spokes off from the little hub that is Vahdat (aka Kofarnihon), a town due east of Dushanbe (that is being somewhat kind, I hope you realize): we took the northern spur into Romit Valley (that's Romit like "raw meat," although if you're following along at home with Google Maps, apparently it's "Ramit").


It was very pretty and very different from the Varzob river valley that runs directly north of Dushanbe and through which we have driven already too many times to count. (Road construction work on various tunnels and road surfaces makes that trip a little tiresome.) It was also quite different from the valley that runs north of Shahrinav, out west of Dushanbe, although it's possible our experience of that terrain was unique because it was springtime and a very wet one at that.


Romit in summer had brown hills, but a wide rushing river the color of jade or celadon. The further up we went (and according to the GPS we turned around to head home right here, at 38.90 x 69.28), the wetter the landscape got -- actually kind of surprising given how dry it is for the most part where we live.

In the valley that runs due north of Romit village, the roadway was lined at almost every turn with carefully constructed rock walls and fences woven out of spindly branches, evidently delimiting orchards and garden plots and grazing land. Some of the road wound under full tree cover where the ground was wet and the walls were covered with moss. (Moss!)


The unpaved roadway up the valley was surprisingly smooth, given our experience elsewhere in Tajikistan so far. Someone had clearly been through with a grader or something since the end of the spring, when all the rainfall we saw here would have covered the route in rockfall and mud. But there were still sizeable stretches of our trip where we were bump-bump-bumping along, which you realize only near the end of your journey is actually quite exhausting. I think maybe if there was a clear destination we were headed to, I'd endure that jostling a little better. (I think of the poor souls on that 22 hour car ride I have heard about between Dushanbe and Khorog, and I wonder if actually I'd be pulling my hair out even with the anticipation of seeing the Pamirs.)

But our usual road trip M.O. is just to head out merely for the sake of exploring, and more often than not Dan's interest in what lies beyond that next rocky outcropping is greater than mine, although he -- by mutual agreement -- invariably holds the steering wheel. Maybe the next time we hit some terrain cooler than Dushanbe, I'll push for less driving time and more footpath exploring (or picnicking), to break up the journey a bit more.

Pizza Night

On Saturday we served pizza to our nanny. We were running late and didn't have our dinner on the table until after she'd already arrived to babysit Anya for the evening. So, as probably would be natural not only in Tajikistan but in the US, too, we offered her some -- in Tajikistan the difference is, you set her up a plate and don't ask, since she will inevitably say "no thank you," yet to simply accept her refusal and not give her any would actually be pretty rude.

(Normally she doesn't eat meals at our house at all, neither food we've cooked nor food she's brought, partly because I actually try to schedule her hours so that they naturally stretch in between realistic mealtimes. I know some people here who provide food for nannies or others working for them, although my guess is that this is not typical in Tajikistan. Really I just don't want to feel guilty for not feeding her on any given routine day; the reason we hired her wasn't to have another mouth to worry about feeding!)

Anyway, this was the typical Walkenfeld pizza special: Bittman pizza crust with a touch of cornmeal for crunchiness, pepperoni, mozzarella (hey, in Dushanbe it is not a given), mushrooms, and artichoke hearts. As Surayo was feeding Anya her dinner (pelmeni!), she saw that Dan was very active in the cooking process -- in fact, my usual role in the pizza preparation is limited to making the dough and helping cut or grate the toppings, and then Dan takes over with the kneading and stretching of the dough, the actual construction, and the decision of when it is done.

Surayo commented that, in her family, she's never had a male relative cook anything for her -- which she has actually told me before (when I offered her a leftover scone that Dan had made), but it is still kind of surprising to me.

We were partly just trying to make conversation, I guess, but Dan and I started trying to explain or put into context the fact that Dan plays an active role in cooking this dish: we explained how he worked in a pizza parlor when he was in high school; how I had no idea when we started making pizza at home how to stretch and form the dough onto the pizza pan, so the default from the start had been for Dan to do it; how, when we started making pizza, we were both grad students, so it wasn't like one of us worked and the other tended house...

To some extent I think she understands all of these things. Her younger brother actually has lived and studied in the US for several years now, although she has never visited. But I also find it funny in such situations how little of some things can really be translated. It occurred to me later, of course, how in the Central Asian (or at least Tajik) context, the fact that a man is a student or not working or just plain out of work does not have any bearing on whether he cooks actual meals in the kitchen. Here, those are just completely unrelated aspects of life for most people, just like the idea of a couple building the elements of their life in relative equality, on equal footing, let's say, I think also really has no relevance or basis in reality.

There's nothing wrong with it, really -- it's just strikingly a subject on which it is really hard to find a bridge point; just one of those things that make you realize how far apart we are. (And probably we are the ones who are atypical from a global point of view, not the Tajiks.) I guess I'm a true Westerner: in the end I'm pretty glad that's the cultural context I grew up in, where Dan will do about 2/3 of the pizza-making, and everything that follows along with that.

Our Journey Along the Silk Road (Take Two)

I know, this is crazy. I took a summer vacation and I didn't even intend to.

It started with being unable to package my impressions of the Silk Road trip into a few (or even several) paragraphs. Continued through our first week of visitors during the last week of June. Then ran into technical difficulties (the internet, our phone line, and the electricity all went out in turns over a 2 week period in July). And my good writing intentions have also just generally fallen prey to the topsy-turvy turn in my schedule for work and play during July, while Anya's preschool has had a vacation, and I too have scheduled in more play time with her, instead of just amping up the nanny.

It's been a fun six weeks or so -- definitely fun to spend more quality time with Anya -- but, starting with the road trip in June, it has also been a period when I feel like all the infrastructural, organizational, cultural, and governmental frustrations of Central Asia have nuzzled up closer to me than I'd have preferred. (As usual, I guess I have to leave a deeper exploration of that for the next post.)

You got a taste of that in my description of the extended false start of our road trip. The trip itself, once it finally got underway, was a lot of fun and a wonderful chance for me to see more of the landscape and civilization in the region surrounding Dushanbe. It was really a chance to see something new in this place that has already become familiar and feels very much like home to me. (Imagine my surprise when, as the mountains of Tajikistan peeked into view out of the dry plains of southern Uzbekistan, I had a real pang of relief that we were finally nearing home!)

Much belated impressions:

To me, Bukhara was a dusty, sandy-colored, wind-swept, furnace-hot Central Asian version of some frontier town in the Southwest or the Old Pueblo itself.

It was also the most touristy place I have ever seen anywhere that used to be part of the Soviet Union. It was very disorienting. At times the area right around the town center, Labi hauz, felt like some very touristy stretch of a town in Italy -- Florence? -- where everyone and everything is oriented toward visitors and their pocketbooks. I guess Bukharans ought to be able to partake in this just as much as anyone else, though, and we did quickly get used to it.

People almost across the board say they like Bukhara more than Samarkand, but for me it wasn't that simple. Part of it was the touristy-thing. Precisely because Samarkand doesn't have a concentrated old ancient city center, which for Bukhara serves as the focal point for all of that tourist-oriented mishigas, that really isn't an issue there. Samarkand felt more like a living city than Bukhara, albeit one with thousand-year-old relics of architecture sprinkled in and among the contemporary buildings and people, which I guess for some reason made it a little bit more enjoyable to me. Although many people fault the Soviet-era reconstructions of the architectural ruins there, apparently I'm no stickler for authenticity, and I found the handful of monuments we had time to see in Samarkand truly amazing. My favorite was the Shah-i-Zinda "street of mausoleums," but we left enough undone that there is more if we're able to make the same trip again (maybe even taking the long detour to see ancient Khiva, too??) in spring.

Mainly, though, I think the meaning of this trip for me was deeper than simply the physical movement and observation of new places it entailed. It kind of shook up my outlook on life and got me paying attention to something new. I had been in a sort of rut in my work over the course of the spring, focused on writing up research I'd done in the Russian Far East before we came to Dushanbe, and I'd gotten kind of separated from the world around me here in Central Asia.

Even before we left home I borrowed an armful of books from the community office at our embassy, to give us a head start and a basis for understanding what we saw on our travels. The highlights:

• The Hundred Thousand Fools of God: Musical Travels in Central Asia (and Queens, New York), for recent and older history as well as fascinating cultural context for Bukhara but also for parts of southern Uzbekistan we drove through and even the isolated mountain valleys close to where we spun our wheels our first day out on the road
  
• The Lost Heart of Asia, mainly for atmospherics
• Stories From the Silk Road, a surprisingly useful story book aimed at older kids, whose pictures successfully captured Anya's imagination, enough that she had as much excitement and anticipation as a two-year-old can realistically muster for seeing the "blue biwdings" of both Bukhara and Samarkand
  
• and, last but not least, The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia, a scholarly but really interesting history of the sea change in culture and authority that Bukhara endured as it came under the wing of the Russian Empire between the 1860s and 1900.

My reading did help me (and Dan and Anya) appreciate the travel more, but it also nudged my thoughts out of their rut and opened me up to some new ideas for the future -- again, in terms of both work and play.

I don't expect this to translate immediately into new work in the archives and libraries here. Who knows: come September, I might be doing something completely different from historical research and writing. For the rest of the summer, I'm happy to sit back and let all the laziness and haziness and heat wash over me here in Dushanbe.

Our Journey Along the Silk Road (Take One)

I am obviously still working at glacial analog speeds when it comes to the digestion of and reflection upon travel experiences. I just can't seem to get the distance and peace of mind to consider my impressions of where I've just been with anywhere near the light speed expected from a blog.

I did upload about 2/3 of the photos we took -- and they do still say that a picture is worth a thousand words, don't they?

But I think by now -- a full two weeks since returning from Bukhara, and almost a week clear of hosting our first visitors in Dushanbe, which came on the heels of our journey -- I've got a handle on what this trip meant to me.

Our journey along the rough outlines of the Silk Route got off to quite a rocky start the Friday we set out. Given my experience with air travel to Moscow, and now our record on regional overland travel, as well as an indirect experience with flights from Urumqi (in western China), it is really starting to sink in just how difficult it is to get from point A to point B when one of them involves Tajikistan. So, I guess in a sense this trip was important just simply for being my first chance to get out of Dushanbe, see more, experience more, get more frustrated, and then just let go and enjoy the journey for whatever it throws in your way.

We made every effort to ensure that our plan to trace a big circle on our way out to Bukhara and back to Dushanbe -- out the northern route and over the mountains, and back the southern route through the plains of southern Uzbekistan and then into Tajikistan through Tursunzode -- wouldn't be blocked. Our main fixation was the scary Anzob Tunnel (which in fact was not very scary at all this time around -- no random sharp pieces of metal jutting out of puddles, in fact no standing pools of water, and a portion of the tunnel even luxuriously illuminated for easy navigation). We'd heard that not only was the tunnel a frightful passage but that it was closed from 9am into the evening while work was being completed on it. Dan's contacts assured us that it would be open, though, and that there might be only uncharacterized "delays" on the roadway north and west after passing through the tunnel. Unfortunately our drive proved that our main concern paled in comparison to the obstacles we hadn't even really considered, and it turned out we probably should have pressed for a bit more information on the nature of those "delays."

By about 11am, we had made it to a point some thirty kilometers after the tunnel's end, where freshly laid, smooth asphalt snaked down the mountain right into the midst of a cluster of about 20 vehicles stopped on either side of the highway. They were being held in place by a roadblock enforced by the Chinese construction workers who, as a rule, speak neither Tajik nor Russian nor English. We waited for over an hour while Dan gathered all the information he could -- the basics were that the crew working on this portion of the new road had stopped all passage (apparently as they have been doing every day, which called into serious question the helpful informants we'd consulted ahead of time), beginning at 7am and most likely continuing to hold traffic in place until 6 or 7pm with, of course, no alternate route provided.

At this point, let me make one thing clear: this isn't just "a route" north from Dushanbe; it is THE ONLY route north and the only auto route connecting the north and the south of this country! (The old route, which the tunnel and surrounding road now bypass, goes over a mountain pass whose roadway, we discovered later in the day, since we had oh-so-little to lose, is now poorly maintained and suffers from rockfalls and blockage by snow well into June.)

When noon rolled around and the speculative limited opening of the roadblock didn't materialize, Dan decided to storm the roadblock and bluster his way through on the basis of the red diplomatic plates, but even that didn't work. It turned out that the block wasn't just a formality; there really was no way to pass the big construction machine that was literally straddling the road atop a precipice -- there was just mountain to the right, air to the left.

But we did succeed in stoking the anger of another group of Chinese road workers, who got really furious at us. One of them started screaming at Dan in Chinese, trying to get us to back up. Dan took the bait and entered into a shouting match with him (neither side apparently understanding anything the other was saying) until, as Dan describes it "something in me snapped and I screamed viciously at him." Yep, that about sums it up. At that point, Anya started crying, my own grip on my armrest ratcheted up another notch, and luckily Dan fairly quickly saw we weren't doing anyone any good and backed down. (The incident of course provided narrative fodder for the remainder of the trip and well into the past week at home in Dushanbe, with frequent asides from Anya about how "the Chinese man made Daddy reawwy angry.")

Since my other blogging weakness is showing terribly at this point (can't seem to make these posts short and snappy, can I?), and since, beyond our Beckett-like meandering through the mountains, nothing much else really happened over the course of this portion of the trip, I'll close out the tale of the folly of Day One of our journey here and tell about The Rest of It in the next post. But not without giving you a few more quantitative yardsticks of our experience (with apologies to Harper's):

Time spent in the car, from departure to dejected return home, in hours: 10

Of that, time spent stopped at the construction roadblock, in hours: 1.5

Quantity of angry Chinese road workers who yelled at us at any point during our sojourn: 5

Routes attempted to cross the mountains and reach Aini and points beyond: 3

Routes successfully navigated: 0

Combined sheep-and-goat herd traffic jams encountered: lost count at 7

Passengers taken in along the way: 1

Types of wild plant advised upon by hitchhiking safed: 2

Of those, types dangerous or poisonous to touch: 1

Cups of tea we got away with drinking in typical Tajik forced hospitality to thank us for the ride (per adult): 3

Minutes of cellphone reception while in the mountains from approximately 10am to 6pm: 0

Minutes of hailstorm and rain encountered on return leg to spend the night at home in Dushanbe: 15

Accidents/pairs of wet undies produced in our car over the 10-hour pointless journey: zero!!

The News á la Tajik

Smooth Sailing á la Tajik















Tajikistan's minister of railroads is apparently the occupant of the brand new, almost finished mansion that occupies the corner of our small street and the main road. For some reason it offends his professional and ministerial sensibilities if the mode of transport beyond his house up to the next corner is unpaved and in poor repair, so they undertook a fix-up session that lasted a few weeks.

Of course, now our road tends to be even less navigable by car than before, because everyone, especially youths on bikes, wants to play and congregate on nice smooth macadam (see photo).

(Also, see one of the only speed bumps ("lezhashchii politseiskii" in Russian, or "lying [as in reclining; not what you probably are thinking] policeman," as I learned in Vlad mere weeks ago) in town, in the foreground of the photo.)

High Finance á la Tajik

We leave Friday morning on our road trip to the Silk Route cities of Bukhara and Samarkand, historically somewhat Tajik, yet presently located in the state of Uzbekistan. In preparation, in part just to have some money for the road, and in part because it is supposed to be hard to change money there, I set out in search of Uzbek som today.

At last count, I hit 7 exchange booths in 2 different neighborhoods of town over the course of the afternoon, returning to one of them as recommended toward the end of their workday, only to come up som-less. If it's actually harder to buy som in Uzbekistan than this, then I guess we really have something to worry about!

At one exchange booth I was offered 14,000 som with a shrug -- since I didn't have the exchange rate at my mental fingertips, I had to make some calculations to realize that this amounted to less than $10. The money-changers clustered around TsUM (who usually constitute the heart of currency exchange in Dushanbe, with the best rates in town) suggested I go to the downtown booth located next door to the Central Post Office, where they explained currencies from all around town get pooled. This was where the clerk encouraged me to return today just before 5, but where they'd still come up with peanuts in som. The afternoon guy's early-evening replacements suggested that by tomorrow at the same time they might have rounded up some som totaling closer to the $100 I'd hoped to collect. We'll see.

Here's hoping that our passage is smoother than the search for som -- that the Anzob tunnel, sometimes referred to wryly as the "tunnel of death," is open, mostly dry, and as safe as it can be. Our route will take us north through the Varzob valley, over or through the mountains at Anzob, and then through Panjakent to the Uzbek border, where we hope our diplomatic plates will let us get through without too much hassle. Then onward to Samarqand, as it is properly spelled to express that gutteral "k" -ish sound in Tajik. Two nights there, and westward to Bukhara, and after 2 nights, back home.

We'll report on the trip once we've returned (hopefully) on Tuesday night!

Vladivostok Adventure

I've already been back a week and a half from my odyssey to the Russian Far East, and the question still remains: how to sum up?

The cancellation of my outbound Dushanbe-Moscow flight on Day 1 made it seem like the trip wasn't meant to be, and truthfully I was very nervous for some reason, both about the conference and about leaving Anya and Dan. (All I can say by way of explanation is that we are so far away from home that I guess it just makes even small trips seem big and dangerous in some vague way -- although of course experience has shown that they are not, so in the end this is maybe all just a product of my psychology....)

But in the end, about 24 hours later than scheduled, I took off, had a pleasant four-hour flight to Moscow (being seated in business class on Tajikistan's own Somon Air didn't hurt), and from there it was a real adventure.

Got into Vlad off of the night flight (the time difference from Moscow is a full 7 hours, don't forget), a full day later than planned. I assumed that meant I had to rush to slip into the first day of a 2-day conference that in theory had begun that morning, when in fact it was all more interesting than that. I rushed unsuccessfully to have lunch with the group, and then met up with them at the celebratory awarding of an honorary PhD from Far East State University (DVGU) to Liudmila Verbitskaia, the former rector and current president of St. Petersburg State University.

Verbitskaia was seriously feted by these people: she is not only the president of the Petersburg university but also on the board of trustees of a recently established foundation called "Russkii mir," or, in translation (in which we were assured the name was not supposed to appear) "Russian world" or "Russian peace" -- "mir" can have either meaning. Basically, it is an organization much like the Instituto Cervantes, Alliance Francaise (which, you might be surprised to know, actually has a presence in Vlad), Goethe Institute, and the good old American Corners that the US government supports. I know that especially the latter must just look like big propaganda centers to many eyes, and I should be able to see the same type of activity from Russia in a similar light (i.e., yeah, so it's propaganda, but it's fine and everyone should be able to do it if they want). But in the atmosphere of post-Putin Russia and in the Russian Far East (where it has pretty much always been necessary ever since 1858 for Russians to emphasize just a little bit more vehemently than you might expect how deep Russian political and cultural roots extend in the region), the celebration of Russian-ness took on a slightly different overtone at times for me.

They really did put on the pomp and circumstance: you can see some of the evidence that just about every DVGU student performing group (and, honestly, where do these students find time to actually study if they are spending all their time perfecting their balalaika solos and juggling?) had a short bit in the show. It was quite an experience -- you couldn't help but get swept away by the enthusiasm, even if in the back of your mind you were thinking, what exactly is the target of all of this enthusiasm, and do I feel comfortable with that?

It turned out that our humble 1-day conference was really just a more private event that followed on this big DVGU-wide shindig. (Although we too brought out the press -- some friends even said they spotted me on local TV, being filmed admiring either Verbitskaia or one of the lounge acts)

The conference itself was actually very good -- the thing that of course I was most nervous about, my presentation, went fine (and as I tried pretty much unsuccessfully to tell myself over and over, it was limited to 10 minutes, so how bad could it be?). And this was in Russian! That felt like a real accomplishment to me.

The rest of the time was unfortunately shorter than planned, but really wonderful -- I was able to reconnect with almost everyone I'd expected to, both Berkeley colleagues who'd come from their various necks of the woods and Vladivostok friends, had fabulous weather (since May in Primorye is usually misty and foggy and chilly), and left with a much more nostalgic and positive feeling about the city that we'd called home for about 2 years than I'd had setting out.

The layover I hadn't originally wanted in Moscow was also a fun (if exhausted) several hours, seeing a friend from Dushanbe who's now in the Big Village continuing her research and going shopping. Main score: avocados and limes!

The Anya Report

I realized I haven't given an update on local toddler progress in a while.

What we're interested in:

• airplanes (toy airplanes, the sound of real airplanes, the idea of and pretending to take a trip on an airplane, recalling our recent airplane trips...)
  
• any small household or mundane item (e.g. cheap satin Chinese purses, empty plastic wet-wipe bottles, trial sized tubes of lotion, earplugs and their cases, plastic eggs that were given on the Easter egg hunt, sunglasses -- Anya can develop a fetishistic interest in playing with these things from the moment she sees them)
• trucks (esp. cement trucks, the yellow-with-red-striped vans that I think are connected to the Dushanbe city gas department and sit parked outside its offices on the route we take to sadik [see photo], marshrutka vans, and really any other type of civilian or military truck you might see on a Dushanbe street)

• the turtle in our yard
• Steve from "Blue's Clues" (esp. when he draws the clue in his "handy-dandy notebook." When he sits in his red "thinking chair" registers a close second.)
• the tiny toy watering can that came with the cheapo and too small beach/sand toys I bought last week
  
• real pens (esp. push-button ones), and using them to draw caterpillars (short or medium or long squiggly lines)
  

What we're doing:

• staying dry (fingers crossed. It took about 2 and a half weeks, but all of a sudden this potty training thing kind of took hold, and she is pretty much choosing -- mostly correctly -- when to use the toilet!)
  
• telling complex stories (for instance -- although this one is already a few weeks old -- about how she got locked in the bathroom and couldn't unlock it, "and Anya was crying. And Surayo said 'ne plach' [don't cry].' And Surayo was looking at you through the window. And mommy was telling you to turn the silver knobby thing. And the guys came and opened the door (...)." Quite an experience. All turned out OK when the person we called for help figured out that in fact the keys to the upstairs bathroom [which we had tried already] did open the downstairs bathroom door. You just have to put the key in only part way.)
• actually, not confusing "you" and "I" as much as the slightly outdated story above would have you believe
• nodding and shaking our heads (instead of saying "yes" and "no" -- it's so much more fun!)

What we're saying:

• "Anya's a big girl when Anya has a really big bite!"
• Friday = "French Fry Day"
• "When the doggies bark they say 'hewoh! hewoh! hewoh!" (Daddy's explanation for a phenomenon that has begun to loom very large for Anya just as she is going to bed. I personally get more annoyed with our neighborly rooster that seems to crow constantly, but I guess you can't choose your pet peeves.)
• "Anya has human hands. Bear has bear paws. Doggies have doggy paws." (Inspired by a new bedtime favorite: Dan's rendition of Elvis Costello's "Human Hands." Especially pleasing: the line where he says "whenever I put my foot in my mouth and you begin to doubt...")
  

Walkenfeld Taxi Service -- Accepting Payments in Rhubarb

We took a drive into the mountains in a new direction today -- traveling out of town headed west, towards the fortress town of Hisor and the aluminum mining town of Tursunzode, but turning north at Shahri Nav (New Town), into to the Dairo river valley.


It was quite a day: we took the road beyond where it deserved that name; passed many young men either hiking, gathering various plants, herding cows, or driving groups of donkeys through the valley; and stopped for a short walk when we judged that the water we'd have to ford was too high. (You can see pictures mostly from this part of the day starting here.)

This valley was truly beautiful -- the most impressive thing was the great gushing volume of water in the river and all the creeks, streams, waterfalls, rivulets, and other flows feeding it, thanks to our unbelievably rainy spring. There were few people, beautiful deep green hills and valleys, and, throughout, the sound of the rushing water.



After our mini-hike (which Anya and we really enjoyed), Dan decided to have another look at the water and found that, while it was truly freezing, as I suppose spring mountain runoff ought to be, it wasn't in fact too deep for us to ford. So we went further.

Then we encountered an old Tajik guy walking, which tends to happen. As we passed him, he yelled something at us, so we decided to see if he wanted a ride. So we picked him up, and he was going to the village at the end of the road, so we kept driving, probably for about 30 minutes or so. He took us a bit further, so we could see how the passable road ended, and then we took him to where he needed to go. He brought us out some rhubarb (it is one of the plentiful things this season -- people say it grows in the mountains, and although it is sold in the markets in great volume, Tajiks I've asked say they don't actually cook it in anything, just eat it raw with salt) , and he said the next time we come we should spend the night and save time for hiking around the area. We met one of his many sons and exchanged phone numbers.

Then someone who I assume was another son, but might just have been another of the residents of Hakimi village, asked if we would take passengers back down, and we felt a bit unable to say no. So we took him and presumably his wife and daughter back pretty much all the way to Shahri Nav, and although these folks were probably perfectly nice, we didn't have much to say to one another as we sped down the valley, unlike on our shorter ride with Mr. Hajji. We definitely felt a little more like a taxi service at this point, but what are you going to do...

The main downside, which actually was not as bad as it's going to sound here, was when the daughter (maybe 8 or 9 years old?) segued from a consumptive cough into barfing -- luckily, apparently that was the commentary going on in Tajik with her mother seconds before the full transition, and the father asked us to stop and the mom got the door open in time. Not early enough to avoid the upchuck getting all over the lower door (plastic, yes, but also home to the rear speakers -- ouch).

Oh well, we mopped up what the mother hadn't and traveled on homeward, figuring we had done our Tajik mitzvah for the day, and certainly earned the rhubarb, which we have just sampled in the form of a rhubarb (with a little bit of strawberry) crisp. Mmmmm.

Oh, the postscript to the journey came when we turned into our neighborhood and noticed what looked like the last bits of unmelted snow lying around on the ground. We puzzled over it for a few seconds, until we realized that another huge hailstorm must have hit not long before. It must have been quite a downpour -- the trees and plants (including the poor, already undertended rosebushes) really took a beating!

From Russia With Puppets

This past Tuesday we made a return to the Dushanbe puppet theater, together with all of our friends from sadik.


There was a troupe from Russia in town, and that was all I knew setting out. It turned out to be the actors from the Kemerovo Provincial Puppet Theater named for Arkadii Gaidar, who had come on a springtime tour to Dushanbe.

The last time we went, I complained about the lack of puppets, but this time the puppets and the staging were great -- very clever and interesting. The production was "Bear Cub Rim-Tim-Ti," the story of a boy/bearcub home alone with his dad while his mom is away on a trip. The kid is lonely and his dad is loving but a bit aloof and doesn't quite get what his little boy needs or is capable of. When Rim-Tim-Ti convinces his dad he's a big enough boy to go to the market and get the last egg to complete his dad's recipe for a "five-egg omelet," he meets a puppy. He wants to bring the puppy home, but dad will have none of it. Whatever Rim-Tim-Ti finds lovable in his "pyosik" (pup), the dad can't see -- all he thinks is this is a dirty "sobaka" (dog), and he refuses to let him in the house.


When Pyosik thwarts a fox/robber (who was surprisingly charming -- I thoroughly enjoyed the interlude where he is introduced and sings about how he's a "khooligan" to a crazy combination of a Russian bard's outcast song set to the tune and rhythm of a tango), and returns Dad's stolen pants, the father relents and lets Rim-Tim-Ti keep his friend.

Whether she is just a bit older, or the story was more engaging, or because we were seated right in the front row (or a combination of all three), Anya actually sat in pretty much rapt attention the entire hour-long performance.

The actors were all visible behind and above their puppets -- it was the kind of production where they make no effort to hide (you can kind of see what I mean in the large picture above, with the woman in the yellow hat manipulating Rim-Tim-Ti). The funny thing was, the actress bringing Pyosik to life looked really familiar to me, and I couldn't stop trying to figure out where I'd seen her before. All I could think is this was some famous actress (puppeteer?) from Russia, when finally in the last few minutes of the play I realized where I'd seen her: she had played Mashenka to Baba-Yaga in the New Year's production! (B.Y. made an appearance in "Rim-Tim-Ti," too, playing the brash & busty chicken/market-egg-saleswoman who sells Rim the 5th egg.) Once I realized that, I was starting to wonder whether this was truly the visiting troupe we'd been promised, but our sadik teachers reassured me that it was indeed the visiting company with a few local actors added into the mix.

Piknichok in the Hills

After some off-road exploration on the third or fourth dry day in a row, Dan boasted of the beautiful views and firm traction on the dirt paths out east of the city -- basically in the same direction I'd walked last week, but a lot further.

Today, after an afternoon and night of rain, we returned, only slip and slide our way over the terrain. There were only a few moments where my jaw was tightly clenched in order to stave off rolling down the hill. A big improvement over some of our off-road adventures in Primorskii Krai.

And it was indeed very beautiful:



When it started to rain again, we figured we ought to get moving or we might get mired in the hills, never to come down again. We escaped in time to help a 2-wheel-drive car out of the mud (thus christening our tow-rope), see both a sunshower and what I think was hail as we headed north on Omar Khayyam St., and pull into our courtyard just as the warm afternoon sun was returning in earnest.

Head For the Hills

I had a good writing day, and the weather outside was gorgeous, after a very, very rainy day yesterday. My treat to myself was to take a walk.

I headed east on Timur Malik and liked the look of the hills off in the distance, just over the crest:



And as it happens, that is exactly where I went.

I continued east past the students milling around at the Ag Institute, wide neckties and all. (Apparently another empty rule about form over substance in Tajikistan is that the men at institutions of higher education are required to wear ties. Some would say they ought to actually learn things and be encouraged to think critically before they're forced to do a Windsor knot each morning, but who am I to judge?)

Skirted south through the sorry little park in front of (our local) statue of Rudaki. Noticed a billboard that had a notice about what seemed to be repairs in the sorry little broken down park, and a photo mockup of better looking fountains in the park. Noticed the date was 21 April. Got interested. Then noticed it was 2007. Got a little disappointed.

Then I headed east again, on Karamova and decided, why not make my ascent close to home? I started my little climb just west of Tursunzoda. I passed the requisite group of kids who yelled stuff in English at me. Today it was "oh! let's go!" At least that's a little more creative than "hello!" Then I passed the requisite adolescent boys who greeted me in Russian. Then I got a young woman peeking out over a roof, who asked, strangely, whether I had a pen.

I continued a short way and the paved road ended, and a dirt path doglegged north and kept going upward. I rose up up up above the neighborhoods below me and got some beautiful views of the green foothills and the snowy mountains:


Then the Tajik woman who'd wanted the pen appeared again, and we had a friendly conversation in Russian. I continued on and two kids on bikes were hanging out enjoying the view. Had a short conversation in Tajik with the friendlier one, who, after of course asking me how old I was (another requisite question), said the Tajik equivalent of "dang, you're old!" (My main clue was 'pir.') Then I think he was trying to recommend some more good places to enjoy the view (I kept hearing 'tamosho'), but my Tajik was ebbing and I decided to leave while the time was right to have more walking time to myself. All in all, a very enjoyable afternoon treat!