Tajikistan Travel Blog Throwback #1
Because only by looking back can we see how far we've come, or another great subtitle: Scatological and Geographical Excursions to the Roof of the World
This series will be an edited reposting of a blog I sent out into the Digi-verse in 2010-2011 when I studied Persian in Tajikistan as part of my Master's degree in that language. Iran and Afghanistan being off limits to Americans then as now, the closest us students of Persian-Farsi could get was to Tajikistan, the Central Asian country of 7 million, which at least borders on Afghanistan. They speak a dialect of Persian that uses the Cyrillic alphabet and is heavily influenced by Russian and Uzbek. The first word I learned in my host family was ‘piola’ for some cup or bowl, which I couldn’t find in any Persian dictionary because it was apparently Russian or Uzbek. This happened for nine months. Tajikistan was once part of the Soviet Union and remained the poorest former state. Its history, culturally, economically, and politically, is impossible to understand without knowing this. I didn’t appreciate that fact when I first arrived.
I wrote a blog about the sit…
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