Christmas hike

We have not had much in the way of snow in Tashkent this winter. The mountains around us have had quite a lot. Nothing, however, deters our hiking guide, the indomitable Boris (on the left, wearing the bright pink fleece. He pulls it off.), and we wade over the hills of a Sunday afternoon with great intrepidity. The Boxing Day Brisk Walk (TM my mother) is the one Christmas tradition I've managed to hang on to here, so I owe Boris for that.

Big Chimgan

My favorite mountain.

Kyrgyz hospitality unleashed in all its muttony glory

Since Tashkent was persistently failing to honour the "get colder" part of autumn, I fled, as soon as I was decently able to Kyrgyzstan, about which I knew little but that it was high, and therefore cold, and that it had to be better than dusty Tashkent with its sputtering fountains and artificially green flowerbeds that serve only to emphasise the dryness of the air. I believe it was at the point at which I was stuck in the middle of a blizzard on the ascent to a 4000m pass, clinging frantically to my horse as it floundered through snow up to its chest that the thought occurred that perhaps there were less uncomfortable ways to escape. Surrounded on all sides by the massive peaks of the Tien Shan range, I felt that such a setting deserved slightly better than my flailing. One hundred and fifty years ago, British and Russian spies disguised unconvincingly as Turkmen horse traders were sneaking through these mountains, vigorously intriguing against each other all the while, and now here I was, trying not to fall off my horse and feeling utterly incapable of even the smallest intrigue. I couldn’t help feeling that I was lowering the tone of the landscape somewhat.

Kyrgyzstan is all about the majestic landscape: over 90% of the country is at an altitude above 1500m and nearly 50% is over 2500m. Lacking the picturesque crumbling masonry possessed in such abundant quantities by Uzbekistan, the country sells itself on a combination of its spectacular scenery and the traditional hospitality of its people. For centuries the Kyrgyz lived an entirely nomadic lifestyle, tribes pitching their yurts together and moving on every few months or so. The Soviets more or less put an end to this, but since independence many rural families have resumed a semi-nomadic existence. Come May or so, the yurt is loaded onto the top of the Lada, and everyone heads with their livestock to the jailoos, the beautiful and fertile alpine pastures that sustain the sheep and cows which are the livelihoods of these people. By the end of September, everyone heads back down again, but for those few months yurts cluster like mushrooms across the hills and mountains, by lakes, up tiny valleys, anywhere there is water and good grazing. Many families have decided that tourists seeking an Authentic Nomadic Experience are a better bet than sheep, so once you leave the unlovely cement streets of Bishkek, the capital, you are swept up into the hills and into a yurt with almost indecent haste. Fortunately, we are all here for the yurts, and from my viewpoint in a yurt by a mountain lake that would have been no doubt absolutely lovely but for the rather Welsh weather, I too was able to observe “Kyrgyz hospitality unleashed in all its muttony glory!” as one of the more enthusiastic local brochures put it.

Said hospitality is genuine, effusive, and generally involves much discussion of everyone’s marriage and children (potential children will do if you are lacking in this department, but this is considered letting the side down) conducted over copious quantities of food and drink, among which the prime culprit is the dread beverage kumis. Kumis is fermented mares milk and tastes exactly as awful as it sounds. It is mildly alcoholic, with a smoky, beery, rancid taste and an effect on the unwary digestive system that can only be described as unfortunate. It is the drink of welcome in a yurt, and one cannot stop anywhere without being presented with a large bowl of the stuff, which you have to at least attempt out of politeness, although finishing it is a risky business as it will immediately be refilled. I developed a kind of love-hate relationship with the stuff, and became unable to stop myself from sampling it at every opportunity, because I could never believe it was quite as horrible as I remembered (it always was). Much better is the Kyrgyz cream tea - fresh bread (cooked in a large saucepan on top of a stove, a technique which I never managed to get my head around), fresh cream and home-made jam. Oh, and tea. Pots and pots and pots of tea (I counted an average of about eight bowls per meal, which translated to about five or six mugs). When your water source is the stream you share with your herds of cows and horses, it is undeniably a better idea to rehydrate with tea as opposed to unboiled water, but yurt tea is usually served with sugar, condensed milk or jam (occasionally all three) which can be a little overwhelming. The Kyrgyz phrase the visitor is most likely to leave with is the stern “choy ich!” - drink tea! - that greets any protestation that one has had enough to drink. This is before even one gets to the muttony part (the primary ingredient of all Central Asian cuisine is mutton fat, and it remains a mystery to me how everyone here doesn’t die of heart disease before they’re thirty), and the upshot is that if you are me you end up huddling under a pile of blankets clutching your stomach, wishing you didn’t feel quite so full and vowing never to have any children.

After a few days of muttony hospitality, I was left feeling in dire need of a more active way to appreciate the scenery. Parked as I was in a lakeside yurt camp, I was thinking vaguely along the lines of a one day amble on horseback along the shore; however, by a combination of circumstances, the exact details of which escape me but I’m pretty sure involved a bottle of vodka, I found myself together with a charming British couple accompanying the guides and packhorses of an organised hiking tour (now disorganised and soaking their feet in the lake) 150 miles back home over the mountains. The vodka had naturally put paid to any qualms about our collective lack of horse riding experience and Russian language skills the previous night, but in the cold light of day the mountains looked steep, the horses were clearly unimpressed, and the guide had clearly taken my cautious venture that I speak “chut-chut pa-Russki” as admission of complete fluency. We struggled up that first ridge gasping fish-like in the thin air, with the guides more or less having to drag our horses who had not signed up for riders on the return leg of their journey, and were making their feelings clear. By the time we reached the top, I was more or less ready to call it a day and would’ve happily abandoned the horses to find their way back on their own, except that from the top you could see nothing but the lake stretching away towards one snow-capped mountain range after another, and nowhere could you see any habitation or sign of life apart from a herd of sheep clinging to a precipitous hillside, and it felt like we were the only people in the world. Which was actually a pretty good feeling, so we rode on.

For the next few days we rode along valleys, scrambling over ridges and up barren, stony morraine and across glaciers melting quickly in the late summer heat and unpleasantly prone to collapsing ice bridges, and over the steep, icy passes and back down again, galloping in slapdash formation across hillsides bright with wildflowers and air thick with bees and butterflies, and down, down, back to the treeline and then through pine-covered canyons until the valley broadened out into wide pastureland cut by a lazily meandering river, and a cluster of yurts sending trails of smoke into the chilly evening air. We stayed with farmers and eagle hunters (erm, they hunt with eagles, rather than hunting the eagles themselves. The golden eagles circling overhead in a picturesque manner gain a slightly more threatening air when you have spent a cheerful evening being shown a photo album full of pictures of the WOLVES which the eagles have killed ON THEIR OWN) in their yurts, nursing our blisters over tea, kumis and bowls of laghman (noodles in mutton soup). One night, I struggled out of the yurt at midnight (the combination of too much kumis, a cavalier approach towards the use of water purification tablets and the local remedy of five shots of vodka laced with pepper (NB I cannot emphasise enough how much this does not work, although it undeniably takes one’s mind off things) was proving a little much for me) and literally gasped aloud, because I didn’t know it was possible to see so many stars. There was no hint of an electric light for miles, but the stars were bright enough to cast shadows, highlighting the silhouettes of the mountain peaks surrounding me. In the morning there was frost on the ground in the shadows of the yurts and the cows loomed out of the mist like ghosts as the sunrise turned the mountaintops pink, and I thought that I had never been anywhere so beautiful in my life.

Just writing that is making me feel less than happy that I am in grimy Tashkent again, and the view out of my window is of grubby apartment blocks rather than rolling mountains. The school I wwas working at has been closed, so I am somewhat at a loose end at the moment, and Tashkent is more or less entirely the wrong place to be at a loose end in. Since the only other option seems to be joining the cotton harvest (the cotton picking season is beginning, where the universities shut for a month or two and the students are sent out into the cotton fields to bring the harvest in) and this sounds rather like hard work, I am dashing off to see the rest of the country to put off making a decision about what to do next. Procrastination forever!

Notes from the golden road

I am writing this at the uncivilised hour of 6.30 am, sulking slightly about the fact that once again my alarm clock has been pre-empted by Tashkent’s unique version of a wakeup call. This is provided by a group of ladies who come into town every morning, bringing fresh dairy products from the countryside which they sell from old coke bottles by the side of the road on which my block of flats is located. I would ordinarily not object to this entirely harmless activity, but these ladies have failed to endear themselves to me by their habit of standing under my window and advertising their wares. Being woken daily at 6 am by bellows of “QATTIQ! QAIMOQ!” (Uzbek for “yoghurt” and “cream”. Say the sound “k”. Now say it again, except imagine you’re being sick halfway though. Congratulations, you’ve just pronounced the Uzbek letter “q”.) does nothing for my mental state, and I have not yet been able to overcome my ire (nor mild hygiene-related concerns) to the extent necessary to actually sample their produce, although I am assured that a) it is delicious and b) I am coddling my digestive system. I am roundly mocked here for my Western tendency to buy most things (and all my meat and dairy) in the supermarket rather than the bazaar, but old habits die hard and I just can’t bring myself to be enthusiastic about a piece of sheep that has been lying about in this heat for any length of time.

It is indeed fearsomely hot (sorry, UKers). Just as I had found myself beginning to think of the 35 C heat “Hey, maybe I could get used to this!” and to be certain that the apologies I was receiving about it being “cold for the time of year” were windups, the thermometer has started hitting 40 on a regular basis, and I have begun to research jobs with the British Antarctic Survey. The only way out of town at the weekends is to recruit a group of friends and hop on the excruciatingly slow, sweltering and uncomfortable train full of formidable Uzbek matrons piqued because you are sitting in their preferred seat, to the mountains out of town. The scenery is undoubtedly attractive, but I would still be there like a shot even if they resembled Slough because crucially the temperatures are 10 degrees lower. The border situation in the area is tortuous enough that a wrong turn at the top of a mountain is liable to send one into an entirely different country, lending an element of interest to proceedings, especially when said proceedings are mapless. Consequently, our expeditions are somewhat hit or miss - sometimes we find ourselves climbing through air thick with black and red butterflies up a hill spread with purple and yellow wildflowers, past Kazakh herders in their summer yurts and gushing waterfalls and it is heavenly. At other times, we accidentally end up in barren, steep-sided valleys with no obvious paths other than scree slopes, leading to ascents that fill your boots with gravel and descents of the kind where you are happy to throw yourself gratefully into a thorn bush as otherwise you are liable to slide off a 60 foot precipice, and it is slightly less heavenly but undeniably invigorating. Variety, as they say, is the spice of life

A couple of weeks ago I took the (sadly no longer golden, more tarmac really) road to Samarkand, the capital of Timur’s continent-spanning empire. During the late fourteenth century it was the centre of the world with the architecture to prove it. Its fortunes waxed and waned over the subsequent centuries, but the name has never lost its allure, and certainly it is today billed as Uzbekistan’s greatest tourist attraction. Samarkand is a place that has loomed so large in my imagination for so long that I was almost afraid to visit since it seemed inevitable that reality would not quite live up to my elaborate, camel-filled imaginings, and so it proved. While Bukhara looks like a silk road town that just happens to contain a TV mast and a football stadium, Samarkand looks more like a Soviet town that just happens to contain a Timurid Experience theme park. That’s perhaps a little harsh, but I felt a bit let down by Samarkand’s star attraction, the Registan (and if you don’t know what this looks like, do a Google Image search for “Samarkand Registan” - it really is undeniably impressive, an ensemble of three beautiful medrassehs surrounding a large square that used to be the commercial centre of the city). It looks exactly like it does on the postcards, and is glittery and shiny and beautiful and appears to only have been constructed the previous day. Which it more or less has, and therein lies the problem. The buildings have been restored so enthusiastically that you can no longer feel the weight of years, the accumulated history that gives these places their power to move. The impression that one is standing in the middle of an elaborate, yet somewhat rickety (most of the minaret towers are leaning in a manner that makes the Tower of Pisa appear a masterpiece of precision engineering) film set for a multi-million dollar epic starring Russell Crowe as Timur and Angelina Jolie as his feisty, ass-kicking concubine (whatever, you know he had one) is reinforced upon peering inside the medrassehs and at the reverse of the facades - freshly whitewashed rooms and plain brick walls that aren’t really meant to be looked at. It’s hard to believe that students ever studied here. A sense of place is restored somewhat among the tombs and mausoleums of Shah-i-Zinda, but even there the brand-new tilework left me only with a vaguely sacrilegious urge to retile the bathroom. A small museum nearby has a display of photos from a century ago which I found myself looking at rather wistfully. Then the structures were derelict, domes half-collapsed, with weeds growing in the courtyards and donkeys tied under the teetering porticos; undeniably more picturesque and romantic than the current reality, but in truth the monuments have been restored and rebuilt numerous times over the past six hundred years so there’s nothing particularly unauthentic about the current efforts. On balance I think it is probably rather better that attention is lavished on these places than not (especially if the alternative is to leave them to rot entirely), but the Hollywood effect is an unfortunate consequence. Although that said, I'm prepared to admit that my disappointment may owe as much to the lack of camels as to anything more profound. Note to tourism officials: CAMELS MAKE EVERYTHING BETTER..

Right, off to work now, avoiding localised flooding (Tashkent is kept lush and green by a battalion of sprinklers, in which the water pressure is so high that the tops often pop off, resulting in geyser-like eruptions which render any journey by foot slightly hazardous), in the hope that there will at least be working air conditioning there. I can manage, I think, another couple of weeks of this before I make a break for Kyrgyzstan, which has the enormous advantage of consisting almost entirely of mountain and (whisper it) I even heard a rumour that it’s sometimes necessary to put a coat on in the evenings. I can hardly wait.

Bukhara: medrassahs, marriage and mulberries

At the moment I am passing my time with my attempts to navigate my way through the forest of suffixes and particles which is the Uzbek language, picking up on the way jolly little sentences such as “Malika and Karima are silkworm breeders” and “Does your elder brother labour in the cotton fields today?”. I cannot but seriously respect a language which not only contains a “future tense of doubt” but also a “past tense of hearsay”. It is also full of sounds that English-speakers (well, me, anyway) appear to be quite incapable of producing (mostly extremely guttural variants of the letter K) that leave one with a very sore throat after a two-hour lesson. I am however in no position to complain to my friends here about the quirks of Uzbek, since they communicate with me primarily in English or French (now there’s a language the knowledge of which I did not think would come in handy in Uzbekistan, but the most plentiful breed of tourist here is indeed French, which make it popular for Uzbeks to learn) which in many cases is their fourth language (the other three generally being Uzbek, Tajik and Russian). Apparently I need to man up and reach for the strepsils.

To make my language problems worse, I’ve spent the past few days in Bukhara, 600 km south-west of Tashkent, in a part of the country where locals primarily speak Tajik (a Persian language very similar to Farsi), thus rendering my efforts largely useless. This is fine, though, since Bukhara itself is fantastical enough not to require very many words, and one need merely wander around in a happy haze of architectural pleasure and satisfaction that some places exist that live up to, and even surpass, their hype. It was once said that while everywhere else on earth light shone down from heaven, from Bukhara it shone up, and even now you can almost believe it. Bukhara was an oasis along the Silk Road and for hundreds of years one of the centres of the Islamic world. It shows in the extravagance of the architecture, and the skyline of the old town is a mass of blue domes and intricately decorated medrassas against a background of mud brick, dominated by the 48m high Kalon minaret, from the top of which condemned criminals were sewn into a sack before being thrown to their deaths (unnecessarily messy, I should’ve thought, but I suppose that was why they used the sack), and where at night a fire was lit to guide the camel caravans in. 19th century players of the Great Game seemed divided over whether Bukhara was a den of iniquity and vice or a wonder of the world, but I tend to come down on the latter side. I think the buildings here are the most beautiful I have ever seen.

Many of the monuments are undergoing extensive restoration, a process which seems to involve covering them with scaffolding and then leaving one solitary bloke to vigorously attack what looks to my untrained eye like a beautiful and irreplaceable piece of tilework with a sledgehammer. Given that the results are universally impressive and shiny, I assume there is a bit more to it than that, but I think it’s a bit of a shame that almost everywhere seems to have received this treatment. It’s almost a disappointment to approach a beautifully restored medrassa only to realise that all it contains is the 47th carpet shop you have encountered that day plus a one-room museum to which you will be charged $1 entry and your camera $3; much more atmospheric are the ruined and empty medrassas and mausoleums which dot the back streets of the old town, or the lively and vigorous bazaars that still operate in the ancient covered markets. In spite of this, though, there really aren't that many tourists, and sitting at a tea house by one of the ancient pools that used to provide water (plus accompanying plagues) to the city eating fresh mulberries from the trees that are shading you, you could almost believe that nothing had changed for the past four hundred years. It would have been even better if there had been a token camel or two around, though.

My experience of Bukhara was made several times better by the fact that I was staying with a friend and his family, and thus got my first chance to experience what I had been told many times was the legendary hospitality of the Uzbek people first hand - something else that lives up to its reputation. Suffice it to say that I don’t think I need to eat again for a month or two. I was enthusiastically fed, watered (well, tea'd, which seems to be the equivalent here) and guided around town by a large selection of friends and relatives all of whom were unfailingly friendly, welcoming and immediately invited me to their homes too. I also got a chance to dwell at length on a subject which appears to be dear to the hearts of many Uzbeks. Regardless of whether an encounter takes place in the bazaar, someone’s home or on the top of a deeply rickety and vertiginous water tower (don‘t ask), and depending on the level of my communicant’s English or French, the conversation always goes more or less as follows: who are you, where are you from, how old are you, where’s your husband, what do you mean you‘re not married, why not, what about your sisters, they aren’t either, dear me, doesn’t your mother want grandchildren (Dear Mum, please do not get any ideas), have you thought about marrying an Uzbek man, what about my son/my nephew/me etc. People marry young in this country - girls at 17 to 20 and guys about three to five years older - so I’m rapidly reaching my sell-by date in that regard, hence many people’s surprise at my single status. I’ve pretty much resigned myself to living a kind of “Lost in Austen” existence here, with my primary goal not to end up married to somebody’s cousin by the end of the year. I have to admit that a certain amount of my motivation to learn Uzbek stems from a fear that I might accidentally agree to something like this simply by nodding too enthusiastically at the wrong moment.

I’m back now in Tashkent, which, bless it, is no Bukhara; thus I am again plotting my next expedition out of town. During my time in Bukhara the weather back here has veered abruptly from monsoon to oven, and I’m seriously considering making burnt offerings to my air conditioning unit if that will encourage it to secrete even a small quantity of genuinely cold air from its increasingly creaky innards . I am reliably informed that things are only going to get worse come June. “Even”, said a student of mine with a certain gloomy relish, “the Tashkent Aquapark will not save you then”. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go find a fountain to camp out in

Of mountains and metro systems

At the moment it is pouring with rain here almost constantly, and everyone keeps saying to me “Oh, it must feel just like home for you!” and I have to restrain myself from beating them over the head with precipitation charts for the UK, because we have had more rain over the past two weeks than London gets in a year, and no matter how bad it gets at home, I rarely actually have to paddle to work. Having said that, the sun has just this minute come out and it appears to be attempting a reasonable approximation of warmth. I am heading out to the hills for a second round of hiking tomorrow, so fingers crossed the weather holds.

The mountains outside Tashkent really are beautiful – not as vast or evocative as the Tien Shan and Pamir ranges in nearby Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, but to someone like me coming from such a terminally flat land as England, they are entirely satisfactory for my needs in that they are agreeably pointy and have snow on top, as everyone knows all proper mountains should. The foothills where we were hiking were green and gorgeous, and full of things which were about to turn into wild tulips (although apparently you have precious little chance of actually seeing said tulips, as locals harvest them as soon as they bloom and sell them in the towns). Still, there was a nice line in blossoming fruit trees, scenic donkeys and pretty (if somewhat brown) waterfalls, and our group (which was quite an odd bunch – the hiking club was set up by German diplomats, so the party contained two ambassadors, and of the rest only I and a few Austrian tourists had no connection to any embassy) was gregarious and not too speedy, so I’m looking forward to tomorrow. With any luck we might be able to find ourselves at least one tulip.

From the sublime to the ridiculous (or possibly vice versa), I feel that I can’t leave it any longer before waxing lyrical about the joys of the Tashkent metro. This, and not the TV tower, is the real highlight of Tashkent, but sadly photos are very much forbidden (enforced by the slightly disconcerting number of police hanging around in every train and station) and for some reason no one seems to have thought that postcards of the public transport system might sell. I love it all, from its severely square blue trains with fake-leather seats which I am suspicious may actually be made out of cardboard to the clocks at each station which count down the time since the last train left, and don’t go above 9.59, but just stay frozen, refusing to admit to the possibility that such a well-regulated mass transit system could result in trains running more than ten minutes apart. Each ride costs 400 sum (about 20p) for which you obtain a blue plastic token which you solemnly insert in a ticket barrier with no actual gates, and descend down flights upon flights of polished marble stairs (which, as I have mentioned, are more likely than not to have been recently washed and thus thoroughly lethal unless you pay close attention), through huge metal blast gates (the stations were originally built to double as nuclear shelters, and the gates are clearly occasionally used, leaving you not entirely sure if you’re ever going to make it back out again) and onto the vast platform, inevitably about 15 or 20 m longer than it needs to be and with one, solitary bench, usually monopolized by somebody’s shopping.

This is OK though, because it gives you a chance to wander around and gawk at the décor which varies hugely in scale, lavishness and taste and comprehensively puts every single tube station entirely in the shade. My local is Kosmonavtlar, a gloomy, navy-blue temple to the heroes of the skies decorated with what was doubtless in 1978 super-futuristic crazy glasswork on the columns, and huge circular portraits of the Soviet cosmonauts plus, in a nod to a local celebrity, Ulug Bek, an astronomer grandson of Timur who ruled parts of Uzbekistan in the fifteenth century. Others stations sport scenes from the works of the authors they are commemorating (the Tashkent metro has a decidedly literary bent), or in case of failure of imagination, just compete to outdo each other in the sheer weirdness and extravagance of their lighting units. Until I learned their names, I distinguished the stops on the way to work by their different designs of chandelier. The trains themselves are somewhat rickety (although no more so than the best the Northern line has to offer) but never (touch wood touch wood) appear to break down or mysteriously pause for half an hour while “waiting for a vacant platform” or similar. My one criticism would be the unnecessary preponderance of exits that most stations have - interchange stations have two names and at least eight exits; consequently, a considerable proportion of my free time is spent waiting for people at the wrong metro entrance, but even this means that the odd miraculous occasion on which we both end up at the correct spot becomes that much more special. In short, I feel that London transport is wasting its time upgrading the track and refurbishing platforms to make the tubes run faster – clearly all a metro system needs to make it work is a generous sprinkling of chandeliers.

…and the fact that I’ve just written this much about the metro probably means I should get out more, so I’m going outside to make the most of the break in the weather and not think about transportation or phrasal verbs at all.

Tashkent

I have sat down on numerous occasions over the past few weeks to write, but have been thwarted by power cuts, painfully slow dialup connections, and internet cafes full of fourteen-year-old boys who would quite like the scary foreign girl to leave now please, so they can get back to blowing things up. However, I do now appear to have located a connection that moves at a speed slightly in excess of that of the average garden snail, which in combination with a keyboard that does not spontaneously switch from roman to cyrilic characters at random intervals gives me great hope of finally achieving communication with the outside world.

In summary: I am alive, I am in Tashkent, and everything is pretty good. I am installed in a flat which contains a chandelier and a piano but no working oven or shower curtain, I have figured out the public transport system (more or less - I'm still getting my head round the part where you can hail any old car as a taxi, since this notion is warring with twenty years of being told not to get into cars with strange men), and I spend an agreeably adrenalin-fuelled week frantically trying to find out what modal verbs of obligation are ten minutes before I'm due to teach them. I'm finding adjusting a good deal less difficult then I had expected (give or take my almost total failure to grasp any Russian), but then I suppose moving from one large, modern city to another large, modern city isn't so different (albeit this one does have suspiciously warm weather for March. If it's 25 C, what's it going to be in July?). Although Uzbekistan is I suppose technically a developing country, you wouldn't really know it in Tashkent.

Tashkent is - well, it's not really a city you send postcards of, let's put it like that. It is large and modern, with wide (unnecessarily wide - I will maintain until my dying breath (which will incidentally not be far away if I have to cross many more of them) that eight-lane highways in the middle of city centres are a Bad idea) streets and lots of parks. It is quite extraordinarily clean (you are liable to pass armies of old ladies brandishing brooms and mops at any time and in any location - I hadn't quite realised quite how lethal wet marble is until nearly breakinge my ankle umpteen times on the freshly-mopped stairs of the Tashkent metro), but sadly lacking in the turquoise-domed Timurid monument department, which is a little disappointing. Its defining feature is the 200m tall TV tower. This is largely a consequence of the 1966 earthquake which apparently levelled the city with ruthless efficiency, leaving only bits and pieces to remind you that Tashkent has in fact been around for well over two thousand years. It does have a certain charm, though, (it is possible that this is wishful thinking, but still) and so far almost everyone I have encountered, from little old ladies who grab my arm and steer me firmly across a road I am dithering on the edge of and English-speaking graduates who translate things for me in the supermarket, to groups of young women each brandishing a giant orange teddy bear (I wish I had known enough Russian to ask why, but it's possible that I wouldn't have wanted to know the answer) who direct me towards bus stops and the guys who try to pick me up on the metro (OK, maybe not them, but, at least they're polite about it, I guess?) has been terribly kind and helpful. I haven't seen a huge number of tourists around, which did surprise me as it's supposed to be the high season right now, but they're probably all looking at Timurid domes in Samarkand and Bukhara, rather than TV towers in Tashkent.

The teaching is proceeding pretty well, if somewhat frenetically. Slightly to my consternation, the (only) other teacher in our school promptly buggered off to get his visa renewed a week after I arrived, leaving me to ponder such philosophical quandaries as "If a language school is left in the solitary charge of a teacher who has no idea what she's doing, does it still actually exist?" and similar. Still, my students are for the most part patient, enthusiastic and lovely, with their only obvious failings being an inability to let a lesson go past without asking if I'm married, and a creative attitude towards the idea of "compulsory attendance". I teach three hour-and-a-half-long classes three times a week, and the students range in age between about 16 and 25. Most are studying at high school or university, and many of them hope to enter the English language university here in Tashkent (it's an international branch of Westminster university). For some reason, all of them without exception are studying/want to study economics and then become international lawyers. This is going to be a very specialised country in a few years.

OK, I think I'm pushing my luck with this connection, but more soon, including an epic tribute to the awesomeness of the Tashkent metro and an enthusiastic thumbs up to the largely carnivorous cuisine. Tomorrow I'm venturing out of Tashkent for the first time to go hiking in the mountains - this is something I've been looking forward to for ages, so for once I'm prepared to overlook the 7 am start....

Unwise and curiously planned

So. I am leaving for Uzbekistan in under a week. I am visa'd up (complete with bonus "You want to stay for how long? Are you nuts?" reaction from visa guy, which is mildly offputting when you're forking over nearly two hundred quid for a piece of paper), in posession of an air ticket (tricker than it sounds) and have memorised the Russian for "I don't speak Russian" and "I don't understand", which may or may not get me through the airport safely.

The fact that I probably wont be back home for a good eighteen months is only just beginning to sink in, which is probably why I waited until yesterday to begin sorting out various crucial bits and pieces that a more efficient person might have attended to at several weeks ago. Things that have made me yell "Shiiiiiit!" in the past 24 hours include, but are not limited to: a), discovering that 75% of my travel vaccinations expired last year, thus leaving me defenceless against any combination of hepatitis, typhoid and rabies that Uzbekistan cares to thow at me; b), realising my contact lens prescription expires next month, precluding me from ordering any more online; and c), being informed that foreign ATM cards don't work anywhere in Tashkent and that I need at least $2000 to cover my expenses during the first couple of months. WHY AM I SUCH AN IDIOT.

Consequently, today has been full of needles and opticians and travellers cheques, so I am now alleviating the ache in both my upper arms (stupid intramuscular injections) with fudge (I have rationalised all of my junk food decisions over the past month with the refrain "But I won't be able to get that in Uzbekistan!", and it has worked out very well for me) and thinking about making a list of all of the other stuff I need to do before Sunday. This includes packing at some point, I suppose. Organisation really, really sucks.