The main languages spoken here are Tajik, Russian and Uzbek, as well as Chinese and English. This week, I conducted a lot of phone interviews with people all across the country. I learned two things: 1) It's much more difficult to understand a foreign language over the phone than it is to understand it in person, and 2) for such a small country (Tajikistan is almost exactly the size of New York State) there are a huge number of different accents! People in the north and the south have completely different accents.
The currency is the Tajik somoni, which comes in 1, 3, 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 500 somoni bills. Unlike the US, no one here uses credit or debit cards. Everyone needs to carry cash all the time if they want to buy something.
A giant bottle of water costs 3 somoni, or about $0.30. A full meal costs about 10-15 somoni, or $1.10-$1.50. Pretty inexpensive, right?
As always, the best meal this week was a meal of osh, Tajikistan's national dish of rice, meat and carrots. People here eat osh -- and most dishes -- using spoons or their fingers. If they have to use a fork, it's only to push food onto the spoon.
