Khujand, Tajikistan: My Life in the 19th Microdistrict

Looking north (and west) across the Syr Darya to the north side of Khujand on a crisp October morning.  The tallest buildings in the shot indicate the 19th Microdistrict, the neighborhood where Anna and I live.

Note: Since starting this blog I've wanted to write about "daily life" and gives some answers to that basic question "What's it like there?" for friends and family back home.  I've really struggled though to put my thoughts into writing, let alone writing I want to share.  I began drafting this post not long after our arrival in Khujand.  I've written and rewritten, procrastinated and "re-procrastinated."  Here it goes though!

I remember the heat.  It wasn't the moist, cloying heat of humid American cities.  It was dry.  It was quiet and sneaky.  It was late afternoon on August 31 and these were my first moments in Khujand.  I was killing time on the grounds of Khujand State University, locally acronymized in Cyrillic as "ХГУ" -- hey ge oo phonetically.  Anna was meeting the dean and getting a tour.  

My first photo in Khujand: One of the main buildings of Khujand State University.  It's adorned, per Tajik standards, with mantras from the president, his massive portrait, and national flags and banners.

I found a shaded walkway, slowly strolled, and developed my initial impressions of Khujand.  Honestly, they weren't that good.   I was hot, groggy from our all-day car ride through the mountains, and also confused.  Anna and I had both expected ХГУ to be in a quaint old city, as Google Maps had, seemingly, promised us.  Our Internet research also had us dreaming of quiet tree-lined streets flanked by aging but still proud Soviet-era buildings.  Again, the vibe we had conjured was vaguely "Old World" European and certainly romantic, with stone walkways and winding, narrow alleys.  We actually weren't wrong.  As we'd quickly learn, Khujand is all of those things.  It just isn't those things where I was walking that day, where ХГУ is, or, to be more precise, the ХГУ building where Anna works. 

Khujand is a city split by a river, the Syr Darya.  That romantic old city?  It's on the south side of the river.  The north side, the university's side, has a completely different character.  It wasn't urbanized until the 1950s and 1960s, when the Soviets rapidly built planned neighborhoods--microdistricts-- on empty, rough grazing land and razed fruit orchards.  A pair of large public universities, ХГУ and neighboring Tajik State University--ТГУ, tay ge oo--were also built at this time, a handful of Brutalist beauties like the one in the photo above. 

This north side of Khujand is what I gazed at that sweltering summer day.  I saw a forest of tall cranes and modern apartment towers in various states of constructions, everything rippling in the heat.  The new high-rises, all 10 floors if not more, stretched down to the hazy gray ribbon of the river a mile or so away.  The north side lies on a moderate, steady slope and ХГУ sits on the edge of things, so it's a decent view.  Hike a mile or so further up that hill, as have done several times since moving here, and it's a commanding view.

Looking due south at Khujand.  The north side in the foreground is the newer part of the city.  The river is difficult to see, but it's a narrow gray band most prominent on the left and right edges. ХГУ and our neighborhood, the 19th Microdistrict, are in the center.

Somewhere, amid the cranes, dump trucks and whirring jackhammers, was our new home.  Anna had asked to live near the university.  I didn't--and don't--resent Anna's preference, I just didn't want to live in a scorching, dusty construction site.  Before arriving in Khujand and thinking about what our apartment here might look like, I'd envisioned a second- or third-floor walkup, something overlooking a sleepy courtyard dotted with stately old trees.  We'd have a small patio for sipping espressos in dappled afternoon sunshine.  We'd take slow strolls home from nearby dinners out, the hot days giving way to pleasantly cool nights.  Whatever we found in our apartment hunt, I knew it wouldn't be anything like this romantic image I'd made in my mind.  It was hard to grasp what I saw below me as a neighborhood, a place to live, a place to call home.

It's become home though.  We looked at several apartments in the 19th Microdistrict, the neighborhood adjacent to ХГУ.  We settled on an eighth-floor unit just off the elevator--one with a constant Muzak soundtrack--in a modern nine-story building.  As I noted in my first post from Khujand, and repeatedly on my family's group chat, we have a majestic mountain vista out our windows worthy of a California penthouse.  We have decent wifi powered by the 19th's fiber optic network, a service available in few parts of the city besides ours.  We even have heated floors, another perk of our modern building.  Old Khujand, for all of its charm, does not have fiber optics or apartments with good heating, never mind heated floors.  A fair number of older places don't have any heating.  If we were in the old city we'd also be missing out on the mountain view.

One of my favorite "apartment window" shots.  It's from November.  Note the glint of snow on

the most distant mountains. In the foreground are a bank and a TГУ building.

Despite my initial misgivings, the 19th has been a convenient place to live.  Anna's commute to the university is a 15-minute walk.  Mine, to the language center I work at, Arkon, is 10-minute walk.  The neighborhood also boasts a bustling strip of businesses with a grocery store, pharmacy, other conveniences, and least a dozen various restaurants.  The running club we do also meets up here.  The city center is only a half-hour walk or five-minute marshrutka ride.  All of this illustrates two central tenets of the Soviet microdistrict. One, residents should be able to satisfy basic needs without leaving their neighborhood.  Two, they should also be able to easily reach a city's center via public transportation.

I wish I had better photos of our neighborhood, but here's a shot from the heart of the 19th.  This is the neighborhood's main interior street.  The apartment buildings reflect typical new construction.

It is also, indeed, a neighborhood.  Gardens and fruit trees are tucked into tiny patches of land here and there, shaded pagodas too.  Now at least forty years or older, there's even some large trees.  There's also a ton of kids running around.  This was one of the first things I noticed.  Tajikistan has a fertility rate double that of the U.S.  There's also a higher level of public trust here, so it's very typical to see kids outside playing on their own.  Adults, kin or not, are certainly around and mindful, but their not parked right there on a bench hovering by the kids.  Major roads, with their hustle and bustle, form the perimeter of the 19th.  Within the neighborhood a couple of schools, a wedding hall, and several small stores, magazini--think corner stores or bodegas.  It's also become a neighborhood to us.  We know people.  We have familiar stores and restaurants.  

In most respects, my initial bad feelings I had have dissipated.  I certainly wanted to make the best of things, but it also hasn't been too hard.  We live pretty comfortably.  

It's a funny mix though of luxury alongside dysfunction.  We enjoy a relatively cushy apartment with modern conveniences but endure regular water outages and occasional power cuts.  Gleaming new construction goes up alongside cracked and crumbling work that cannot be more than a years past being new itself.  Things do age fast in this windy and often arid climate, but they seemingly could also be built, and maintained, better than they are. 

Meanwhile, there are things I just don't like about living here though, both specific to the 19th and with Khujand as a whole.  One of the most disappointing parts about Khujand is the city's poor air quality.  Khujand generally has air quality in the 60-90s on the US Air Quality Index, the yellow zone.  Straddling a river in a mountain valley, Khujand is already prone to foggy winter weather thanks to temperature inversions, but this dynamic is also exacerbated by smog.  The air is actually a bit worse in Dushanbe and even that is nothing on the horrific pollution of Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan.  I feel it running.  I get winded more easily, so I run slower here, about a minute off my usual pace.  After a run, I notice a stink on my clothes and it's not body odor!  I think it's mostly diesel fumes as it's still used a lot here.  Maybe the saddest part though is to discuss the poor air quality with students and to have so many say they've never thought about this issue.  They don't know anything different. 

The dumpsters closest to our building.

Another environmental issue is trash.  Khujand does have trash pick-up.  Small open dumpsters are scattered throughout the city's residential areas, usually in groups of four.  There aren't separate bins for recycling, it isn't collected by the city, and the whole scene is a little grimy, but this isn't the bone I want to pick.  

My contention is all of the waste I see in other places.  Mounds of trash bags accumulate nowhere near dumpsters.  Broken bags can be found anywhere and everywhere, abandoned and leaking.  Meanwhile, I've stopped counting the number of times I see people throw down their trash--a drink bottle, a food wrapper--wherever they are walking. 

One can view these problems and see systems issues.  Ad hoc trash piles could indicate the city needs more dumpster locations.  Open air dumpsters are another red flag.  Broken bags--just plastic grocery bags--might point to a need for stronger bags and/or cheaper proper trash bags.  Perhaps the littering would happen less with more public waste bins on sidewalks and in parks.  I also mentioned earlier how Khujand's often dry and windy, a tough combination for waste management. 

Yes, there are problems with waste disposal and collection in Khujand, but I really think there's also a mindset problem.  It kind of reminds me of that picnic scene from Mad Men.  It's just so hard for me to imagine being so brazen with trash, honestly.  It's an issue to varying degrees everywhere in Tajikistan, but, for whatever reason, it's particularly bad in our neighborhood. 

A trash pile in our neighborhood.           

I hope to learn more about this and other aspects of the trash issue.  The problems and solutions of the air quality problem are much more obvious to me, the trash one not as much.  I know it's not just a "foreigner" problem though.  I do, rarely, see cleaning of litter, both by individuals as well as groups.  There are also people regularly picking through the trash bins, looking for items of some value, including recyclables.  There is one plant here of some sort.  I want to learn more about who does this and why.  It seems to be a sort of caste issue as it is in so many places, including Dayton, Ohio.  

The trash issue in our and other neighborhoods is kind of strange because there is another side to it.  There are perpetually fleets of city workers beautifying public spaces, including city parks and plazas, boulevard medians, and drainage channels.  Indeed, much of Khujand regularly looks polished and clean.  Meanwhile, right alongside the trendy new apartment towers are heaping piles of garbage.

A entirely different negative issue to living here is that I (and Anna too) get a lot stares.  I should preface this by saying that I've been treated so warmly here.  I've lost count of the number of times I've been on the receiving end of kindness, from a free meal out with a neighbor to a warm chat with a taxi driver.  However, I do get a lot of looks out and about.  It's not hostile, but it's kind of tiring.  There's little diversity here and I certainly stand out.  Tajik men can be tall, but most are smaller, 5' 8" or so.  My hair is a complete anomaly, both by being long as well as blond.  This is probably the root of the staring!  My complexion is lighter than most, but there's enough Russians around to make this aspect of me not as unusual.  If I'm running on a weekday morning, I try to leave before 7 and/or after 7:30, avoiding the school "rush hour" on the sidewalks on the 19th.  Navigating the crush of children when I'm decked out in my running gear is not something I savor!  Again, the attention is not hostile, but it's still uncomfortable.  

On my first day in Khujand all I could see was the bad.  Over time though, I've found things I liked and this place started to become a home.   As the warm weather returns, hopefully soon, I think I'll have more to appreciate.  Much of the city is designed to be enjoyable in hot weather, and certainly not cold weather, as I detailed in my last post.

Overall, my life here has many of the familiar comforts of home, from streaming favorite shows on (mostly) reliable Internet to making a hot mug of coffee in the morning--it's expensive though!  There are things that wear on me, but everywhere has its particular set of issues.  The downers here are just different than those of Dayton, which are in turn even different than say, those in New York. 

Mentioning coffee is a good segue.  In my next post I'll explore our food scene including both dining out as well as grocery shopping.  My take on food here is something that I know is high on the list of many of my most loyal readers!  As always, thank you for reading!