Alan Abroad: NSLI-Y Tajikistan Summer 2019

·       Rose: Not being sick as a dog anymore. Don’t physically feel like trash! ·       Thorn: For dinner, we had since stuffed peppers. My host mother made some with meat and some without, but all in the same pot, since they are cooked in a soup broth. Not only am I pretty sure it was an animal broth, but there were also little pieces of beef floating in it. As a vegetarian who hasn’t eaten meat since God-knows-when this was very tough ·       Bud: Internet café tomorrow! There’s so much I need to do. I didn’t realize how much not having internet access would affect me and how many little things I use it for. ·       Bee/Pollen: Someone who helped you and how they helped you ·       Roots: We went to a Sufi Muslim shrine today and we basically walked around and there were men sitting at various places around the compound. We would approach them, sit, and they would talk in Tajik for a bit. Then they would sing a prayer. In Tajikistan, they pray by cupping their hand

            My cold got worse, so I am staying home today. I am missing going to the bazaar, but I think that is okay since I didn’t really need to buy anything. I have five weeks lefts to buy souvenirs. Some shorts might have been nice since my host mom said I could wear shorts, but the only kind I have are these very casual basketball shorts. Being sick sucks because you are missing out on a once in a lifetime experience and you don’t have access to Netflix or anything else like that. I can’t even find my earbuds to listen to music. While Martin Hagglund (author of my summer reading book, This Life ) is a smart man with interesting ideas, he is tough reading when you can barely type, let alone think.   And the Cormac McCarthy books I brought are just so violent and sickness-addled brain doesn’t know where to put the quotation marks like normal. That said I think Cormac McCarthy is my new favorite author (to read when not sick). He reminds me of Hemmingway.  

We had class all day today. ·       Rose: All of the city in Dushanbe, there are these ice cream stands that sell one-somoni ice cream (for what it’s worth 9.4 somoni is about 1USD). These ice creams ( yakh mos transliterated) are one of the few cool things around. Most bottled water isn’t even refrigerated. The ice cream is just really good. It’s like soft serve in those stryfoam-y kinds of cones. Sometimes they put chocolate sauce or powder on it as well. Anyway, today I had two. ·       Thorn: I have a cold (in the hottest place ever as my host family liked to tease) and there was this moment where I was lying in my room, struggling almost to breathe in the stuffy air, feeling sweat coating every part of me, and at that moment I wished I could be anywhere else but Tajikistan. Otherwise, things have actually been going well. I also really messed up reading a passage aloud in class. It was very embarrassing. I can barely read aloud in English, so it’s unsurprising I gu