{"id":1475,"date":"2012-10-01T01:00:06","date_gmt":"2012-10-01T01:00:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/?p=1475"},"modified":"2012-09-28T11:33:52","modified_gmt":"2012-09-28T11:33:52","slug":"short-runs-in-strange-places-ashgabat-turkmenistan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.viggers.com\/roundtheworld\/2012\/10\/short-runs-in-strange-places-ashgabat-turkmenistan\/","title":{"rendered":"Short Runs in Strange Places \u2013 Ashgabat, Turkmenistan"},"content":{"rendered":"

I am half way through my jog round Ashgabat when I start to get worried. The police are starting to take an active interest in this random Westerner who is running around the government district at dusk, and I am worried about the language gap. To me, I am a harmless traveler keeping semi-fit while providing semi-amusing travel \/ jogging anecdotes to a very small group of touchingly devoted blog followers. To a cynical policeman, I am an undocumented foreigner running around their equivalent of Whitehall in an ex-Soviet (now proudly independent) state with an earpiece and a GPS tracking device. I wasn’t sure at the time whether I would have been able to explain that yes, my documents are at the hotel, that my earpiece is the unbroken half of my earphones keeping me supplied with Leonard Cohen tunes and that the suspicious tracking device is an iPhone with an app allowing me to count calories and to send maps to my mates, officer. And my, what lovely truncheons you and your friends have.<\/p>\n

As it was, the police \/ army interest was mercifully restricted to two loud flurries of whistles and lots of truncheon waving, and happily died down when I ostentatiously gave the international sign for: “Who me? Oh, I’m terribly sorry officer. Yes, I will happily run across this six lane highway to keep away from your turf.” You may see a couple of sharp kinks in the track below.<\/p>\n

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