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.