We had a decent night’s sleep. It helped that we didn’t have to get up early for anything. While I patiently waited for Nicole to stir, I discovered one of our options for flying out of Uzbekistan is now sold out, which limits us to one option so I went ahead and booked it. I don’t have any airline affiliations in this part of the world, which shouldn’t come as a huge surprise. It will require we take a train back to Samarkand in a few days and fly directly to Kazakhstan from there. It will give Nicole another go at the Hilton Garden Inn and possibly another trip to the laundry room.
We had a late breakfast of baked goods, bananas, and I tried some samsas — a kind of filled meat-filled pastry popular in these parts. One had meat and onion in it. The other was some kind of cabbage. The meat and onion one was better, but honestly both were a bit too savory for my breakfast pallet and I dipped my pain-au-raisin in some Nutella to compensate. Nicole kept smelling onions emanating from my person hours later.
We took a Yandex to the train station in Samarkand which looked more modern and clean (and calm) compared to Tashkent. Shortly the train was arriving and we boarded car 16 where (after a brief confusing exchange with ticket collector) we got into our backwards-facing seats as we headed off to Bukhara. We made good use of the two hour journey by watching the second semifinal of the Eurovision Song Contest. The Grand Final is tonight and we mustn’t have any spoilers as to who made it to the final.
We arrived in Bukhara in the midst of a major heat wave. Thus, I was even more irritable when the taxi hawkers started aggressively following us around. They’ve clearly just memorized a couple phrases in English like, “Cheapest ride to city!” (without mentioning how cheap that would be) and “Yandex down! No work!” (while I already have the app open in front of them with a car on its way). While we don’t like it, we will still tolerate a certain amount of salesmanship aggression especially in other countries when it’s sort of a normalized part of the culture. However, “No” is such a simple word, and one that they don’t take for an answer as they start to follow you around. A line is then crossed. So we did the only prudent and logical thing a couple of good ambassadors of travel should do — we started harassing them back. It’s a little unsatisfying because they didn’t understand. “Dickhead” was thrown out there quite a few times without any reaction. Nicole started loudly humming her own tune in front of one of them while I insulted another’s manhood.
It was a thirty minute drive into the center of Bukhara. For some reason the train station was located even farther away from the city than the airport. We checked into the Mercure in Bukhara’s old town. If I were to be honest (and I will be obvs), it’s not what either of us was expecting. The way Bukhara is described, it is like a smaller, more intimate version of Samarkand with an old world charm and romantic architecture. As we made a left by a strip mall with a dental office, my preconceptions were dashed.
As it was 96 degrees out, we decided to delay our walk around the old town until later when the sun was going down. In the meantime, we had ourselves quite a spread for an early dinner. Like many other things in Uzbekistan, it has a bit of an identity crisis, so most food items are just things from other places. Putting the word “Uzbek” in front of a menu item doesn’t inherently make it local – like “Uzbek Fish n’ Chips.” Yet, that hasn’t deterred them. Nicole stuck with pizza, but get this! She ordered cheese pide, which is Turkey’s equivalent of margherita pizza.
Finally we walked into the main areas of old town. It is a fairly sprawling area, but I would say its central point is around the Abdulaziz Khan Madrassah. We thought it was a bit crowded, but we didn’t know what was coming. We continued our walk through the crowds of the old town and stopped inside the Kalyan mosque. It had a modest entry fee of $1.25. That minor exchange of money seemed to make all the difference in separating us from the crowds outside.
The sun was now setting, and overcast skies covered the area and created some moody scenery for exploring the courtyard of the mosque. They were rolling out carpets for an upcoming prayer, so we made our way to the exits and back into exponentially larger crowds. Loud street performers were now attracting dozens of spectators and we found it hard to negotiate the pedestrians in the streets. We walked around to other areas of the old town, but the crowds were so bad, I didn’t take a single picture the rest of the evening even though I had high hopes for some nighttime photography. It was just impossible to stop for a second and get out of the way.
We were so disgusted by the crowds, that we just decided to go back to the hotel. It felt like we were on the Ponte Vecchio in Firenze in the middle of July. You come to Uzbekistan and don’t expect the crowds, but they find you. To be fair, I think these were mostly locals on a weekend night out. We saw maybe less than a dozen actual tourists. This doesn’t make the experience that much more enjoyable when you’re slow-walking through clogged streets wondering if you’ll ever get out.
But escape we did. We checked out a few markets on the way back to the hotel in hopes of getting some refrigerated beverages, but they didn’t have that much other than a woman working there whom I thought was eating an onion like an apple. We arrived back at the Mercure and went back to the rooftop restaurant to get a few drinks. Though the sun had gone down, it was still quite hot out and we felt quite parched from our slow march through the old town. After chugging some water and a Fanta, we returned to our room to recover for a full day in Bukhara tomorrow.
passports & pepto bismol 