Apologies for the break – I was busy finishing a piece of writing and didn’t have any spare time to continue the Pamir roadtrip story.

Where were we? We were still on Day 2, having just arrived into Khorog, and were exploring the gardens at the Serena, while Dan napped off his stomach bug. We can cover the remainder of that day plus Day 3 (In Khorog) here.

By about 5 in evening Dan forced himself out of bed to show us a bit of the town, and we went to have a bite to eat and a pleasant time relaxing on the tapchans at the Chorbogh teahouse (operated by the group of Aga Khan organizations, just like the Serena – the AK development network seems to kind of run the Pamirs, or at least Khorog). The teahouse is situated just on the banks of the river Gunt, in a corner of the Khorog city park, with a raised platform hanging out over the river and the icy blue-green water rushing by below.

The town itself feels quaint and small, although it also has the bustling feel of a regional hub, and the center of town right next to the bazaar housed a constant crowd of travelers and touts and small-time sellers and minibuses and SUVs – the marketplace for anyone wanting to depart the Pamir region for west-central Tajikistan and not aiming to pay for one of the very limited airplane seats out of town (meaning almost any ordinary traveler).


Khorog is a border post, founded in the 1890s by the Russian military as the boundaries between British-controlled Afghanistan and Russian-controlled Central Asia were firmed up, so in a sense, although the town is picturesque, it isn’t surprising that it also has a hint of the rough and ready menace of a border station. And maybe because our visit coincided with a holiday weekend, including Tajikistan’s independence day, for which there was a large public celebration in the city park, there was also at times an ever so slightly trashy feel – drunks hanging around on the edges of the park, groups of men ranging around after the late afternoon breakup of the local football match, and literally lots of remaining litter lying around in the park after the main heaps of trash had been carted away on the actual holiday. So Khorog was a pleasant break during our travels but certainly not home to us, as tourists and visitors.

We had a peaceful stay at the Serena, got rested up, and refroze the ice packs from our cooler. Continued to meet up with random travelers you’d never imagine would bother to make their way to Tajikistan, although I suppose that for them that’s the point: the Pamirs in a real sense are the end of the world, following in Marco Polo's footsteps, that kind of thing. On our first evening we’d already met up with a group of San Diego based travelers in Kalai Khumb who were making their way from Osh in Kyrgyzstan (I was surprised, given the relatively recent violence there) to Dushanbe, by way of Khorog. They claimed they’d visited (or would soon have visited?) every country in the world. “There’s a group of us,” their ringleader noted, by way of explanation. Who knew? In Khorog we crossed paths at the Serena with a French family traveling in a 2-car caravan. They had driven overland all the way from Europe and aimed after an exploration of the Pamirs to end up in Tashkent, where their university-aged son had a reservation to fly out in a few weeks’ time.

We also spent a thoroughly enjoyable morning in the Khorog Botanical Garden, perched up on a hill above the Shakhdarya river, on the southeast edge of the narrow town. (Khorog is situated in a narrow gorge, where the Gunt runs westward and intersects with the northward flowing – at this stage – Oxus. It basically has room for one main east-west street on the north side of the Gunt and a few secondary ones parallel to it.) Not much more to report on here except a slow meander through the semi-wild gardens and admiring (and taking snapshots of) the flowers, groves, and the imposing and tacky new mansion the president of Tajikistan has built for himself at the edge of the grounds. (The Serena, where he used to stay, apparently is no longer good enough. But thinking about that made us realize, kind of ickily: ‘wait, if we splurged to stay in the deluxe suite at the Serena, probably we’re sleeping in the same bed where Rahmon has slept!?’)

The brief R&R was good for our peace of mind, and Dan began to feel better. After a phone consultation with our Dushanbe medical provider, he decided to get his hands on some metronidazole, on the suspicion that he’d gotten giardia. We had a moment’s doubt about whether we could find it in Khorog, but then we realized that the prevalence of stomach bugs in this part of the world meant that actually this was probably the easiest medicine to get your hands on in a local drugstore. And we were right. He started to improve after 1 or 2 doses of the meds.

On the negative side, Monday morning we got a phone call from Dushanbe, alerting us that, in addition to the recent 25-man jailbreak and reported suicide-bombing at government buildings in Khujand, there were now reports of a bomb (or a fight? in Tajikistan rumor is king) in a local Dushanbe nightclub on Saturday night. That was slightly unsettling news, although the rational mind would tell you that in the remote eastern Pamirs you’re about as safe from unrest and political violence as you can be in Tajikistan.

Another negative that was nagging at both Dan’s and my mind, as we prepared to set out on our eastern loop through some of the most remote and unprovisioned territory in the country, stemmed from the unfortunate fact that the X-Terra’s “Service Engine Soon” light had lit up just as we pulled into Khorog, and it hadn’t yet gone off. Although the message was ominously vague, after consulting the owner’s manual, we’d established with pretty good confidence that in fact it was primarily a warning about the emissions system. Bad gas from a brief refueling stop in Kulob, perhaps? We weren’t sure, but we convinced ourselves that it probably didn’t mean we were in danger of breaking down. We hoped.

After our second morning enjoying a hearty breakfast in the Serena dining room, overlooking the sunny garden and riverbank, we gassed up again at the much more trustworthy-looking main gas station in Khorog (hoping the possibly bad Kulob fuel might get diluted?), and set out southward on the road toward Ishkashim.

8 Days To the “Roof of the World”

I’m afraid my impressions of the trip we took over the recent short week (Labor Day for those who get US holidays, and 2 days off for Tajikistan’s Independence Day and Eid) are already fading, and I’m desperate to write them down and save them. At the same time I’m having that familiar feeling of anticipatory disappointment at the way that words and even the photos you’ve taken can only poorly convey an experience, even for your own memory.

This was a trip we, especially Dan, had been planning for months, a weeklong road trip to the remote Pamir mountains and plateau, Tajikistan’s “Autonomous Region of Mountainous Badakhshan” (abbreviated in Russian as GBAO). He went last year at about the same time for work, so he had a better idea of what we were in for, in all senses of the phrase, while my notion of the trip was more vague.

I knew our itinerary as we planned it – from pictures and the telling I had some ideas of what it meant, but largely it was just place names:

Saturday, Day 1. Dushanbe to Kalai-Khumb (368 km, approx. 8 hours)
Sunday, Day 2. Kalai-Khumb to Khorog (240 km, approx. 5½ hours)
Monday, Day 3. In Khorog.
Tuesday, Day 4. Wakhan: Khorog to Langar (215 km, approx 6 hours)
Wednesday, Day 5. Langar to Lake Yashilkul (~120 km, approx. 4 hours)
Thursday, Day 6. Lake Yashilkul to Khorog (~195 km, approx. 3.5 hours)
Friday, Day 7. Khorog to Kalai-Khumb (240 km, approx. 5½ hours)
Saturday, Day 8. Kalai-Khumb to Dushanbe (368 km, approx. 8 hours)

On the first leg we would take one of two possible routes to get from Dushanbe to the eastern region of Tajikistan: either the northern route, through the lower mountains and valleys due east of Dushanbe, traveling part of the route we took in March to see buzkashi in Gharm, via the Rasht valley, but shifting south and going through Tavildara; or the southern route through the agricultural expanses of Khatlon, the southern towns of Danghara and Kulob, rounding upward toward Badakhshan. For our sake and Anya’s, we’d break up the trip that most travelers make in a Herculean single drive of anywhere from 14 to 24 hours and more, depending on road conditions. From the middle ground of Darvoz (literally, “gateway,” in Persian) we’d climb to the chief city of GBAO, Khorog, and after a day’s rest and sightseeing there, we’d follow the looping Panj River (more familiar generally as the Oxus or Amu Darya) ending up moving east through the Wakhan Valley, a remote finger of lowland shared warily by Tajikistan and Afghanistan, with the Hindu Kush peeking out from the south. Then we’d skirt northward to the lower sections of the Murghab plateau, and, meeting the main Pamir Highway, we’d return westward, back to Khorog, and from there retrace our tracks homeward via Darvoz.

The earlier debate about the “two possible routes” quickly ended after the recent Dushanbe jailbreak. The prisoners supposedly had fled to Rasht, traditionally a base for the political opposition in all its incarnations, and security recommendations from the American Embassy pointed us firmly southward. It’s hard to explain, but the escape didn’t worry us very directly on personal safety grounds. It was mainly a confusing event – ultimately followed by several others this week, but as an isolated event it called into some slight question general political security here rather than promising hardened criminals around every bend. We didn’t feel any need to call off our trip, but we did follow the guidelines and avoid what was possibly the hottest spot in what was a slightly warmed over general security situation.

I’ll try to set down my impressions of the progressive stages of the trip here over the next few days. As the vagaries of planning would have it, this Friday we’re already setting off again on a long weekend trip from Dushanbe to Oslo that defies credibility. So my fears about preserving the impressions of the journey to the Pamirs are quite real.

For me it was an adventure, a getaway, an exposure to some of the most dramatic and inspiring landscapes I have ever seen. It was a weird inside-out, through-the-looking-glass kind of experience, a trip both outward and inward: staying within Tajikistan, yet going to the edge of its borders, to a region that is extremely different and otherworldly in many respects. Going further inside and in a way digging a level deeper into the isolation and remoteness of our existence here, and yet traveling out into vast expanses, getting away from our physical and psychological lives at home in Dushanbe, away from the everyday. Depression makes you burrow in, in ways that you don’t even recognize, and it’s a gift to be able to escape, even if the return is difficult and the changes you’re able to envision during that reprieve and pledge to yourself that you’ll make threaten to slip through your fingers like the light dust blowing all along the road. You hope that, like that dust in another way, they’ll settle in quietly and barely noticed through every crack and crevice, and all but become a part of you.

Summer in Dushanbe Is...

• A month-long break from sadik.
• (In connection with the former:) Visits to the many new indoor play centers that have opened recently in our fair city, replete with those pools filled with small plastic balls, jungle gyms, climbing apparatuses, rides, little huts to play peekaboo in, etc.
• Rides in just about the only elevator in town -- and humorously quaint views out the window. (Elevator conveniently located in the same shopping center as one of our favorite play centers.)

• New nightgowns -- we love Hello Kitty.
• Hot sun. And a new bit of shade in our formerly burning hot, shadeless yard (see below -- the white canopy, just a corner of which is visible).
  
• Pools, small and large. With and without views of the mountains. At home and away.

• Watermelons!
• Qurutob* (I'm ashamed to admit that this summer I have had only my first taste of this salad, despite its widespread popularity here. I've been very tempted to order it out, but both years we've lived here, by the time I've gotten around to really wanting it, the warm season has already arrived and with it a serious increased danger of getting food poisoning from something like that. This taste was much better: homemade by our housekeeper in a home-based Tajik cooking lesson.)
  

* Qurutob, a south Tajik bread salad
serves 4

3 medium ripe tomatoes
3 medium cucumbers
4 small onions
5 green onions
2 bunches of cilantro
1/2 liter of plain yogurt
1 loaf of fatir (crispy Central Asian flatbread made with oil -- fairly different from Middle Eastern or Arabian fatir, as far as I can tell)
1/4 - 1/2 cup of vegetable oil or butter

1. Seed and finely chop tomatoes and cucumbers, and mix in a bowl. Set aside.
2. Cut onions into small, thin moon-shaped slices, or simple half-circle slices. Divide in half. Set aside.
   
3. Chop the green onions and cilantro finely, mix, and set aside.
4. Warm the fatir in the oven on low heat, if it isn't already warm from having been homemade. (Yeah, right. Although where exactly are you going to get the fatir in the US if you don't make it at home?) Remove from the oven and rip into bite sized pieces, placing the pieces into a large bowl. (If you have a flat-ish wooden turned bowl made out of walnut from the mountains of Tajikistan, all the better.)
5. Pour the yogurt (it works best if it has a moderately liquid consistency; if the yogurt is pretty thick, add some water and stir well) over the fatir pieces and mix so that all the bread gets some yogurt and soaks in a bit of liquid.
6. Arrange in layers on top of the fatir-yogurt mixture: first the cucumber-tomato mixture, then the onions, then the greens/green-onion mixture.
7. Put about 1/2 cup of butter or vegetable oil in a small skillet, and warm on medium-high heat. Add onions when oil or butter is fully warmed and/or melted, and stir and fry for about 5 minutes, until translucent. (At this point you can add salt and pepper to taste.) Pour the onions and the oil all together over the salad mixture, so that the oil can evenly trickle down throughout as a kind of warm dressing, and so that the fried onion is evenly distributed on top.
8. Serve immediately -- especially when made with butter or butter-like ghee, the oil will congeal and make it less appealing if you don't. (If you really want to get Tajik, eat out of the common large bowl in the middle of the table, using your hands to take a little bit from your edge, mixing the layers together, and lifting up carefully to your mouth. Repeat until you're full of qurutob!)

Sadik Graduation: A Bit of Cultural Context

I posted a video clip and some photos today from Anya's preschool year-end pageant. There were a whole lot of dance numbers and a wonderful spread of food, with the landlord's plov as the centerpiece. The evening was a lot of fun, not least for us personally because of how Anya showed to what extent she has come out of her reserved shell in the last several months, capping this year in preschool with a dance "solo."

I guess I feel the need to explain a bit, though. There was one number that made us feel a bit uncomfortable for the way race played a role, and although I loved Anya's own Eastern dance number, it occurs to me that it's possible someone unfamiliar with the cultural context might wonder what was happening with her short routine.

First, race. The kids did a group routine to the tune of "Chunga-Changa," a song from the Soviet-era cartoon "Katerok (Little Boat)." You can see the original 1970 animated version here. When we saw Anya come out together with her classmate O. to dance in costume amid their peers, we were a little surprised that the one child with an African parent was cast in a piece with that name, in outfits made to look like classically imagined "native dress."

The song is a little paean to a simple life of plenty on the desert isle to which the Little Boat in the cartoon gets blown off-course in a storm: the lyrics celebrate the "miraculous island's" blue skies, year-round summer climate, and the diet of coconuts and bananas that one apparently adopts once one is grounded there. On that level, one can probably read the song and the cartoon scenes as a simple daydream about escaping the life of shortages and difficulty in the Soviet Union. The trouble for a person born in the post-Civil Rights United States comes in where the somewhat stylized figures of black children enter (which is almost immediately), complete with curly heads of hair and what look like grass skirts. To me this looks like the product of a centuries-long distance from African and Afro-Caribbean colonialism, and the twentieth-century relationship of the Soviet state to the Third World and Africa and the Caribbean, with a dash of Russian old-school Romantically informed views about the immutable and inherent qualities of race (and, for that matter, gender).

Obviously, cultural relativism in this situation could be seen as no different from agreement and support. I'm still honestly not sure what to think of the way the teachers staged this piece, but I guess for now I think it's best to assume that this is primarily about a fondly remembered Soviet-era cultural artifact and that the bit was being staged with all the best intentions, and basically to leave it at that. (After all, so much of what the kids in our sadik do, especially at their pageants, comes from exactly the same nostalgic place: witness fondness for the Soviet incarnation of the Ded Moroz-Baba Yaga story that people in the post-Soviet world are truly loathe to part with.)

(I should mention too that this dance number at the preschool was preceded by an intro about how delightfully international our particular group of kids is, and more generally praising in broad strokes the multitude of difference kinds of people and nations in the world, complete with each kid waving the flag of his or her parents home country. Never mind that that becomes complicated with so many of our preschool's families in dual national households: the point was just to do one of those simple celebrations of the "thousand flowers" blooming together, to praise the "friendship of the peoples." More Soviet-era concepts re-imagined in the post-Soviet (re-)developing world, where expat NGO and diplomatic families and some locals can afford to pay for a better quality private day-care/preschool than what is offered officially on the local market.)

True, after seeing the dance number, there may be a place for commenting to the teachers about the role they chose for O. (I will note that O.'s European mother didn't seem to mind a bit that her son was cast in the piece, although she could have simply been keeping her reaction inside. When I talked to some of our fellow parents about it later, we all agreed that she and her family have to be used to the very different views about race that people hold in the former Soviet Union. Whether that makes it OK is a different question, but I wouldn't be surprised if in fact she wasn't phased by it.) But are our own American views and cultural associations with race so perfect that we can go around lecturing to Tajiks or Russians about their assumptions?

It might also be appropriate for us to engage our kids in conversation about race after the performance, but I tend to think that 3 and a half is young to have a talk about these things. I think my view is that here, as in other aspects of our social relations, it's probably better just to model tolerance and openness to our kids, rather than to have overt discussions about how the world works (and ought to work), to show by doing rather than to instruct by talking. (Part of that I hope is the way we interact with O., and I do think that part of the reason it took me a split second to notice the weirdness of the casting in the dance number precisely because I don't notice O.'s race. It's only because of the dance number that I'm even thinking about his skin color, really.)

Incidentally, if you want to know more about how race is discussed in Russia and in the former Soviet Union's cultural sphere, this Russian-language article on Wikipedia is actually quite insightfully written. There are a few spots where I start to wonder what the author's own biases are, but for the most part I think it explains really well the differences I've noticed in over 20 years of direct contact with Homo sovieticus and visiting his (and her) habitat.

OK, with all of that as prelude, just take a look at the photos and videos for yourself. I will try to explain my position on 3-year-olds doing something that resembles belly dancing next time, but in the meantime I'll just say that I look at the whole belly dancing thing as an art form, and one whose moves and shiny costumes truly fascinate kids. I'm really glad that Anya, whose dancing always has an Eastern flair to it, probably because she's spent these formative years in Central Asia, did this particular dance for her little year-end solo.

Flowers Multiply As Spring Nears

There were some direct requests for photos of the embroidery, so in addition to what I had up there before, here are some more.

Project #1: One Flower

This is the same one I included a different picture of in the original post.



Project #2: Three Flowers, With Shading

This is the one I completed over the fall and winter. At a slow and relaxed pace.

This is the sort of abstract style of shading that this studio uses a lot. My teacher showed me a piece from I guess probably 5 years ago that they had done, which was more like my first project, without shading. She commented that they had developed the shading method in response to people's tastes. (She teaches young girls, mainly, but then the studio also accepts orders from brides and people who want holiday doilies and stuff, so I think the more experienced older girls are the ones who work on those projects.) Anyway, I guess this stuff is constantly evolving, as culture does -- even ostensibly "traditional" culture.

As I commented on Flickr, locals prefer brighter colors than I would choose. My teacher also praised these synthetic yarns over natural fiber from the very beginning, because she says they wash better and therefore survive over time. The American students and I who originally started out with the lessons all figured that, since we weren't likely to wash these very often, we'd rather have colors more attractive to our palette, but this was the best we could do.



Project #3: The Race to Navruz

This is the Tajik national dress, or chakkan, that I'm working on now. We are trying to finish this by the Navruz holiday 3 weeks from now. I'm further along than 2 flowers, but I still don't see how it will be done in time.

You can see here that my teacher draws the pattern on the fabric (she has a whole library of patterns to trace from), and then we talk about how I'll fill it in, and then I set to it. (She is helping me a lot with completing the dress, but I still am lobbying for her to lose the Navruz deadline.)

This fabric was apparently something the girls at the studio hadn't seen before. The yarn is all bought by my teacher, but for this I went and cruised the fabric stalls at Green Market to see what I could find that I was least unlikely to wear. Baby blue satin was the best I found, and all the girls oohed and aahed over it as the sewing studio teacher quickly snip-snipped through the much-used pattern for kurta and PJ pants.



The fabric is wicked shiny, so unfortunately my photos of this are coming out badly. I'm not a very good photographer, obviously.

Coda: Suzani

I still really have to dig more to understand the difference between suzani and gulduzi. As I said before, it seems to me that gulduzi describes a method, while suzani describes an object and its function. But I'm still not sure. And part of me is thinking that suzani is one of these words that I keep discovering is really just a Russian colonial word that isn't even used in the Central Asian vernacular (e.g. plov [in reality in Tajik, 'oshi palau': rice pilav dish with regional variation], khalat ['chapan': man's quilted coat], tebiuteka ['toqi,' I think: headwear, esp. man's squarish hat]).

Anyway, here is the best example of suzani that we have at home (unlike many of our friends, we haven't invested heavily in the embroidery market). We bought this pomegranate composition last June in Bukhara, and supposedly it was made by hand by a group of women who included the daughter of the man who owned the little shop, in one of the covered markets in the old city.





If you look closely, you can see that in fact this is actually done in a very different stitch than what I'm doing -- it's more of a chain stitch (zangjirak, I now know) than the flat, long stitch that predominates in the style I am learning. So I wonder whether that also enters into what is defined as suzani vs. gulduzi. I don't know, and of course my Tajik informants are not really all that into the finer points of categorization. I think I need to finally take my embroidery teacher up on her offer to go to the ethnography museum and explore with her their examples of embroidery to get more of the story.

Flowers in Winter

What's been happening these last few weeks in Tajikistan, you ask?

Quite a lot.

Maybe my explanation of The Rogun Powerplant Drama either didn't make sense or wasn't very interesting to anyone who reads this regularly (I know, you don't number all that many, and probably the bulk of you are more interested in the Anya report than in updates on the political or social situation in and around Dushanbe). Or maybe you just decided that the long arm of the Tajik government might reach out and bite you if you commented? In any case, if you had spent the past month here, you would see to what farcical and more serious (although not yet that serious) extremes the whole enterprise has played itself out.

The forced deductions from people's salaries continue, and reports are also piling up about people (and organizations) receiving "strong suggestions" to purchase blocks of shares to support the hydropower station. Those suggestions have supposedly been backed by very real consequences: students can't take (or pass) exams; car owners are blocked from registering their cars; and there are some vague reports that the health ministry requires citizens to show proof of purchase of their Rogun shares (for what? all I can assume is for getting health care, or maybe access to their health insurance?).

For those who work with the bureaucracy I think it's been a pretty demoralizing time, although since I don't have a lot of direct interaction of that kind I have not been experiencing the same level of negative feeling.

For me, I've been getting more active locally -- doing a little bit of charity work, getting active in my next research project, on malaria in Tajikistan in the 1920s and 30s (finally, after finishing the Draft That Would Not End, based on Vladivostok materials), and continuing with a few different outlets for improving my Tajik, where I do finally feel I'm making some progress.

Back in the summer I added to my Tajik language lessons one additional way to practice language: I started taking embroidery lessons. (The most well known word for Tajik/Uzbek embroidery among expats in Central Asia is suzani, but apparently this really describes the object -- only some of the particular kinds of embroidered decorations -- produced using this method of embroidery. The craft method that I am learning, and which I guess is used to create those suzanis, is called gulduzi [гулдӯзӣ, literally "flower-sewing"] in Tajik.)


In some ways this embroidery stuff seems totally crazy: both in the way that even a 1.5 hour lesson barely fits in my week, as well as in the way that at first glance this seems like something only a "lady of leisure" would do. But I think it's good for two reasons: first, because it does allow me to have a little more chance to hear and try to speak Tajik, outside of class. But also, because men and women live in such separate spheres in Tajik culture (traditional Tajik culture -- which still accounts for so much more of the total culture here than it would in many other places in the world), and because women's roles are so prescribed (again, at least for those women who are not in the middle or upper class, that is, those whose lives tend to be more traditional), this actually seems to me to be one real, authentic way of interacting with some of my natural peers -- Tajik women.

Sure, I could have a local friend who, in education and interests and life situation, was a bit more like me, and I would interact with her by, I guess, going out for a coffee or having lunch or getting together for a play date with our kids. But I haven't yet found that person. It's not that she doesn't exist. It's not even that she wouldn't speak Tajik -- although the probability is, as far as I can tell, that a peer in terms of education and class probably would be more likely to speak Russian in her daily life and more generally live in the European (which in Tajikistan means Russian) style. I think in theory she probably exists, but she is rare. Mainly I just haven't had the opportunity to find her.

Anyway, embroidery class is fun, and it's a totally different way of interacting with a few local women (and girls: I study with a lady at a local NGO who gives daily lessons to groups of Tajik girls between the ages of 8 and 16. Teaching them embroidery is viewed in part as a way of giving these girls a skill that they can use to earn money even within the confines of their more traditional, home-bound lives into adulthood. It's a strategy that isn't unique to this NGO -- I've heard others engaged in this kind of training. In the months I've been visiting the sewing studio I've started to reflect -- undoubtedly with the help of the meditative process of embroidering -- on that development strategy and have kind of decided that it is a bit lame and overly accommodating of the very misogynistic tendencies in contemporary Tajik culture. But I guess I still enjoy the activity and the unique kind of contact it gives me, so... I continue to participate in it).

So far I've learned the 3 basic stitches and have completed one mini doily-square (see photo) and one larger doily-square, the smaller of which I guess I'd like to frame or something for Anya. I know how to say "my yarn has a knot" in Tajik ("Решта гиреҳ зад."). I keep forgetting the damn Tajik word for "scissors." I have only seriously pricked myself once with the needle and have (surprisingly) only once sewed my needlework onto my own clothes. An important element of the whole method is that we sit on the floor on a traditional Tajik cushion (курпача), surrounding a low little table that is like a Western table that has had its legs chopped off halfway down. We sit with our backs propped up against pillows, and our knees folded up at a loose angle, and we have to keep the right edge of the fabric that constitutes our embroidery project fastened in place by holding it between our knees. That is actually an important element that our teacher always needs to remind me to do. Somehow the friend who used to take the class with me in summer got away with using a safety pin (сӯзанак) to anchor her project to her right knee and sitting cross-legged. I just keep forgetting the suzanak.

I'm now on my third project, which is probably a tad ambitious: my teacher decided I was ready to embroider the flower pattern all over a set of Tajik national loose-fitting pants and dress (kurta, or chakkan), all to be completed (and worn!?) in honor of the Persian world's start-of-spring holiday, Navruz (March 21). So I have just under 6 weeks to finish, and I think I am done with all of 4 flowers -- woefully under par by my calculations. But it continues to be fun, and if all else fails I will aim to wear it on Navruz 2011.

Back to the Future

Dedicated viewers of Tajik TV yesterday were treated to a silly all-encompassing tribute to an impromptu holiday: a National Day of Solidarity in Honor of the Construction of the Rogun Hydropower Station. Or something along those lines.

Basically Rogun (technically "Roghun" in Tajik) has been the quiet theme of all the ever-present yet continually changing large billboards in Dushanbe throughout December. New Year's wishes couldn't be avoided, so Rogun couldn't have center stage all to itself, but it was there waiting in the wings.

Once New Year's was over, Rogun quickly jumped in to dominate the billboards: "Have YOU contributed to the foundation of Rogun HPS??" sternly queries the banner hung over the recently opened and now smoothly asphalted Tursunzade Avenue. (Somehow they resisted the urge to have a photo of either President Emomali Rahmon or national historical hero Ismoili Somoni there with a finger pointing, a la Uncle Sam or the Soviet equivalent.) Billboards in the usual places were joined by those at unfamiliar points, like right outside the recently constructed (in grandiose post-Soviet style) Youth Palace where we hope to take a try at the sauna this weekend, and at other random street corners where you normally just see a guy in a quilted chapan wobbling by on his bike with a pile of brooms tethered to the rear.

Then yesterday it all really reached its zenith, with performances on those unexplained stages that had been erected on Opera Square and right by aforementioned Youth Palace, and (somewhat small) crowds and TV cameras gathered round. And it was all capped off by the simultaneous TV coverage at night: as far as I could see all the stations were broadcasting the same thing, kind of like during a State of the Union address with the American president on at least all the network channels as you surf through them.

Rogun power station was started under the Soviets but abandoned after the union's collapse and Tajikistan's slide into civil war, in the mid 1990s. Now, plagued by the difficulties of being dependent on other independent countries (mainly the spiteful one in Uzbekistan) for power at the colder points in the year, when Tajikistan's means of generating power tends to be all locked up in snow and ice, Tajikistan is intent on completing Rogun and gaining true energy independence.

The trouble is, to build it they are "requesting" that the population of the country -- one of the poorest around -- invest in the construction and buy shares in the company. Yesterday was dedicated to that, and the TV coverage jumped all over the map of the country -- interviewing people in the South, in the North, in Hissor, in Khujand, everywhere -- about their pride in that investment and what it means for the future of their country (and interspersing these mini-interviews with silly music videos of songs dedicated to Rogun). Interesting how nobody they talked to seemed to have any problem with giving their hard-earned money over for this purpose...

To me the whole thing is so very sad: where will this well earned and saved money really go? Why couldn't the government gain the confidence of any foreign investors in this project? How many of the somoni invested will truly go toward supporting the project? For that matter, will the station even really get built?

And as if all of the forced hoopla to mobilize support for heroic, earth-moving projects meant to wrench a country out of its misery and into modernity and independence didn't give Russian historians enough deja-vu, true to form, just as Dan predicted (and those who've read Richard Stites will chuckle to learn), today a little baby boy named Roghunshoh (King Rogun) came into the world in a district close to Khujand.

(I'm surprised to learn that, not only could he possibly be rocked by great-grandma Elektrifikatsiya or dandled on the knee of great-grandpa Traktor, but he could conceivably have a cousin in Russia named Viagra?! I guess say what you will, but at least in Tajikistan, the more things change, the more they really do stay the same -- for better and for worse.)

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.

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!

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!

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!