Hissyfit in Hissor

I really wanted to soak up the Tajik magic and get into some Zoroastrism so I went to Hissor, which is a town not far from Dushanbe and heavily banks on a local fortress as its chief tourist attraction.  It's nice and stuff, but they need to stop thinking that fixing old fortresses with new bricks is a good idea, because I like looking at old stuff, you know?  Anyway, as always I attracted a tonne of attention in Hissor because I have no idea where I am and what I am doing at the best of times and my Russian is so bad that people just laugh at me and wonder how I have made it this far in life.  The fortress was a few kilometres south of the main part of the city, so I walked from the bus depot along the main street and enjoyed the beautiful warm weather.  In the area where the bus depot parking area gradually transitions into a marketplace, a man with a large wheelbarrow walked up to me and asked me if I was from Hungary.  I said technically yes, I had come from Hungary, and he told me that he had lived there in the 1970s as a soldier.  Can you imagine how bumpin and sexually liberated Hungary must have been in the 1970s?  Especially when you are coming from the Tajik SSR?  I was kind of jealous of him because coming from rural Tajikistan as an occupying power to 70s Hungary must have been like a free passage to the West.  

Cool, casual pic at the Hissor fortress.

The grounds around the fortress were cool enough but the procurement department of the heritage restoration ministry had made some seriously ill-informed choices when they selected the brick for restoring, as it was that weird plastic-looking brick that you see in garbage suburban homes that will likely fall down in the coming years or turn into a ghetto if you’ve ever watched “End of Suburbia” at an impressionable age and since then given up on any hope for humanity and have since been preparing for the coming Apocalypse.  There were some cute kids wandering around the fortress who screaming at me to give them money, but I liked the market in Hissor the most.  It was so full of life and energy and animal carcasses and sassy young tweens yelling at me and telling me to buy these fantastic sheepskin vests and different Chinese-made that I had zero interest in purchasing.   

Cool, casual sheepskin vest.

Anyway, southwards towards Hissor two young women passed me on the street and asked me to marry one of them.  So the first thing I did was get to an internet cafe to update my Facebook status to "Rory is enjoying being a "hottie" in Tajikistan.”*  Achievement unlocked.  Furthermore, in the marshrutka coming back from Hissor a teenager kept staring at me and when I finally looked over he asked in Russian, "Are you from Moscow?” Looks like 18 years of living in Grand Forks is finally paying dividends.  

*omfg I remember the evolution of Facebook so well.  Do you guys remember when the Facebook wall was a single editable text field?  Wasn't that so strange?  And then they allowed you to start writing on your own wall, and then it became a status update in which you had to qualify something after the verb "is" (as though simply being isn't enough work for most of us) and then a bunch of intolerable people formed a group that was some sort of petition to send to Mark Zuckerberg to remove the word "is" from all status updates so as to allow people creative expression (because evidently the great unwashed weren't simply content with simply being anymore).  Then FB went as far as to allow you to comment on others' posts on your wall, and then finally not only like something, but like a comment.  All you have to do is click "like" and you're engaging in user-generated content.  You're basically in marketing.  Get you.