Day 559

Tashkent this summer is all fountains and flowerbeds and sprinklers and slightly unfortunate new architecture, and I bought an old coke bottle of fresh mulberry juice from the bazaar and wandered through the parks and boulevards drinking it and thinking that the Peace Corps are right to do it for two years. I feel like I'm only beginning to get the hang of things here,that I'm balancing on the edge. And I'm going home tomorrow, and it's not enough time.

Home from home.

Crossing the border to Uzbekistan felt like coming home. I had a stupid grin on my face all the way to Tashkent, and I rode the metro to my hotel which stopped at all the most bizarrely-decorated stations (astronauts and chandeliers forever) and I bought samosas in the bazaar and when I walked into the hotel one of my best Tashkent friends was there fixing somebody's bike, and all was right with the world.

Then I went to look for things and found out that the main Uzbekistan Airways booking office has moved the cafe with decent wifi (cafe. singular. Freaking Dushanbe has more wifi hotspots than Tashkent, which is at least three times the size) had closed and my UCell sim card, worth its weight in diamonds now tourists are forbidden to buy at all, had been blocked and my taxi driver tried to grope me and I would've bought a flight ticket to leave this evening were it not for the fact that no one knows where the bloody ticket office has gone.

And then I bought a drink and received a single teabag and a piece of bubblegum as part of my change, which is possibly my favourite Uzbekistan quirk of all (I have wrangled thirteen-odd currencies in the past six months and the Uzbek sum is still the most inept I have to encounter; guys, your biggest bank note is now worth less than fifty cents, suck it up and print bigger ones already) and I'm reluctantly forced to admit that I still kind of love this stupid place.

I do really need to find that ticket office though.

Central Asian food #1 - main dishes

Above: Uzbek ladies know how to party! Correct technique for a bridal welcome party: dump the boys in a skanky dark room to drink vodka and be manly, then assemble in a huge room with delicious food and even more vodka. Eat food, drink vodka. Repeat. The two ladies sitting at the far end of the table are the brides.

So, I think I have been extremely remiss so far in devoting little or no commentary to the wonders of Central Asian cuisine. Possibly that's because "wonders" is a bit of a strong word. The food here is often delicious but, as I may have mentioned once or twice before, the base elements of the local food constitute mutton and, well, mutton fat. Sheep are prized for the size of their booty (the specimen on the left sports a particularly fine example) and fatty meat is much more expensive to buy than lean. The results can politely be described as "hearty", and you quickly become closely acquainted with the very special sensation of congealed mutton fat coating the roof of your mouth. And while home-cooked food is almost inevitably great, restaurants haven't really got the hang of variety, so you can easily find yourself carefully rotating the same four or five meals over and over again in order to avoid eating plov for two straight meals in a row and thus losing the ability to move for the next forty eight hours.

Flavouring is bizarrely hit-or-miss. The most commonly-used herb is dill, in what seems to me to be unecessarily large quantities; garlic makes an occasional appearance and while there might be a hot and spicy sauce on the table if you are lucky, the food in general errs on the side of blandness. Everything is served with bread, round, cooked in a clay oven andspectacularly moreish when fresh, less so when stale or made with mutton fat (no, seriously. In everything.). Vegetables are rather an afterthought although salads can get quite creative (too often drowned in mayonnaise though); fruit on the other hand is so good in season that I don't think I'll be able to bear going back to stuff we get at home.

In summary: artery-clogging is actively encouraged, and vegetarians need not apply (I've met one or two dedicated souls attempting to cross Central Asia without eating any meat - they were to a woman rather wild-eyed). Below is a selection of the Central Asian (well, mainly Uzbek, but there's not a whole lot of difference) greatest hits. Breathe deeply, wash everything down with plenty of green tea and think about how well your stomach is being lined for the forthcoming vodka toasts.

Plov:

Where better to start than with the king Central Asian cuisine, that exquisite mixture of rice, mutton fat, carrot, mutton

fat and a tiny bit of mutton, plov. This almost approaches a religion in Uzbekistan particularly, where among other things it is invoked as an aphrodisiac (personally, I can't imagine how you could possibly be up for anything after a plate of plov, but then again, I'm not Uzbek, and the birthrate here is undeniably high). A good home-made plov is delicious, studded with entire bulbs of garlic and heaps of mutton and carrots; unfortunately the restaurant variety can often end up swimming in half an inch or more of oil. I am going to unpatriotically admit that I prefer the Afghan variety, which isn't cooked in oil.

Laghman:

Laghman is my favourite of the local standards: thick Chinese-style handmade noodles, served either in a soup or dry with on top. At its best, it is spicy and garlicky and full of aubergine and peppers and tomatoes and limited mutton fat. At its lukewarm, flavourless worse it is still approximately 47% less likely to leave you prodding the roof of your mouth with your tongue and wondering if drinking nail polish remover would dissolve the fat coating than every other dish listed here.

Manty:

These are huge meat dumplings, usually steamed but sometimes fried. Often delicious but very easy to overdose on, especially when an enthusiastic hostess is urging you on, so much so that I can barely look them in the eye any more. The pumpkin versions (autumn only) are spectacular, only somewhat less so once you are aware that they, too, have been enlivened with handfuls of mutton fat.

Shashlik:

Nothing can be quite as good, or quite as bad, as meat on a stick. From Iran to Kazahstan, of an evening the street corners are alive with miniature barbecues with an attendant vigrously fanning the smoke, and the smell of roasting meat is everwhere. Usually alternating cubes of mutton and (you guessed it) mutton fat; I personally prefer the whole lot minced up together which is a) tastier and b) you can pretend that what you are eating isn't 50% fat.Served with lots of raw onion and (naturally) bread.

Shorpa:

Meat and potato soup, often with bonus lumps of fat floating in it. I tend to associate it with dismal roadside cafes during long-distance bus journeys where it is often the onlything served and can thus take it or leave it. Usually rather tasteless, but can be absolutely superb when homemade. I think that this one wasn't that bad actually.

Halim:

Meat porridge. Um. It's not quite as bad as it sounds (although admittedly this isn't hard)?. It's more unexpected than anything else.


Still to come (when I assemble the photos): drinks, snacks, desserts (such as there are. Likely to be a love letter to the fruit here). In the meantime I am off to take full advantage of the fact that I'm in a capital city and shamelessly stuff my face with pizza which may be of questionable authenticity, but is 100% guaranteed not to contain any mutton fat at all. Score.

Xayr O'zbekiston, yakshi qo'ling

Tomorrow morning I'm leaving on what I hope will be a six month trip through Turkmenistan, Iran, Pakistan, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and back to Uzbekistan. Getting the visas was such a performance that it became an end in itself, and now I have a passport full of stickers it's begnning to sink in that oh crap, I'm leaving tomorrow. Now the thought is almost overwhelming: I have Persepolis and Isfahan and Kashgar and the Hindu Kush all before of me, and I am so excited and terrified that I can hardly breathe.

I've no idea what it's going to be like; I've never travelled alone for such a long period before, and although I'm reasonably confident of my ability to handle most things these places may throw at me, I'm a little worried I may find it all too mentally exhausting and crash after a month or two. Except this is what I've been dreaming of for years, and I've lived on my own for a year in one of the most frustrating and ridiculous countries in the world (I love you, Uzbekistan, but good Lord, you don't make it easy), and I've just spent a week in Afghanistan (this did seem like a sensible idea at the time), and now is not the time to wuss out. I can do this.

It is, however, a great shame that the buildup to epic journeys has to be ruined by bloody packing. Marco Polo was strangely silent on this point (mind you, things would be a lot easier if I had my own caravan of camels). My backpack capacity seems to decrease every time I use it.

Premier league buzkashi

I am (still) recovering from a new year spent in Bukhara, primarily being fed. New year is the most important winter festival here, and, like all good festivals, involves family and food in large quantities. Just when you’ve finished three courses and are eyeing the fruit bowl and contemplating whether there is in fact a polite and non-messy way to eat a pomegranate, out comes the fourth, and then you sort of want to die. In an attempt to prevent myself from sinking into a mutton-and-oil-induced stupor (a recognised medical condition in Central Asia), I’ve been spending the weekends stomping around the mountains (Tashkent has had a disappointingly mild winter, with only a couple of desultory snowfalls, but the weather in the mountains certainly make up for it). Given that flailing around in waist-deep snow loses its novelty after a while, I jumped at the chance to spend a day with some friends at a village which was hosting a championship of that most Central Asian of games, known variously as ulaq, kukmar, kupkari and kuk-boru. Never heard of it? Yes, you have. You know, the one with the dead goat? Yeah, that one.

The Tajik name (buzkashi) translates, more or less, as “grab the goat”, which pretty much sums the whole thing up. A goat is slaughtered and the head removed; the carcass is then soaked in cold water overnight to toughen it. The next day, several dozen horsemen assemble and fight over it. I think there’s a method for goal scoring in there somewhere, but lets face it, that’s not especially important when you are engaged in serious horseback wrestling. Enjoyed primarily by the historically nomadic Kyrgyz, Kazakh and Tajik people (indeed, Kyrgyz evening TV schedules give pride of place to a buzkashi Match of the Day, complete with interviews inarticulate players, grumpy managers and overly groomed commentators), my announcement that I was going to a game was met by blank looks by my Uzbek colleagues, who eventually admitted that this might be something that “those weird people in the mountains do”. Indeed, the playing field was a plateau set in a mountainside outside a village miles from anywhere, almost on the Tajik border. We were deposited by our rickety-lada-driving taxiste on an icy footpath, and immediately had to fling ourselves out the way of a hundred or so horsemen hurtling past on a detour from the field of play. Rule one of buzkashi seems to be that the game is wherever the goat is.

The spectators had ranged themselves across the hillside among dozens of makeshift barbeques and snowdrifts sprouting cooling vodka bottles. The horsemen (and yes, they were all men) ranging in age from six to sixty (and the rule was not necessarily one man, one horse) hurtled around the field below, caked in mud and slush. Every so often, the guy with the goat would decide that playing on the field was cramping his style and make a beeline directly up the hill towards the onlookers, forcing everyone to make a run for it, scattering fur caps, empty vodka bottles and spare goats in all directions. Over the chaos, the commentators, aided by a monumental sound system the looked as though it had been patched together from several dozen car radios, kept up a breathless, multilingual commentary. As a group containing the only two women in attendance, our presence attracted a certain amount of excitement and we were immediately invited to introduce ourselves on the sound system and tell everyone how much we loved Uzbekistan (a lot, obviously) and drink a toast to international friendship.

The four of us wandered around taking photos and dodging stray horses, offers of dinner and marriage, and people who were keen to show us their photo album of their horses which they had named after Premier League football teams. The game (or games - someone assured me that several teams came and went, but I really couldn’t tell the difference) went on all afternoon, and as the sun went in it became bitterly cold, prompting the spectator to up their fortification with copious quantities of vodka, plov, shashlik and vodka. Since none of us had really dressed for subzero temperatures, we were by this time all too happy to accept all of the above, and the proceedings rapidly became pretty merry. Eventually, a team (or person? I really never got the hand of the rules) and they (or he?) were awarded an extremely irate-looking eagle as their prize and everyone stumbled back down the hill, carrying the prone bodies of their friends who had medicated against the cold too liberally or received a knock on the head from an over-enthusiastic goat-chaser, only stopping for one final vodka-fuelled picnic in the snow at the bottom of the valley. By this time we were firm friends with Premier League Horse Guy, so we retreated to his brother’s house to defrost and drink toasts to love and international friendship and horses named Arsenal and so on. I have no memory of how we got back from the mountains, but those who were alive to the particulars of our chauffeur’s driving on the icy roads assure me that this is a good thing. Sometimes one is happier not knowing.

Anyway, drunk driving aside it was something I was glad to have experienced, because my time in Uzbekistan is rapidly drawing to a close. In a couple of weeks I'll be heading to Turkmenistan (fingers crossed for the most awkward visa in Central Asia) and Iran (headscarf-tying practice in progress), so every day at the moment is an exhausting mixture of hanging around in embassies perusing prmotional leaflets exhorting me to consider the investment opportunities inherent in the Pakistani towel industry and visiting every nook and cranny of Tashkent I could never be bothered to before (Hello, museum of cotton-picking, can't think how I missed you!). And for those of you who asked, pictures (including buzkashi) are (finally) here.

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.

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.