Around (Part of the) World in the Past 80 Days

A non-chronological rundown from A to Z of what I’ve neglected to report since I last wrote:

A – Archives, in both Russia and Tajikistan. I have been surprised in the last six weeks to learn just how much bureaucracy and apparently arbitrary and informal adjustments to bureaucratic rules really do differ between TJ and RU. I’m sorry I have to be reminded, but I do often forget that it is wrong to lump these two together into a single category. If you want to be wowed, I suggest you work for several months just trying to get registered and allowed to see documents in the sad national archive of a regressing Central Asian nation, and then go overnight to the beautiful oasis of the main reading room at GARF (State Archive of the Russian Federation), with its computerized index system and terminals at each reader station. But be careful not to faint from shock.


B – Buzkashi. The art of dragging around a goat carcass and fighting over it from your position atop a galloping horse. See photo essay.


C – Cheeses. Twelve of them, packed in multiple plastic bags, ziplocs, and stuffed together with a gift freezer pack in Paris into suitcase #3, only to emerge upon arrival in Tajikistan still cool and smelling wonderful. Now awaiting experimental freezing.


D – Disease. Luckily for Anya, only “angina” which, I guess contrary to our use of the word in English (from the Latin for choking or congestion) in reference to chest constriction and heart disease, in French refers to something like tonsillitis or strep throat. It was the sickest she’s actually been her whole life, but she was still a trooper. And our visit to the French pediatrician in Tonnere, France, renewed our already high respect for socialized medicine – bring on that Obamacare, thank you very much!


E – Embroidery. To my great disappointment, I must admit, the needlework has stalled out! But for a good reason: renewed research inspiration and necessity (much-procrastinated research trip to Moscow) made me turn away from the embroidery kind of right at the point where I was going the strongest on it, unfortunately. But I am really glad to feel the new boost in creativity and production, and the work is fun. Whether to keep up with the crafts in this current phase of Dushanbe life is my next decision…


F – France. Mmmmm, 2 weeks binging in the heartland of duck confit, terrine and paté, fromages hard and soft (especially soft and runny Epoisses and Chablis, my favorite of our discoveries), red wine (Burgundy, to be exact), and escargots (Anya to Dan: “dai mne eshche ulitku! [give me another snail!]”). Throw a few raw oysters – and whelks and winkles – on top and you pretty much have our vacation in a nut (or snail) shell.


G – Grandparents. Had a great time with 2 of them in the French countryside – Anya for 2 days longer than we did, and apparently all 3 of them had a blast.


H – Hotels, good and bad. FYI, in Autun, it's probably wise to splurge on the Hotel les Ursulines up in the old town, with the beautiful enclosed garden, despite the nondescript rooms. The incompetent front desk manager at the Hotel St. Louis et de la Poste downtown (together with the single, yet surely not solitary, cockroach we spied) made that one a bust. And the experience kind of ruined the whole next 24 hours, to be honest.


I – Insects. Fleas to be precise, which are the most bothersome ones that have visited us (and apparently left, during our vacation) over the last few months. But with the onset of spring the aphids on the fruit trees in our yard have also come out of hibernation. We are trying to spray with soap and water, but is it possible that Central Asian aphids are immune to this approach?


J – Jeans. In addition to the fact that the fashion right now is very clearly to tuck these into your tall, but flat-heeled, boots, I gleaned many other fashion tid-bits during my many hours walking from archive to archive, and people watching, in Moscow.


K – Kyrgyzstan. In truth, this doesn’t really deserve to be on this list, since ironically (and probably luckily) we could hardly feel further from the unrest and changes there. That is not to say that it might not spill over – you definitely never know. But so far it really seems not to have one iota of an influence here in Tajikistan, and in a practical way for us that is a good thing. In the larger picture I am not so sure that it is in the best interests of Tajikistan’s citizenry to be so complacent, but I am not complaining right now. The “revolution” – or maybe “coup” – occurred while I was in Moscow, and actually I probably knew more about it learning about it from that location than from home in Dushanbe, since while I was there I had the time and the inclination to watch the news quite diligently (and even discuss all of the very interesting, mainly tragic or disturbing, current events, from Kyrgyzstan to Katyn to the Moscow metro, with my landlady). It kind of felt like I was at the center of a much more connected universe while I was in Moscow, while here in Dushanbe everything typically seems very insular, very isolated from what is happening in the outside world. In any case, I include this mention here mainly since so many people have asked us about events in the neighboring ‘stan.


L – Lady drivers. It seems I’m one of them again. More precisely, for some reason when spring arrives in Tajikistan, not only do the local men do a typical double-take for women walking and perhaps wearing something pretty (a revealing mid-calf kurta, or what have you), apparently they also have a habit of looking twice and even staring when they see a woman behind the wheel. Come to think of it, women and kids will crane their necks to check it out, too. It’s just that shocking a sight to see.


M – Moscow! What a big, bewildering city it really is – I had a great time, and although after two and a half weeks there I was ready to get back to the slow pace of life in Dushanbe (and my peeps), the hustle and bustle was pretty fun to experience. It was my first time really living in the city (and right downtown, in a great location, steps away from Kievskaya metro station) and exploring it myself – the town I know best is Petersburg, and Nizhnii Novgorod I suppose is a close second. (Sorry, Vladivostok, I guess you take bronze.) I think I might not even mind spending some extended time in Moscow in the future (although maybe I’d get sticker shock if we really were to live there for a stint, not just visit short term).


N – Navruz. After a week of sun and warmth leading up to the biggest Central Asian holiday of the year, with people getting positively punch-drunk on the weather, it was a big dud. Rainy and cold. Certainly not inspiring for anyone to wear their new kurta, especially if it is still far from being completed…


O – Other scholars/academics. This spring has brought a lot more contact with researchers here in this part of the world, surprisingly many of them here in Dushanbe. It started with the German grad student, studying Soviet history, whom I met by sheer luck near the end of her 5 year stint here in Dushanbe. (5 years because she is also a spouse and mother raising her small kids here; she wasn’t spending the entire time doing full-time dissertation work.) Then it gathered steam with the grad students I met in Moscow, and now, partly because it is summer (those US based academics are smart: avoid Tajikistan in the winter. What a good idea!), there are 3 grad students here in town whom I know. I also met an inspiring independent scholar from Canada and I hope soon to formally meet the German scholar who was working at the desk next to me at the archives today. It’s gotten to the point that I am seriously planning to have an academic dinner party soon, before some of these folks cycle out of here and the population dwindles again.


P – Potty Progress. Hooray! Big girl undies (thin, no soaker panel) + possibly an unusual time-out from preschool teachers in response to her last real accident = I guess a month or more of dryness and a nearly perfect (I’d say ‘spotless’ but that wasn’t actually our problem…) record with trips to the toilet.


Q – “Quiet time.” This was how I explained to Anya what the side chapels in the several French cathedrals we visited were for. She started wanting to go in them with me to catch some together.


R – Rain. Unfortunately we departed from rainy spring weather in Tajikistan (where it is at least warm) only to be met by rain and half-century record low temperatures hovering at or under 10C in France. And now we've returned to TJ, where the rains are just an annoyance in Dushanbe but have left over a thousand people homeless and camped out in the stadium in the southern city of Kulob. Anya and I tried to make a small contribution to help Monday when we brought 4 bags of things of hers and mine that are either no longer worn or have been outgrown to donate for local efforts to assist in Tajikistan’s south.


S – Spring! and the arrival of the “Season”: the season for produce in Tajikistan, that is. When even the neighborhood bazaar has strawberries (sad and soggy though they may be) for sale, you know the highwater mark of fruit and veg season is just around the corner. Sure, you’re still advised to make the trip to Green Bazaar for really good quality and selection, but the season has arrived, for sho’.


T – Train travel. And the miracle of catching our Frankfurt-Paris train, for which we had planned a layover of 3 hours. Ultimately we had to run for it in the 45-minute interval that Somon Air's delayed arrival afforded us. (Anya to Lisa the night before the return trip, in Paris: “Will we have to run for the train again? I didn’t like that.”)


U – Umbrella. Anya was pleased as punch to be given a Winnie-the-Pooh children’s (hey, they probably make them in adult sizes, so I might need to specify) umbrella, after a shopping spree in the hypermarché outside Autun. (Shopping therapy after our bad experience at the hotel? It’s possible.) It made the trip home just fine packed in a suitcase and still hasn’t broken. Surely better quality construction than the 9-somoni jobbie I bought her at the bazaar in Khujand in the winter.


V – Vaccines. The polio outbreak in Tajikistan has given me reason to renew my earlier interest in polio vaccines, both injected/inactivated and oral/live, albeit from a very different perspective. Anya got her first round of the OPV booster series today. The situation is truly serious, but for kids who have received good quality vaccines so far and are up to date like Anya there should not be an extreme risk. With that firmly in mind, I actually think it might do us a lot of good if more academics had to deal with their topics of heated abstract discussion in direct and concrete relationship to their own or their kids' lives. But I guess that probably isn't a widely applicable or appropriate thing to wish for. The experiences is actually very enlightening and provides fascinating insight.


W – Water, dirty. Spring rains (well, any rains, really) bring “brown baths,” as Anya has called them since her first ever dip in the tub here in Dushanbe, a year and a half ago. The water from the tap used to be brown all the time, but shortly after we moved in the city did some improvements (yes, it happens), and the quality on a typical day improved. But we are reminded right now of how extremely cloudy and dingy that water can get. At least it serves as a good reminder that it wouldn’t be wise to drink out of the tap!


X – Хозяйка. Or khoziaika. That is, “landlady.” I had a really good one in Moscow for the 2 weeks I rented a room in her apartment – it was a surprisingly nice arrangement for me, working for many hours during the day and into the evening at the archives, and coming home to have a bit of dinner or tea in the kitchen with Inna Zinovievna.


Y – Yoga! So glad that Dushanbe has seen a renaissance (or I guess simply naissance?) of it in the last 6 months. I am happy to say I’m back to 2 times practicing per week (when not on vacation – but I did go to 2 overpriced yoga sessions in Moscow!).


Z – From Anya Z. (Vladivostok friend) through the mid-alphabet, mid-Europe Meilak, to Berkeley’s own Z-spot, visited with lots of friends we hadn’t seen in years during the past few months’ travels. It's a good thing to do, since living over here, even in this internet-, Facebook-friendly age, means we still aren't able to keep in contact as often as we'd like with people we care about. Sometimes the isolation here just makes us sluggish and complacent in that frame of mind, and the months stretch on and the messages (and blog posts) don't get written. So it was really good to reconnect with so many friends (and family) over these past 80 days.

It Speaks! It's Alive!

Whew, what a breather!

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

I guess real life got in the way.

Update since the end of September:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Vladivostok Adventure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Library Day

We finally got our passports back on Friday, after the lengthy process of extending our initial visas, so I decided today was the day I needed to get registered at the library. Eventually I have a suspicion that the library of the Tajikistan Academy of Sciences will be more useful to me, but since right now I am still getting my feet wet, I began with the Firdausi National Library.

I had an experience that is not really all that exceptional to a foreign researcher in the former Soviet Union, but even in that context it was a slightly bewildering and humorous episode (if it had taken up any more time it would have been annoying, but it was ultimately too quick to be worth anything more than a chuckle and a shrug). Still perhaps it merits a remark here, for those who've not had the pleasure.

I went to the front desk and asked "how do I register?". I figured the answer would be pretty simple -- even though I still need to summon up some amount of energy and chutzpah to face the challenge of these places, the registration part really isn't what's daunting for me anymore. The process can vary a bit: sometimes you go inside and fill out your forms at some fancy old wooden desk (like at St. Petersburg's National Library), sometimes it's all done out in the area outside the "turnstiles" or their equivalent, through which you enter the venerable institution (like it happened in Khabarovsk last summer). But by now I guess this is the part of it all -- especially at what is basically the public library, where any Jamshed with an address ought to be able to get a card -- that I expect to go smoothly.

The guy sitting at the entrance and coatcheck with his two female colleagues -- who look fairly typical for local women with their loose headscarves and the constant stream of sunflower seeds that enters one of their mouths, although I don't think I've seen anyone knitting such expert booties in public yet -- tells me quickly that it costs 2 somoni.

I rummage through my wallet to present him the roughly 60 cents together with my passport. He glances at my documents and quickly says "Oh, for you [I can only assume it was because I was foreign; maybe because I hold a diplomatic foreign passport] to register, you'll need to get a spravka [memorandum of permission] from the Ministry of Culture." I say, "OK..., I know that's located just down on the corner." So far I can handle this one, I'm thinking. "Can you tell me what section I go to?" He can't quite come up with a name -- he discusses it briefly in Tajik with his colleagues and another man trying to enter, and I catch only about 20% of what is said, but they come up empty-handed anyway. I say, "OK, rahmat [thank you in Tajik]," and his face lights up -- "You know Tajik?" And I quickly say, "oh, no -- kam-kam mifahmam," which I think in itself is a slightly wrong way of trying to say "I only understand very little," and ought to have solidified the fact that I was really just giving it my best college try.

I head out and down to the corner, and the Ministry really is literally only a 2 minute walk away, so, so far, so good. I ask at the little window with the administrative checker where I need to go for my spravka, and the first sign that this is going to take a good old Kafkaesque turn is the puzzled look she returns through the little square. She shakes her head and tells me I need to go to the library itself to get registered. I explain that, noooo, they just told me to go here. She asks the man working the inside of the Ministry entrance, and both of them seem to be encountering this supposed rule for the first time in their careers; they can't come up with what department would distribute such spravki.

She tries to tell me using sign language together with Russian, which I clearly speak well although I think the request has her so dumbfounded that she assumes I need the extra dimwit-help, that I should go back to the library to register. (In all of these conversations, I already kind of instinctively don't even bother to try or provide introductions in Tajik, or to apologize for using Russian, since it's been no problem -- except when some don't speak enough Russian -- to use Russian for everyday business in the private sphere. But this experience as a whole makes me think that using a few words in Tajik as an opener may well smooth the way a little in government institutions.) I know it isn't going to work to just return to the library, so I press on, and even as she continues to wave her arms in a signal for me to go back down the street to the library itslef, I half-act, half-am confused enough to bumble my way through the entrance with a puzzled look on my face and pleadingly try my luck again with her colleague just inside. The guy posted at the door still has no idea, but together they finally come up with a name: Jahongir! Let her see him.

So I'm led about 5 doors down the hallway to an office, and after trying one door which is locked, Mr. Entryway knocks and opens the door across the way and we are greeted by a pleasant if slightly puzzled young man in a blue suit and tie. I open with a "Salom aleykum" and explain again in Russian what I've been told I need. He has me sit, looks at my passport, asks me a very few questions, which he tries to do in English, which works fine -- the main thing he asks me is how long I've been in Tajikistan (which ought to be clear from my passport, of course) and what I'm going to look at at the library (I say historical journals and the history of Tajikistan. Why, he asks? Because it's interesting to me, and new, I say with a stupid smile.). And he folds a piece of A4 paper in half, carefully rips it along the fold, and handwrites a "spravka" that I ought to be able to register at the library. He wishes me good luck and I'm on my amused way.

The library guy of course barely even looks at the spravka, helps me fill out the brief Tajik registration form and sends me over to the cashier and library card office, which is surprisingly modern compared to the rest of the place: my 80 cents buys me a card with my picture, taken by digital camera, and slated to be ready and laminated for me tomorrow. And I then spent a rather chilly (though it didn't hold a sputtering, icy candle to my sojourn at Tbilisi's national library in January 2005) but fruitful morning working with the card catalog and figuring out what sources I'll consult first on the modern history of medicine in Tajikistan.

Like I said, by no means a very unique experience for those who frequent these kinds of institutions in the former socialist world, but just a taste of what happens when you try to go about this business. I guess for me it is only remarkable in 2 respects: one, as I said initially, for the pleasantly short time it took to do the little bureaucratic dance, and, two, also for the sheer lack of logic or understanding on the part of my various partners. Usually, at least in my experience, even if there is little in the way of rules laid down to lead us in the dance, the participants put on a good show of everything needing to follow a set process, which maybe I don't know but of course they can recite backwards and forwards in their heads. Clearly (as I've already had chance to see and hear from others), Tajikistan plies its own particular brand of post-Soviet crazy, so now I'll go about trying to learn this one and see if anything I learned most recently in the Russian Far East will apply here...