TURKMENISTAN ~ First 24 Hours in Ashgabat (Dec 29, 2010)

 
First Impressions.  Breathtaking New Years lights.  

Luxury apartment replaces African mud hut.

Turkmenistan's desert dunes

The Path to Ashgabat from Washington DC:  Pilots followed the path to Ashgabat from Washington, DC which includes flying over the Atlantic Ocean, a six hour wai in Frankfurt (Germany), then up over the Czech Republic, Vienna (Austria), Bratislava (Slovakia), Budapest (Hungary), Bucharest (Romania), the Black Sea, Georgia, Armenia, and a landing in Baku (Azerbaijan), on the edge of the Caspian Sea.  There the male crowd of gas and oil workers, including an Alaskan native I’d chatted with, seven Norwegians in hand-knit sweaters, and several Malaysians left the plane.  Only one person boarded in Baku, and suddenly the 20 passengers remaining in the 300-person aircraft revealed they were on first-name basis.  Mostly diplomatic types, peppered with a Scottish oil exec here and a Dutch development worker there, they chatted cheerily in English and Russian about their holidays, golf scores, and where people had been posted previously, a question I initiated.   Their lists of residences lived and languages studied made my world travels sound like a kid’s first trip to the zoo.

In the black night at 2 am, two hours late for my waiting Peace Corps colleagues-to-be, I stepped down the stairs into the cold air.  Rows and rows of bright streetlights stretched in the direction of the city, reminding me of the refinery town in Texas where I lived as a kid.  Electricity went out in the VIP lounge
(actually CIP Lounge, Commercially Important Persons), as we waited in complete darkness for our luggage to appear.  No one groaned or commented, just business as usual, though I did happen to have one of the few flashlights.  At the curb, I was charged $45 in American dollars for having used the lounge, and now fathomed the difference between a CIP and a VIP.

Breathtaking city at night:  The drive to my apartment was breathtaking.  The new part of the city, stately white marble buildings, often with gold-coated mosque-shaped structures on the top, was strewn with millions of blue, green, purple, and gold New Years lights (in a 92% Muslim country they are not called Christmas lights).  They went on for miles.  The boulevards were wide and at this hour, completely deserted.  I noted the driver steered down the center line, rather than between the lane lines, a practice which was continued by all cars the next morning, only in heavier traffic, rendering the three lanes into four lanes.  Noted: no bicyclists. 

Lights at Constitution Monument in Ashgabat

It is rare to see an architecturally monogamous city:  buildings of the same height lined with ample space between.  The population of Ashgabat is 600,000, and an entire new and perfect city has sprung up since 1991, when Turkmenistan declared itself independent from the Soviet Union.  The white marble glows in the sunshine, and the landscaping of plants, trees, fountains and bushes is intentional and formal.  A holiday tree, festooned with lights and silver garlands, stood in city center, the largest I’ve seen in my life – my neck craned to see the top.  In the precise, science fiction-esque city, it seemed impolite to reflect that Turkmenistan’s GNI is only $6,980 per capita.  (Lesotho’s was $1,800).

Ashgabat's all-white marble-sided buildings

My elite apartment building on a snowy night

My apartment is spotlessly clean, long and modern, the fifth floor of one of the white buildings, across the street from the Chinese and Saudi embassies and US Embassy residential compound.  I count 25 steps to walk down the hall from the master bedroom to the living room. Unpacking felt like a hike, back and forth to the laundry room, two baths, bedrooms, huge living room, sizeable kitchen, study.  No balcony -- too bad, as one side looks out to the Kopet Dag mountains of Iran, and the other toward the sleeping city, now a sea of twinkling lights.  No neon, just street lights, and lights of expensive apartments (many empty), museums, theaters, university and government buildings.  I want to juxtapose photos of these new digs and my one-room thatch-roof mud hut from Lesotho.

Peace Corps Office in older part of town: The Peace Corps office is in an older part of town, very charming, and as I’d been promised, populated with one of the nicest staffs a person could hope to work with.  Five Peace Corps Volunteers were there too, in a familiarly messy Volunteer lounge, left “homeless” several weeks already, while waiting for their residential visas to be granted for a part of the country that has more strictly controlled access.

2011 is Turkmenistan's 20th year of independence & 50th year of Peace Corps worldwide

By the end of the working day, I’d met everyone and acquired a case of diarrhea – possibly from the zesty Turkish restaurant lunch, or possibly from having crossed too many borders in one day.  My colleague suggested I might want to pick up a few groceries, so we stopped at a giant supermarket.  It was upscale and festive, as today was one of the last shopping days before New Years, the major holiday (lots of eating and drinking in family homes, and then visiting friends and relatives ).  That wasn’t a good idea:  the aisle labels were in Russian;  the place was a zig-zag chaos of children, shopping carts, and fashionably-dressed women (chic leather coats, uncovered heads); and checkout lines were long.  It seemed a fun way to plunge into urban culture until I got to the head of the line.  A young male and female clerk began asking me questions.  They were probably saying, “Are these yours?  Paper or plastic?  Do you want the cake in a bag? ”   I nodded yes to everything but I don’t think they were fooled.  It may well have been, “So, you’re new here?  You really think you can survive by speaking neither of our languages?  Are you an idiot?”

But my colleague’s hired driver seemed to be patient about waiting, as did everyone in the long lines.  American impatience must strike people from the patient cultures as pompous and rude.

I sigh at this new form of sanitized journalism, and hope you will become good at imagining nuances.  Even in the USA, we read or listen to what a person claims is “true” (stone in desert) and meanwhile carry on internal conversations that place this “truth” within broader perspectives (wet rocks in tropical forest stream).

New year, new country.  May your 2011 contain new vistas as well.

Sent as Public Letter 1 on Dec 2011 to friends and family.