What IS That Smell?

I think I have only really described this to one other person on email before. In fact, here is a quote, one of the first times I took the opportunity to sit and express to someone back home my impressions of our new home in Dushanbe:

"The house is big and weird and has stinky bathrooms (something about the plumbing: they are nice, in principle, just looking at the fixtures, but when you flush it seems like you disturb some vast collection of turds right under the little vent in the floor. I guess on the bright side, you don't have to be embarrassed when you stink the place up yourself due to a bout of Somoni's revenge...). OK, probably more than you wanted to know..."

Yeah, well, again, probably more than anyone needs to know, but in the last 48 hours it seems like maybe that vast collection has morphed into an angry army. What's the deal down there? Our bathrooms are the stinkiest places.

Here is a link to the smell.

(Ha, fooled you. Too bad that, with all of the technological advances that Google has introduced, you can't go to GoogleSmell and download a sample sniff of something. Or maybe, as you are probably thinking, thank god that isn't [yet] possible...)

Actually, wonder of wonders, it turns out someone else already had that very same thought.

Yeah, I guess by now chances are, if you think of it, someone else out there has probably already blogged about it. Isn't that about the size of it?

A Similarly-themed What We're Saying:
Our latest little game with Anya is to ask how you say something in Russian. Wouldn't you know it, she can tell us correctly that "diarrhea" is "ponosik" in Russian. (And the thing that kills me about this is that, more often than not, when we play this little game, the translation she comes up with is a diminutive form of the correct word (e.g., ponosik, not ponos). Why? Because that's the way people talk to little kids in Russian -- they are always using the diminutive, and apparently that applies to diarrhea, too. For some reason that is just hilarious to me.)

There are much cuter things I can report from other exchanges, but I'll leave the topic for now and won't tarnish their cuteness by mentioning them in the same post as that one.