Halfway Around the World in 2 days

Luckily by Friday, my headache finally dissipated and I left for the airport around 1 am. I didn't bother going to sleep at all, looking forward to stretching out in my own row on the flight to Frankfurt, which often has fewer than a handful of people. Surprisingly, the flight was almost full - I've never seen so many people on it - but given the shortage of space, I was lucky to only have one other passenger in the row with me and was still able to be moderately comfortable although sleep didn't really happen.

At some point I noticed that we were quite a bit behind schedule. Then I noticed that for some reason, on the screen that shows the flight's progress, the time to destination had dropped by about an hour. Of course, at the time, I was pretty pleased, thinking that there had been a glitch and we were actually on time. No such luck.

Shortly thereafter, the pilot came on and said that we were almost out of fuel and had to land in Budapest to get more because we couldn't make it to Frankfurt. Turns out there was a strong headwind and they used more fuel than expected. Lovely. And I'm not sure which was more disappointing, that we were going to be even later getting to Germany, or that I was going to Budapest but not going to be able to see the city.

When we finally landed in Frankfurt, we were almost 5 hours late. I got through the airport pretty quickly but there was no longer enough time for the side trip I planned for a boat trip on the Rhine. But I still made the best of it. Rather than staying in Frankfurt again, I had booked a hotel in Mainz, which is about equally distant from the airport.

Mainz is a more traditional German town and the weather was gorgeous, (upper 70s), so I spent the day seeing the sights and hunting for a good meal. The sights were everywhere, from the beautiful blue stained glass at St. Stephen's -

- to the impressive Mainz Cathedral -

then on to the old city with it's medieval architecture.

The German food was a little tougher to come by - lots of Thai, Italian, and pizza places, but it was 2:30 pm by the time I found a restaurant that offered some traditional fare. Starving by then, and knowing I probably wouldn't be ready to eat again until quite late, I decided to just eat a whole day's worth right there. Some type of German pizza, potato pancakes, sausage, fried potatoes, sauerkraut, dessert, and very dry cider - heavenly.

After lunch I completed my walk, mostly passing from church to church. Two that stood out were the ruins of the oldest remaining Gothic church, (9th century) -

- and one near the river that was exquisitely decorated inside.

Without sleep, I was pretty bushed by then, and had seen everything I wanted to see, so I returned to the hotel to kick back and relax.

The next morning I made the most of the excellent free breakfast, (when I make the most of food, that's saying something) and made my way to the airport. I've never waited so long at an airport to check my bags - I made it to the gate halfway through boarding. I know they say to arrive 3 hours before an international flight, but it NEVER takes that long and I end up sitting forever in a boring airport, so I've been arriving more like an hour and a half before. I don't think I'll change my policy, but I wish they could suggest a narrower window of time and stick to it.

The flight to DC was wonderful. The seating on Lufthansa was comfortable and they had the individual monitors on the back of the seats. I literally spent the whole flight catching up on movies I haven't seen. It definitely made the flight go faster and we arrived right on time in Washington. On Sunday afternoon, I was able to get together with some of my family in the local area, which was really nice.

I'm not going to talk about training because it's boring - although useful. So my main mission remains to eat all of the things that I can't get in Tajikistan - which is impossible in just a week, but will at least hit my favorites. I was reunited with McDonald's for the first time in a year for lunch on Monday - did I mention that August 20th was our 1 year anniversary in Tajikistan? Wow. And then it was sushi at a business dinner Monday night. I've got Chipotle scheduled for lunch today and then wings tonight. I still have to get a good burger, Arby's, Cold Stone Creamery, good BBQ, and a few other items, and will try to make it work with my busy schedule. Oh and of course, I have my obligatory tube of cookie dough in the fridge at my hotel. In fact, the jet lag has me up at 5 am so I think I'm going to go have some now.

Oh, and here's the link the the rest of the pictures as always.

Mainz 2010 JPGS

A Real Headache

Nice things first. On Sunday, we took a trip sponsored by the embassy to Nurek lake. It's a man made lake created by the construction of the Nurek hydro-electric dam during soviet times, and I believe it's still the tallest dam in the world. More than 80% of Tajikistan's power is generated here. The problem is that in particularly cold winters, the lake can freeze to the point that no electricity can be generated, causing nationwide power outages. Last year was mild, fingers crossed for this year.

Our first stop was to see the outflow plumes, where excess water not used for power generation comes pouring down these massive chutes and then flies high into the air. It's like seeing a vertical waterfall.

Pretty impressive.

Here's a short video to get a better idea.

Unfortunately, due to security measures, it isn't possible to see the dam itself.

From there we went to an overlook point to see the lake. Despite the hazy summer weather, it's still very picturesque. The tops of hills that were drowned stick up like improbable islands.

We spent the rest of the day by a small lake created by bypassing some of the outflow. It was a nice afternoon just relaxing, snacking, and enjoying the cooler weather by the water.

The not so nice thing has been what seems to be a migraine headache. I haven't gotten them very often, so it's hard to tell, but I don't really care what it is as long as it goes away. It started Sunday evening and I just thought it might have been from not drinking enough water, so I drank water.

Then it got progressively worse through work on Monday. By Monday night I couldn't really sleep despite tylenol and ibuprofen. So on Tuesday, I went to see our medical officer and she gave me a big dose of demerol before I went home - enough that I was feeling pretty good in the marshrutka. Unfortunately, a dose that should have lasted 10-12 hours wore off in about 2 and the muscle relaxer/sleep aid didn't work at all, so I spent another sleepless, head-pounding night.

Today I had a meeting at the British Embassy that I couldn't change, so I went in for half a day in the morning. Before I went home, we tried an injection specifically for migraines. It was one of those spring loaded injections and I've never had a shot hurt so much, except for a epidural I had once. Fortunately, that pain was brief and my headache quickly faded. So far it hasn't come back, but we're going to do another injection as prescribed to be safe. Plus I'll take a little ambien to make sure I can sleep well. Pretty good medical care for the third world - all thanks to the medical center at the embassy. I can only imagine what it's like for people living here without these resources.

Speaking of living here, I saw a prime example of what's wrong with governance her in Tajikistan on my way home today. I was in the marshrutka and when I was almost home, there was a huge traffic jam because they were trying to repair the trolleybus lines in the middle of a major intersection. In true local style, everyone abandoned all reason and crowded their cars into the intersection trying to get through first. Inevitably, this led to grid lock.

So the driver of our marshrutka decided to go a different way, (they're supposed to follow set routes), which would have taken me away from home instead of towards it. With no alternative, I got out to walk and not 20 feet from the traffic jam was a traffic cop. Not trying to sort out the gridlock, but looking for people to pull over for bribes. Oh, he glanced at the mess once or twice, but here it's all about the money. I suppose I could have pointed out that if he could get traffic moving, there would be more cars coming by for him to pull over, but I think it's more of a lost cause overall.

Wonders Never Cease

Dushanbe never ceases to amaze, there's always something unexpected.

One morning this week, I hopped in the marshrutka and found myself looking at a very nice DVD player mounted on the dashboard playing local music videos. To understand the juxtaposition of a mounted DVD player in one of these things, picture an Astro van, shrunk down to about 1/3 of it's size, with the strength of a tin can and something akin to cheap folding chairs for seats. I was blown away.

Then one of my staff sent me an e-mail expressing concern about one of the procurements being processed in our system. He told me to check the link because it didn't really match the item described in the request. I clicked the link and a rather colorful ad for Viagra popped up. The request was for holiday greeting cards. We eventually cleared things up, but again, totally unexpected.

On Wednesday, Stephanie made some amazing stuffed zucchini flowers from the garden. I include this in my stories of unexpected happenings because it was just so delicious. Not that Stephanie isn't a good cook - she does a fantastic job with the limited options available on the local market and I always look forward to seeing what creative dishes she has made for dinner. But we searched all over Italy for stuffed zucchini flowers and only found them once - and then they were just ok. These were fantastic, something I never expected to eat here. Kudos to my wife!

Last night, we went with one of my coworkers to try to watch the Perseid meteor shower. Despite heavy light pollution, some cloudiness, and a lot of dust in the air, we still managed to see about six shooting stars. That wasn't the surprise. The surprise was the amount of shenanigans going on around us. Normally women are very reserved in public, but in the park we were in, we could hear quite a bit of revelry, both men and women. My coworker theorized that they were prostitutes, but they had children with them, which made that seem a bit less likely. I was also expecting things to be quieter during the month of Ramadan, but there seems to be quite a variety in the level of observance here.

This morning, I was riding to work with a coworker when his driver was pulled over by one of the cops. The driver doesn't have diplomatic plates of course, but we both felt bad. So we got out and went to the officer and showed him our diplomatic accreditation cards. Surprisingly, it seemed to have an effect. The driver told us he only got bribed for 5 somoni instead of 50.

That said, not all surprises are good. Today was an unexpectedly bad day. Just a lot of problems that I wasn't expecting to have to deal with. This led me to observe to a colleague that being a GSO can be a lot like being a hormonal pregnant woman - lots of ups and downs at a moments notice. One minute everything's fine, the next it's falling apart. But even after a spectacularly bad finish, I can still say the goods outweigh the bads.

Of Budgets and Crooked Men With Tiny Light Sabers

Another week has sped by in Dushanbe. Work is now mostly consumed with the end of fiscal year process. Without giving anything away about how we reconcile budgets and close out the year, I can say that we are very busy making sure that we've used government money as it was intended. It's a great learning experience and is giving me some really good insight into how an embassy, and really the whole government, work from a financial point of view.

On top of the flurry of fiscal fun, we received a shipment of eight 40 foot shipping containers at once. Usually, we only get one or two at the most and that's about all our laborers can handle. We don't usually know what's in the containers until we get them so as far as we knew it was just some unlucky confluence of orders descending upon us at once. Fortunately, it just turned out to be a big shipment of large items that were easy to unload in a short period of time and the team was able to get through it in a couple of days.

On a more disappointing note, there were rumors that we'd get our bid list for our next assignments this week that turned out to be very untrue. Now there is no firm idea of when the lists will be available, but my colleagues and I who are due to bid in this next round are all chomping at the bit for any scrap of information or clue as to when we can expect it. Bidding is by far one of the highlights of Foreign Service life as we get to speculate about where we could go next.

Outside of work has been almost as interesting. On Wednesday, coming home from work, my marshrutka driver saved all 7 passengers (me included) from a very nasty crash when he swerved after a large SUV made a u-turn from the other side of the road into our lane. It's been almost a year since we got here and I still haven't figured out if people are really that oblivious or just don't care. Earlier in the week, the driver of the car I was in suddenly put the car in reverse and drove backwards against traffic for a good mile before continuing further. No clue as to why.

In more transit fun... Thursday, on my way to the gym, I had to wait quite some time to get a ride because there was an inordinate amount of police officers with their pazhalusta sticks, as we call them. (Pazhalusta means 'please' in Russian and the cops here all have these little orange sticks, like cutoff light sabers, that they use to tell people 'please pull over'. Although, if you see them do it, there's nothing so polite as 'please' about it since they're usually just asking for bribes). Anyway, there were so many, that the cars that didn't get pulled over just sped by to get out of the way. Then there was the one cop who was just standing in the middle of the road, pulling people over in the middle of traffic. There were several times I thought for sure he was going to get run over, but no such luck.

And like any good super-busy week, this one finished off with a surprise. I found out that I need to go to training in Washington the week of August 23rd. Not only is this an unexpected trip halfway around the world, but I will now see my family less than a week before they arrive in Dushanbe to visit us. How ironic!

So with all of that put behind, Stephanie and I went to a happy hour at the marine house after work to say good bye to departing colleagues, then we tried a new Korean restaurant on the main street with some friends. It was remarkable because the food was delicious, the restaurant was clean, and the wait staff was professional and courteous. A trifecta rarely found in Tajikistan. As a bonus, they even had Western toilets. Besides all that, it's nice to have another type of food to choose from. We finished off the night by stopping by a luau sponsored by the embassy and just enjoyed hanging out.

The weird weather continues and it has recently become oddly humid here. We especially noticed it last night when even at 10pm it was uncomfortable outside. Usually, with the low humidity, the nights are quite cool by around 8:30. Even today, the weather remains quite yucky. I went to get a haircut and being under the smock with no air conditioning was quite unbearable, although I did have an interesting conversation with my barber about the upcoming Ramadan season in Russian.

On a closing note, Happy Birthday Mom!

Adventures with Bread Knives and Baba Ganoush

So here we are on the first day of August and there's some cautious optimism that the worst heat of summer may be over (at least according to some of our local staff). We have had a couple of very unseasonal rain showers this week and it has been a bit cooler, but I'm not holding my breath. When we got here at the end of August last year, the temperatures were above 110 degrees!

Stephanie and I continue to both be very busy with work, but we've managed to work some fun in as well. On Friday we had a little date night and tried a restaurant near our house that we hadn't visited before. It turned out to have very good food and some of the most pleasant service we've seen so far.

One unfortunate remnant of the Soviet Union is that many places still fail to see customer services as an important component of a successful business. It's a bit bizarre given the high level of hospitality we receive when visiting someone's home, but I understand that during the Soviet Union, customers didn't really have much choice as to where to go so there was no need to woo them. But again, this particular restaurant was excellent and we definitely plan to go back.

Most of our free time this week was dedicated to preparing for the 'Garden Party' we hosted on Saturday. Our garden has grown in leaps and bounds and is rapidly overflowing it's borders, so we decided to have some folks over and share the 'fruits of our labor' in the form of zucchini bread, roasted patty-pan squash and fresh zucchini sticks. Obviously, that would have been a bit spare by itself so we added bruschetta, anchovy tapenade, hummus, baba ganoush, sugar cookies, spicy honey roasted nuts, other veggies, meats and cheeses, and, (inspired by our recent trip to Spain), homemade sangria.

The prep was fairly easy for the two of us although we did have a small mishap Friday night. As I was cutting up loaves of bread to make toast squares, the knife slipped and made it about halfway through the top of my thumb before I even noticed. Needless to say, blood was gushing so I rushed to the sink to get it under cold water. I was able to put enough pressure to cut off the blood supply, but couldn't free my hand to make a cold compress. Stephanie was on a work call, so I had to quietly peek my head in and enlist her help.

In true Stephanie fashion, she calmly excused herself, got me a cold compress, made sure I was ok and went back to finish her call. No panicking, just taking care of business. She's amazing. By the time her call was done, the bleeding had mostly stopped. Steph thought I might need stitches, but I felt safer taking my chances with self-administered first aid. It was

amazing how one of the first things that went through my head was "my thumb is hemorrhaging and I'm in Tajikistan". Even though it was a relatively minor wound, it still hit home how few options there are medically speaking.

Anyway, Steph helped me bandage it up and I was good to go. Of course, the next day, being minus one thumb, I had to seek help when I went down to the beer depot. Fortunately, I was able to strike a deal with my cab driver. I was in one of the numbered cabs, (which charge 2 somoni - or 50 cents per passenger), so rather than get dropped off, buy the beer, lug it out to the street and find another cab home, I just offered this driver about 25 somoni ($5) to drive me to the depot, help me carry the beer, and take me home. It worked perfectly and I had a good chance to practice my Russian.

We spent the rest of the day Saturday on food preparation and were ready when our first guest arrived. The party was great as the temperature cooled off wonderfully as the sun went down. I think everyone had a good time and the sangria was a big hit. We were too busy having fun during the party, but I got a couple good before and after pictures.

I think we really made the most of our relatively small outdoor space.

The best thing is that today we get to enjoy the leftovers! My thumb also seems to have reattached of it's own accord and is healing well.

Oh, in other good news, our friend who was hit by the car is doing fine. We're all relieved and much more aware of our surroundings - even on the steps of the supermarket.