Dushanbe, Tajikistan

The best thing about this city, aside from the ubiquitous green electric taxis that charge almost nothing for a ride, is the evening walking culture.  There’s a long pedestrian boulevard spangled with LED lights leading to the central square of the city, and there are families out there every night once the sun goes down: kids on tricycles, friends strolling with their arms around one another, matrons with canes and ice cream cones.  Every nightfall there’s Tajik music pouring from the sound systems in the public square and near the parliament building.  It feels small-towny in the middle of a large city.  

The worst thing about this city is the air pollution, which is oppressive and especially visible around all those LED lights.  The culprit is not entirely emissions, though it is certainly that too; it’s also that the country’s main natural resources are underground.  Lots of mining here—gold, titanium, silver, *coal* (used for electricity, with all the foul haze that entails), etc—and the particulate matter that gets hurled up into the atmosphere from all those mines settles on everything in a whisper of dust.

Speaking of underground, here are some paleolithic artifacts from the National Museum of Tajikistan, mindblowingly dated to 950,000 BCE.  

There have been people in this part of the world for an incomprehensibly long time.  Layers and layers of civilization, empires overwriting empires overwriting empires.  The time scale is so long and the history so complex that I actually cannot keep all the narratives untangled in my mind. Like, I begin to get a sense of the relationship between the Samonids and the Mongols, but then I have to add in the Sogdans and the Zoroastrians and the Achaemenids and and and.  And I give up taking notes, knowing that I'm not going to be able to account for any of it.

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Pro tip: If one should find oneself weary after traveling for an extended period in foreign countries, far from friendly support and real-time conversations with loved ones, far from English-speaking pharmacists and western toilets, I highly suggest checking into the fanciest hotel you can find and spending a few days getting pampered, having your laundry cleaned and pressed and returned to you smelling only of soap, enjoying afternoon tea and pastries, setting the A/C to 16C (around 60F), and frequenting the infinity pool and the Finnish sauna.  Not every minute of every day needs to look like the centerfold of Outdoor magazine.