سفر به کوه پامیر / Trip to the Pamir Mountains / Сафар ба куҳи Помир

If you’re considering traveling to Tajikistan, which most of my readers are probably not, I highly recommend you travel outside of Dushanbe. Sure Dushanbe is the capital city, and the biggest one. Sure it’s got some okay restaurants and a few pretty parks, but I must say my favorite places in Tajikistan, by far, have been the cities and regions I have visited outside the capital.

Near the top of the list of my favorite places in Tajikistan, is Khujand, the northern city to which I travelled over Nowruz, which is spacious and has both an intellectual and a laid back vibe.  Even higher on the list however, is Gorno-Badakhsan, the massive autonomous eastern region of Tajikistan, and the home of the Pamir mountains.

The majority of the 300,000 people who live in the Pamir mountains are Ismaili Shia (this becomes important later, stay tuned), rather than Sunni unlike most Tajiks, and also unlike most Tajiks, they speak the local languages of Shugni and Wakhi.

If you’re seriously planning a trip, let me warn you that the Pamir mountains are not a destination for the faint of heart. Or the faint of body. It takes two full days of driving over mountains on dirt roads that haven’t been touched since the Soviet Union to even get there from Dushanbe. In most places, there is absolutely no cell service, let alone internet. In the words of another one of the girls on my trip “if our car broke down right now, no one would find us for DAYS.” (Don’t get concerned mom and dad, we had a satellite phone and emergency food and water with us, so we actually would have been found relatively quickly and well provided for until then).

Despite all the difficulties of traveling to the Pamirs, as some have affectionately called them, let me also say that for those who are able to handle it the trip is well worth it:

Who cares about bumping around in a Jeep for a few days when you can stand on top of a fortress that is literally thousands of years old from which you can see the snowy mountain peaks of three separate countries?

What bother is an altitude induced bloody nose to someone who can put their feet into a chilly bright blue freshwater lake and chat with a local meteorologist about the history of his entirely solar powered village.

Who wouldn’t squat on behind rocks and in rundown roadside outhouses for the chance to feel a soft steam rising past your face and up through the cold air as you yourself are submerged in the warm nutrient infused waters of a natural hot spring -- completely naked -- discussing the fertility benefits of those waters with a 60 year old Tajik woman, who is fluent in 5 languages (and is also completely naked).

There’s only so much I can say about the Pamirs, you really have to go and see them for yourself. And for the majority of you who can’t, below are some pictures accompanied by the stories that go along with them. Keep in mind though, that the pictures captured on my android j3 smartphone come nowhere near conveying the beauty of this place.

The small town of Darvoz, one of the first stops on our trip. You can see here the mountains are still green and the road is still paved, which means we haven't gotten too far out yet. 

A view from the central bridge in Khorog, the capital of Gorno-Badakhshan. Although you can't tell from this picture, Khorog is a pretty cosmopolitan city, given its location. Most of the people who live in Khorog speak Shugni as their native language, but can also easily chat with you in Russian, Tajik, and even English, and I don't just mean some of them.... I mean nearly ALL of them. How is this little mountain town able to produce a fully quatrilingual population? Great education system. Where does the money come from? Remember how I said it would become important that the people of this region are Ismaili Shia? Well, it just so happens that a whole lot of money and programming is poured into their region by none other than the Agha Khan, leader of the Ismaili sect of Shia Islam, close friend of Justin Trudeau, and one of the 10 richest royals in the world (fascinating guy, look him up). 

 The road and mountains in the town of Iskashim, at the beginning of the Wakhan Corridor.

These camels are not for tourists to ride for photo opportunities of their exotic trips to the desert. Nope. These camels are actually used for transport.

 The ancient fortress I was talking about above.

 The village of Bulunkul, situated right in the middle of the Pamir Plateau.  At about 12,000 feet above sea level, Bulunkul boasts a whopping total of 40 something families, a fully functioning solar powered weather station, and a handful of cars without wheels.

Breathe in, breathe out, enjoy.

See you later / تا بعد / до встречи
Lindsay / لینزی / Линдси

Happy Nowruz / نوروز مبارک / навруз муборак!

    As you may or may not know, Nowruz is the Persian Year.

    As you probably don’t know unless you’re Persian, it is also the oldest continuously celebrated holiday of all humankind, pretty cool right? Today, Nowruz is celebrated all across what used to be the Persian empire, all the way from Azerbaijan to Central Asia. This post is about my experience of Nowruz in Tajikistan.

    My Iranian conversation partner Saodat told me that while in Iran Nowruz tends to be a family holiday, in Tajikistan it is more of a public holiday. In my experience, this has been true. My host family didn’t do anything to celebrate Nowruz in their home, however that by no means means that it was not celebrated. Here I will describe some of the ways I celebrated Nowruz and saw Nowruz being celebrated in Tajikistan.

    A ceremony: ​At American Councils, where I study, we commemorated Nowruz with a huge Nowruz ceremony, in which I was chosen to be what Iranians call “mojri” Tajiks call “baranda” and what probably in English roughly translates to Master of Ceremonies. Our Nowruz party consisted of different acts of both Americans and Tajiks who study here (American Councils also runs exchange programs for Tajik students), in which we did traditional dances, played traditional Nowruz games such as wrestling and tug of war, and recited poetry. As the MC, I had to some sort of a poem between every act, so if you’re ever interested in hearing someone recite Nowruz poetry in Persian, hit me up. I also shared the jeesh story (see earlier post) with the crowd who seemed to enjoy it a lot.

    Haft Seen / Shin: ​Another one of my jobs as MC was presenting the “haft seen” table. Many traditional Persian holidays feature ceremonial plates and tables, each of which is full of symbolic items. To all my Jews out there, surprise surprise, the seder plate was based off of the haft seen.

    In Persian, haft means seven and seen is a letter of the alphabet, so there are seven things on the haft seen all of which begin with the letter seen: sir (garlic, symbol of health), sekeh (coins, symbol of blessing, sanjed (a type of dried fruit, symbol of love), samanu (see below, a symbol of abundance), sib (apple, a symbol of health), and samagh (sumac, a symbol of the flavor of life). There are also other things which don’t begin with sin, like a mirror (symbol of light and cleanliness), an egg (symbol of life), a goldfish (symbol of movement and flow), and plants and flowers (a symbol of life).
     Interestingly, historically there was a variation of the haft seen called the ‘haft shin’ which is basically the same concept with 7 things that begin with a different letter (shin, not sin). The haft shin variant is more common in Tajikistan, but not as much in Iran (at least publicly) because of its inclusion of sharob (wine).

    Preparation of Sumalak / Samanu: ​Another tradition I found particularly awesome is the making of sumalak (which Iranians call samanu). Sumalak is a paste made of wheat that is traditionally eaten around Nowruz. In Tajikistan, it is a tradition that the woman from each neighborhood will gather together and cook a big pot of sumalak outside, which they then give out to everyone in the community. Cooking sumalak takes an entire day, so women from around the community will all gather around the pot and take turns watching it and stirring it as it simmers. It’s a great time for gossip and community building.

    Bocha: ​Over the week we got off of school for Nowruz, I travelled to the northern city of Khujand (highly recommend traveling there if you get the chance) and in Khujand I saw another Nowruz tradition which I think is unique to Tajikistan (although Iranians reading this, let me know if you do it in Iran as well, I’d love to know). This tradition, which I think is called ‘bocha’, is where young boys will all hold on to the edges of a blanket and carry it around their neighborhood asking for candy. It is sort of like halloween, except unfortunately only boys are involved, and fortunately, all the kids have one blanket of candy which they share, rather than each of them having their own basket. They also have a rhyme that they sing when they collect it, which you can see below.

    Buzkashi: ​Buzkashi (literal translation: the pulling of goat) is something you have to see to believe. It is a traditional Central Asian sport played primarily in Tajikistan and Afghanistan, which I can probably best explain to Americans as follows: It is like soccer. Except the ball is a stuffed goat. And the players are on horses. And there are hundreds of them. There is no official Buzkashi league here, but what tends to happen is wealthy people will often host games around Nowruz, and people from around the region will come and compete for prizes which can range from anything from a goat to a brand new car, depending on how rich the host is.

    Atlas: ​Atlas one of the traditional fabrics of Tajikistan, and around Nowruz, you’ll be hard pressed to find a woman on the street who isn’t wearing it. In my time here, I have seen atlas scarves, atlas shoes, traditional atlas dresses with loose atlas pants under them, and even custom made European style atlas dresses. For the nowruz party, my host family graciously lent me one of my host sisters traditional atlas tresses and a traditional hat (toughi) to wear. See below for pictures.

I hoped you enjoyed hearing about my experience of Nowruz. I’d love to hear what you think or about your own experiences in the comments or by email.

See you later / до втсечи / بعد تا
 -Lindsay / Линдси / لینزی

buzkashi

a haft shin from Khujand

me wearing atlas as the mojri 

our nowruz party

The bocha song

A traditional wedding / جشن اروسی سنتی / Тӯйи анъанавӣ

    Hi everyone, sorry it has been a while. I have been incredibly busy lately and debating giving up on this blog, but a few comments from friends and family has encouraged me to keep writing.

    About two months ago, I had the privilege of attending a traditional Tajik wedding. One of the girl’s in my program had a member of her host family getting married, and in true Tajik style, her host mom invited all the people in our program, so that we could get to experience both a Tajik tradition, and Tajik village life (the two-day wedding was in a village about an hour outside of Dushanbe). Early Saturday morning, the three of us who actually decided to go to the wedding piled into the car of someone’s relative (a very common experience here) and, next to homemade cakes, pastries, and a little portable oven, drove about an hour east of the city and found ourselves in the village of Navobod, home to about 400 people.

    The house where the wedding was to take place was packed with relatives and all their children, and the trend seemed to be that the ten year olds played games and carried around their baby cousins while their mothers prepared food and their fathers chatted and ate it. It was a traditional house, meaning that there were doors to specific indoor rooms, but a central space which was outside. The first day mostly consisted of preparations, and on the first night, everyone who had been involved in preparations gathered together for a meal.

    There was a woman's room and a men’s room, and both rooms were set up with cushions lining the walls where people would sit, and the center of the room with a blanket spread over it and an endless amount of food on top of the blanket, which we all enjoyed. There was a 60 year old woman named Matlyuba with a penciled on unibrow who sort of took us under her wing that night and explained all the traditions to us. In traditional Persian culture, unibrows are considered to be extremely beautiful (there’s even a special name for them: abru-kamun or eyebrow like a bow), which is why in many parts of rural Tajikistan women to this day will pencil in unibrows. For me, this was a major reminder of the relativity of beauty standards.

    The preparations continued late into the night, and in true Tajik style (again) one of the neighbors of the wedding house offered for us to stay the night with her, since the house where the wedding was was pretty overcrowded. So we went with her and her daughter Niloofar, who was our age, and had nice conversations about marriages in the US versus Tajikistan during which we all struggled a bit to understand her accent, which was significantly different than what we are used to in Dushanbe.

    The next day we woke up early and went back to the wedding house, where tables had been set up in the outside courtyard area and people from all around the village were coming in and out to get their fill of the national food of Tajikistan, Osh. A few years ago, it became illegal to have more than 150 people gathered together, and cops come around to check this, so that’s why people were coming and going, rather than everyone staying the whole time. Anyways, the Osh which consists of rice, beef, carrots and chickpeas, is cooked outside over a fire in the most massive pot I’ve ever seen in my life. Although most cooking is considered to be a woman’s job here, for some reason Osh is a men’s thing. All the men were gathered around the massive pot, cutting pieces of meat to thrown in, talking about manly things (presumably), and eagerly telling us to come and take pictures.

    Finally, around noon, the osh party was broken up to the piercing sound of trumpets and drums. I looked to Matlyuba for an explanation and she told me “they’re going to bring the bride.”

     Sure enough, the groom and a group of his friends and brothers in suits gathered around and piled into a shiny new Mercedes-Benz which somehow had made its way into this village (sometimes I feel like Central Asia is straight out of a Gabriel Garcia-Márquez novel) while everyone else cheered and danced. They drove away to the bride’s house across the river while we went back into the women’s room and listened to the woman singing wedding songs, playing drums and dancing.

    About an hour later the trumpets and drums began again, and everyone crowded around to watch the bride, wearing an extremely intricate white dress, and the groom, in a suit, get out of the car. They walked inside to the biggest of all the food eating rooms and everyone crowded in to watch as the groom’s father welcomed everyone to the house and a cleric said a few prayers. Then the bride disappeared behind a curtain to change clothes, and reappeared about forty minutes later in an equally intricate red dress. The music started again and everyone presented her with gifts. People danced for a bit and then the bride disappeared again and reappeared wearing a blue dress. Apparently in Tajikistan multiple dresses are common, and I was told it is a way to show the bride will be well provided for.

     In the blue dress, it was time for the legal portion of the wedding, so an official from the nearest government office arrived and had them both sign the legal wedding contract. After that, there were speeches and to my embarrassment they insisted on the foreigners giving a speech. The other girls from my program very quickly tossed the microphone to me, and I stood there staring at a bride and groom I had never met before that day, and about 100 others. I thanked them for their hospitality and wished them happiness, love, and (of course) many healthy children. The dancing and the eating continued until the evening, when we all piled in a car and headed back to Dushanbe.

    Disclaimer: This was a very traditional wedding. It isn’t necessarily representative of every wedding in Tajikistan. Still though, I feel really privileged to have been invited and to have seen it. Interestingly, it looked a lot like the traditional Iranian weddings I have seen in historical Iranian TV shows and movies. It felt nice to be reminded of the shared history and culture between Tajikistan and Iran, which is often hard to see these days due to strained relations between the two countries and a whole lot of Russian influence over here.

That's all for now,

See you later / до втсечи / بعد تا
-Lindsay / Линдси / لینزی

preparations

the wedding house

the most massive pot of osh you'll ever see

bride, groom and food setup

in her red dress and drums playing

A day in my life and the story of "jeesh" / як руз дар зиндагии ман ва достони чиш

This post is primarily to let you all know what a day in my life looks like, but I'm going to start with a funny story:

Yesterday, me and my three year old host sister Mahvash went on a walk, aka "pogudka" (this is her mispronouncing the Russian word for walk "progulka"... adorable). It was just the two of us, and we went to a park near my house to play. All was going well until Mahvash ran up to me and said "Lindsay, jeesh." I didn't know what jeesh meant, so I asked her "Mahvash, what is jeesh?" In classic three year old fashion, she just said louder "JEESH!" I thought it was a game, so I too started shouting "Jeesh! Jeesh! Jeesh!" Then I noticed a puddle forming around Mahvash's feet. And that my friends, is how I learned how to say "pee" in Persian. I felt pretty bad for Mahvash but fortunately she seemed to be more upset about our "pogudka" coming to an end than she was about the jeesh itself. Thankfully, my host family was nice about it as well.

Anyways, time for a day in the life: the day I've chosen to share with you happens to be Thursday, also known as panjshanbeh.  Welcome to panjshanbeh.

7:00am: I wake up, mess around on my phone for a while, answering the messages that came in from the day in the US also known as my night. Sometimes I do a bit of homework. I get dressed and ready for the day.

8:00am: I go into our living room and sit on the couch. The TV is on the national channel, called “Tajikistan”, which pretty constantly alternates between beautiful nature shots, news, and children reciting poems and giving flowers to the president. The table in our living room is set with fresh bread, halvah, and syrupy fruit preserves my host mom makes over the summer. As family members come in and out at different times, they help themselves to these things as well as a warmer breakfast item, which my host mother cooks for everyone. I usually eat either kasha, which is basically a Russian form of oatmeal, or fried eggs. I casually talk to my host mom while I eat and around 8:30 or 8:45, I leave.

9:00am: I walk about 15 minutes from my house to my language school. I usually arrive, make myself a cup of tea, and do some homework.

11:00am: It’s time for my first class. Today my first class is called mass media, which essentially is talking about current events in Farsi. Each class, I’m supposed to bring in a news article and summarize it, and then my teacher Sareh, a very smart Iranian woman with an impressive degree in Farsi literature and very high expectations, asks me extremely difficult questions about the article that would be hard for me to even answer in English. That’s how you learn apparently. This class lasts two hours with a ten minute break in the middle.

1:00pm: It’s time for my second class. It is called conversation, even though I think it’s more of a vocabulary building class than a conversation class. Every day I’m supposed to read a chapter in our textbook before class, and during class my teacher Rustam and I go over what was in the chapter and talk about it. Rustam is a thirty something Tajik man, who also has an impressive degree in Farsi literature and enjoys having philosophical conversations with me that usually turn cynical and I’m not sure if that’s his doing or mine. Each chapter covers a different subject (for example forms of government, or economics), and the idea is that by the end you’ll have vocabulary for a wide range of things.

3:00pm: My classes are over for the day, but the learning is not. After I get out of class, my language partner Saodat, who is half Iranian half Tajik, is waiting for me outside. I meet with her once a week and we usually go to a cafe, or go for a walk and just talk about literally whatever we want. My classes focus pretty heavily on more academic Farsi, so I think the point of these meetings is to get more of the everyday stuff. In a normal study abroad program, I could get the everyday stuff from my everyday life, but due to the dialect difference most of the day to day vocabulary I hear in my host family would be completely incomprehensible to an Iranian.

5:00pm: I finish with Saodat and walk home. I take a shower when I get there and put on my house clothes (here, like Russia, it is not really acceptable to wear your street clothes in the house) and go to hang out with my family. I watch a mixture of Russian and Tajik tv with them, play with baby Mahvash, and around 7 or so we eat dinner.

7:00pm: Dinner could consist of lots of different things. My favorite so far happens to be a staple Tajik dish called Osh, which is this greasy rice with carrots meat. Osh is a good representative of the traditional Tajik food I have eaten here so far, in that it is very heavy, very delicious, and quite bad for your health. Not so fun fact: In Tajikistan, more people die here of heart attacks than of car accidents.

9:00pm: Around 9pm I usually say goodnight to my family and head to my room where I have gotten into the habit of watching an episode of an Iranian TV show before bed. The show is called Shahrzad and it is a romantic / political drama that takes place in the 1950s. I find it super interesting to see how the director, who lives in post-revolution Iran, looks back on that time period, and how the censorship limits the extent to which the past can be portrayed. The plot is also pretty great and sometimes my inability to understand it creates for super surprising plot twists. One time I watched this show with my host mom and we both laughed about who was able to understand more of it: her as a native speaker of Tajik, or me, a student of Farsi. She definitely got more, but we were both having some difficulties.

10:00: Around 10, or sometimes a bit after, I go to bed. I find that 4-6 hours of one on one classes plus speaking another language all day is pretty exhausting, so I usually fall asleep in seconds.

Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of cool pictures due to my phone being stolen, but let's not focus on the negative. Enjoy these three random pictures I do have:)

A very classic Tajikistan shot

Soviet Era public art

A snowy mountain from our ski trip a few weeks ago

First few days / рӯзҳои нахустин

Hi everyone! I have arrived. Here are some scattered comments (and pictures!) from my first week or so:

Host family: In Dushanbe, I have the privilege of living with a host family, which is awesome for language learning, as well as getting a chance to actually see what life is like for a Tajik family (or at least what life is like for this Tajik family in particular). My host family is made up of my host parents Muhabbat and Juraqul, their thirty four year old daughter Dilafruz, and her two sons Azim and Akbar, who are ten and thirteen. They also have another daughter Dilnoza, who doesn’t actually live with us, but she comes almost every night for dinner, and her trouble maker three year old daughter Mahvash stays with us during the day while Dilnoza is at work. Mahvash is absolutely adorable, and enjoys disrupting family activities in any way she can, including singing the Tajik national anthem as loud as she can when we are watching TV or insisting that everyone sticks post-it notes on their faces.

The physical house that they live in is pretty different from anything I’ve seen in the US: when you walk in the door, you are actually outside, in a central courtyard. The central courtyard then has doors which lead to different parts of the house. This became extremely relevant a few days ago when we got a few inches of snow, and in order to get from my room to the kitchen I had to walk through it.

Classes: I’m on my third day of classes and they are awesome! All of my classes are intensive language classes at the language center of my program. I am taking a Farsi grammar class, a Farsi conversation class, a Farsi media class and a colloquial Tajik class. Due a combination of factors, I happen to be the only student in all my classes and I cannot understate how useful that is. Some of my teachers are Tajiks who went to college in Iran and others are Iranian. They are all quite brilliant and have high expectations which I appreciate. What do I mean by high expectations? So you can get an idea, here’s a sampling of some of my homework assignments:

-write a paragraph (in Farsi) detailing several ways that a country can ensure a stable and enduring democracy

-prepare a 15 minute oral presentation (in Farsi) on the similarities and differences in the Jewish and Muslim concepts of community

-read an article about child labor and come to class prepared to discuss how views of child labor may differ depending on cultural context

Language: As I mentioned in my previous post, I came to Tajikistan to learn Persian. The Persian that I have studied up until now was mostly the Iranian dialect of Persian, which is called Farsi. In Tajikistan, they speak a different dialect of Persian called Tajik, which is written with the Russian alphabet and is just about as different from Farsi as Spanish is from Italian. ُTo understand the situation I am in, imagine going to Italy with an intermediate level of Spanish. In other words, there’s a lot that I don’t understand yet.

After a week, I am beginning to understand more and more Tajik, but when I speak it still sounds very Farsi. Yesterday I was talking to the woman sitting next to me on the bus and she asked if I was Iranian, which I found quite hysterical because I do not look Iranian at all, and I’ve been told by many Iranians that my accent in Farsi sounds pretty American. I guess though to a Tajik woman who is not used to talking to foreigners, it does make sense. Due to the country’s Soviet past, most Tajiks see a white person and assume they are Russian. So, a lot of people on the street speak to me in Russian, but then when I answer them in Iranian Farsi, I see how it could be a bit confusing.

Speaking of Russian, I decided that in an attempt to really work on my Persian, especially in the beginning, I would not tell my host family that I speak Russian. That fell apart pretty quickly. On my very first day, my host mother said something on the phone in Russian which I unintentionally reacted to, upon which she instantly asked me “To rusi mi duni?” (Do you speak Russian?). I told her I did, but that I really wanted to practice my Tajik, and so far the whole family has been very respectful of that. The Russian also has come in handy, because when I don’t know a word, I can ask them what it is in Tajik using Russian (whereas my classmates who do not speak Russian have a lot harder time, because their host families usually do not speak English). I have also found it very interesting to observe when people speak Russian here versus when they speak Tajik. In my host family, I have found that they never really have entire conversations in Russian, but rather they pepper their Tajik with Russian words and phrases. For example I have noticed my host mom always inserts the Russian phrase “nu konechno” (“well, of course”) in the middle of her Tajik.

I could go on and on about this for pages probably, but this post is getting long, and I imagine my average reader is not as passionate about code switching as I am, so I’ll stop here for now. If you have any questions for me or things you’d like to hear about in a future post, shoot me an email or comment below.

 See you later / до втсечи / تا بعد

-Lindsay / Линдси / لینزی

The snowy courtyard of my host family's house. The doors are to different rooms.

My bed.

A big tea house 

A market

Mahvash and I. She is my best friend in Tajikistan right now. 

Monday I'm going to Monday

    I wish I had kept a formal record of people’s reactions upon my telling them that I’ll be studying abroad for a semester in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

    I’ve gotten all kinds of reactions ranging from one of my classmates who told me with 100% seriousness: “Wow I’m jealous, I’ve always wanted to spend time in Central Asia!” to a middle-aged woman in a Manhattan bagel shop who told me to be careful because Tajikistan is “right in the middle of the hot spot.” To all my concerned relatives out there reading this: Tajikistan is not in the middle of the hot spot, in any sense. Climate wise, it is fairly temperate, politics wise it is quite stable, and safety wise, as a foreigner / study abroad student, I statistically am safer in Dushanbe than I would be in Barcelona, London, or Paris. 

    Hot spots aside, the typical conversation usually goes something like this: 

Friend / Family Member: Oh you’re studying abroad? That’s awesome! Where are you headed to? 

Me: Tajikistan 

    Once I say Tajikistan, I usually get a surprised “oh” (or in the case of those who know me a bit better, a sarcastic “of course”) followed by “Where even is that anyways?” and “What do they speak there?” 

    If you find yourself unable to locate Tajikistan on a map, or picture what the people there look like or what language they speak, don’t worry: not too long ago, I was in the same boat, right next to you. 

    So you may be wondering: how did I get from not knowing a single thing about Tajikistan to choosing to spend a semester there? I’ll be honest: The languages. When I chose to study abroad in Tajikistan, I probably didn’t know much more about it than you know right now... What I did know however, was that in Tajikistan, both Russian and Persian are spoken, and I happen to be studying both of those languages, which means Tajikistan will be the perfect place for me to keep up with my Russian as well as to work on my Persian. There is, however, a small linguistic hurdle in that Tajik, the dialect of Persian spoken in Tajikistan is pretty significantly different than Farsi, the Iranian dialect I’ve studied for the past two years. I’ve heard that Farsi and Tajik are about as different from each other as Spanish and Italian, which means pretty similar but far from 100% mutually intelligible, especially at first... But for a linguistics nerd, that’s all part of the fun, right? 

    Since deciding to study abroad in Tajikistan, I have done some research and learned more about the country, but when it comes down to it, I’m still an American undergraduate who has never been to the area before. In other words: I have a LOT to learn. 

And I invite you to follow my experiences on this blog and learn along with me.

 See you later / до втсечи / تا بعد 

-Lindsay / Линдси / لینزی 

About the blog title: ​If you’re wondering about the title of my blog, it is likely that you don’t speak Persian. Let me explain: In Persian, Dushanbe literally means “two-day” which also happens to be the way to say “Monday.” As a lovely and very punny coincidence, I also happen to be traveling to Dushanbe this coming Monday. So when I say “Dushanbe miram Dushanbe” I’m doing a play on words: On Monday I’m going to Monday.”

A view of Dushanbe, my home for the next few months

Flag of Tajikistan, in case you were wondering

Don't know what this is but I will soon!