Tashkent, Uzbekistan

We had a fun day in Tashkent, doing some urban stuff for a change.

First off was breakfast, and one of the better buffets on this trip. Checked with the front desk about whether we should carry our passports around town, but they almost laughed and said we wouldn’t need them.

We took the subway to Chorsu Market. According to the Lonely Planet, the subways are also vestiges of the bureaucratic past, but that’s no longer the case. There are plenty of police around, but they were all very helpful once they determined we were tourists. They didn’t even care if we took pictures!

The subway stations that we saw were all works of art. The system is also well signed and easy to get around. We had no issues getting to Chorsu Market, even with transferring lines.

Chorsu Market was cool to see. The vendors didn’t mind tourists taking pics, and offered us samples of unusual items that we asked about. Tried a hard crystal-like rock that turned out to be sugar.

The best area of the market was the bakery, although at 11am we caught the tail end of it. Who doesn’t like the smell of freshly baked bread? There was still some bread-making in action, and the bakers invited me for a close-up pic.

Next on our tour was the Central Asian Plov Market. Plov is a local favourite, fried rice with raisins and nuts and other stuff, topped with meat (usually beef or lamb). At this market, the rice is cooked in giant kazans about 10’ in diameter. The plov is good, but really it’s the giant kazans that are the attraction.

We took the subway back towards our hotel and saw a few more beautiful stations.

The History Museum was also on our list for today, conveniently located beside our hotel. It’s pretty good, and the quality of some of the ancient pieces dating from as old as 1 AD was astounding. It was also helpful that we had already seen parts of Uzbekistan, having gone west to east (it’s more usual the other direction).

After the museum, we stopped at a cafe for a Turkish coffee and sweet. Got back to our hotel and got ready for the opera. There’s a good number of tourists that attend who don’t have formal attire, so I wasn’t out of place in my jeans and running shoes.

We were lucky to have bought our tickets for Aida the day before - our seats were excellent, 5th row centre. We really enjoyed the performance!

We had a late dinner at the hotel lobby bar to wrap up our Uzbekistan leg of the trip.

Overall, we really liked Uzbekistan. It’s very easy to travel independently now, all the old bureaucracy has gone away. I’m glad we went from west to east through the tourist towns. The Silk Road cities themselves are really impressive, and different from anything else I’ve seen so far.

Next stop: Beirut