Talkuchka

Last Sunday morning I went to the oldest (or so I have been told) open air market in Central Asia. I think it's spelled, "Talkuchka". I already got some souvenirs that are quite nice. It was important to have someone who could list numbers along, though calculators are my and the women in the market's friend when it comes to price negotiation. It's amazing walking through the market, as you walk through tiny aisles and dodge the men walking through with carts to collect goods to take home. You pass from women selling hand stitched handbags to vendors hawking Disney plastic bags and Barbie knock offs to traditional wedding headdresses and scarves.

The "parking lot" is a dust filled bowl brimming with buses that come in from villages around the country and cars of every make and model. There is no rhyme or reason to parking or driving, with the painted divisions and pedestrian crosswalks little more than decoration. I think it took about an hour to park, with me laughing at the "direction" that pedestrians would offer the drivers in the parking area. Heaps of good are being loaded into the buses and press against the windows as villagers line up to get onto the buses that have little signs hanging in the window indicating their destinations. After almost being hit with buses backing up and cars shooting into too small lanes, we finally park and get out. We orient ourselves to where our parking spot is: kitty corner to the main gate, across from the blue glass building, near a retaining wall, and before you hit one of the sand dunes.



When you start walking into the market, you pass vendors offering soda, honey out of Cola bottles, women selling bracelets, and a continuous stream of people coming in and out of the main gate. Traditional dress continues to be well respected, with me wondering how the men are not dying in the fur hats a good chunk of them continue to insist on wearing, layers of robes, and pants. You can taste the dust as everything is so dry and the dust is everywhere.

Once you enter the market, you are immediately immersed in small stalls that are roughly divided by different womens' carpets that they display their goods on with aisles that are almost two small for two people to walk abreast. Women in traditional scarves and beautiful long dresses with embroidery around the collars offer goods that range from tourist souvenir sales to ancient neck wraps and carpets. As you move down the aisle, men hauling carts, both empty and brimming with goods, come by, pressing you to the edge of the walkway as chatting Turkmen women wander to stalls alongside the foreigners. As you move further into the market and away from the tourist areas, it becomes clear that this is the main way to purchase goods in Ashgabat.



Turkmenistan has a lot of strange laws, especially about antiques and valuable metal (anything over ten years old is considered an antique, and thus a national treasure and cannot be brought out of Turkmenistan), but it doesn't really strike one in the market. It's evident that it is completely different from anything I've been to before, but children dart in and out of the crowd, sometimes shoving too roughly, and continue racing forward through the stalls.



When a shirt grabbed my eye (not going to describe it too much as it's a gift for someone who may be reading this), I stopped and this little old woman began bargaining. She offered it for 450,000 manat. I countered with 250,000 using her little calculator, and she agreed, "Da!". Hmmm, maybe I could have gotten a better deal, but for about $18 for a shirt that would easily have been $30+ in the US, I wasn't going to be too annoyed. She smiled, let me take a pictures with her, and kissed me on the cheek after insisting on looking at the photo I took. I had to carefully remove my sandals before stepping onto the carpet to take the picture.

I also bought "evil eyes", which are meant to protect someone from bad forces. These beliefs are alive and well in Turkmenistan. From leaving a longer strand on the end of carpets to wearing certain bracelets, men and women use various symbols to ward off bad things. Some of these are very beautiful and are hung at entryways to ward off evil.


We continued to move deeper into the market, eventually ending up in the fabric section. It's rather surreal, going straight and walking through one curtain after another of cloth that separate each vendor's booth from another's. Fabrics range from polka dots to beautiful velvet that are used to create the long dresses that are worn around the city.

We continued looking around the market for about another hour before the heat and the sun got to all of us. We started to head out and extracted the car from the parking lot. As we were driving out, we saw a string of camels with baby camels being led along the road. There were sheep and goats wandering, with a goat examining our car over the back of the truck ahead of us. I can't wait for my next trip out there.