Dushanbe is a small city, but it’s even easier to get around than you might think.  Everything is only a few blocks off of the main drag, Rudaki avenue, and if that weren’t enough, there is a robust network of public (and easily accessible private) transportation.

Easily most visible are the rusty trolleybuses that ply Rudaki as bus route 1, many of which have a Tajik flag billowing on a little mast above the driver’s cab.  You step on at any of three doors, and pay an attendant one Somoni for the ride.  As many a Tajik have learned, you then assess where the sun has been hitting the vehicle most recently.  Since Rudaki runs north-south, depending on the time of day, one side of the bus is considerably hotter than the other because it’s in direct sunlight.  Maybe that’s why so many people looked at me strangely for the three days I chose to sit on the sunny side of the bus before realizing on the fourth that the right side of the bus was a good twenty degrees cooler.

In addition to the trolleybuses, there are also regular diesel buses that run similar routes.  From what I understand, they also run more routes in other parts of the city but I never actually see them since I haven’t ventured too far off of Rudaki with the exception of one visit to the Hyatt hotel (the most upscale and secure hotel in the city – they have security similar to that of many embassies).

My favorite things, though, are the minibuses and the shared taxis – the line between them is still a bit unclear to me.  Basically, whenever you walk along Rudaki or Ismoil Somoni (the main east-west road), random cars will come along and honk at you.  In their front window is a laminated number.  Those numbers correspond to the bus routes that those cars follow.  For three Somoni, you can flag one down, hop into it, and speed away to anywhere along the route that you want at 80 kilometers per hour or more.  It’s great.  A bit terrifying, but you can get from one end of the city to the other in less than ten minutes.

According to my friend and my host family, these are referred to by the Russian word for minibus, “marshrutka,” which along with Ladas are two of my favorite things.  To put the convenience in perspective, the couple times that we’ve gone out to bars after dark, because we don’t want to deal with getting doc-checked by police (police here like to check your documents after dark, and they are convinced that we are all Russian, which is in its own way a compliment but at the same time linguistically inconvenient), we will take a taxi home.  For the equivalent of 65 US cents, we are saved an hour to an hour and a half of walking with a 5-10 minute taxi ride that drops us off a few blocks from home.  In Boston, I might pay 20-30 dollars for a similar cab ride home.  It’s amazing and because of the regulatory system in the US, could never exist there.  To be perfectly frank, I’m not sure it’s legal here either – whenever we pass a policeman, the driver will quickly pull down the number in the window as we pass.  But those things are fluid here anyway.  So long as I get where I’m going without much trouble, it’s all good.