July 9th, 2019


Today after class we went to the Ayni (or Aini) museum. He was a writer whose name I don’t know how to spell. It was a very quick visit and the guide spoke very qick Tajik as well. But I understood more than I usually do. He was from Bukhara, but had radical ideas for the time, so the government of Bukhara beat him. He supported education and talking about republics, I think. He also was into Egyptian stuff, or went to Egypt, or got gifts from Egypt. I didn’t really understand that part. There was more, but I didn’t understand. Once I have internet I will look him up.
We have another test on it and we have to memorize 4 short stories and a very long poem for it, in addition to talking to people about the history of Dushanbe so we can write/speak about it on the test as well as a bunch more vocabulary words. It’s a lot. It doesn’t help that I am very bad at memorizing as well. It doesn’t seem like the best teaching method.
            In other boring news, I finished All The Pretty Horses just now. To be completely honest I liked it much more than Blood Meridian (which I really enjoyed). It was much less gruesome while still capturing the starkness of landscape, harsh reality of life, and the wildness of the west. It was also nice that the main character didn’t die at the end. John Grady was also a lot more sympathic to me than the boy. I liked the sense of open-ended closure at the end of the novel, whereas in Blood Meridian you just have to assume the worst. The Spanish dialogue also keeps me on my toes. Funnily enough, the only app on my phone that still sends me notifications is SpanishDict! Word of the Day. The app also works offline, so it has proved a valuable resource. My favorite scenes were the ones where they were just traveling whether at the beginning with John, Rawlins, and Belvins or just John making his trek with the captain and without at the end. Despite presently being 6,300 miles it made be want to go travel/wander. I wish we got to visit the Pamir Mountains, but at the end of the program we do get to go to Khujand and we’ll see some mountains then.
            Small victory: I beat level 5 in Sokoban. On to level 6!

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