Tashkent: beautiful, but sinister

June 1, 2008

Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Note: I wrote these blogs from Uzbekistan a few days ago but we were nervous about posting them while we were still in the country.

There aren’t a lot of foreigners here but there are a lot of empty hotel rooms. There are even fewer foreigners who don’t speak Russian. So the bellhop laughed when he heard I didn’t speak Russian and asked “Why not?” Why not, indeed? Who needs to speak anything else? Hmm, reminds me of another place I know…

The city of Tashkent is the largest capital in Central Asia (2 million officially, but apparently 4 million unofficially). There has been a town here for 2,000 years, although it was first referred to as ‘Toshkent’ in the 11th century, and it was never as more famous as Samarkand, which is a few hundred miles away. Most of the city was destroyed in an earthquake in 1966 so there is little of historic interest to see. It is very modern, green, and clean, with wide, wide boulevards, shady parks on almost every block, and many Soviet-style buildings leftover from before 1991. However, these are interspersed with beautiful Georgian (the architectural style, not the country…or even state) buildings, which mostly house ministries and the like.

Unlike in Kyrgyzstan, most people here do not look “Asian.” In fact, there is no one “look,” except maybe some leanings towards Turkish, with some European thrown in. There are virtually zero women with veils, and many who don’t wear anything on their heads. People are very gentle, calm and polite. Few look us in the eyes, even when we brushed shoulders with them in the grand bazaar today. We did make contact with a few people though, most of whom showed only a passing interest in us. Given the fact that we were virtually the only tourists in a market consisting of hundreds of vendors, and thousands of visitors, I found this a little suspicious. I am guessing that it was out of fear. After 2005, most international organizations were asked to leave after many foreign governments protested the ‘Andijan’ incident, where hundreds were killed during a peaceful demonstration. We heard from several sources that there has been a thawing in the last year, however, on the part of the Uzbekh government. This may be why no one has yet asked to look at our documents, which we had heard was quite common. Our other theory is that the police know exactly who we are and what we are doing so when we jog by in the morning they just check us off their list. One tends to get paranoid in this country, although there is no outward need to be so.

Just found out that we now have official letters to enter Kazakhstan, which we are trying again on Wednesday. For some reason I’m not really looking forward to visiting that airport again…