Tajikistan is a cash economy, which means that I’ve handled more cash in the past week than I have probably handled in the previous four years of my life (with the exception of my international travel in the past year).  There are a handful of places that accept Visa and Mastercard, but out of fear of causing a card problem, I’m hesitant to use them.  I might just give it a check in the next few days, just in case.

Tajikistan’s currency is called the Somoni, named after Tajik historical slash mythological figure Ismoil Somoni, and the current exchange rate is about 4.88 Somoni to the dollar.  It is printed in denominations of 1-3-5-10-20-50-100-500-1000, although bills larger than 50 almost never see the light of day.  The one exception was when I found a 100 som bill (around 20 dollars) on the ground.  The Somoni is divided into dirhams, but the coins find rare use and, in a way similar to countries that don’t have change smaller than 5 cents, we have only actually gotten change less than 1 Somoni back once.  The bills themselves are quite beautiful (I have a weird obsession with how beautiful currency designs are in many countries), although their quality is uncertain – many bills are torn or taped, and when I changed my money, the bank was actually inspecting each bill they gave me.  In addition, after accidentally putting a 1 Somoni bill behind the sweat guard in my money belt, my money belt is now a suspectly similar shade of green.

Things in Tajikistan are cheap.  A bus ride is 1 som, a shared taxi home is 3 som from anywhere in the city along one route.  As I said before, lunch can be had for 5, and a fancy kabob lunch at the Iranian restaurant can be had for 20.  Cappuccinos are 10, as is a locally brewed beer.  It’s quite remarkable to us.  It’s not super cheap, but we don’t feel bad if our stomachs really need a bit of comfort food every once in a while.

In any case, we’re right now in a mixture of preservationism and naive optimism about spending.  It shouldn’t be a problem, especially now that our settling expenses are taken care of.  The next step is exploring local cusine to not only find good deals, but good deals that won’t give us an illness.  It’s a fine and subjective line, but we will all figure it out.  Unfortunately, it will be trial and error.  Luckily, those mistakes won’t cost us very much.