so i just got back from a long exhausting day in new york city. this time on the train home i did not convert any fellow passengers to kerry. instead, i stepped on the train to find my car was filled with foreigners in some kind of islamic dress.
i spent much of the ride eaves dropping, trying to figure out what language they were speaking. it wasn't arabic, that was clear enough. the passengers looked uzbek to me--both in their dress (the women wore what looked like traditional uzbek garb to me) and facial features. but part of me didn't believe it. i know i'm obsessed with uzbekistan and apts to assume any non-arab muslims with vaguely asiatic features are from central asia. so i sat there, pretending to do arabic homework and debating to myself whether they looked more like malaysians after all.
then one of them pulled out a novel, it was clearly written in cyrillic. at that point i was sure they were central asians. i jumped up and asked where they were from. they were from tashkent, but didn't really speak english. but at least 2 of the 20 or so uzbeks in my compartment spoke arabic (which also beats the odds, i spent 2 weeks looking for arabic speakers in uzbekistan and only found a single person who could).
unfortunately, while i am quite capable of carrying on a simple conversation in arabic, it has to be a pretty vapid conversation. or at least limited to a few basic topics. plus, my uzbek friends were also just learning the language. so i stumped them with my vocabulary about as often as they stumped me. i did get to show off my rudamentary uzbek too--which is limited pretty much to: "no" "thank you" "lawyer" and counting from one to 10,000.
so what are the odds of an uzbek-obsessed arabic-speaking american ending up in a train with a bunch of uzbeks some of whom also speak arabic? why do i get such a kick out of things like this?
