UZBEKISTAN: Tashkent

I met Ross in the Istanbul airport and took a night flight to Tashkent, the only visible landmark along the way being a burning gas well somewhere in the Turkmen desert, which Ross spotted. Tashkent was a very surprising city. You would expect it to be fairly small and underdeveloped but it was the biggest urban center in both Russian and Soviet Central Asian so central planners pumped money and development into this "Moscow of Central Asia". Believe it or not they have a subway system as nice as any I've ever seen. It definitely makes the NYC subway look like third world infrastructure.

The main part of Tashkent is leafy, with avenues much too wide for the sparse traffic of Brezhnev-era Ladas and little toy-like Daewoo minivans. The capitol buildings themselves are pretty grand and gleaming, especially the parliament, which, ironically, doesn't do anything, since the country is more or less a dictatorship, run by Karimov since Perestoika. To his credit he's not a tacky dictator like some of his colleagues in Turkmenistan, Syria or North Korea--he spares his people the endless statues, parades and calendar changes seen in those countries. Basically he seems like lucid businessman's dictator. According to the two people I dared to inquire about politics, he seems to be well accepted and even admired. One credited him with shutting down the mafias which quite recently turned the Silk Road into the Afghan Heroin Highway, and the other said that people were prospering, although this seems to vary depending on where you go. My general impression is that people have very low incomes but that money stretches far and few people are destitute.

Things are incredibly cheap here--we've had good meals for $2 and a 100km taxi ride cost us $4 each person each way. I spend about twenty dollars per night on accomodation which more or less reaches western standards. The strange aspect of money here is that the biggest bill is the 1000 som note, which sounds like alot but is really only worth about 80 cents. The smallest bill is the 100 som, or about 8 cents. Everyone here seems to know how absurd this is but the closest I've come to an explanation from it was from an old woman who explained "This is not America". Anyway, everyone, even the poorest street vendor or cab driver carries around big stacks of cash. Many mid-size enterprises have money counters. It all reminds me of the Johnnie Depp movie Blow, when they're working all day to count their millions in drug money. Ross and I exchanged $150 at the central bank and we were each given two bricks of 1000 soms, which made us feel like gangsters. Well maybe Uzbek gangsters.

Our crazy, drunkard hostel owner laughing while flipping through Arab porn channels

The EuroCup's been going on and the Uzbeks have been following it pretty closely. Most of them liked Turkey and I had a great time watching the Turkey-Germany semifinal in the "Adana Cafe", a Turkish establishment in Tashkent with about 60 people, a mixture of Turkish Turks and the local Chinamen Turks, more politely known as Uzbeks. The Uzbeks also really supported Russia, which also made the semi-finals. People here seem to have a lingering, deep affinity for Russia even though the country has not exactly treated Uzbekistan gently over the years. Still, I was told that 80% of Uzbeks overal and 100% of urban Uzbeks speak fluent Russian, which would partially account for this alliegiance. It's amazing to think that bascially the whole country speaks two or more languages.

Watching the Turkey--Germany (2-3) Eurocup semifinal in a Turkish cafe in Tashkent