Sunday, April 19, 2009

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.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

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....