Snow Leopards On the Silk Road
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re in a small town in Provence, called Six-Fours-les-Plages. I wrote this last week, while we were in Paris.
Snow Leopards On the Silk Road
You know how colleges number coursework as one hundred level, two hundred, etc? At least they did back in the last century, when I was coming along. The one hundreds were survey courses—a general overview of a topic or area of study. They were mostly packed with freshmen, who were trying to figure how college worked and what they wanted to focus on in their education.
When Lee and I started traveling, everything was a survey course. And like a college freshman, I sometimes struggled to absorb all the information and experience that washed over me every day. Nowadays I usually want something a little deeper—a four-hundred-level specialty class, or maybe even a graduate-level seminar. I feel like I have a general grasp of how the world works, how history got us to where we are, how different parts of the world fit into the bigger picture.
But Uzbekistan has thrown me right back to freshman orientation.
It’s a whole new region of the world that I’ve never been to, and I find that completely exhilarating.
Uzbekistan is not next to, or related to, or part of, any countries or cultures that we’ve visited before. We used to spend a bit of time with a friend of Toby’s in Bangkok who was Uzbek; her family had emigrated there from Korea. At the time, I found that surprising and a little perplexing. Now, having been to Uzbekistan, I suppose I find Lydia’s background less surprising, but Uzbekistan? I still don’t have any mental categories to fit it into.
Uzbekistan is a small (or smallish—all things are relative) country in Central Asia. It was unified when it became a Soviet Republic; before that it was a series of independent city-states under the aegis of the Ottoman Empire. For nearly two thousand years, Silk Road traders passing between China and Europe made cities like Samarkand, Bukhara, and Khiva some of the wealthiest places in the world.
Nowadays, Uzbekistan is smack in the middle of a part of the world that is strategically important, but not particularly well-known to the average American Joe on the street. So I thought I’d share a few of my cursory observations.
I never did figure out who Uzbek people are, ethnically speaking. Some of them look a lot like the imaginary Genghis Khan in my head. But some look a lot like me. And others look East Asian. Some of the men look like Persian people we’ve met. The books I read told me they’re a ‘Turkic’ people, but The Google very helpfully says ‘Turkic’ means—wait for it—the people of Uzbekistan and surrounding nations. What does Turkic really mean anyway? It’s all a mystery to me.
The language was a bit of a mystery too. Most things were written in both the Cyrillic alphabet and the Latin alphabet. Was that because they were written in Russian and Uzbek? I have no idea. Sometimes there were three languages. I got the impression most people in some parts of the country actually speak Tajik, which I assume is the language of Tajikistan? I don’t know. Lee stuck with the Russian word for ‘thank you,’ which seemed to work. I finally realized the locals were saying ‘salaam allakum’ for hello (which is Arabic, adding another layer of confusion), so I used that for hello, and a hand-on-heart gesture for thank you, which I also picked up from the locals, many of whom had gold teeth.
I’ve never seen so many gold teeth in my life. I’m pretty certain every person I spoke with had at least one that was visible; some folks had many. I made two assumptions based on that observation: there’s a lot of tooth decay, and for some reason, gold is more popular than amalgam or composite. Or maybe their dental schools teach some kind of ‘pull it out and replace’ methodology.
Given the bling level of women’s clothing, the gold teeth might actually be an aesthetic choice. The vast majority of women’s clothing seemed to have some degree of sparkle. Related: one of the most significant local craft/souvenir categories is gold embroidery, so maybe the sparkly clothes are just one two-thousand-year-long trend. Second fun clothing fact: most older women cover their hair (Uzbekistan is nominally a Muslim country, but doesn’t seem especially devout), but they wear more of a turban-style wrap, rather than a hijab. The overall vibe, to my eyes, was more babushka than Arab princess.
There were Roma people in Tashkent. I didn’t expect that—it seems geographically very far from all the places in Europe where we’re used to seeing Roma. Interestingly, the Uzbek Roma are not nearly as good at begging as some we’ve encountered. Just saying.
We went into a mausoleum in either Samarkand or Bukhara (they’re beginning to run together in my head) that is considered the precursor to the Taj Mahal. Let me tell you: when you’re having lunch in Samarkand, it doesn’t seem like you could possibly be anywhere that has anything to do with India, but apparently the connections run deep, what with the Mughal Empire and all. Once again, I had no idea.
The food was … better than expected. It was one of the most difficult places for a vegetarian that we’ve ever been. For the first time in nine years of restaurants, I actually went back to our hotel and ate a power bar for lunch one day. But it was only once, and overall, I found the general style of the food kind of interesting. I could see the influence of Russia, Persia, Georgia, Turkey, and China on every menu. I just didn’t care for the meat-heavy interpretation/melding of those cuisines.
The capital, Tashkent, is full of BYD cars. BYD (short for Build Your Dreams) is a Chinese electric car manufacturer. I’d say every fourth car on the road there was a BYD. Our airport transfer on arrival was their SUV, and it definitely rivaled Tesla in luxury and comfort.
The ride share app (Yandex) was a serious challenge outside of Tashkent. We can only guess that the problem is the dual-alphabet situation. All I know is, we wound up being unceremoniously dropped off nowhere near our destination several times. Once, when we had our luggage with us, I pulled out a wad of cash and solved that problem forthwith. Princess does not drag luggage down the street in blazing hot sunshine.
The toilet paper was all kind of stretchy, and in our last hotel it was unperforated. It was like wiping with crepe paper streamers.
There was alcohol pretty much everywhere we went—restaurants, bars, hotel lobbies. We were given a drink menu that included wine, beer, and cocktails at every lunch. But in one hotel, we were told we could only drink in our room. There was no pork anywhere, I don’t believe. Women wore short sleeves in mosques, but had to cover their heads. It was a surprising balance between Muslim and non-Muslim.
I can’t make sense of the buildings—some seem western-ish to me, with windows that look out on the street like we’re accustomed to, while others (especially in some of the older neighborhoods that are still inhabited) seem more like the internally-focused architecture that I’m used to seeing in the Middle East/North Africa region.
The national bird is the stork, which I associate with Europe. Quite a few species of tulip are native to the area. There are also apparently snow leopards in the mountains? Maybe it’s just me, but that seems like an unexpected combination of flora and fauna.
Construction began on the Tashkent metro system during the Soviet era, and like the Moscow metro, it’s a work of art. Each station has a different theme, and is decorated accordingly. They’re all huge and well-kept, and the people are incredibly polite. Lee and I spent a day and a half riding from station to station, ogling and taking pictures. Every single time we hopped onto a train, someone immediately stood up to offer me a seat. I never had to stand, even at rush hour.
When I skim back over what I’ve written, I realize there are a lot of question marks. That pretty much sums up my impressions of Uzbekistan—a lot of question marks.
We said good-bye to Uzbekistan last weekend, and I’m writing this in Paris. It feels like we’ve come back to familiar ground. I don’t know or understand everything about France, by a long shot, and most of what I think I understand is probably me deluding myself, but at least I’m not walking around feeling like I’m swamped in a firehose of incomprehensible newness. On the other hand, no one has offered me a seat on the Metro, not once.
Take care,
Lisa
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