My last week here in Uzbekistan has been a bit of an emotional rollercoaster. I have been doing a workshop on overcoming test anxiety for the US Embassy’s American Center in Tashkent. The students have been fun to work with and it is much less stressful to work through the Embassy rather than an Uzbek university. Also, we held it in the American Councils on International Education office in central Tashkent which allowed me to make some new connections there.

Last weekend, I got the chance to travel to Samarkand, one of the beautiful silk road cities in Uzbekistan. A friend of mine was getting married and invited me to her wedding. I’ve received many invites to Uzbek wedding over the years, but for one reason or another, I have never attended before now. However, Malika is a good friend and I was excited that her wedding was taking place while I was in Uzbekistan.

For those who don’t know, Uzbek weddings are a THING. They are huge and extravagant and all about show. This wedding had over 350 guests. I will say more about the wedding and include lots of photos further down in this post.

It was the worst of times…

But before I get to that, I need to share some unfortunate news I received shortly after I arrived in Samarkand. I am renting and Airbnb in Tashkent and the property manager called my friend to tell him that a fire had broken out in the apartment. She didn’t have any more details at that point, only that the firefighters were there and she was heading over to find out the situation.

I did my best to use my mindfulness skills to focus on enjoying dinner with friends in Samarkand I hadn’t seen since my last visit, and not let myself worry too much about a situation that was completely beyond my control. About halfway through dinner I received this video she took of the apartment immediately after the firefighters let her into the apartment.

Thank God I was not at home at the time. Since I was away for the weekend I also had my passport with me, some clothes, my good jewelry, all my money, my iPad, and a special Uzbek dress I had made from vintage silk that was gifted to me by my friend’s mother. My laptop however was in the apartment on the kitchen counter very near to where the fire occurred. Sadly, it sustained extensive water damage and is likely destroyed. I hope that when I get back to the States I will be able to retrieve the data off the hard drive. Thankfully I had already entered all my dissertation data and backed it up to the cloud so I did not lose any of my dissertation related work.

Many of my clothes, shoes, and my luggage sustained smoke or water damage. I spent days washing and rewashing all my clothes. The owner of the apartment has been great and immediately moved me to another apartment she has that wasn’t rented out right now. She also had my luggage professionally cleaned. She couldn’t find anyone that was willing to try to clean my shoes so i will bag them up and bring them home with me in the hopes I can find a place that knows how to clean them. Now that I’m over the initial stress of the situation, I’m grateful that things weren’t worse. I’m fine, my data is fine, and most of my clothes are actually okay.

So let’s get back to a happier subject, the Uzbek wedding…

My friend’s wedding was quite the extravaganza. It was loud, it was golden, it was so very Uzbek. I loved it. There were women dressed as angels welcoming you into the venue along with a string quartet. They were flowers everywhere you looked and the table setting did not disappoint. Malika looked gorgeous. They had a somsa making station and the waiters hovered over us ready to refill our vodka glasses the moment we set them down. It was a fun evening seeing Malika and her family and making myself look like a fool trying to learn how to dance to Uzbek music. I had a great time.

As I am writing this last post, sitting in my apartment, luggage packed and waiting by the door, I am filled with gratitude for all the people who have made this a success despite all the challenges. Thank you.

I love you all.

Our last week of the treatment phase of the project was the week of May 15th. Things went more smoothly this week. The teachers all showed up for their classes (yay!) but student attendance was low. It feels like everyone is just ready for the end of the school year. Students have 2 more weeks before they have to take their end of year exams but it feels like the students and teachers alike are done. We pushed through and tried to include some fun activities for this last week. We read Fox in Sox aloud in the reading classes so the students could practice pronunciation. In the Listening and Speaking classes we played Pictionary which the students really seemed to enjoy.

The 5th and final week was post treatment data collection. We repeated all the same measurements that we did the week prior to starting the 4 weeks of mindfulness training. One of the problems that I was thinking about this week was attrition. Attendance among the students in these final weeks was low, as I noted in the previous paragraph. This was an issue for the post data collection so I contacted the Dean’s assistant and asked her if she could “encourage” the students to attend their classes this week. This turned out to be a good strategy as most of the students were in class at least one of the three days of the week so we were able to get their post-test data collected. As soon as we had the data, my research assistant and i sat down and immediately starting entering everything into an Excel spreadsheet, which automatically backs up to the cloud when I save it. This turned out to be a fortuitous choice, as you will realize after reading my next blog post.

I also presented at a conference hosted by the university during this last week. The conference was on innovations in Foreign Language teaching and included two local faculty members, one woman from India who presented via Zoom, one English Language Fellow, and myself. One common theme here at conferences is that presenters generally disregard any time guidelines and end up running way over time. I was presenting last and was pleasantly surprised when we only ended up 30 minutes over the scheduled time when it came my turn to present.

Finally, I was happy to be able to meet our FLEX exchange student from last year here in Tashkent to celebrate his birthday with him. I have not seen him in about a year, since he left Minnesota to return to Uzbekistan in June 2022. We enjoyed a lovely dinner at one of my favorite places here in Tashkent (Cafe Kafe, which I recently learned has been renamed Kafe Loft).