May 09 survey - Ashgabat

Ashgabat, Turkmenistan
This is a slightly crazy place that I wish I had better understood before the survey. The travel guides that I read about Turkmenistan were extremely patronizing, especially of the former President-for-Life Saparmurat Niyazov, AKA Turkmenbashy. He turned post-Soviet Turkmenistan into a dictatorship run by a cult of personality. He would make really random suggestions (and enforce them??). My favorite so far is from the Bradt Travel Guide for Turkmenistan, where, at a meeting at the Agricultural University, the Turkmenbashy told one of the students that her gold teeth would look much better if they were white and then suggested that "Turkmen should look after their teeth by gnawing on bones, as a dog looked after by the young Niyazov had done. That dog had excellent teeth." He also "urged television cameramen to change the angle from which they were filming Turkmenistan's female singers, as they were making them look too fat." I like to think of the Turkmenbashy as Turkmenistan's answer to Michael Scott/David Brent of The Office... in real life.

He wrote the Ruhnama, a combo autobiography, revisionist Turkmen history, and moral guidelines for the Turkmen people, requiring it to be valued on par with the Koran. Supposedly reading this book three times in its entirety guaranteed the reader automatic entry into Paradise. Schools were required to teach it, and applicants were questioned on it as part of their driver's license test (which maybe explains why Turkmen drivers are, in my experience, the scariest drivers in the world... it's like barreling through a video game with no concept of lanes and no seatbelts).

The Turkmenbashy died in 2006 and in the last few years the cult of personality has died down, too. Supposedly during his presidency, the Turkmenbashy's portrait was plastered all over Ashgabat; I only had him smile on me a few times during my short week there. Although my hotel was right around the corner from the Arch of Neutrality, a monument that is topped by a gold-plated statue of the dude himself, rotating to constantly face the sun and greet it with open arms.

So you can imagine the script that was going through my head while I was in Ashgabat! It's a beautiful showcase capital city... but it felt like they were trying way too damn hard to prove something. The country has come into a lot of wealth from its oil and gas reserves, and walking through the city it feels like they're the Nouveau Riche who just bought Park Street and are developing the hell out of it. And according to my housing meetings, they're not very good at maintaining what they've created. These beautiful domed government buildings and marbled luxury apartment complexes are eye-candy on the outside but questionable quality and durability on the inside.

The impressive "Cobra Building", commissioned by one of the ministries.

Despite the Soviets and the Turkmenbashy, the country has retained some strong cultural history and traditions. Many of the women wear these beautiful full-length slightly fitted dresses with elaborate patterned collars. I visited Tolkuchka Bazaar, one of the largest bazaars in Central Asia, and wandered through the clothing section where beautifully patterned fabrics hung down like curtains between the stalls. Tolkuchka also had a large carpet section--the country is renowned for them. I can attest to their beauty, but I was not tempted to buy any as (1) 99% of them were red and red is one of my least favorite colors (sorry Elderhostel!); (2) there are too many hoops to jump through to legally get a carpet out of the country; (3) I'm cheap and currently have nowhere to put a carpet. Although I did go to the carpet museum, where they have a carpet on display that is certified by the Guinness Book as being the largest handmade carpet in the world: an impressive 301 m2. The museum is overpriced, but you at least get your very own staff person who trails you at a respectable distance for the length of your visit. I think she was there to make sure I didn't stuff a handmade carpet under my skirt and make a run for it outside into the 30+C, since she otherwise wasn't particularly helpful.

Walking through Tolkuchka Bazaar, amongst the dress materials.

Ashgabat was incredibly unique and I am grateful that I had this opportunity to visit, especially given how difficult it is to get a tourist visa into the country. Unfortunately, I was quite road-weary by the time I arrived and found myself easily frustrated and irritable, and quite cynical. I fear a lot of that has found its way into this recounting of Turkmenistan. But really, the more I read about the place, the more I realize just how amazing and how ridiculous it is... in all possible senses of the words.

May 09 survey - Tashkent

Hi everyone,

So I never wrote email #2... if I had written it from Ashgabat, it would have been the most expensive email ever given how much the hotel was charging for internet, and I might have had an unintended audience reviewing it... so I decided to wait until I was home... and then all of the usual excuses apply and now it's some time later... anyhow.

Tashkent, Uzbekistan
I landed in Tashkent shortly after Swine Flu hit the news, so my flight was greeted with nurses holding mercury thermometers that we were all supposed to use and then give back... yeah, there was no way that thing was going in my mouth, so I copied my fellow travelers and put it under my arm, meaning that it didn't register any temperature when I gave it back... which I guess is better than registering a fever, although not what I would call a full-proof method for catching and quarantining the sick.

I was lucky to have a personal connection here: a friend from Brown is from Uzbekistan and put me in touch with her parents in Tashkent. They picked me up at the airport and her mother, a professional tour guide, showed me around Tashkent on my last day. Most of the city was destroyed in 1966 by an earthquake and was subsequently rebuilt as a "model Soviet city" with wide boulevards and beautiful parks. Tashkent is the only city in Central Asia to have an underground metro. We rode through some of the stations and they are beautifully and uniquely decorated. I was there for over a week but I found the city confusing to navigate. I attributed this to the extensive number of trees that line the streets--it's harder to find a landmark when it all blends in behind the trees. So the trees, combined with my dependence on taxis and their varying routes for transportation (you literally linger by the road until John Doe pulls up, settle on a price and hop in... usually not in English), and the overwhelming anxiety that I felt during most of my time there, made it hard for me to get a grasp on the city.

I was varying degrees of anxious for pretty much the whole week, hitting some kind of a surveyor crisis point and questioning if I really have the balls for this job and scared that the answer is actually "NO". I also had a hard time adjusting to surveying alone after spending two weeks with Alan. It makes a difference when you've got someone that you can eat and plan with. It validates you when you're spending 5 minutes in front of the instant coffee looking for the 200g jar of Nescafe Gold because, when you do it alone, you feel like everyone is questioning you. But surveying with someone also made me second-guess my own working style to the point where I was pretty low-confidence by the time we separated. So really, I was in the perfect state of mind to be stealthing in a foreign alphabet, hitch-hiking my way through a city that I couldn't quite grasp.

My goal was to finish the work to have enough time to do a daytrip to Samarkand, which is about a 4hr car ride away. This 2700+ year-old town and UNESCO World Heritage Site got its wealth from the Silk Road and was a Muslim center of learning. It's a beautiful historical place that is known for its blue-domed mausoleums. Google images from Samarkand and you'll see what I mean. I had an amazing guide who overwhelmed me with information that I unfortunately quickly forgot. But the name that stuck with me was Amir Timur (AKA Timur the Lame), a 14th century warrior who founded a massive empire that spanned from modern-day Turkey through Central Asia and to the Western edges of China. He is supposedly buried there (he died in the mountains during a winter campaign against the Chinese, a fair distance from Samarkand). Many of the mausoleums in Samarkand are commissioned by him or his descendants. Many of the mausoleums have been restored and their ceramic tiles are vibrant colors. Others have moss growing between the tiles, which I found equally fascinating. My other tourist outing of note was to see the oldest known Koran, housed in Tashkent. It's an absolutely massive book, written on deerskin. I was just overwhelmed by the size of the book.

In the drizzle in Samarkand, with the Registan behind me.

I just loved the colors and the ceramic tiled domes

May 09 survey - Minsk and Kiev

Zdravstvuite from Kiev. One of the handful of words I know in Russian, to go with my childlike sounding out of the Cyrillic alphabet that I have picked up over the last two weeks. I've just hit the halfway mark of my May survey... I've been in Minsk, Belarus and Kiev, Ukraine with my Boston colleague, Alan. He left today for Bucharest, Romania and I will solo-survey in Central Asia next. Realizing how exceptional this job is, I want to do it more justice by recording the experiences I'm having... playing with the idea of a blog... but in the meantime I thought I would try a few group emails from the road. This is the first and I apologize for the length. Whether or not you make it through the whole thing, I've enjoyed writing it out :)

Minsk, Belarus.
I liked the city, but I think that that was partly because we were really lucky with the weather, we had an awesome translator, and I hadn't been to Kiev yet. Most of Minsk was rebuilt after WWII after being completely destroyed... meaning that most of the city is very Soviet with wide boulevards and wide sidewalks and big buildings and massive squares. It's all very clean and tidy and a bit bland. (Not to generalize, but) the people are really friendly, although it doesn't feel like there are that many of them in the city; I wonder if that's an optical illusion due to the excessive sizes of the public spaces.

The guidebook called it a time capsule of Soviet Russia and a super model breeding farm (which Alan never tired of commenting on)... it's like stepping back behind the Iron Curtain with a lot of really manicured women and so-so men. Stilettos and techno/pop music are the soundtrack to Minsk--at all meals, in all taxis, in all stores, with the requisite TV turned to MTV. I increasingly felt less and less feminine with every day that we spent there, feeling virtually asexual by the time we got on the plane for Kiev. If a real woman has the heels, the makeup, the hair, and the matching accessories... then I'm not sure what that makes me... at least by Belorussian standards.

I can't really comment on Minsk's tourist industry as we spent all of our time in the stores and on the hotel phone.

This sign was in the elevator of our hotel and it made me smile every time.

Kiev, Ukraine.
(Not to generalize, but) unlike Minsk, more people here seem to live on short fuses where rather than join you in miming to communicate they seem to get angry at you for not understanding them. Of course not all Kievites are like that, but unfortunately they're the ones that you remember. The city has much more character and activity than Minsk with a mix of older European- and Soviet-style buildings. Lots of churches and parks and hills. Both Minsk and Kiev enforce Face Control; casual doesn't cut it. Bring stilettos next time.

But back to Kiev: we've had one real day off in these last two weeks and we used it to go to Chernobyl. I'll refer you to Alan's blog for a blow-by-blow recounting of the day and a handful of pictures:
http://www.the9to5alternative.com/blog/chernobyl-exposed-a-tour-of-the-worlds-most-infamous-radioactive-disaster

The tour includes seeing the sarcophagus covering Reactor 4 (the one that exploded) and visiting the ghost town of Pripyat. There were 50,000 people living in Pripyat until two days or so after the accident. They were evacuated and never returned, so the city is presented as a place where life stopped mid-step. I have to admit that Pripyat is what really drew me to the tour--it is what fascinates and disturbs me. It makes me think of those epidemic movies (28 Days Later, I Am Legend) where you see a city that you recognize but it is deserted with everything still in place as if its inhabitants were there only a moment ago (pre-dust). I was hoping that Pripyat would be a real life version of that... but it felt more like a combination construction site/bombed/vandalized city. Nature is pushing its way back through the cement, warping the sense of being in a city. All you can hear are the voices and footfalls of the group and birdsong. We were required to wear closed-toe shoes and I thought that that was due to the radiation, but it's really to protect you from all of the broken glass and broken everything that is on the floor.

We watched a documentary on the two-hour ride to Chernobyl. It had a lot of moving footage and interviews with people who were directly involved. I would tear up periodically during the documentary, which made me worry about how I would emotionally handle the rest of the day. But being on site is a total disconnect from what the place actually is. It ended up being a really fun day, with a light-hearted joking group commenting on how things seemed to be placed just so, making the photo-ops a little too perfect. It was like a photography safari, which left me feeling a little weird about the whole visit. We were voyeuristic, walking over and photographing the debris of other people's abandoned lives, and we were having fun... what does that make us? Well, hopefully the lingering radiation won't make me sterile (I was one of two women in our group of 15, and the only woman under the age of 60. Hmmmmmm). I'm glad I went and I would recommend the tour to anyone going to Kiev... but be prepared for questioning the Dark Tourist side of it all.

A cascade of books in the school in Pripyat.

We spent Alan's last few hours in Kiev today by walking through the Victory Day celebrations in the city's parks. Victory Day marks the day that the Soviets defeated Nazi Germany in WWII and it's celebrated throughout Russia and the former Soviet states. If my observations were correct, people walk around with flowers that they give to the elderly veterans who were all decked out in their uniforms and medals. It was really touching to see these old men and women, arms full of flowers, a tradition I could never really picture happening in the USA or Belgium.

We also visited the Kievo-Pecherska Lavra where there are embalmed monks in glass coffins in narrow underground tunnels/rooms below the city's primary monastery. Your entry fee is a candle that you use to light your way underground, which I found to be the most fascinating
part of the visit. At one moment there are a lot of people lighting up the room and making you a little nervous that your makeshift headscarf is going to catch fire; the next minute you're alone in a dark hallway with only an itty-bitty flame to light your way.

After Alan left, I walked my ass off in the city, wandering through parks and the many beautiful Orthodox churches. I have one more day here (a true weekend off from the otherwise non-stop work!) and then go to Tashkent, Uzbekistan and Ashgabat, Turkmenistan. I'm really excited for both, but I'm not sure how I feel about staying in rooms that are supposedly bugged (but hopefully not camera-ed, too????) It took me some time to get into survey-mode, and now it's going to take me some time to get used to surveying alone. I'm finding the work more stressful this time around: a combination of the Cyrillic alphabet and stealthing due to suspicious supermarket staff. I got kicked out of my first supermarket already... a necessary surveying landmark but hopefully not one that I will repeat any time soon!

I hope that you are all doing well and best wishes from the road!