All's Well Ends Well: A Traveler's Tale

Salut,

There’s that old saying that lifetimes can pass in a few weeks while some weeks feel like a lifetime. Or at least I’m paraphrasing wherever I heard it from. Anyhow, the last two weeks have truly felt so long, but that’s because it was Halloween week then fall break. Also, I think the title is a vague unintentional allusion to a Hong Kong comedy film and a Shakespearean play, but just ignore that. 

The post will feel a bit like my post about my time in Naryn, where I have many stories about traveling and random tourists/people I found along the way. I loved traveling with other volunteers, my mom, and my friend Bhaavya, but being alone is always interesting. This was my first time truly traveling entirely by myself to another country and on my own (usually, I’m with someone or going to meet someone). But I’m getting ahead of myself. 

Halloween swept in, roaring through school amidst the final week of classes for the quarter. I had my students do several word searches, mazes, word scrambles, etc, which they enjoyed. Meanwhile, I made several Halloween cutouts, and on Monday and Tuesday, we had all the classes make Halloween decorations, whether it was orange pumpkin cutouts, drawings of ghosts and cats, spider webs, or anything, and everything. My school is small thankfully, so after much work, we were able to hang things everywhere on the walls of the school, on both floors. I compensated for a lot of it, making cutouts while watching Agatha All Along. By the way, super underrated show, and my new favorite show to get me in the Halloween mood (I binged it in 3-4 days while waiting for the finale on the eve of Halloween). Unlike my older sister, I wait until at least the 1st of December before I start blasting Christmas music and I don’t forget Halloween and Thanksgiving exist. We asked students to prepare a dance/skit/performance. Last year, I was late preparing anything for our Halloween concert,  but this year we had a whole program prepared. 

This year, Baktygul was also in the Halloween spirit, and she took charge of decorating the front foyer, wheeling in the whiteboard, bringing in hay, pumpkins, hanging streamers and cutouts, and balloons from the ceiling. I decorated the hallways and had my students help me hang little ghost cutouts near the 1st- 3rd-grade classrooms. On Halloween day, it was a mad rush. Evidently, the chaos of students making costumes for themselves, putting on makeup, and drawing skulls on their faces drew the irritation of some teachers. A few still didn’t know anything about Halloween and watched it all from afar, while a few joined in. Turrabek, the Kyrgyz language teacher, helped students apply paint to their faces, and a few of the vice principals (zavuches) served as jury for our costume contest. 

The day before Halloween, my students celebrated the Autumn Festival. This is a holiday I actually missed out on last year, though I can’t remember why, I think I was off work or in Bishkek for some other reason (it wasn’t the day before Halloween last year). Another volunteer had told me her school celebrated it several weeks ago, so I assumed my school just wasn’t going to (school celebrations vary considerably, except the very very big holidays like New Year, teacher’s Day, and the first and last day of school). In the morning, 5th and 8th grade students around 10 am, brought in tons of food, preparing their classrooms to serve the teachers. Bread, chips, juice, soda, rice, sushi, samsa, fruit, and other foods they adorned on the tablecloth. They shoved desks together and lined them with chairs to make a makeshift long dining table. I asked, and the majority of the female students made the food themselves. As a teacher without an affiliation for one grade (unlike homeroom teachers), I was free to flit between classes as they prepared. Though my favorite class is arguably 8A right now, and after the teachers came in to see their preparations, I sat down with them after all the teachers left to dine with them. It’s a bit like Thanksgiving honestly. I ate an entire lunch between all the classes I visited. The other students (9th, 10th, and 11th) still had their regular classes. 

Baktygul and I spent Halloween morning decorating the gym (our school has an auditorium but it’s not a real auditorium, just a slightly large classroom, so we use our gym for most events). Baktygul wrote a Kyrgyz program for the 11th-grade students to present. 5th-grade students participated in a mummy-making contest. That’s always a favorite of mine; two teams, one mummy per group, and 3 students in each team armed with toilet paper rolls, and 5 minutes to cover their classmate in toilet paper. I don’t teach 6th-grade students regularly this year, but they are persistent. 

Several of the boys kept asking me to find them a dance or song to do for Halloween, and after classes were over, they dragged me to a free classroom to present to me a waltz they had been practicing with the girls in their class. So on Halloween, I had them participate in musical chairs, which they enjoyed, and one boy, Julduzbek, won the competition, and they did a slow dance to Love Story (not the Taylor Swift song, it’s a random French song). 7th grade participated in balloon pop, where we had 10th graders blow up white balloons, fill them with candy, and then have the students pop them without their hands and feet. They all sat on them, a total lack of creativity. Baktygul told the 7th-grade class to prepare something, and a group of boys stood up and danced to Waka Waka by Shakira. I was so impressed mostly because 7th-grade boys never do anything. You’ll notice their performances are not remotely Halloween-related. 

8th grade A, again my favorite class, are incredibly smart, but bankrupt when it comes to doing something creative. They always enlist their class singer, Bacdoloot to sing, in this case, she sang Lovely by Billie Eilish, which is her go-to song. Even when we did Halloween decorations, most of the students in 8A took the entire class period to draw a pumpkin. I’m no artist, though some of my students have real talents. During my English club, I had a few students draw scary images to hang around the school. 8B has real creative talents, even if they don’t pick up on English as fast as 8A. Several of the girls did a Halloween medley dance, so finally, something on topic. We had 9th-grade students participate in limbo, and I asked Baktygul to bring a stick or a broom to use, to make it seem witchy. Brooms here don’t have handles, funnily enough, so she brought a long stick from outside. The 10th-grade class brought their own game, bringing two boxes with something inside and having students stick their hands in and guess what was in it. Baktygul told me they were going to bring a cat, but they ended up bringing a live chick in one box and a pumpkin in another. 

A lot of these performances I had no input or monitoring of, just let them run wild (I had a post about English week back last spring, where the students turned English week into International week, wholly unrelated to English in any way). 11th grade pulled a 6th grade and did a romantic dance. Afterward, students walked the runway, those wearing costumes. On the whole, this year less students wore an official costume, though many put on makeup/paint on their faces. Tatina came in a wedding dress she painted that looked like Corpse Bride. Two 7th-grade girls came as Elves, and one girl, Elina, even put in contacts to make herself look otherworldly. I have no idea where they got wings from. One older student came as a Frankenstein-looking doctor, amongst other very creative costumes. We had a discoteca dance party, right before my director very rudely stopped the celebrations. While Halloween week had been in full swing, she had been on her toes angry at teachers with the government on her ass about bookkeeping and keeping track of students’ copybooks. I let Baktygul deal with administrative stuff within the school, as it bogs everything down. Anyway, Gulzara disrupted our party and went on a 15-minute lecture to the students about their behavior, basically turning the celebration into a student-wide behavior meeting. Lots of students lost the dancing spirit after that, to my displeasure, but many remained. 

Immediately the next day was the end of term. Just as quickly as Halloween came, it ended. I spent the last day of term taking down all the decorations, throwing out ones students had ripped or ripped when taking off the tape, and stowed the rest in our room, should Baktygul revive them next year. The older students, instead of serving a meal for their Autumn festival, they instead have a dance ball. I remember the dance very well from last year. Busy with that, they just did the same dance they were going to do at the festival at our Halloween party. The Autumn ball is basically their Homecoming, I suppose. With a class of only around 20 people, though it’s hard to match the energy of an American Homecoming. I don’t know how, but I came into the auditorium to watch it and then got voluntold to monitor it alone with the music teacher. All the other teachers left, but after like 10 minutes, they dropped the pretense of a ball and it was just a dance party. 

Over the weekend, I left for fall break. I went to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for my trip. Many other volunteers have already gone either last spring or in the summer. Last spring, I felt pretty sick, and in the summer, it was ungodly hot in the region, so I decided against it. Uzbekistan is famously hot in the summer, as it’s very deserty, nowhere near as elevated as Kyrgyzstan. Speaking of Kyrgyzstan, it snowed in Naryn for the first time recently. I do think this was a relatively good time to go. I live very close to the actual border, and I asked my host family for advice, they told me to cross the border near Bek-Abad, which is only about 1 hour from my village, and then I took a taxi to Andijon. Andijon, despite being a relatively small city, felt big. All cities in comparison to Kyrgyz ones feel huge. From Andijon, I took a train to Tashkent. I haven’t been on a train in SO long. I really loved trains in Italy, they were frequent, very fast, and relatively inexpensive. 

Tashkent is a gorgeous city. I stayed there for about 2 days, more or less. I met up with some of the boys from Naryn, who were on their own way through Uzbekistan (though not the same itinerary), and we got dinner, and I had actually good tacos. When I go back to Texas in January, I plan on devouring beef tacos and nachos. I wandered through the old city of Chorsu, which had a bustling bazaar and a madrasa. This will pop up, but a Madrasa is an Islamic school of sorts, a center for learning (about the Quran). I’ve had a student or two go to Madrasas, but the Madrasas are famous in Uzbekistan. 

Before I continue, some general things about Uzbekistan. One, it’s a country-wide Pepsi advertisement. No Coca-Cola, only Pepsi. Pepsi signs everywhere, at bus stops, in malls, Pepsi markets next to bus stops. It seemed sort of strange. Two, Uzbekistan, in my opinion, has some extremely unique architecture and designs in all of Central Asia. Having been to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, I can say that Uzbekistan stands out in its Iranian and Islamic architecture. Of course, the calligraphy and designs in Mosques are common everywhere, but the blue tiles and style of Madrasas I’ve only seen prevalent in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan to me at least seemed to be less Russified than Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. 

Third, yes I can understand Uzbek. Kazakh is the easiest to understand, I estimate I can understand 70-80% of Kazakh based on my experiences in Almaty. Uzbek is a little more distant. One, it’s written in the Latin alphabet, not the Cyrillic. There are lots of similar words and similar verb structures, and I estimate I could understand around 40-50% of Uzbek. I described Kazakh as a strong accent relative to Kyrgyz, while Uzbek feels like a strong dialect; of course, both are languages in their own right, I’m merely pointing to the way in which I can understand them and how I can articulate to English speakers what hearing Uzbek and Kazakh sounds like to me. Kyrgyz has a strong “J or Zh” sound, while Uzbek replaces it with a “yuh” sound (think Ariana Grande from 7 Rings). I convinced myself I should learn some Russian before I went but I didn’t do that, and I managed fine in Uzbekistan. Uzbekistan has a very strong English presence due to lots of tourism (Kazakhstan has strong English due to business (and also some tourism). 

In Tashkent, I visited the Amir Temur museum. The country brims with praise and love for Amir Temur, the famous emperor of the Timurid Empire. Perhaps a footnote or paragraph in your world history textbook, the Timurid Empire lasted for centuries in Central Asia and the Middle East (and some of South Asia too) starting from around the 14th century. The Timurid Empire, as Uzbekistan points out in all its monuments and museums, was a great contributor to architecture, astronomy, the arts, literature, and trade. The capital of the empire for a time was Samarkand, which I’ll talk about later. Kyrgyzstan brims with love for Manas, its folk hero (who maybe was real or maybe not?), but Uzbekistan’s Temur was very real. I had forgotten most of that, but that legacy is inescapable and everywhere in the country. 

The Tashkent Metro is only the second Metro I know of in Central Asia and arguably much better than the one in Almaty. Tashkent is also the largest city to my knowledge in Central Asia (Tashkent is around 3 million, Almaty is 2 million, while Bishkek and Dushanbe are both around 1 million or so). It was bustling and had some gorgeous art and carvings in its stations, though for some reason boiling hot. The botanical gardens was just a large park much to my disappointment, though seeing the leaves red and orange was beautiful. Where I live in Kyrgyzstan, there aren’t actually a ton of trees, so it’s hard to imagine it’s fall, besides the weather. 

I visited a few more museums and the national park, but the highlight of the trip had to be Magic City. The Naryn boys mentioned it to me, but Magic City is basically a copy of Disneyland and Universal Studios, though not affiliated with any particular brand, just the amusement park vibes. It’s not Six Flags or an actual amusement park, I describe it as Universal or Disneyland because of the similarity in themed roads, the abundance of shopping and restaurants, and the shows. It’s smaller than either Disneyland or Universal and also free to enter. Magic City opens with hanging fairy lights, and a large Pepsi can fountain. A huge aquarium I visited with stingrays and turtles, and a Cinderella-like castle. 

At night, the huge fountain in the center plays a water light show every hour. I ran into a random 18-year-old Uzbek student who sat in Bellisimo Pizza cafe with me and talked to me about how much he loves International Relations and wants to study it in university (my major was IR which is how it came up). He showed me the park and then Seoul Mall, a large waterfront mall complex named after Seoul, the Korean city, and a business company that owns the complex. It actually rained in Magic City. 

Anyway, so the night train I took from Tashkent to Bukhara was awful (though the second night train was better). I mistakenly bought a top bunk my first time, and the train was boiling. There is no real ladder for the top bunks, so I had to step on the pull-out table to get in. It was literally midnight, and because the train makes several stops, often for 10-15 minutes at a time, the lights come on and off. In 3rd class, one section will have 6 bunks, 3 below, 3 on top, and it so happened that my section had a crying baby on the bottom bunk, and several locals who wouldn’t fall asleep and kept talking past 1 am (and the bathrooms don’t open unless the train is in motion). So imagine me boiling in my regular clothes and holding onto a top bunk with a crying baby and chatty adults trying to sleep at 1 am. The train arrived early at like 6-7 am. I accepted when I bought the train tickets and went on vacation that I would not get a lot of sleep. My phone was having issues when I arrived, so I couldn’t order a taxi, and a taxi driver offered to take me to my hotel for an exorbitant amount. I pick my battles when it comes to these types of things. Something I’ve also learned while traveling alone is that if you have money to spare, or can afford to pay more, you’ll always be able to get from point A to B. Luckily, my guest house was open already and they let me come in early. 

Bukhara (and also Samarkand) are tourist cities, in the sense that they’re old and quite large but because tourism booms, they are built now for tourists. Which has its ups and downs. Conveniently they have lots of bathrooms for tourists, tourist police boxes if anyone gets harassed, signage to direct you to where the sites are, and lots and lots of souvenir shops. Unfortunately, it means lots of the sites charge tourists high prices for entrance fees, and a lot of the beautiful sites are just tourist spots. What I mean by that is that in Bukhara several old Madrasas, which used to be places of learning and knowledge, you now need to pay at the ticket office to enter, only for there to be souvenir shops in what used to be old classrooms or alcoves. The architecture is gorgeous, of course, but it caters so heavily to tourists.  Tashkent, for example, has lots of tourists, hell I ran into a Chinese group and a French group, but the hostel I stayed at (where I ran into 2 other PC volunteers actually) was the go-to for international visitors. A big city like Tashkent and Bishkek have lots of hostels and hotels, but they are lived in cities, while in Bukhara and Samarkand, definitely lived-in cities, there are roads where there are only long rows of 8-10 different guest houses or hostels. Cities whose economies are probably propelled so much by tourism. Kyrgyzstan is far more off the road than that. 

Bukhara was very deserty, though probably my favorite city I visited (Tashkent close behind). It was very walkable, and I walked around 9 miles that day (the most I walked the whole time was November 8th and that was 14.8 miles). I intruded on various tour groups who spoke English. It made me feel nostalgia for the tour groups my family and I used to go on around Europe, with the tour operator and the radios and headphones and the waving flag to keep the group together. One tour group was led by a bald man and full of older tourists who spoke French, and I saw them again in Samarkand. I also met some Americans working as English teachers in Tashkent while at the souvenir market, and the vendor was super impressed to see me and the man next to me both able to speak to her in Uzbek. Bukhara has this gorgeous fountain in the city center, flanked by a souvenir market and several Madrasas. Many Madrasas are next to mosques, and many madrasas are most known for their gorgeous entrances and courtyards.  

Getting out of Bukhara to Samarkand was a total mess. My train was early at 5 in the morning, and one of the women at the guest house helped me order a taxi. It began to rain, and while on the road, the taxi tires blew out, after he drove over something. So, imagine me at 4 am in the rain pulled over with blown-out car tires. Luckily, the driver was nice, and he and I had a brief conversation in Uzbek, while he ordered me a new taxi and paid for it for me. I arrived in Samarkand to pouring rain, and the bus I took to get into the city veered far off from the drop-off point listed on the map, so I had to walk 2 km to my hostel in pouring rain, only for it to be closed, and for me to be directed to a new hostel further away. And this is all before 9 am. We travel for crazy annoying stories like these. 

I explored Samarkand in the rain, though that didn’t stop me and evidently, it didn’t stop a lot of the tourists either, as I saw several. Samarkand, as I said before, was famous for being the capital of the Timurid Empire for a time, so a lot of the most famous stuff is in Samarkand. Ulgbech, a famous astronomer, has his conservatory in Samarkand, in addition to a Mosque named for him. Amir Temur’s mausoleum and household are all in Samarkand too. Regestan is a famous and large complex of madrasas and mosques near the city center that light up at night. Samarkand describes itself as the World Tourism Cultural Capital, which I’m a bit skeptical of, but I love the pride.  

I followed the advice of a vlogger on YouTube on going from Samarkand to Dushanbe (I think there is a train but I couldn’t find a reliable one). Dushanbe is the capital of Tajikistan, and I am required to go to Tajikistan through Uzbekistan, not through Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan has a border dispute and conflict with Tajikistan, which means the Peace Corps forbids us from stepping foot in Batken (the Kyrgyz oblast which is near said border dispute) or from going to Tajikistan through Kyrgyzstan. The drive from Samarkand to the Tajik border was relatively quick. I got in a shared taxi. The taxis in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are interesting. Uzbekistan has these marshrutka-like cars, that look like you cut a bus in half (they only fit around 6-7 people), with the front jutting out, and the main body of it slimmer than a usual van or car would be (and they definitely don’t have trunks for stuff like cars do). I’d never seen them in Kyrgyzstan but they were hard to miss once you got into Uzbekistan. I crammed myself into one. We’re near the border, passing through these small towns near the Tajik border, it’s November 7, and we’re for all intents and purposes, in the middle of basically nowhere, when the men, unprompted, begin to start talking about the US election and Donald Trump. I didn’t speak or say anything, but I was bewildered at where I was and how such people, who will be probably completely unaffected by the results, yet still seem so interested. 

I found a taxi to take me to Dushanbe, and it was full of old ladies. Always a pro tip for single lady travelers, you’re nearly always safe in a taxi full of older women, and I gravitate towards them in foreign places. These women primarily spoke Tajik, though they understood bits of Uzbek. Tajik is a completely different language, it’s related to Farsi and Afghan languages like Dari; it’s wholly unintelligible from Uzbek, Kazakh, and Kyrgyz, except for a few similar words like “Thank you”. I was extremely lucky that while in Tajikistan, I conveniently met lots of people who spoke Uzbek because I heard that not many people there speak it. I was so happy that while in Uzbekistan, people’s faces would light up whenever I spoke to them in Uzbek (or rather Kyrgyz with a Uzbek lilt), because as a tourist hot spot, they like Kyrgyz people, assume I speak English (which I do) or Russian (which I don’t). For me, it’s no bother, particularly in souvenir shops, to speak in their native tongue and not mine. I don’t know if that necessarily got me better deals but it did get me appreciation. In Tajikistan, not as much, it was much harder to talk to people there. 

The border is basically a militarized zone, and the vlogger warned not to take any photos lest you be hounded by guards. Also, their passport control is seriously, seriously backed up. One person in a tiny window with 50 people surrounding the poor person. On the way to Dushanbe, we passed huge mountain passes and even had the car washed. The taxi driver was kind of an ass. The front passenger seat apparently costs extra to sit in, which the vlogger I watched made a mention of, but the driver never mentioned it. So when it was time to leave, not only did he not drop me off at my hostel as he said he would, but he also charged me extra and I had to go find an ATM to pull out extra cash while he waited on the side of the road. 

        

Tajikistan is a very very interesting country. I’ll only make some observations, not judgments, as it is a very authoritarian government, which makes the vibes when you enter, very interesting and occasionally uncomfortable. Immediately upon entering, there are a million flags. I’ve never seen so many flags of a country. I saw thousands in Dushanbe, the capital. Every block has maybe 50. Even grocery stores have a small one hanging in every aisle. Its colors are red, white, and green, which when it only uses strips along the roads, not the actual flags, it looks Italian almost. But I certainly wasn’t in Italy. 

In the capital, green taxis are roaming around the city. Huge lots with charging stations, as they’re all electric and the city boasts about emission-free cars and buses. In addition to green taxis, police are everywhere. I did notice lots of security guards in Tashkent near monument sites, but these weren’t security guards, they were police and military men. My taxi got flagged down, and I saw more people pulled over in 1-2 days in Dushanbe than I did my entire year in Kyrgyzstan. 

The president of Tajikistan has ruled the country uninterrupted since 1994, and drawings, pictures, and portraits of him are plastered around the city. On large malls, in government buildings, in schools, everywhere. Two large skyscrapers with blinking blue lights illuminate a huge picture of him that I could see several kilometers away. The tourist buildings and buildings of interest like the Parliament building are large and ostentatious. I met a Maltese tourist who described the new huge mosque as a “government vanity project”.  Open public spaces feel so big and the city feels so big for its size. It’s marginally bigger than Bishkek in size (a driver told me it was 1.2 million versus 1 million for Bishkek), but the city itself has much bigger roads, more skyscrapers, and developed bus stations. It feels like a city meant for 3-4 million people but with only half. Buildings are more extravagant than they would be elsewhere. I met a few Dutch tourists too. I was the only female tourist at my hostel, so I basically got my own room (my room had 3 beds but no other ladies came). 

            While in Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, I wasn’t very adventurous with food; I eat a lot of Uzbek food at home already, and the Maltese tourist told me the food was all the same, even in Tajikistan. I wasn’t craving a variant of Plov. I had Tajik KFC and Uzbek Wendy’s instead. Tashkent had Pizza Hut, Wendy's, KFC, and Papa Johns. You have to go to Almaty or Tashkent to get Western food beyond KFC. That food reminds me of home, despite how unhealthy it is. I did have Uzbek Lagman on my last night in Samarkand. 

I spent a day in Dushanbe, where I was there mostly as a tourist. Meghran is its large bazaar/food market, and the city does indeed have a fake Eiffel Tower, fittingly enough connected to a French restaurant. The National History Museum of Tajikistan was nice, although each level did have a mandatory section about government action plans and the president’s actions on water conservation. In all of Central Asia, I didn’t expect such a fierce climate change campaign to be waged in Tajikistan of all places, but some tourists told me that all the aforementioned green taxis are Chinese-made and given by the Chinese government, which he noticed based on their models, not something I would have picked up on myself. Chinese influence in Central Asia is something I think I’ve discussed only in passing; it’s evident in Bishkek where lots of roads and buses have Chinese manufacturing logos on them, and it was evident in the Alay region of Osh, which borders Western China, where Chinese trucks drove in and out. 

On the way out of Dushanbe, I was lucky again in that I had to wait only 45 minutes-1 hour for my taxi to fill up, and I was joined by some lovely Uzbek ladies who were visiting Dushanbe for a toi, but with whom I could talk to. I encountered a taxi driver and a vendor in a bazaar who could both speak a little bit of Uzbek. So here I am, an American speaking Kyrgyz to a Tajik man speaking sparse Uzbek, and we can understand each other. I honestly never thought Krygyz would get me that far, but it has. Back in Samarkand, I was lucky that it was bright and sunny, and I bought tons of souvenir gifts for the family back home (and for the future in-laws). My second-night train was from Samarkand to Andijon. This time I had ordered a low bunk bed against the wall, which was sooo nice. It was a much nicer train, just evidently much newer or better-taken care of, still hot but not boiling, and the people around me were quiet enough that I was able to sleep for 70-80% of the ride. 

My favorite recurring game is whenever I meet anyone (not just locals, tourists too), how quickly they ask me my nationality, even sometimes after I say I’m American. Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai. At least they ask. While on the train, a bunch of people were hanging out in the back section of the train where the bathrooms were. I’d asked about them and one man pointed to the outside words on the door, which I couldn’t read. Then, someone came in (I didn’t think they were local) with their phone, having translated what I assumed was the message about the bathrooms being closed from Russian into Japanese on his phone, shoving it in my face for me to read. I was clearly speaking in garbled Uzbek to them and had to say I wasn’t Japanese, and I told them I was American and walked away dismissively while they all laughed. I don’t know if being alone means more people are going to make awkward conversations, but I think I had more people prying and asking than I ever have when out with other people. People always have ideas about what an American should look like or how Americans usually act, and the small confidences I have are in breaking these assumptions. Some PC volunteers know Russian and so lean on that outside of Kyrgyzstan, but not knowing any Russian beyond a few words forces me unwillingly to have to rely on my Kyrgyz/Uzbek and sometimes they laugh when I say I don’t speak Russian.

From Andijon I got a taxi back to the border and then re-crossed and then made it back to my village. So alls well ends well. On my first day back at school I was completely exhausted. I told my Kyrgyz language teacher that I didn’t really relax that much on my vacation which is true. Looking at my health app, it did record that I was walking many miles every day, which I did in the various cities for time’s sake. I read a little bit, but not as much as I should have. Anyway, the highlight of my trip had to be Bukhara as a city and the Magic City park in Tashkent. Food-wise, definitely the Mexican bar I went to in Tashkent with the boys. As of now, I have vague plans to maybe go to Astana next spring, depending on how much annual leave I’ll have left. I do one day want to go back to Uzbekistan; I would want to explore the Ferghana Valley and Khiva, Khiva which is far west but a very very old city. I have more reservations about Tajikistan due to the language barrier, but I would like to go on the much-talked-about Pamir Highway and see more of nature in the country. I mostly went this one time to say I’ve been and check it off my list. 

Unlike some of my previous posts, each week could be its own separate post because of how disjointed they feel in my mind. Halloween ended abruptly and I immediately left. I felt fall when walking in the parks, and I felt winter when the cold front came in.  My host family and others asked if I was nervous or scared, and the answer was no. I was armed with knowledge of Uzbek in a part of the world always known for their kindness and hospitality. The people I did meet were kind. The families running the guest houses, and the people in souvenir shops and restaurants. Not always pure kindness, of course, I felt more like a real Western tourist at some points than others. But I made it out alive, and I walked a tourist’s road, even if I am a somewhat unconventional tourist. 

It sounds strange but I feel offended sometimes when locals lump me in with regular European or American tourists like the ones I see in tour groups. And even then, I don’t relate to the tourists fully like the ones in the hostels I visit. Those tourists are always different; the vast majority of them travel through Central Asia for months at a time, while I’m just passing through for school break. It feels like straddling a few different worlds and a few different identities, and I feel that immeasurably when people single me out, asking about my ethnic identity, it’s a difficult thing to describe. On one hand, I know so much about this region’s identity, its geopolitics, its food, its socio-economic problems, its holidays and celebrations, and its languages that I feel close and immersed in it in a way perhaps differently than a regular diplomat or business expat does. Yet simultaneously, I’m still an outsider, and even speaking Uzbek or Kyrgyz is impressive and can bring you closer to people. But it’s that bridge, the one that Peace Corps tells us about, the one that really does separate locals from tourists/visitors/expats/foreigners, a large bridge of lived culture and experiences and language that even for me, cannot fully be crossed. I think going to Uzbekistan and Tajikistan reminded me of that.

Thank you Uzbekistan and Tajikistan for taking me along the Silk Road, to see madrasas and mosques, heroic emperors and venerated presidents, broken taxis and heavy rainfall, boiling trains and delicious chicken nuggets, and half-decent tacos and water light shows. To my students, you are my coven and poured your heart into a jaw-dropping last Halloween. All’s well ends well.

À Bientôt,
Grace

Music, autumn core!


1. Marjorie- Taylor Swift
2. In Your Arms- ILLENIUM & X AMBASSADORS
3. The Last Great American Dynasty- Taylor Swift
4. All Things End- Hozier
5. Bird Set Free- Sia
6. I Bet You Don't Curse God- Christina Grimmie
7. I Found- Amber Run
8. Far From Home (The Raven)- Sam Tinnesz
9. Blood in the Water- Joanna Jones as the Dame
10. Broken Ones- ILLENIUM & Anna Clendening

PS. I do all the formatting for this blog on my computer, so if you read it on your phone, that is why the text sometimes gets smushed by the photos, because I don't format it to adjust to phones, which would be incredibly laborious to adjust for. I apologize.