A Visit Back to Tajikistan
Looking across the Zarafshon River at Panjakent. A mountain range of the same name rises in the distance. The Zarafshons boast peaks as high as 18 thousand feet, but the ones in this photo are "only" 10 to 12 thousand feet. "Hello! What is your name?" I've been back in Tajikistan for a short visit to Anna. Every walk in the small city of Panjakent , her post for this year, seems to feature this exchange with least one child, usually several. These little interactions reveal the warmth of local children and also the unusualness of westerners here. In comparison, this kind of thing almost never happened in Khujand , the much larger city where we lived last year. Tourists from Iran and Russia are part of the scene in Panjakent; the Uzbek tourist mecca of Samarkand is not even two hours away across the border. Evidently, we don't pass as Iranian or Russian to these kids. We're leaving today for Almaty, Kazakhstan . This...
