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.