Mary, Turkmenistan: Yarmarka Bazaar

Turkmenistan Journal November 2009 A Sense of the Place

Mary, Turkmenistan

Where I live, Kuweit, some people call a village. Probably it used to be a kilometer or so from the city of Mary, but now there are communities and businesses from here to there. It is a village in the sense that the only shops are small groceries and car repair shops. There are no doctors or pharmacies or fabric shops, no gift shops or shoe shops. Of course, the great Yarmarka Bazaar is just down the road, and there is every manner of shop there, but in the village sense, Yarmarka is worlds away.

Every house on this street, and every house on every street in Kuweit, is made of yellow brick. The houses are built almost on the street. A margin of about two yards separates the cars from the bedroom walls. In this margin, some people have trained up beautiful grape vines. Others have planted scrubby shrubs or fig trees. One house has tall pine trees that whistle strangely in the wind just like the pine trees in Colorado. One house is defaced by a flesh colored plaster, arched at the top. The craving for something different must have been intense.

Another architectural feature is punched and shaped tin ornamentation. I saw this often in Azerbaijan, but there it was confined mostly to roof lines and gutters. Here, it is used to decorate spouts and roof pipes and hung across the –what is that bit of the house between the flat ceiling line and the triangular roof line? – anyway, highly decorative tin is used to decorate the house in that space. Another method of decorating is to incise the bricks. A nearby house looks, at first glance, like a rough stone castle, but on inspection, it is just yellow bricks incised in about twenty different ways. Every house has a heavy steel gate and door, and except for brief moments or momentous occasions—weddings or funerals, the gates are closed.

When I see an open gate, I stare inside as hard as I can. I have been told that this is rude, but I want to see how people live. Behind the gates, I see dirt courtyards, clean or junky, but always the topchan located to catch the breeze. There are scruffy trees or beautiful rose gardens. There is usually lots of concrete. I have tried to figure how much concrete is right outside MY window—a driveway 50 paces long and about 10 paces wide, and the remaining three sides of the concrete courtyard that total probably 80 paces in length and about 8 paces wide. Lots of concrete. The garden is in the center… about 35 x 25 feet. There is no grass, just weeds and very poor trees.

To get to the Yarmarka Bazaar, I walk down the street and cross the creek over a bridge made of heavy sheets of iron welded together. This is where I do my main shopping once or twice a week. They are modernizing the bazaar by putting up white plastic clad aluminum shops. This bothers me. The bazaar is interesting because it is open and you can see seven tables of carrots or eggplants at once. You can see the whole row of kebab vendors. One man hangs a purple sunshade, and another hangs a yellow one and that makes the bazaar beautiful. The aluminum shops are all the same, but I suppose the vendors are happy to get in out of the weather though invariably these little shops are uncomfortably warm with poor, or no, air conditioning, or they are stiflingly hot in the winter from over heating.

All over the neighborhood are small groceries, medieval quick trips. I love them, and I can not resist going into each one to see if there might not be something different for sale. No. The contents are as uniform as if they were ordered by law. Some don’t even turn their lights on and you go into and shop with squinting eyes.
I often exercise at the new stadium built here in Kuweit. I am not allowed inside but run on the access road across the front. It is about three quarters of a mile from my house. I walk through my darkened neighborhood, cross a busy highway, and then walk through another darkened neighborhood. Small groups of teenaged boys are always hanging out, joking and playing with their cell phones. Sometimes after I am past them, I hear, “Hello, hello.” I pass another house where the street is always wet after the woman has done the laundry, by hand, at the faucet in front of the house. She has thrown pan after pan of water into the street which serves to wash the street also. The tandir oven is there, too, but in the evening the oven is long cold. There is the wife/mother doing the laundry and an old woman at this house. I passed one evening, in my modest exercise clothes, and gave the old woman a pleasant, “Salaam aleikum.” She gave me a look that would freeze paint. I tried again on another night but got the same response, so I leave her alone now.

I arrive at the stadium, and wave to the guards. Now that the weather is colder, I have to shed my coats and scarves as I run, and I hang them on the guard’s chair. Some evenings, young kids bring their huge dogs to run there, and that makes me very nervous, although I have not seen a dog seriously intimidate a human yet. Most of the street dogs are interested only in finding food and shelter, not biting people. I feel sorry for the guards. The job has got to be tedious because really, nothing is happening. What can someone do? Break into the stadium and unbolt a plastic seat?

Other nights I stay home and exercise in my yard. Last week there was a dust storm and the sky that night was a gray brown mauve. With the yellow glow of the street lights and the glow of the city, I felt I was in a bubble. Only the brightest stars were visible through the dark and the dust—the dramatic summer triangle of Deneb, Vega and Altair—shifting westward. Now, if you look up at about 9 o’clock, you will see the Great Square overhead. From the courtyard of my house, the lower constellations are not visible, but over the fall I have enjoyed watching the Swan move westward and have enjoyed seeing Cepheus again—a constellation I first learned in Mound City. Northward of the Great Square is Cassiopeia—the elongated ‘w’. Between the Square and Cassiopeia is the constellation Andromeda and, not visible to me, the Andromeda Nebula…just right over our heads these fall evenings. From the opposite corner where Andromeda is attached to the Square, you will find Pegasus, the winged horse. The Great Square is actually part of those constellations; divide it into two triangles and you will have the wing of Pegasus, and Andromeda’s head is the bright star at the opposite corner. Orion and Gemini will be appearing in the weeks to come. They are beautiful and easy to spot. The stars are a part of my life here. I warm up or exercise, hidden by the walls of my gated house, and I can look at the bricks, or I can look up to the heavens. The city lights block out the western constellations, but I am lucky the sky is dark and clear to the east.

I have to take taxis into town. If I had a bike, I could ride, but I don’t and I don’t know if I will get one. The taxis are never ending trials, occasionally funny and interesting, and occasionally irritating. One old Geezer in Ashgabat proposed to me before getting me to my hotel, but then complained loudly that I hadn’t paid him enough so I don’t think he was serious about marriage.

Some of my favorite people here are the Lada Lancers, or more appropriately, the Lada Geezers. Anyone here can drive a taxi. People stand in the road with their hand down and out and a car will stop. Maybe it is a taxi, maybe it is a young guy who needs to earn a manat or two. A lot of old men are behind the wheels of a lot of old Ladas. They must be great cars because the roads are full of them. The Geezers that drive the Ladas are old and their cars are old too. I once got into one and sunk to the floorboards. Sometimes they are so dirty I have to wave the Geezer on. The windshields are usually cracked, and they are never clean. The window cranks are always missing. Always. In Cairo I noticed this phenomenon also but if you asked the driver for the window crank, he would pass one back. Here, no. When the weather was blistering hot, I looked to see if the car had window cranks. If it didn’t, I didn’t get in. Another unusual feature is that about half these old Ladas reek of gasoline. I have had to get out long before arriving at my destination because the smell was overwhelming.

But beyond the personality of the car, is the personality of the driver. Today, I had to tell the driver I did not speak Russian or Turkmen but only English. “Engilische. Engilische.” He repeated “Engilishce” all the way home. A few days ago I told the Geezer I spoke English and he wanted to know where I was from. “America,” I said. Oh, he couldn’t have been happier if a giraffe had gotten into his taxi. I didn’t mind except that he kept turning completely around to smile at me and say, “Amerikanski,” and shake his head with wonder. I kept motioning toward the road, saying, “Shall we watch the road?” and he kept turning back to me smiling. I made his day, but I thought he was going to kill me. Another driver had to tell me he had been to America, Florida, in 1999. He repeated this about ten times—a peculiar habit of some people here, especially men. Anyway this Geezer kept taking both hands off the wheel, waving nine fingers, saying, “Nine, nine, nine, Florida, nine.” I think he was driving with his knees.

Everything is a little adventure, but frankly, I don’t want buying rice, like yesterday, to be an adventure. The Azeri word for rice is duyi. I went to the market looking for rice but didn’t see the 50 lb bag. I was asking for duyi, then saw a bag that I thought was rice. The girl said, “Duz.” Oh, I was thinking, that is strange. In Azeri, duz means salt and here it means rice. I got home and measured out my rice, but it didn’t look quite right, and that is because it was, after all, salt—the chunky, slightly brownish salt sold here. Ha. I looked in my Turkmen children’s picture dictionary for the word for rice: tuwi. Ha. I cursed the girl in the shop for not figuring out what I had wanted. I went back out but went to the closer shop. No problem. One kilo of tuwi. But the woman in the shop would not believe that I don’t speak Russian or Turkmen. I mean, she went on and on and on, and I said, “Dushenmok, dushenmok, dushenmok.” “I don’t understand, I don’t understand, I don’t understand.” And she went on and on and on with such a hopeful look that I wanted to whack her. I was quite ill with stomach upset and that is why I was needing rice and she was giving me a Turkmen as a Mystery Language lesson. You can see that adventure is literally just around the corner and maybe not always welcome. Of course, when I compare this woman with the paint freezing Geezerette down the street, I will take the talkative, senseless woman and hope for the best.

I hope all is well with everyone. Holiday season again. Holidays away from home are getting more melancholy, but I will have a brief holiday in Baku in January and our Fellow conference is in Cairo so I will trundle off to Egypt again in February. I have a few days holiday after that conference too. I may stay there for a camel trek…. or maybe go visit Lynne in India! Now that’s an adventure I can look forward to!