October 28th

A few weeks ago, I took a bunch of pictures of my one and a half year old host-baby Ayjemal dressed up in her mom’s prayer scarf. Turkmen are big fans of looking at pictures, and pictures of babies in prayer scarves seem to be very high on the “love-it” list. My host-family has been hounding me constantly to get them copies of the Ayjemal pictures, so today was officially the day to get it done. After I swept my carpet. Damn.

My oldest sister Tylla, and my youngest sister Gurbangul accompanied me to the Russian bazaar in Ashgabat to make sure the mission was successfully accomplished. Ayjemal came along to supervise her big pictoral debut. There’s a really big difference between the Talkuchga bazaar and the bazaars in Ashgabat. The in-city bazaars are a little more controlled, a little less insane. While we waited for the Kodak store at the bazaar to print my pictures, I did a little people watching. There is definitely a sizable Russian population here, and it is pretty obvious when you are looking at crowds as to who is Russian and who is Turkmen (Besides the fact that Russians also wear sunglasses). Russians seem to be extraordinarily averse to their natural hair color here, with artificial shades of orange hair that I hadn’t imagined were possible. They are also big fans of tight jeans, short skirts, and fake fur. I felt so boring in comparison. My American flip-flops and long skirt just couldn’t stack up.

In the midst of my people watching, I happened to look over at a vendor who was selling cookies. All of his cookies were sitting in big piles on a table, and as people came up to purchase a kilo or half kilo of them, he would scoop a pile of cookies into a bag for them. While I was watching, a pigeon flew over and perched ON TOP of a pile of cookies and POOPED on them. I swear, I saw it with my own two eyes. The vendor saw it too, so he reached over and stirred around the cookie pile so that the bird turd wouldn’t be noticeable to his upcoming customers. That’s gross. Even grosser, a mom and her three screaming children walked up to him no more than thirty seconds later and bought some of the defecated-upon confections. Scoop. Bag. Pass out to children. Her kids all shut up as soon as they had mouths filled with cookies, I wonder if it had anything to do with the secret ingredient…

After we got our pictures, Tylla told me we were going somewhere really really fun. I was hoping that a Wal-Mart had magically sprung up in downtown Ashgabat, but alas, that was not the type of fun to which she was referring. No more than half an hour later, I was once again standing in line at Disneyland, getting elbowed in the kidneys by a mob of impatient Turkmen. Definitely fun.