Karabolo

Ahh, things are much better since I last posted. I've hung out with some Americans since my last post, which has been fun. People who decide to come to Tajikistan are all freaks, I have noticed. There is nothing specifically strange that I can pinpoint about any of them, but they all have some sort of weird, affected manner. One guy just bought a one-way ticket to Tajikistan because he had a fight and broke up with a girlfriend. He had done the same thing a couple years earlier and gone to Mongolia. I found a second Emory graduate on this trip too! He is weird, he keeps making "That's what she said" jokes. Which is fine and sometimes funny, but the incessant way he does it makes me wonder what's going on in his head. It's not even annoying, it's just strange, because I can't imagine how he would think in his head that making 20 of those jokes in a row is effective communciation. And fewer American women than men decide to come to Tajikistan, I don't know why that is. Maybe it is because more men are in the military than women, and a lot of military people learn Farsi.

I went to an enormous bazaar called Karabolo today with some Americans. It means "Caravan." The bazaar was enclosed inside four walls with an open roof, except most of the vendors put up small tarps. It was a huge maze, it is so difficult to describe. There must have been at least 100 vendors, maybe 200. Some vendors sell fabric for the long, loose tunics that women here wear. People buy the fabric and then go to seamstress, so they are all made for each person individually, although I don't think that is necessary, since they are so loose they could be one-size-fits-all. They really are like muu-muus. The bazaar also had a ton of clothes, religious rugs, traditional hats, pirated music and DVDs, jewelry, watermelons and other produce, electronics, irons, teapots and plates, toys, everything. My favorite thing they sold was rat poison, haha, I took a picture.

This vendor selling rat poison was actually outside the walls of the bazaar, here are pictures of the inside. It's difficult to show what the bazaar actually looked like, imagine these pictures and then walking forward and seeing more and more of all of it, and then turning corners and seeing vendor after vendor forever and getting lost. That is how it was like. The second picture is a vendor selling the fabric for the traditional dress.



I am going to Pamir tomorrow!! I am so excited! I know I already explained Pamir a little, but I forgot what I said so I'm just going to write a little more about it. People there speak an older form of Persian which is not mutually intelligible with Tajik. I am going to be doing 7 interviews in 8 days, it's going to be insane! I don't think I'll have a lot of access to internet though, so it may be a while until I post again. Pamir is actually a huge province, and I will be traveling around Pamir to interview the wives of the migrant workers who were already interviewed in Moscow.

Oh, and this is off topic, but I wanted to mention something in my last post that I forgot. When I was walking down the big hill, every so often a big cow would come rumbling past and I'd have to jump out of the way! The way they herd cows and bring them back home is by chasing them so they run home themselves. So at the end of the day when I was walking home with all those little boys following me, some of the cows were being herded in. It just seemed very pastoral to have a cow lumbering past every so often, with a little boy chasing behind.