I was so anxious to meet my host family and their exotic entourage. I was told they included the couple whom I'll call Bobo and Bibi (Tajiki for grandmother and grandfather), their daughter-in-law Doktar, her two daughters and two sons, together with the family dog and six partridges. I wondered did the partridges have names and would I be able to keep them all straight.
The first family member I met was the dog Butch,
or
Boochair, as my host mother called him. She stuck with that name even after I explained what
butcher meant in English. I called him the Hound of
the Dobermans after his hair raising howls and lunges every time I passed by. He did have more to say than anyone else, especially when they put him on his short chain, which was whenever i came home from school. Here he is, watching me very carefully. It turns out he was the only other family member that lived in their rather large villa.
The partridges were all caged. Daytime they were covered with odd remnants or unwashed rugs. I did aim my camera through the drawn coverings of a cage once, but couldn't bring myself to pull the trigger on that sorry bird. I only heard them cooing in the morning when Bobo fed and watered them. Bobo I only saw coming and going from his job as watchman at the Pedogogical Institute. Uninclined to talk, he always gave me the traditional slight bow and touch to the heart. Although the institute where he worked was just a few blocks away, he drove. Sometimes the partridges must have gone with them, as they would be gone from time to time.
Doktar and her children were nowhere to be found, so I assumed they were on vacation. Bibi and I mostly spent our time in the summer kitchen, gabbing in an unpredictable mixture of Russian, Tajiki and Farsi.
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| Summer Kitchen Open to Courtyard |
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| Winter Kitchen across from my room |
Her Russian, like that of most Tajiks who went to school under the Russian regime, was quite good. But I could never be sure if she were speaking Farsi or Tajiki. They are both dialects of Persian, but Tajiki substitutes different vowels and packs in a host of Russian loan words. Bibi taught me how important it is to only take corrections of my Farsi seriously if they come from a native speaker. This was after she proudly explained that she had learned her Farsi from the American students who roomed in her place over the years.
We ended up conversing mostly in Russian, which had terrible effects on my Farsi. Russian words began regularly coming to mind in farsi class. That was no disaster, as most of the language school teachers and administrators spoke Russian. You can imagine how much that helped my fluency in Farsi.
Over simple, but wonderful Russian meals
Bibi talked lots about another daughter and family who had emigrated to southern California, but not much about Doktar. When I got up the courage to ask, turns out they had moved out the winter before. To an apartment owned by the family.
With Boochair alternately barking and whining when he was chained up at night, the partridges acting up in the morning and the nearby construction sites giving intermittent barrages of hammer hits any time of day or night, my life was not the idyll I expected. After a week of our quiet meals together, Bibi livened things up.
She invited a neighbor over and then her son and his family popped in. Then the next weekend lo and behold the whole tribe came over.
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| My view from the Summer Kitchen |
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The kids brought down the rope swing and made for the mulberries that canopied the courtyard (
tup in tajiki). Terrific kids and one of the few days when Boochair, unchained, stopped barking. I braved getting near for a photo op and he even forgot to lunge at me that once.
Sitting at table I was always given the end seat with the cushion - the seat that Bobo would sit in when I wasn't there. It caught the breeze and the view from the courtyard. Bobo didn't sit at table when I was there. Oh, he's inside at his prayers or at his Koran, they said.
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| Climbing for mulberries |
From here and there I gathered that Bobo took the partridges out for partridge fighting, his major past time when he wasn't working or praying. Every now and then there would be roasted bird for supper.
And not to worry about the dog. Dogs never lasted much more than
a year in the house. I wondered if it was because the dogs were fed a diet of bread and more bread. Or if it was because of the thing that Bouchair would try to dig up in the clayey yard for hours on end.
When weather warmed up the dog was mercifully unchained at night.
Unmercifully he liked to sleep by my door, requiring a major defensive campaign for me to get to the bathroom on the other side of the yard.
Each of us lived in separate rooms that stretched, one room
deep, around three sides of the common yard. Boochair and I observed a co-existence pact that lasted until it got so that I couldn't sleep a full night. I can't remember what exactly what precipitated it, but one morning I woke up swinging a bloody tennis racquet back and forth at the wretched animal. Until I shook myself completely awake.
I asked for a transfer. I waited. I was asked if things were better. No, so I asked another director for a transfer. Approval from the home office came through and two days later I was asked when I could be ready to move. Is an hour ok??
And so my second adventure began.
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| Canopy of trees over the yard |
The flag represents several things. The crown stands for the people, the number
"seven" is a symbol of perfection, the embodiment of happiness and the
provider of virtue. According to legend, Islamic heaven is composed of seven beautiful orchids, separated by seven mountains each with a glowing star on top. The 165-meter flagpole entered the "Guinness Book of World Records" as
the world's tallest in August 2011. See the youtube video here. (amazing shots from atop the pole). Three meters higher than the one in Azerbaijan, it weighs in at 220
ton. The price tag of 3.5 million dollars (in a country where average
income is $2,200 ) is cheap in comparison to the $24 million Azerbaijan spent. 
The country’s 20th
anniversary of independence saw the hoisting of the flag a month after the flagpole was installed.
Komsomol Lake creates a refreshing breeze all evening long. After a couple strolls around the flagpole you cross to the other side of the lake. There you find a playground for kids and adults of all sizes, ice cream wagons and a rotundo affair for refreshments.
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