A Much Needed Sunday

I've spent a quiet day at home reading and preparing for my first full week of classes.

On Friday, I went to the Antiquities Museum, where there is a huge Buddha much like the one the Taliban blew up a few years ago in Afghanistan. It was extracted from an archeological site and brought the museum for restoration. Buddha is in meditative repose (napping, really) and about 100 feet long and 10 feet high...an impressive and unexpected sight. There were also interesting collections from the Stone Age, Bronze Age, the Greek period (yep, they made it here, too) and the Arabic rule during the Middle Ages. I had to wear plastic coverings on my shoes and follow taped arrows on the carpet. There were some descriptions in English. Museum workers followed me around to turn on and off the lights, presumably to save money, and to keep me going in the right direction through the collections.

Later, I met Mimi for dinner, and she introduced me to her friend Maksim, an IT guy. I also met one of Mimi's daughters, who doesn't speak much English, but we managed to communicate about something understood by all teenage girls everywhere, Twilight (she likes Edward AND Jacob). It's playing in the theater here too. I picked Mimi and Maksim's brains about the history of Tajikstan, especially because I'd just been to the museum. Both Maksim and Mimi are part Uzbek. Historically, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan are completely different cultures. Uzbek is a Turkish language, and Tajik comes from Farsi. The Soviet Union tried to make them one country, but experts were sent to Moscow to prove that they were not the same. Bored, yet? Another time perhaps about the civil war.

We decided that Saturday we'd visit an old Arabic fort outside of the city after I finished my classes at 1:00pm, but it was very hot yesterday. Back we went to the cafe. While we waited for Ella to come, the cafe cleared out. Maksim said everyone had probably gone to the river and suggested we all go there too. After stopping at a grocery store for snacks, we were off. Only about 15 minutes outside of the city on a canyon road that looked very familiar, like the mountains around Price, we turned off to a little "resort". It was built around a pretty green mountain river and felt at least ten degrees cooler than in the city. Metal lounging platforms with legs had been built along and in the river. Ours was right in the water with a canopy of trees above it. It was covered with big, stuffed quilts and pillows for lounging. The people around us put their watermelons and soda in the water to keep them cool. We ordered lamb and beef kebabs that were brought to us with a yummy tomato cucumber salad and big round loaves of bread that we tore apart with our hands. It's customary for men to serve food to women if the company is mixed. That's right, as we lounged on a platform in the river, Maksim filled our plates and told us to eat the meat quickly because it's only delicious when it's hot. Dreamy.

When it chilled off and started to get dark, we headed back into the city for another stop at the cafe, then home.