after a long long dinner

we took the following photo and laughed all the way to

%&$@#^$%

Lincoln, Leigh, and Pittsburgh

king of the castle....

I left NYC by American Eagle on December 30 and enjoyed great days of 13 hour sleep in Lincoln, NE. I woke up on my first day in Lincoln at 3pm, and it was pointed out to me that I had slept through an eight-inch snow fall. Lincoln is the greatest place in the world - it can bring any New Yorker back to reality. Slowness and the priorities of relaxation creep back... this feeling of OTDIKHANIE was a brilliant phase - and I even took up some beer drinking while I was there, until I jumped back on the Eagle and landed in Shitsburgh (oops, I actually liked it, so... Pittsburgh)...alas,

here i am in the "cathedral of learning" (a strange Pittsburgh building) doing a Borat impression, "king of the castle, king of the castle"

Don't Play Tricks with Lentils

"Lentils are very sensitive, you have to warm them...not just thaw them and eat. If I weren't averse to the smell of food, I would have warmed it more. That's what you should do." Words of Wisdom from Nazia.

I have returned from a nice five day trip to Geneva. It reaffirmed my desire to live and work in Europe. I didn't take any photos cause my photoapparat was without batteries. But Mahdi's birthday party was really fun - lots of guests and lots of food. I cooked and surprised the guests and His roommates were really cool - internationalists. They are all part of the International Organizations MBA program that started up a few years ago. I recommend it for those who want to get in on the Geneva action - only catch is that this program is more expensive than other University of Geneva courses...but I suppose that MBAs usually are.

The design in Central Asia is so profoundly beautiful. I hope to surroud myself and my life with such creations. This piece is displayed prominently in the Museum in Dushanbe.

Looking back on Turkey

Turkey looked very familiar after my prior travels. I was quite comfortable in what seemed to be sanitary, calm and even rather small bazaars...comparatively speaking to the chaos of certain markets in Iran and Dushanbe.

Updates from Boston

Hello,

My apologies to those of you who may want to know developments in my plans. I am currently still in Boston and finishing up a difficult semester at BU Law, where I practiced at the BMC as a student attorney. I dealt with several unusual cases that gave me more than my fair share of headaches. Currently, I am planning for a trip to Geneva. I will return shortly and then take some final exams. This coming semester I will be at the University of Leiden to take some unorthodox law courses, like "Law and Governance in Indonesia." Such a subject might not otherwise be my first choice.
I am reading often - and thanks to a suggestion by Jason, finally getting through 1984.
Here's a great passage:
"Talking to her, he realized how easy it was to present an apperance of orthodoxy while having no grasp whatever of what orthodoxy meant. In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding, they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm, because it left no residue behind, just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird."

In other news, I will probably travel soon by train to Nebraska, and I will surely document it for you. My friend Liz will come by leiden while I am there and we should have a great time.
--I am also working on a collection of short stories, which I estimate will be complete by June. They are loosely based on my travels, but not at all for plot or people. I look forward to having some of you as my proofers.

Love,
K.

Longing for Dushanbe

I have been back from Dushanbe for several months now...but I can't say that I could possibly long for this country any more! I really want to go back despite all the problems and difficulties I had there.

Here I am with a gorgeous Uzbek horse in the Lenin Park (traveled all the way to Dushanbe to give rides), just a short time before my departure for Turkey.

One Month Later in Boston

Hello Everyone!
My apologies for posting little in the past month. It was a busy and chaotic travel season for me. I first left from Dushanbe, Tajikistan to Istanbul. I stayed in Istanbul for 10 days and really had a wonderful time. It's definitely very touristy, but the beauty of the many mosques and monuments really outweighs the negatives. The restaurants were amazing and the hotels all reasonably priced. After my stay in Istanbul, I went for 12 days to Iran. I stayed with Mahdi's very kind and hospitable family in the center of Tehran. They have a lovely house and I was grateful to enjoy many nice Iranian meals while I was there. We took a group trip to the famous pilgrimage city of Mashad where we saw the shrine of Imam Reza. It was amazing how many people we saw there at all times of the day.

Now, I am in Boston! (I have really down a roundabout tour of this small world). Law school has started up again, and the most new photos I can post now will be of my criminal clinic where I prepare for my work as a student attorney in criminal defense. Wish me luck! In my spare time, during the next few weeks, I will post some late photos from Istanbul and Mashad. Next week I have a mock trial and the week after I pick up my first clients.

Note: quote: Chief Justice Hughes has said: "The security of the public will be found in the treatment of the poor and the ignorant; in indifference to their misery and helplessness lies disaster." (1919)

Leaving soon from Dushanbe

Today I finished the final exam for my Persian language instruction here in Dushanbe. We are now winding up our stay in Dushanbe, and the plane leaves on Friday morning. Tomorrow will be our "banquet" or large shashlik lunch with all the families and the teachers and...well, everybody. I have to admit that I've been a poor blogger and that there are probably too many people reading this despite the lack of pictures and updated entries. I will do my best over the next two weeks to add quite a few more pictures. With this entry is a picture of me in the 20 degree weather up in the mountains, wishing I had believed the advice that it really would be like winter and that I needed warmer clothes. I threw on a blazer and braved the cold for this picture. Sorry, I don't match!

The Square of Hojand

In the beautiful square of Hojand (khujand) is this mosque. Leave a comment if you have information to share. I think it's called the Juma mosque...But on a side note, I was impressed that Hojand actually has pigeons. Dushanbe itself has NO pigeons, only pretty little doves. At first I thought they were baby pigeons, but actually they are beautiful birds...is it because the altitude is too high here for pigeons?

Soviet remnants

I really enjoyed Hojand if only because I could photgraph rather unusual and inexplicable remnants of the Soviet Union -- most notably this large red sickle and hammer. I like the fact that it's now used as a bulletin board, with flyers taped up. Perhaps that's why it has remained all these years. I wish I had had more time there as Hojand is still known and appears as a Soviet city. There were many great monuments and Communist artifacts to photograph.

Schools and Internet Centers

Hello again,
The resident coordinator of our program was previously involved with setting up numerous internet centers throughout the country, with aid assistance from the US government (through relief international). Here you can see one of those centers with a prominent American and Tajik flag display. All of them running on US assistance have large american eagles and flags reminding the Tajiks where the money's coming from. I have found some of these centers to be excruciatingly slow...but some computer is better than no computer. :)
There's a good website you check out on this: http://www.schoolsonline.org/

I was a coward...

I have to admit that when I saw this bridge, I didn't want to cross the river....this bridge was near a rest-stop oshkhone (restaurant) that we saw on the way to Ayne...I prefer to not cross scary bridges when I can enjoy the smells of local cuisine instead.

Inside the Bazaar of Hojand

In the few short hours of our stay in Hojand, I went to the Bazaar - This is a photo of the inside of the Bazaar - in the nuts section. We tried many kinds of dried fruits and nuts. The best pistachios that everyone had a hard time selling (cause they were so expensive by Tajik standards) had come from Iran - by the hands of traveling Tajiks. They did not taste nearly as good as the pistachios I had in Iran, so I felt bad that the Iranians, due to logistics, are hogging their best dried fruits and nuts.

Fountains and Lenins

Just as we were running for the airport in Hojand we came across a palace, apparently modeled after Saint Petersburg's style, and I believe built in the 60s. Please leave a comment if you're acquainted with its history. Lots of Tajiks love to get married here because it's very beautiful with the fountain. There's a huge statue of Lenin right in front though, which I would imagine would partly kill the romantic atmosphere for a wedding. I would post that statue here but perhaps you are already tired of Lenin...

our plane

My apologies that these pictures from our trip to Hojand are totally out of order -- this computer is in Russian and I'm in a rush to get to class. This is a photo of the old Soviet plane we took to get back to Dushanbe. If you're a plane expert and can identify it, please leave a comment. It sat about 40 people and looked quite rickety inside. I have to admit I was terrified, but I'm always scared of planes. Once upon a time in Alaska with my grandparents I was content to fly in a 4-person plane, but no more!
This was a fun plane trip because we boarded the plane through the rear...

Gaaowww....(cooow)

We saw some cows along the way in this village by the river....

small villages along the way to Hojand

The mountain views were stunning. We occasionally came upon small villages where everyone would wave and the children would run after us. Lots of people ride donkeys here (including myself - and I will have to get those photos for you). It's always funny to see two or three people on one poor little donkey. I liked this little village, it reminded me of some of Iran but the houses were made of different material... not, for example, carved out of the rocks themselves...

We drove to Hojand (280km?) in a van that sits 14 more or less comfortably. It was a big vehicle and barely fit on the mountain roads that were basically just rock ledges. The whole way there were signs for falling rocks and we were amazed at the trucks and old russian cars that travel this pass. It was almost as scary as the time I went from Pristina to Durres, Albania by bus --- through the north of Albania with their narrow roads over mountain drops. I understand that this road through the mountains will soon be closed because they are building a tunnel that will open this year...we may have been some of the last foreigners to have traveled these winding mountain roads.

Back from the cold and sneezing two hundred times a day

This was a picture of the "44 springs" that I wanted to post before and ...that we went to last week. Just now we've returned from a three day adventure to the mountain passes on our way to Hojand, the second largest city in Tajikistan. We slept the first night in a small town called Ayni and then in Istaravshan. From Istaravshan we went by car to Hojand. We visited the city of Hojand for a few hours and then took a plane back to Dushanbe. It was a long three days but I really got to see more of this amazing and beautiful country. There are so many photos I would love to share with you and I will do my best despite the slow internet connection. I didn't realize on the way to Ayni how cold it would be up in the mountains (despite the fact that my host father told me there would be snow) and so the major memory from this trip is a horrid cold....