Day 3: first day of class

I am starting to feel less jet lagged, which is nice, but still not fully adjusted. By the estimate of one day for every hour of the time change, it’ll be just shy of a week until everything feels normal (since there's a 9-hour time difference from Boston).

Class was honestly really refreshing. As much as I love summer and not having school, class is at least one thing that isn’t totally different from the United States. I guess sitting in a classroom for multiple hours taking notes is pretty universal.  Unlike communicating with my host family, taking notes is something I am relatively competent at, and I can get a head start on my goal for the school year of being more organized. The teachers were also very good at balancing Tajiki with explaining directions and concepts in English if it was clear that we didn’t understand. Our classes actually just take place in a personal house, instead of a language school like a lot of other NSLI-Y programs have their lessons. The teachers write in cursive, which was a tough transition since all of the pre-program course was using print Cyrillic letters. Especially confusing is how the script letter for the “t” sound which normally looks like t looks just like the letter “m.”

I still have vocab to learn for tomorrow. I thought two packs of 500 index cards each would be enough, but I have already gone through much of the first stack. I guess Quizlet makes you forget the impact of vocabulary, that or the fact that the words you need for living in a country plus keeping up in class are much greater in quantity than a Latin chapter.

We also went shopping today. At the mall, they have these cubbies where you are supposed to lock up your bag before you go shopping. The somoni is also relatively weak, which was evident when exchanging money. You could get a decent ice cream cone for 1 somoni (1 USD is about 9.4 Tajik somoni).  In addition to shopping, after class, we also went to a presentation by a representative from the US embassy at the American Councils office. Most of it was stuff we had already covered at arrival orientation, but some it was interesting and new like how the terrorist attack against the bikers in the Eastern mountains last summer was like the Tajik 9/11. The coolest part was getting to chat with the CLS and ERLP students. They were all also studying Persian but are in college or doing graduate work. They seemed like a great resource, but I don’t think we are doing anything with them in the future.