Just another day in Tashkent

Yesterday we were supposed to run some brief errands in Tashkent, then head out by mid-morning for Samarkand. Clearly I had forgotten my Africa parallels, and assumed that a few errands would only take a few hours... a woman in line with us at the Uzbek Air office said to us "yes, you can buy a ticket here to anywhere in the world. But it will take all day. Soon they will have online booking. Maybe in the next century."

So we spent the day in Tashkent, among the millions simply trying to get their errands done.

In Uzbekistan, it's easy to divide the population into to groups: The Uzbeks, and the Russians. The Uzbeks, who can be further broken down into Tajiks, Kazakhs, Karakalpaks and actual ethnic Uzbeks, are a splendid people. Despite having only 2-3 words in common, I've had a rousing conversation with every cab driver I've sat next to. The guess-which-country-I'm-from game has gotten great results (bearded, I often solicit "Spanish" or "Arab"). Also successful is the "which country is 'Harasho' (good) game" ("Uzbekistan Harasho!" "Amerika Harasho!" "Khazakhstan Harasho?" "Nyet").

Their friendliness and openness stands in quite start contrast to the policies of the police state they live in. Indeed, even the police, while in the process of enforcing some ridiculous restriction (like the closing of a national monument for spurious reasons) have been extremely friendly and curious. The policy of not allowing foreigners to buy mobile phone SIM cards was easily circumvented just by my asking: the clerk simply used his own ID card for the registration. We have had none of the problems we foresaw with police extorting bribes: the only halfway hostile treatment we received was when we were in the company of a Russian Uzbek citizen...

This Russian was Yvgeny, our companion on the road from Kyrgyzstan. He was in the process of completing a law degree, studying at Russian law at a Russian university in Tashkent. He was planning to join his sister and mother in Russia as soon as he finished. "I don't speak Uzbek, so I can't be a lawyer here!" he told us.

He spoke English pretty well, but no Uzbek. The Russians here, who were the colonial upper class in an apartheid system have chosen, en masse, not to try to adapt to their new role in the society, but instead to emigrate. Those that don't yet have the means to leave are making do; we had some drinks in a very Russian bar, with Russian bar staff, a few Uzbek patrons, but only Russian beer, imported from St. Petersberg. At dinner in a posh Tashkent restaurant last night, I was curious to see more than a few couples comprised of a pretty young Russian girl accompanying a flashy Uzbek young man. Apparently the girls know which side of the bread has the butter on it.

Uzbekistan is quite different from Kyrgyzstan in this since. Kyrgyzstan was a rainbow of different ethnicities, with the Russian language as the binding force that kept them all together. Uzbekistan, which had far deeper central Asian roots prior to colonization, needed only the soviet lacquer to be removed to fall back to its independent ways. The Russians here are just along for the ride.

We were able to collect our needed plane tickets just minutes before the office closed, and only through the help of Svetlana, a Russian desk agent who I befriended. She helped us find out which of the 30 lines we needed to stand in, and then walked me out of the office into the nearby bazaar to change $500 US Dollars into the Uzbek Som that I needed (which I had to carry back in a large plastic bag). She even pleaded on our behalf with some of the other desk agents who told us that they couldn't help us because "bank closed." We got everything settled, and I tried to find her to thank her, but she had gone.