First of all, happy belated birthday to both Gwen and Suspect Granger. I haven't been able to email them, what with being stuck in the wilds of Central Asia, but I was aware of the days as they passed.

I am in yet another internet cafe in Dushanbe. Markus has about a thousand emails to review, I suspect, and I will endeavor to spend my time creating some kind of interesting content here. Either that or choosing participants for a WHO conference. We will see. Perhaps I'll do both.

I think I probably smell bad. It's been a long, sweaty day. I would kill for a shower and a nap, but due to my control freak tendencies I am instead checking email and writing this journal entry. And after this I will go back to my TDY apartment and work on success stories and trip reports. I have a bottle of lukewarm RC cola in my briefcase. Surely that will do in place of a shower and a nap.

Speaking of showers, I am sharing the TDY aprtment with a Kyrgyz woman who has not showered the entire time we've been in Dushanbe. I realize we just got here on Saturday, but still.

Dushanbe, as I mentioned before, is surprisingly unlike the other Central Asian countries. For one thing, I heard a rumor that they put spices in their food here. This has not yet been proved to me, but I have had too many working dinners at the local chinese restaurant to be a fair sample.

Women almost universally wear skirts or dresses here, not pants, and tend to wear one specific kind of dress that makes them look somehow both rectangular and pregnant. I feel less comfortable here as a woman alone - when I walked to the apartment from my taxi last night, a guy talked to me. I ignored him - it was no big deal, but that's never happened to me in any of the other countries out here. Okay, there was the time that that guy in Tashkent groped me but it was the one and only incident of its kind.

Dushnabe is small. It feels like a regional city, not a capital. It only has one main street, which makes navigation very simple.

On Sunday, we went on an excursion to a hydroelectric dam. It was about an hour from Dushanbe, through the mountains, which were a lot like all the other mountains I've ever driven through. Winding roads, goats, heartstopping cliffs at the side of the road, goats. The mountains were brown this time of year, not green, and we saw very few people.

The dam itself was, well, a dam. We went on a tour that included the control room, full of gauges and switches circa 1964, large and mysterious pieces of equipment, and the electric generator room. It was interesting primarily because it was shocking that such old equipment could control so much power. The generator room actually smelled like electricity to me.

After the dam we went out on the lake created by the dam. It was very, very blue and we didn't know why. There was a boat which took us across the lake to a platform moored on the far shore. It was not entirely clear what we were supposed to do there, so we sat on the tea bed and drank beer and some kind of local drink made from rose hips. A few people went swimming. I hadn't brough my swimsuit because I didn't know there'd be swimming, but was eventually coaxed into going in anyway, in my clothes. I was glad I had - the water was a perfect temperature and the girl I went swimming with was interesting to talk to.

(This has been a good trip in terms of people - it's nice to realize that outside of Ashgabat I seem entirely capable of making new friends and being liked.)

After the swimming we sat around on the platform some more, and drove off for our picnic. Which was not a picnic at all but a meal at a local restaurant where every protein source was an unmitigated horror. There were little fish, about 2 or 3 inches long, friend whole and you were supposed to eat them whole, bones and head and all. There was boiled goat - big piles of boiled goat meat, fried goat liver, and a thin soup made from the broth they got by boiling the goat. I had bread and soup and tomatoes and fruit.

Somewhere between the dam and the swimming platform I developed a headache, and by the time we were eating it was so bad that I could feel my sinuses throbbing in time to my pulse and and was wishing with some passion for death. Eventually I admitted it to my colleagues, one of whom went and brought me some cold medicine with codeine. That brought the headache down to a dull roar and quelled the thoughts of suicide, but the headache didn't actually go away until I was back at my apartment and took many aspirin.

(The headache tried to reapper today, but Markus conveniently had tylenol with him. Two naked tylenol pills, in his pocket. Whatever. I do not look gift painkillers in the mouth.)

The water here is ghastly. Tea made from tap water is almost undrinkable, and even the bottled water has a tendency to taste like chemicals. I have been sticking with carbonated water, which seems safer, and smelling everything suspiciously before I drink it.

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USAID is one of many donors for the project I work for. The views expressed herein are the author’s own views and do not necessarily reflect those of the author’s employer or especially those of the United States Agency for International Development or the United States Government. And I mean it. I probably give the US government heart attacks.