Dushanbe Nightlife

Apparently there is some repressed sexuality in Dushanbe.

Last night I met up with an American girl named Samyra. She's a friend of a friend from Emory, Clay, and he knows her from undergrad when he transferred to NYU. I met her for coffee, and she was friendly but also very intense and maybe too cool for me. I knew she would be a little weird because Clay is sort of emo and can be pretentious. Samyra is doing a language program for Farsi here with about 50 other Americans. Farsi and Tajik are mutually intelligible, contrary to what the Irani in San Francisco I met told me.

First Samyra took me to her host family's house for dinner, who are half-Tajik, half-Uzbek. Tajiks are super hospitable. When I hear someone talking about leaving their door open and welcoming strangers, I usually think about the South and think that maybe that used to be the case, but welcoming strangers is a little exaggerated referring to today. But Tajiks truly welcome everyone. They treat you like part of their family, no matter if you are just passing by, and will keep feeding you until you explode. And they will expect you to stay forever, even if they don't know who you are. Samyra's host family is a grandmother and a sixteen-year-old granddaughter. I was really excited to try a Tajik meal for the first time, but unfortunately they weren't eating meat that day and made macaroni! It was still delicious though. We sat outside under a canopy of grapevines on this raised platform covered in mats and ate off the mats. I couldn't understand what was going on most of the time since they were speaking in Farsi/Tajik, but sometimes Samyra would translate for me. This dinner was not the repressed sexuality part, the dinner was super nice. Samyra's 3 friends showed up a little later, and were equally intense/pretentious but friendly. One was a Chinese-American girl Grace from Columbia who was studying Uzbek, and there was a guy Kevin who was in the military and spoke like every word he said was very dramatic. They all knew different languages, so they spoke with the family in Farsi/Uzbek/Tajik/Russian, which was a little overwhelming for me.

After this we went to the host house of another student in their program. His host family gave him a whole floor in their house to live in (!), so he bought a refrigerator for alcohol and hosted a refrigerator-warming party, which is what we went to. I felt so bad for his conservative Tajik family! I guess they couldn't have been too conservative because they were letting the party go on, but maybe they are just nice. A little boy of about 9 from the family came up to the party at one point with a huge, delicious mushroom salad and several spoons. He looked very sheepish, like he did not want to be there, poor Muslim boy!

There were about 20 people at the party, and I felt like I was in college. Especially with that alcohol refrigerator. Everyone kept talking about sex, I couldn't help thinking it was kind of juvenile. Maybe I've become an old fogey, or a boring med student. I think people tend to go crazy when they study abroad, so maybe I stumbled upon their crazy study abroad experience. I don't know why people go crazy when they study abroad, maybe it feels like it doesn't count or isn't in reality. But by the end of the night they were all hooking up with each other. Anyway, it was actually fun to meet and talk with other Americans. A lot of them were military related because of Farsi's national security uses. For one guy, it was his first time leaving the US! I couldn't imagine coming to a country as complicated and different as Tajikistan as my first experience abroad.

From the party, we all moved to a club called Opera, which is silly because this is what the big Emory club in Atlanta is called. I don't know what I was expecting, but I was completely blown out of the water by the club! After not seeing women's thighs and skin for so long, suddenly I was seeing so much of it! And there were dancers! Like a strip club except no stripping, just dancing provocatively in very few clothes! Apparently dancers like these are normal for clubs in Central Asia. I just kept staring at all these half-naked women and some of the women coming into the club. I don't even know how they got from their houses to the club, maybe they used nightcover to their advantage. I thought how funny it would be if some of these women would wear the traditional Tajik dress the next morning.

The dancing was super fun. There were crazy lazer lights all over the place, and the music was mostly Russian (I think), although I heard some French and German splayed in there. Most of the clientele were actually Tajik, which I was so surprised to see, because I expected it to be all Russians and other foreigners. I was interested to see most of the Tajik men and women dancing separately, in groups of men and groups of women. There were a few couples, but not many. And they didn't grind, so I can only wonder what they thought of us Americans going crazy simulating sex on the dance floor.

There was a creepy American guy who none of us knew hanging out with us. He works at the US Embassy, and must have been in his mid- to late-thirties, although the kids I was with were mostly college and post-college. His name was Steve, and he bought a hookah for everyone which I thought was really nice, although now I think he might have done that because he felt awkward with no one talking to him. It was a smart move though.

He asked me what I was doing in the land of the Tajiks, and I told him HIV/AIDS research. When he asked if he should be worried, I told him only if he was having unprotected sex with multiple partners. At this point, I was already creeped out by him, because he had refused to tell me what he was doing in Tajikistan. Then he said, "Oh good then I don't have to worry. I'm a virgin." I just stared at him then, not knowing what to say. Then I got up to dance. I really didn't mean to be offensive, I was just at a loss for words! Later on he grabbed me for the one slow-dance they had with super cheesy saxophone music, and he danced in a way where I felt he might be a frotteur. Bleh. He also gave Samyra's Iranian friend a little pill, which made her friend sick and then very excited. Luckily, all this was only about 15 minutes of the night, I just had to mention it because he was so creepy.

Dancing with the group was really fun, but it was so hot! Tajikistan is hot already, and once you get 100+ people in a room all dancing together, it was just disgusting. I must have sweat a gallon of water. And I couldn't do my normal drinking from the faucet trick at this club, because the tap water is not safe to drink! I also looked super dorky (said one language student), because I was wearing my mom's long skirt which is appropriate for normal Tajik life, but completely weird in a club. I felt like such a prude next to all these half-naked Tajiks! Whatever, they still couldn't bring themselves to dance with the opposite sex. :)