The Loooong Walk Home

Today we took an unnecessarily long walk home from sadik. I got there early enough to have to ring the bell (the guard doesn't unlock the gate until 12:30), but it took so long to get Anya suited up for the chilly, slushy walk and then the journey itself took enough time that we got home and ready for nap only by 2:15, about an hour later than usual.

I'm trying to make Anya walk on her own two legs more these days, rather than carrying her the majority of the time. She seems to agree to this more readily more for her dad than for me, and I'm not exactly sure what the trick is. From my perspective, I'm putting my (her) foot down partly because she is so darn heavy and partly because I often have other stuff to carry, like today with two medium-weight bags of holiday items from a shopping trip in town.

Anya really doesn't care for this walking thing, and I constantly have to stop and cajole and convince and distract, with much whining and rather fake crying in the mix. As other parents of toddlers will surely attest, it takes forever to get anywhere, since I really don't want to give in and teach her that she can have her way that way. I try to get her to meet me halfway, and I tell her 'if you walk to such-and-such a landmark, I'll carry you until this-other-landmark, but you gotta help me out because Mommy has all these heavy bags!'

Our trip takes us from near the corner of former Karl Marx Street and Tursunzode Avenue, a bit less than a kilometer west to Rudaki Boulevard; an unfortunate 200 meters more along Rudaki whether north or south to get to the bus stop, since we are poorly placed in the middle; and after about 3 stops on the bus, about a half kilometer walk again west to our house, which is roughly here. (The links spit out the wiki map with the location I'm talking about at the center of the screen, right underneath the small crossmark, in case you are interested enough to follow along with my description with cartographic aid.)

Luckily we don't have to do this all that often. All 9 of the other rides we need between sadik and home during the week we have been getting from our sometime driver, but on Fridays he can't work after 12 noon. And our car is in an undisclosed location somewhere between here and Antwerp (and even when it does arrive, we expect a harried bureaucratic battle over registering the vehicle with its illegally tinted windows). So, at least for the next month, maybe two, we have some decisions to make about how we make the trip on our own steam.

In principle, we don't have to do the trip this way -- we could take a cab, which would cost $3 maximum. And I guess that probably sounds cheap, and I seem like a crazy person to go on foot. There seems to be some part of me (the part that believes in public transportation, I guess?) that thinks: we are able-bodied people, and there is a public bus that runs most of the way between this location and our destination, so why would we take a taxi all the time for this routine trip that we make? I don't know, I guess I'm kind of still figuring out what our habits ought to be. And I think it's just the principle of the thing -- for trips I make that are not routine, I will readily hail a cab, but for something like this it seems like we ought to be able to do it on the bus (an 18 cent ride; 15 cents if you get a trolleybus).

I mean, what would we do in an American city? I got a small sense of the stroller culture in NYC when I was there in November, although mainly I was just relishing the chance not to have to pay attention to kid-related things. There have been a few times here where I've used the stroller for this trip, leaving it in the courtyard at sadik while I go about my business and Anya's inside, but it still is not the most obvious solution. (We of course never quite got into any consistent habit of using a stroller to get around over Anya's first two years while we lived in hilly Vladivostok, where sidewalks and stretches of even, stairless pavement were both rarities.)

Using the stroller for this trip has its own challenges. The pavement isn't all that much more even in Dushanbe than it was in Vlad (although you might be surprised -- the capital of the poorest former Soviet republic does generally beat the Pacific port city on sidewalks and walkability, hands down). Our neighborhood does happen to have pretty rutted road surfaces, but that is still manageable.

I think it's more the street-to-bus transition that is the problem for me. The ironically good thing about riding the bus in Tajikistan is of course that here people (OK, men) are very ready to help a woman with a stroller lift it up onto the bus. Not to mention the readiness with which people on public transportation give up seats for even young women with a heavy load of kid or inanimate luggage. Basically I stand at the back door to the bus and start to heave the load upwards, and the money-taker guy who stands in the center of the bus himself and whatever men are standing toward the rear swoop in quickly and help me lift it all the way in. (I have tried this trip with the stroller folded up, holding both it and Anya, but it is a lot to manage with just two arms, and the problem of the dirty, muddy wheels also distracts from the theoretical beauty of this approach. They brush up against my own coat and pants or, worse, someone else's. So in more recent trips I've started just hoisting stroller plus kid into the bus -- with help, of course -- without separating the two or folding either of them up.)

As long as the bus isn't too crowded (unfortunately not a situation you can totally count on), the stroller seems to me to be the best option, and although you have a few seconds of pain getting everyone both on and off, I think it may pay for itself in time not spent listening to whining or carrying a heavy toddler in my aching arms.