On the move. I'm in India now, deep in the Himalayan Mountains. Things happened so quickley since my last email that I never finished my Uzbekistan update: I'd seen only the nothing town of Jizzak, and the cities of Samarqand, Buxoro and Toshkent are eminently story-worthy. Since part of my goal in travelling is to share knowledge with the hope that we can all act more in the best interest of the world, I should not like to omit sharing of these universes! So I write on paper here in India, and hope to transfer the scripted word to the screened word when I find another terminal.
In Uzbek, there are sounds we don't have in English, which they've notated using characters that are redundant in English. The k sounds normal, but q is pronounced like k with a hard gutteral after it; h is a regular h, but x is a plain gutteral as in Bach or Loch Ness Monster. Thus xaq, in spoken Uzbek, becomes the creation and expulsion of a loogie. Is this a sign?
Samarqand and Buxoro just celebrated their 2500th birthdays, which the government knew to the day (Samaqand was a couple of days younger (note sarcasm)). Despite the hype, these are truly Ancient cities. Little remains of the original architecture, but the Soviets rebuilt the gigantic Registan mosque, recapping the many domes with the tradtional Central Asian blue tile and refitting mosaics of animals and heavenly bodies and geometric patterns and the long vertical lines of stylized Arabic text. It makes an impressive, if sterilely touristy, sight. Not that there are many tourists. Most were likely Soviets travelling to see the rich culture they captured. Now the only westerners one sees are the herds of rich 50+ aged Americans on the Uzbektourism bus. I'm clearly not one of those, and I don't look very Russian with my facial structure and full beard, so I get curious stares from many a child and approaches from a few bearing gifts of Indian rock-star stickers from bubble gum packets and the occasional eye of an Uzbek girl. The bazaar is home of many such interactions. These markets are brimming with colors from fruits, vegetables, spices, sweets, cloth, carpets, not to mention people. THe men wear black square hats embroidered in white with loose cool earth-tone suits. The women get to don the sparkle with their vibrant bandana hair-covers and atlases (traditional long colorful dresses) sometimes glittering with sequins or gold embroidery.
Walking down the aisles of tables claimed in early-morning free-for-all you see the claimants' goods, usually clustered by identical item (hence the need for business advising by the Peace Corps). Ginger, potatoes, carrots, roots of grey, green, yellow, white; pepers, garlic shoots, parsley, mint; apples, tomatoes, pomegranates, alas none of the legendary melons were in season; dried apricots, raisins, golden raisins (both eatne usually with stems attached-yuk! I pick mine off); almonds, peanuts, deshelled peanuts, sugar-coated peanuts, walnuts, apricot pits,; jarred honey, raw edible honeycomb, slabs of rock sugar; melting native cheese, imported cheese, soft pools of yoghurt; cones of spices in burlapo sacks, reds and oranges and yellows and greys. Still, with all this food, why can't they make tasty cuisine? Shoppers feel free to sample a nugget of this or a pinch of this: how else can you evaluate the qualitites? The sellers call out in Uzbek to buy this, buy that; try this, try that to get a hook in; and the everpresent bargaining finishes each deal.
The number of packaged goods from the West is increasing, and one can even find non-lye soap now, or Tide (which competes against the local detergent "Barf"-I swear). Not that it's used much: the Uzbeks bathe about once a week. The Uzbek currency is non-convertible, meaning you can't buy dollars with it without a special permit issued to government officials who undoubtedly make a truckload of money (read: $1000 = truckload of soom-Uzbek currency) by changing their dollars on the black market for 80% profit. Companies can not, therefore, take profits out of the country-so why invest? Kazakstan to the north, in contrast, has convertible currency and with it a large supply of Western goods (or bads depending on what you value). Uzbekistan is trying to make a stable transition to a free-market economy and thus fixes exchange rates artificially low to allow local products to compete. It's an interesting policiy problem and I haven't yet concluded whether they are helping or hurting their country in the middle term; short term it helps and long term it probably doesn't matter.
I suspect they're not thinking things through carefully, if other government behavior gives any indiciation. One example: the militzia cleared the main street of the bazaar of people, sprayed the street with a trickle of water as a pathetic attempt to clean it (made even more pathetic by the serious water shortage cotton irrigation has caused), and then waited an hour or so when a small motorcade tolled by, containing the Belgian ambassador, who therefore missed his chance to see the bazaar in true form and instead saw a deserted street. This sounds from this description like a credible procedure, but let me assure you it was a beauteous display of idiocy and inefficiency.
The real jewel of Samarqand was a yet-to-be restored tomb of Mohommed's brother. It is said if you visit this place twice it is as good as visiting Mecca. Old stone walls and domed ceilings and crumbling blue mosaic and hexagonal lattices, aligned in oblique view along a central stone path leading to a serene graveyard overlooking the city's valley.
Buxoro was my favorite place. I centered my operations in the Labi-Hauz bath pool in the center of the old city, where old men sat backs to the two mosques, playing dominoes cross-legged on carpeted, floored bed frames supporting low tables; Uzbeks sold candy, nan breads, and cigarettes; ducks swam in the pool with young boys jumping off gnarled trees topped with albatross nests put there articifically to lure back the luck-bringing birds who abandoned the area with the Soviey draining and cementing up of most plague-transmitting public baths. A block away was the synagogue of the two thousand Buxoro Jews whose numbers have dwindled from the twenty thousand who inhabited the city since the Diaspora some huge number of years ago. Down a road a few minutes along a narrow canal, I came to the Ark, a gigantic artificial walled hill topped with a mediocre fortress from which the local rulers ruled. Nearby was a minaret, climbed by Jengiz Kahn and spared because of its hugeness. A small bribe and a bit of pleading in Uzbek opened the necessary doors and I climbed in the footsteps of the Jeng-meister to a spectacular 360 degree view of Buxoro. One of the Uzbek candy-selling girls invited me into her home to watch an Indian action-romance-musical-tragedy with audio translation into Russian by a single narrarator speaking all characters, male, female or animal. Maybe she wanted me to marry her and take her to America, rich land of milk and honey. I was always being asked why I wasn't married, and was told that I needed a nice Uzbek girl to cook and clean for me. I like American gender roles better (especially given the cooking (anti-)skill of the Uzbeks.
After a lovely 12-hour train ride with eight other folk in the open cubicle I arrived in Toshkent, took the (efficient!?!) subway to the geology museum; they turned on the lights for me, being the only visitor, and let me hold an 8000-year-old pestle. The rest of Toshkent was pretty blase', being a pretty much barren Soviet city with a few replaced monuments and parks.
Uzbekistan was a great place to visit; yet another incredibly foreign world; but I wouldn't recommend it to someone who doesn't have the supremely helpful and generous network of Peace Corps Volunteers who housed me and shared their accumulated Uzbek wisdom and stories. But if anyone has a hankerin' for plov thrice a day, you'll have no problems...
Peace,
-xaq