5am Musings

5 a.m. seems to be my waking time here in Turkmenistan. It may be remnants of jet lag but I see it as an opportunity to get some writing done before the rest of the city has awoken. Last night was my first big social outing. The DCM (the 2nd in charge after the ambassador) had a big Thanksgiving party for a bunch of us Americans and local who have been on various programs to the US. It was a fun time and I wound up knowing people who knew some of the same people I know. For example, the DCM Susan knows my friend Brook because they worked together in Cheng Du in China. I also found out the head of the Peace Corps is someone I worked with in Moscow for CARE. Small world. I guess the older and more experienced I get in the international world, the smaller the world gets and the more people I know. I like when that happens, it sort of opens up a new layer of friendship.
I am on day 6 of being in Ashgabat and today I’m going to head out and walk this town and get my bearings. I was here eight years ago and things have changed a lot. Mainly all the rebuilding of the city, tearing down of the old and putting up of the new, white marbled buildings. I have to walk around to get a sense of where I am. Life is rather quiet here compared to New York, as I’ve probably already mentioned, and that’s OK. The fast paced craziness of NYC leaves me unfocused most of the time. Here there seems to time to breath and go about things in a moderate pace. After a while I’m sure it’ll drive me bananas but for now I embrace it.
The more time I’m here and start scratching under the white marbled façade of this town, I realize that this place really is like Wonderland. If I keep it in that perspective, I’ll be OK. Things are really not as they seem. Giant white buildings all lit up at night but completely empty, pristine apartment buildings rising in the sky with just a few windows ablaze to show someone lives there, a newspaper that only has news about what the president did or who he talked with, with a giant picture and large font to fill up the columns of what could be more interesting stories. Maybe on my walk today I’ll find the Mad Hatter’s tea party somewhere. It seems apropos that my daily notebook is a recycled copy of Alice in Wonderland. A friend of mine in NYC takes old children’s books and adds blank pages to them to make them into cool notebooks, so you can read the story and write down your thoughts. It’s very eye catching at meetings here. I also found in one of my jacket pockets ticket stubs to the Broadway show “Wonderland” that I went to see with my friend Matthew earlier this year. I take all this as a sign and a coping mechanism for dealing with life in a repressive country that shuts out the world at large and creates its own reality, feeding people whatever they feel like or just giving them no options at all. I’m not here to dramatically change things and I don’t want to get on the KGB radar (they literally spy on everything here) and get kicked out of the country. I want to give kids a chance to use their brains and think for themselves whilst learning. Hopefully that will not be too much for the local authorities.
Here is an interesting fact about Turkmenistan I learned the other night. It is not allowed that local girls go out with foreigners, so they keep their distance. If a foreigner wants to marry a local girl, he has to pay $50,000 to the government. Go figure. I wonder how they feel about local guys dating foreign guys or maybe they just can’t imagine that. So far there’s not really anyone I’d want to date here anyways. I’m sure the longer I stay, the more interesting and odd facts I will find out. The government works in a mysterious way and you never know how they will react to things so you just got to be careful. That seems to be the local mentality. I’ll try to follow some of the rules of the game the best I can.
My goal of eating in different restaurants in town is going well. 3 within 5 days is a pretty good record. Merdem, the Turkish place is still my favorite. Kaptdegai was alright more like bar food-good fajitas though. Restrantino has a good steak and nice atmosphere. What I would like to find is some decently priced wines. In the restaurants, mediocre wine is about $50 a bottle and $15-20 for a glass. I’ll have to search out the wine selection today on my walk. Maybe there’s some magic wine shop with an amazing selection somewhere in town that I’ll stumble upon. If so, I suppose that will be my Mad Hatter’s Tea Party!