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From: Anna Kirtiklis
Date: Fri, 1 Sep 2000 03:30:09 -0700 (PDT)

bulk thoughts: y'impash (16)

Anastasia Kirtiklis
2006-06-29 10:50:15

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Thursday, August 31, 2000

Hello. I'm writing from excellent Ashgabat, the capital of Turkmenistan. Its super slick and fancy—at the moment I am writing from an i'net cafe in a mallish style city center. I actually heard the Cranberries on the sound system. Very, very sophisticated. I'm full of Turkish coffee and hummus and eggplant-in-yogurt and life couldn't be better. Having it out with Cpt Clegg this morning was good fun too—it certainly cleared the air on my end. He seems somewhat stricken, but enough is enough.

The goods at Y'impash (this mall) are pretty dodgey, though they look good from afar, and this connection is extremely slow. Yes, I'm afraid the glitz is all skin deep, skin deep from a distance. All the super weird new buildings, every one with a two or three story photo of the president stuck on the side, and the gilded 32-meter statue of him on top of a 8 story tea kettle tripod (or something) are for show.

There's oil here and the Turks are putting a lot of money in so the city looks amazing (look, I've been in Uzbekistan for 5 months), but the people are poor, poor, poor. The Pres, 'His Excellency Saparmurat Niyazov Turkmenbashi', decided to rename the month of January after himself. More on "the Lord of all Turkmen" and his politics later.

My bulks are going to be more like bits for a bit because I don't have much time on the new schedule. I have such excellent stories to tell—the last days in Bukhara (much disco dancing!), the border crossing (they sent me back until I paid the weirdest of bribes), and the always-misbehaving, getting-us-into-lots-of-trouble, eighty-three year old Captain Albert Hadley Clegg.

You can just call him Hadley, though I shall continue to refer to him as Cpt Clegg. (Have I mentioned his 20 pounds of camera equipment worth about $5000? Enough, enough. For the moment anyway.)

I've been here 45 minutes and I'm still trying to open the message from AU about the next border crossing. Patience. I have read all my yahoo mails though. Yea! Thanks. Keep them coming.

Friday, September 1, 2000

It's Uzbek Independence Day and I'm wondering how they are. It's always a time of havoc there (09.01) and even more so this year. Hmmmmf.

This morning we went up into the tea-kettle tripod for a view of the city and up at the top there was another Cranberries tune playing (I think it was anyway). I'm not sure I've heard Britney Spears even once here. Is it possible?

We cross into Iran tomorrow.

Let's pray that the Captain behaves himself.