Howdy, goers of West Side Stories Online! I’ve been in Tajikistan the past couple of days, and I’m sure you’re curious about what’s going on.

The flight here, in a word, was long. A 10 hour flight to Istanbul followed by a 4 hour wait in the airport followed by a 4 hour flight to Dushanbe followed by a 2 or so hour long wait to get the entry visas to Tajikistan. Very long. Lots of waiting.

Once the day got started, it was a good time. We all went to the Qishloq restaurant for lunch and dinner, and in between those meals we walked to the park near our hotel (I’ll get back to you with the name of the park). It was a beautiful evening, and we all had a fantastic time. After dinner, the Pakistanis in our group celebrated their country’s independence day with traditional dress and national songs.

Today we had the iEARN workshop. This means there were a lot of presentations from the three counties present about the experiences the teachers and students had while doing this year’s iEARN project. After lunch, we broke into groups and brainstormed ways to improve it in the future.

For dinner, we went to the Rohat teahouse. This was a very traditional Tajik restaurant, and it contained many beautiful designs on the walls and ceilings, as well as a very open layout. In standard Tajik fashion, we had a huge meal for dinner. It was a very enjoyable as well as delicious experience.

That’s about it for now. Hopefully I’ll post again before we leave, but I may have to do a conclusion post once we’re back in the US. The wifi at the Asia Grand hotel isn’t kind to the WordPress platform that this runs on, which is why I’m going to urge you to check out my Google blog where I’ve been doing daily posts.