Wednesday, July 6, 2011
Wordle of my T-stan experience
http://www.wordle.net/show/wrdl/3828619/Turkmenistan_Peace_Corps_Volunteer_blog
Interestingly, the Wordle document of most commonly repeated words in this blog, "miss" comes up the most. A better summary of the Peace Corps experience would be hard to find. Happily "good" and "like" came up often as well.
Thursday, January 27, 2011
One year later
Turkmenistan is never far from my thoughts these days, although I’ve been home for more than a year. A month ago, on the one year anniversary of returning to the states, I realized that there was one more blog entry needed to complete this story. I never ended up going to London -- as “The End” states – the visa fell through, a situation I would have expected to happen traveling in Turkmenistan, but wasn’t expecting for getting a simple student visa to the UK. So I stayed home, unemployed and volunteering and applying to as many jobs as I could, before ending up at Peace Corps Headquarters in DC working in their department of overseas programming and training.
So many times in this blog I wrote about how strange Turkmenistan was, how odd it was that something I knew in my head was “weird” had become so “normal” in the practice of daily life. Every now and then I look around at DC, at its unstated codes and expectations (stand right, walk left; the Red Line is delayed; donkeys mean liberal), and think that a Turkmen would have legitimate cause to think we were the strangest of all.
But this strangeness has the comfort of the devil I know, and I’ll be around for awhile.
So many times in this blog I wrote about how strange Turkmenistan was, how odd it was that something I knew in my head was “weird” had become so “normal” in the practice of daily life. Every now and then I look around at DC, at its unstated codes and expectations (stand right, walk left; the Red Line is delayed; donkeys mean liberal), and think that a Turkmen would have legitimate cause to think we were the strangest of all.
But this strangeness has the comfort of the devil I know, and I’ll be around for awhile.
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