On Hiatus

My tour in Central Asia officially came to an end on June 13, and I'm back in the US for home leave and training before heading out for my next post.

I'll be in Afghanistan on the next tour, and blog posts will probably be even less frequent (and they aren't so frequent now). One of the perks of a tour in Afghanistan is more frequent rest breaks, and I'll take as many as they allow. Most future blog posts will likely be about trips on those rest breaks.

Website of Almaty photos

One of my colleagues from work sent this link around, and it has some great photos of Almaty. You don't normally have such clear views, so the photographer must have been very patient.

http://www.voxpopuli.kz/post/view/id/568

Bukhara

 I also had a guide for my trip to Bukhara, but it was unbelievably cold that day. After it started to snow, the tour didn't last much longer. Both the guide and I were OK with that.

Bukhara has a lot of history, and it deserves a second visit to see more of it. My guide made sure I got the highlights though.

The top photo is a citadel on the edge of the old town of Bukhara. It's called the Ark and is one of the most interesting castles I've ever seen. The citadel was destroyed by the Soviets, trying to make sure the locals knew who was in charge. The restoration of the walls was done well.

The second photo is of a mausoleum near the Ark. My guide commented on how it appears to be carved out of blocks of stone. In fact, it's made up of thousands of small bricks, placed carefully to give the appearance of a building carved out of stone.

In the middle is a photo of an entrance to a medressa in the old town. I love the artwork around these portals. My guide said that the images in the corners were phoenixes. I'm not sure if that was the original design, or the idea of the people who did the restoration.

Next is a picture of an old mosque that is still operating in the city. The wooden pillars supporting the roof have mostly been replaced, but two are still original, hundreds of years old. In front of the mosque is a pool where people would come to get water. If you look closely at the left side of the mosque, near the small tower, there is an electronic display that shows the times when people should pray. The combination of the electronic display and ancient building is really cool.

The final picture shows one of Bukhara's most famous landmarks, the Kalon Minaret (I just looked it up in my Lonely Planet book). In the Middle Ages, when Genghis Khan came through Central Asia, he pretty much destroyed everything. He allowed the tower to remain, most likely because it was a useful defensive structure. It's possible to climb the tower, but by that time, I was freezing and only wanted to get somewhere warm.

 The photo itself was taken inside a mosque next to the tower. It's possible to make out the tree in the courtyard, and I asked if it was usual for mosques to have a tree planted there. My guide replied that it may be normal for open air mosques like this one, especially to provide some shade in the summer.

Carpet Weaving in Bukhara

No, the method for weaving carpets doesn't change from town to town. I thought the light was too dark to make out much detail in the other video. My guide took me to a carpet shop in Bukhara that was much better lit, so I took another video.

At this carpet shop, I was told that carpets are made from sheep wool, camel wool, and silk. The type of material affects the price of the carpet, as does the size, but the main factor in price is the number of knots per square centimeter. I felt the difference between a couple of carpets with different knot counts. My purchasing advice? Spend the extra for more knots per centimeter. The detail in the designs is unbelievable.

Carpet Weaving in Samarkand

It's still possible to find hand-woven carpets in Uzbekistan, and they are rightly expensive. Not only because they are so beautiful, but you can get an idea from this video at the time and effort that is required to make one.

Uzbek plov

First off, I should note that if you think about the word "pilaf" when you see "plov," you'll get the basic idea. Plov varies greatly from family to family, restaurant to restaurant, country to country. I've had it in three of the Central Asian countries and not really been impressed. I can make rice just as well. However, at the place with no name from my other post, I finally found some in Samarkand that was super tasty.

Full disclosure, this is NOT a picture of that plov, but it looked pretty much just like this. Only the other kind was tastier. I was told that the shredded vegetable on the top was the mysterious yellow carrot. I had never heard of such a thing, but Uzbekistan also has green radishes.

Bakery in Samarkand

I took a short video of bread being made at a place in Samarkand. When I asked the guy what the hardest part of the job was, he said there was no hard part. I figured that he'd say sticking the entire upper half of his body into the oven would be a bit tricky. I was wrong.

Samarkand

 Yes, I really do visit these places, even though I don't have many pictures of myself to prove it. I opted for guided tours of Samarkand and Bukhara over a long weekend, so my guide in Samarkand took this one for me. In the background are three medressas (Islamic schools) established by Ulugbek, one of the most famous scientists of his time. This area is called the Registon, and it has a wide public square in front where markets were.

We went inside the medressas to see the study rooms and living quarters that students experienced. Most rooms were quite small and unfriendly to the taller tourist. However, they also now contain souvenir shops, and I found some nice, hand-woven decorative cloths. This time of year is slow for tourism, so we had time to talk to the shopkeepers who were happy to have visitors.

The rest of the pictures here are from Amir Temur's mausoleum. Central Asia is earthquake prone, and the building suffered a lot of damage over the years. However, a good portion of the original work still exists, and much more has been restored.

One of the things I really enjoy about Islamic art is the amazing tile work. The entryway, with its three-dimensional qualities was something I hadn't seen before. My guide told me that was a Persian style of architecture. In the mausoleum room, there were markers for Temur and several members of his family. The black one is Temur's. The bottom two photos give you an idea of how amazing the craftsmanship was that went into the design and construction of the mausoleum. The blues and greens in the tiles are still used in Uzbek pottery that is made today.

Visit to Uzbekistan

As my time in Central Asia grows short, I'm trying to do some of the things that remain on my list of "to dos". Visiting Uzbekistan and seeing some of the historical sites was an important one, and a temporary assignment to our office in Tashkent, the capital, allowed me to check this off the list.

All of Central Asia is very interesting for a variety of reasons, and Uzbekistan is the most interesting of the four I've visited so far. The top picture shows Amir Temur, or as I learned his name in history class -- Tamerlane or Timur the Lame. In the background is the Hotel Uzbekistan. I was told some horror stories about tourists getting hassled by police for taking pictures that inadvertently included government buildings, so I was hesitant to take this photo. A couple of policemen were hanging around, and I didn't see anyone else taking pictures. Eventually, I saw another couple of people take some shots, so I finally took this one and left.

Uzbekistan works hard to insulate itself from the rest of the world. Rather, the country is more like Hotel California for foreign investment. They like foreigners to come and spend money in the country, but they don't really like people to take money out of the country. Because it's difficult to get foreign currency out of Uzbekistan, changing money is (ahem) interesting. The government of Uzbekistan sets the official exchange rate, but the unofficial rate is significantly higher. I stayed at a few different hotels in the country. All quoted rates in dollars, but they didn't all use the official exchange rate for payment in local currency.

Another interesting part of using money in Uzbekistan is the fact that the highest value of a bank note is 1000 soum. The official exchange rate is about 1800 soum to the dollar. This results in people carrying around stacks of bills like the one in the middle picture. That's $100 in Uzbek soum. While I was disappointed that the weather wasn't warmer during my trip, it did mean that I had a coat with plenty of pockets to stuff cash into.

Prior to coming to Kazakhstan, many of my colleagues who had been here before told me to make sure I had plov, a rice dish with various ingredients depending on the region where you get it. Most plov has horse meat and chickpeas. Sometimes, it will come with raisins, and I had some that had hard-boiled quail eggs in it. However, during my 18 months in Central Asia, I had never had plov that I considered that good or worth getting a second time. Uzbekistan is known for having excellent plov, so I knew that if I didn't find it on this trip, it just didn't exist.

The bottom picture shows the exterior of a restaurant that had excellent plov. The only one where I would get it again. I'll add a picture of the plov later, but I just thought this was the type of place that would have great plov. There were three businesses operating in this building. On the left was a car wash, and the restaurant is in the middle. I didn't get a chance to see what the other business was, but if you didn't know this place was here, you'd never find it. I was told the secret ingredient was yellow carrots. Whatever it was, it tasted great.

Ded Moroz and Snegurochka

Now that the holidays are over, I wanted to post about the New Year's tradition of Ded Moroz. From my days in Macedonia, I recall the Santa Claus equivalent called "Dedo Mraz" or Grandfather Frost, and they have the same tradition in Kazakhstan. Here, the Russian name is "Ded Moroz" and translates the same as the Macedonian. One difference is that Ded Moroz is assisted by Snegurochka, his granddaughter.

I asked my local friends for more information on Ded Moroz to see what the similarities and differences are, and there are some interesting differences. Ded Moroz does not live at the North Pole, and he doesn't have elves to make the toys for him. He lives in the forest, and the forest animals help him make the gifts for the children. I mentioned to my friends that Santa Claus leaves lumps of coal for the bad kids, and I asked what Ded Moroz leaves for the bad kids. The response was that there are no bad kids. I wondered how parents get their kids to be good for the month leading up to New Year's.

As I was trying to clarify Snegurochka's role, I learned that people here don't know that Santa Claus is married. My friends said that Snegurochka was basically someone to help Ded Moroz and keep him company. They felt sad for Santa because he's all alone, so I told them that he had Mrs. Claus with him up at the North Pole. They seemed relieved to know that Santa wasn't alone.