Any blog about life in the former Soviet Union is incomplete without a post discussing the omnipresent marshrutka, the transportation of choice in most cities of the former USSR. I wrote a little about the shared taxi system of Dushanbe in a post a few years back called Managing Marshrutkas, but now that I spend about an hour every day inside the real deal, I think it’s a subject that bears revisiting.
First of all, what is a marshrutka? Continue reading “That Marshrutka Life”
Before I had even arrived at my office on my first morning of work after swearing in back in June, I had already made a mistake. Thanks to my basic language abilities, I missed a change in instructions, and wound up half an hour away from where I was supposed to be when I was supposed to be there. Oops.
Friday was a big day for us – not only did it mark over two weeks at our training villages (it says a lot that I began typing “months” instead of weeks while typing that sentence), but it was also our big Bishkek Day. Bishkek Day is a milestone because we get a full guided tour of Bishkek, the largest city in Kyrgyzstan, and it also is the point at which we are allowed to leave our villages to visit other volunteers, shop in a regional city, and also to travel back into Bishkek. In short, we are all thrilled and exhausted.
We started out our day at the normal time, but rather than sit cross-legged around a table and study Kyrgyz all day, we climbed into a marshrutka (a kind of minibus that I’ll write more about later) and rode into town, changing vehicles along the way. From one bus station, we took another marshrutka to the other so that we would know where both were (this is very important, since we have to take the local minibuses to get around town and the country). These each have waiting halls, a bunch of shops and stalls, and outside, a series of parking rows where the next minibuses to assigned destinations in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan depart. Merchants walk up and down selling bread, water, and soda from small carts, while drivers of shared taxis and the buses alike shout names of destinations in the hopes of getting additional fares. The logo of both bus stations is an “A” in a circle, with wings coming off the sides, in a socialist realist style. Continue reading “Bishkek Day”
The other day, I was on my way to an evening at Public Pub, which is this lovely Irish pub (of which there are, unbelievably, two in downtown Dushanbe) where we like to have a beer every so often. As usual, I stood on the side of Rudaki, waiting patiently for a car (or even better, a Lada) drive up with a nice big laminated “3” in the front window. In minutes I was speeding down the road in my own private Mercedes (for the grand cost of 3 Somonis, or about 60 US cents), when we were flagged down again. I watched incredulously as three other men my age climbed in and sat on the bench next to me, two more crammed into the front seat, and three others climbed in on top of us, to put a total of what must have been 9 or 10 people in a relatively small sedan.
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. Continue reading “Managing Marshrutkas”
A few days ago I took my first hair-raising ride in a Lada. I had just meant to catch a marshrutka or shared taxi to go to a restaurant with some friends, but when the first one to stop was a black old-fashioned Lada, I couldn’t help but hop right in and smile as we began to weave our way through Rudaki avenue at 80 to 100 kilometers per hour. Given that I’ve cracked at least two jokes at the expense of this automobile, I figured it only reasonable that I write a post all about them. Continue reading “A Lada Love”
