Finding a new apartment

Before coming to Tajikistan I had arranged to rent an apartment for the month of September with the possibility of extending the lease for the entire year. The previous Fulbright student that I got in touch with recommended the apartment because it was decent and had electricity year-round. Electricity can be a problem in the winter here, because everyone heats using electricity since gas is supplied from Uzbekistan only when relations are good, and relations change seasonally. The utility service cannot meet the winter demand for electricity, so they brown-out sections of the city at different times, rationing the supply.

We’ve spent the last two weeks unsuccessfully trying to find out what sections of the city are more or less prone to having their supply shut off. Landlords swear they have electricity year-round, while lay-people say it doesn’t really matter where you live, or that the center is better than the outlying suburbs, but the center loses electricity sometimes, too. Recently, an expat told us that even in her very expensive apt, they lose electricity regularly during the winter, and that expats in $1500 per month apts lose theirs, too.

So we decided to rent a place that is very inexpensive but a nice apt, just outside of the center, and if we have electricity issues in winter, we’ll use our savings to take a vacation to Goa, India. It is warm there.

In an interesting coincidence, as we were viewing the apt that we would eventually take, we walked into the bedroom and on the bookshelf was, “Introduction to Biostatistics”, typically a book only MPHs are interested in. Then on the wall I saw a diploma from Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health. It turns out the landlord is in the same field as I am, and he’s currently in London doing a PhD. I hope to contact him and chat a bit.