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”
Remember how I was waxing poetic about Dushanbe’s marshrutka system? I really glossed over a lot of the other routes of transportation. In particular, I did not do justice to Dushanbe’s beautiful rusty old trolleybus network. My love for this relic of Soviet Russia has grown many times like flower in pot. These elegant green and white and iron oxide colored buses quickly whisk people from one stop to the next, manned by a driver and a fare collector who rides in the door and tells the driver whether to stop and mercifully wait for people running for the bus or to drive by completely without stopping. In general, they are far more eager to take an extra one Somoni fare from a passenger than to maintain a “schedule,” though, so I rarely miss them like in the US. Here are some of my favorite stories about the trolleybuses so far.
Continue reading “Tales From The Trolleybuses of Tajikistan”
