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!

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.

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!

Keeping Tajiks Baffled, One Day at a Time

Anya and I went to the neighborhood open market on Sunday, before Dan got home from Kathmandu (via Delhi and Almaty), to get him some pickled mushroom salad. We sidled up to the sellers who deal in things marinated -- there is a little row of them, a few Tajiks who are off to the side (one a brother and sister pair, as far as I can tell, with the brother speaking only Tajik and the sister who can speak Russian), and then the three middle-aged ladies: one Tajik, one by all appearances Russian (but seems to jabber away in Tajik, so maybe the child of a mixed marriage?), one Korean.

The ladies were clearly talking about us and laughing good-naturedly, but too quickly in Tajik for me to really tell what they were saying. Then, when I heard "pampers," I remembered what they were chuckling about. I acknowledged it, and we all laughed together, and they switched into Russian for more commentary.

Anya had made sure that Bear was wearing a diaper for our outing (although ironically she herself opted for undies). The ladies thought that was pretty hilarious. And, honestly, it kind of was.

Tuesday we garnered stares and chuckles from the schoolkids on the avenue, too, as we pushed Bear along the street in the stroller. I guess being in a place where I so obviously do not blend in, together with a toddler -- who, even if you are able to pass, pretty much at any moment can blow your cover by blurting out a foreign word -- has all just made me relax into my role as crazy foreigner here in Tajikistan.

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Meanwhile, in other news:

Today I drove on the streets of Dushanbe -- taking Anya to sadik -- for the first time ever. Our car was finally issued license plates, and we are now toodling around town in "Our Car," as Anya calls it. Pretty amazing that it is now in our possession and driveable -- we have been here so long already without our own wheels that we've gotten used to getting around without it, but we are so glad to have the convenience now.

And, in something pretty much unrelated to the Dushanblog, I will be doing a couple of guest posts for a friend's blog devoted to global health issues this month -- who knew? Check out the Other March Madness here.

The Dinnertime Dispatch

Successful cooking ventures since arriving in Dushanbe:

• Beef curry stew with potatoes and peppers (secret ingredient: Kazakhstan packaged spice mix "Karri" [one of my more positive purchases at Sadbarg!]; secret technique: browning the stew chunks after first dredging in flour mixed with salt, pepper and spice)

• Cabbage, carrot and turnip/rutabaga? soup (the squat, roundish yellow root vegetable sold here in the markets remains a mystery to me -- even after scouring the Wikipedia page... I guess this is closest to a rutabaga, although the way it looks when sold really doesn't look exactly like the images I can find online)

• Apple tart -- gradually adapted from several recipes on Epicurious.com; just your basic flour-sugar-butter-salt-icewater dough, plus sliced apples, with cinnamon and honey and some more sugar, arranged on top, raisins optional (unless you are Anya, then they are de rigueur)

• Oatmeal cookies -- from this recipe (with the sole adaptation of substituting anise liqueur for vanilla extract -- thank you, Istanbul Airport Duty Free)

• Simple ground beef pasta sauce (secret shortcut ingredient: letcho [Hungarian stewed peppers] from a jar)

• Roast chicken and roasted root veggies (simple, but good...)

• Marinated strips of chicken breast (marinade ingredients: a whole lotta minced garlic, onions, lemon juice, and kefir and yogurt, coriander, cumin, and cayenne), pan-fried and eaten in a flatbread sandwich or over cilantro rice
  

• Pan-fried steak (well, it sounds easy, but can you really be confident you won't screw it up?)*
  

• Sour cream pancakes (quick and easy, and pretty tasty, too; recipe c/o The Big Book of Breakfast, often substitute some combination of kefir and yogurt for actual sour cream or local smetana)

* Meat/poultry note: I am still working my way up to the confidence to purchase the butchered meat sold hanging out in the open at the bazaars. So the beef we still buy from the counter at the nicer supermarkets in town, and the chicken is almost universally the Brazilian frozen imports sold in the same Western style supermarkets. But this week maybe I will screw up my courage and get some lamb, at 18 somoni or so per kilo.

Sad Barg

I went shopping today for some more little holiday gifts (Hanukkah? Christmas? who can say...) and left feeling just kind of fed up and depressed with local offerings. "Sadbarg" is sort of like a central department store, post-Soviet style. Meaning that in its interior halls it is filled to overflowing with a combination of little glassed-in storefronts and counters, but the goods on sale leave something to be desired.

They are OK -- I have kind of followed a strange trajectory on them. In the beginning everything just looked like cheap trash. Then I started to distinguish the super cheap from the sorta cheap and the things that were made with some degree of quality. The turtleneck sweater that I bought for Anya, to go together with a little pink sweater dress, for the kids' New Year's party at the Embassy this afternoon, both of Chinese manufacture, actually seems to be better than expected. Others have even commented that they're surprised I found it at Sadbarg. I'm tempted to go back and get another from Dilshod, the friendly proprietor of the glassed-in shop "Fashion Kids."

But I guess today I was on the downturn again, and everything just looked like shoddy crap to me. I think the way everything is crammed together, with very little rhyme and reason (OK, yes, clothing is generally separate, and there are other sections where drugstore-type items and cleaning supplies are sold, but there is still a sense that you might find the category of thing you're looking for or you might not -- I am a little tired of that insecurity and the subsequent need to traipse all over town if I really want to find a particular thing). And no wrapping paper in sight, just little Christmas bags.

*Sigh* Luckily I have a few things bought locally, and a few things bought online, and I think I'll be OK. And I am telling myself to buy some supplies for the future online, as they come on post-Christmas discount, and (as always) to think about this earlier in the year next time around!

Market Rounds, Part 2

(Hey, I'm an American, shopping is what we do, right?)

Seems like this is the norm for me: getting to know a new place is apparently tied pretty closely with figuring out where to buy stuff. I suppose that isn't very strange, after all. You appear in a new place, and you need to eat. You need your daily stuff, like soap, shampoo, etc. You need a few comforts that you may not have brought with you. You may have the benefit of a whole container-load of your existing stuff being sent behind you, but while you're waiting you probably need some things that, at packing time, didn't seem essential enough to stuff in the suitcase. DVDs to watch. A toy or two for the kid when the ones you've got are getting old or when she seems to be reaching a new stage. Warmer shoes when it starts to get colder and rain a bit. A hat or a scarf. Tupperware, or what passes for it in Tajikistan. Spices! You get my drift. So where do you find all this stuff?

Actually, it's sort of appropriate too that I'm thinking so much about shopping and "marketing" -- and not because we're in some ancient, bustling node on the Silk Road. Apparently Dushanbe ("Monday" in Persian/Tajik) was the site of a little settlement whose market day was Monday. The modern city, though, is pretty much a Soviet creation, and it dates to the 1920s, when the Red Guards rolled in, put down local resistance to Soviet-Russian rule, and took over the emirate of Bukhara. That was when they started to reshape this area into the republics of Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

The central, older part of Dushanbe is kind of laid out along a roughly north-south axis, along the river Varzob. (If you look at the link, you've got the river pretty clearly cutting through the center of your view; the main downtown of Dushanbe is laid out to the northwest of the hippodrome -- the easily identifiable oval to the east of the river. And all of that sprawl on the river's west bank is comprised of much more recent neighborhoods and prefab construction -- "novostroiki" -- built more after 1970.) We don't tend to venture out too far beyond that basic center of town, but we still seem to do a fair amount of traveling here and there.

In the beginning, it seemed like TsUM and the Green Market summed up our most frequent shopping experiences. TsUM was an obvious place for us to go, working as we were on the post-Soviet model, when we needed basic household things after we moved in, like plastics or kitchenware (we got the interim Minnie Mouse potty chair there, and some random plastic tubs for laundry and other stuff, those sorry excuses for Tupperware, that sort of thing).

Most of the expats or American diplomatic folks we met from the start tended to do their fresh food shopping at the central "Green Market." That place is impressive! And luckily I have already gotten fairly used to the dirty, loud, chaotic market experience and now can do it better than I could at one time. If in Vladivostok it just seemed like the wisest choice, where you ought to go for good quality produce at the right price, here in Dushanbe it seems to me that the Western style supermarkets really are almost not an option for produce. They carry some basics and some things that bazaar sellers just don't apparently bring in (although I'm still learning -- maybe oyster mushrooms really are available at the bazaar), but if you need a good range of basic fresh staples and root vegetables, you've got to just hit a regular open market and save the supermarket for what it's good at.

Without a car, the Green Market -- in the very center of town -- really isn't that great an option for me, so now I tend to go to our local bazaar, up at the north end of our neighborhood (and almost at the north end of town). It's much smaller than the Green Market (which really is defined at its main corner by a funny greenish building in that kitschy Orientalist style -- imagine a built style to match the cheesy "Sindbad" type lettering on the railroad station and the airport, and I think you get the picture). Ironically the Green Market is actually looking a little grey and sooty ever since about the time we arrived. Apparently warring bandits who were vying for control of the selling there set fire to the main building literally on the morning that I was first shown the market. When I walked past it the other day, it wasn't smoldering any more, but it still kind of just looked like charred heap of greenish metal. That doesn't mean the selling in the other parts of the bazaar doesn't continue unabated, though -- the market is really a sprawling entity that sort of starts at that green corner, but encompasses larger structures, smaller structures, outdoor territory, etc.

The Varzob neighborhood bazaar is more my speed, although of course it doesn't have the selection and variety (or the kind of rich-feeling Central Asian-y experience) you get at the Green Market. It's kind of just a plainish corner market -- it has a rectangular permanent building with sellers set up inside, food, housewares, clothes, etc. all piled up on glass-front display cases; several semi-permanent metal kiosk or trailer types of storefronts, each divided up into little cells and each of those with a seller inside; open produce areas, where people set up their wares on old dusty blue metal countertops; and then there are the butcher section, the hardware section, and the cooked food sections.

And while we're on the subject of fresh produce and where to find it (before I take a break and continue my shopping descriptions at a later time), I have to comment on the excellent dinner we had for the second time this week at the restaurant Yangtse Tian (I hope I'm spelling that correctly), complete with green and just a tad crunchy stir-fried bok choi. I don't know how they do it, but these people evidently truck the veg in from China! Some of our friends have named this place as their top restaurant in Dushanbe, and I think I'm close to placing it at the top of the personal favorites I've accumulated so far, too. And apparently a hall full of Chinese people whom I have yet to see on the streets of Dushanbe agree.