So… Uzbekistan

It was an amazing trip. We bitched and complained while we were there about all the French (sorry!) tourists who were making our trip miserable, but after a couple of weeks, all that negative stuff has faded away and we’re left with all the positive stuff. The sheer beauty of all the monuments we visited, the images of children working in the cotton fields, the blue domes of the mosques against a piercing blue sky – every day. The Uzbek people were very kind, extremely generous and always smiling. They are not particularly poor, there are very few beggars, people have a little bit of land, they grow some food, they go to school, they work a little, it looks like a nice balance.

There are many reminders of their past, both the opulance and importance of the silk road trading period – Samarkand, Bukhara, battles with Ghengis Khan as well as from the more recent past, the period of Soviet occupation. In a surprising twist, there are some very nice things to say about the soviets in that period, they started the restoration of a lot of the mausoleums, the mosques and monuments which is a good thing, because had they not they would all be destroyed today. 1 point to the Soviets. On the other hand, some of their fashions remain and that truly is to the detriment of the Uzbeks, the gold teeth. In soviet times the women would have their teeth plated with gold to show their wealth, today amongst women of a certain age, it’s quite common to be dazzled by a beautiful smile containing a mouth full of gold. Gaudy, definitely off-putting, but the smile itself is generous and freely distributed – so I guess that brings the points back to 0 for the Soviets.

Foodwise, it was not so pretty. It started ok, there was mince meat in cabbage and a kind of watery stew thing. Then some shashliks which were good, if not too greasy, plov – rice with mince, and watermelon, lots and lots of watermelon. Then we had the same. And the same again. It wasn’t that it tasted bad, it just started to all smell the same. Lucky for me, I managed to lose some pounds while we were away….

And now for the photos. This is an advanced preview, I haven’t edited them, there not even all of them are there yet. Once we get back from Jordan (!) I’ll finish uploading, putting captions and editing the crap ones out. Enjoy the preview – bonnes vacances!