{"id":63337,"date":"2013-03-10T17:27:28","date_gmt":"2013-03-10T21:27:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=63337"},"modified":"2023-01-20T15:20:43","modified_gmt":"2023-01-20T20:20:43","slug":"vlad-and-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2013\/03\/10\/vlad-and-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Mellnick ’95 and Peterson ’09 meet each other, and Lenin, in Tajikistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

Vlad and Us<\/p>\n

It didn\u2019t take long for Keith Mellnick \u201995 and Grif Peterson \u201909, attending a horse festival in Murghab, Tajikistan, to ID each other not only as ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ grads but as former denizens of adjacent rooms in Smith Hall.<\/p>\n

They marked their meetup some 6,300 miles from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ with this photograph, showing them flanking the city\u2019s Lenin statue that\u2019s left over from Soviet days. (Grif\u2019s cap sits atop Lenin\u2019s head.)<\/p>\n

Peterson, who blogs for The Huffington Post<\/em>, is an academic affairs officer for the Univ. of Central Asia, an ambitious new university set to open campuses in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan in the coming years.<\/p>\n

\"Keith<\/a>

Keith Mellnick \u201995 and Grif Peterson \u201909. Photograph courtesy Keith Mellnick \u201995<\/p><\/div>\n

Mellnick is a freelance photographer and writer who posts at his blog, Expatmonkey.com<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, Mellnick headed west to report from Khorog, the site of recent armed clashes between government forces and local groups still at odds since the country\u2019s civil war in the 1990s.<\/p>\n

By the time he arrived, the city was quiet, yet buildings splattered with bullet holes revealed what had gone down, as did the presence of soldiers in the streets.<\/p>\n

Soon, Mellnick was stopped, his bag searched and prodded with the muzzle of an AK-47. The soldiers demanded to know what he had photographed.<\/p>\n

So Mellnick turned himself into Boring Travel Guy, showing each photo on the camera\u2019s LCD display and narrating in excruciating detail: \u201cHere\u2019s my hotel in Murghab. This is the cat that fell asleep on my lap. This is the yurt in which I slept in the Pshart Valley….\u201d<\/p>\n

The trick worked, wearing out the soldiers, Mellnick reports. \u201cAfter examining my passport, they told me to find another road and not to pass that way again.\u201d \u2014 HJB<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you\u2019ve lived in Smith, you\u2019re ready for Tajikistan<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":63343,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"bates_author_byline_override":"","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"","_header-color":"","_photo-credit":"","_header-effect":"","override_related_with_tag":"","_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[10856,9873],"class_list":["post-63337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-batesnews","tag-bates-magazine","tag-winter-2013"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63337"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63337\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":64337,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63337\/revisions\/64337"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63343"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}