45 degrees???

Hello everyone,

I'm glad that so many of you are enjoying these posts. I will try to take more photographs and write more stories. It's hard to keep focused on sharing experiences of Tajikistan when the weather is so brutally hot and the food leaves you ill for days on end. Today we encountered two amazing Dutch people. They have gone from Amsterdam to Turkey by bike, went through Iran, and then Turkmenistan and now around central asia for a few weeks. They have been on their bikes for eight months or so already. their website is www.buurma.nl
So, I think my last run-in with 'traveler's stomach' was fromt the ketchup at the Turkish restaurant. I cannot explain for the life of me WHY I suddenly decided to eat ketchup...in my entire life, I have never liked ketchup and all of a sudden, I chose to eat like four tablespoons of ketchup with my fries...!! My host mother last night in a typical Tajik fashion decided that the solution to an upset painful stomach would be to eat fried rice (osh)...But for those americans who are unaccustomed to eating with their hands, when you're sick, watching people eat with their hands and licking fried rice off their hands is not really helpful.

So, I've had a run-in with all of my classmates here about the nature of the Tajik and Persian languages. They won't even let me express my opinion anymore about this...somehow they think that I believe the languages are two separate ones. I have never said this, nor do I believe this. It's quite clear that linguistically they are like 95% the same. My problem has been quite plain and simple...when I speak the basic/intermediate Persian language that I learned in Tehran, people here do not understand me. If I say in Persian, I would like a piece of watermelon, for example, at least three words or sounds will be different enough that the average Tajik won't understand. Therefore, whether or not the languages are sufficiently similar that they each can read Hafez, I couldn't care less, my point is that basic sentences about what I want to eat do or see cannot always readily be understood. I have to either bump my level up to Hafez or dumb it down to kindergarten words. Nonetheless, because most of my classmates either speak at the level of Hafez or have studies Tajik for a year, they don't want to hear that there actually are vocabulary differences...