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.