Samarkand Day Two

 Early start today. I booked myself a tour of the historic area of the city and need to get there by 9. That’s early for me right now. I arrive and text my guide… nothing. At 9:15 I ask another nearby guide if he’s running anything in English today. Russian only and I am welcome to join. I decline and he connects me with a friend of his who is doing a tour tomorrow. Same place, same time.

Since tomorrow was going to be a day for history I figured I’d start the day with the present. Now that I’m coming to the end of this trip and I’ll be hauling the bag less, I’ve been on the hunt for souvenirs. Specifically a carpet and some hard to find Soviet cameras. I’ve been tipped off that as large as the main Bazaar is, there’s an even bigger market outside the city center where I may find what I’m looking for. I called a cab and rode to Dalny Lager. This was like nothing I had ever seen before. Not crowded, not chaotic, not loud, but with everything you would ever need. This puts a wal-mart to shame. You can get everything you would ever need here. A gently used clutch for your Lada, stoves, fresh fruit, clothing, fish, sewing machines, furniture. Everything is here. The market is divided into clusters of people selling similar things. The rugged old men presiding over rusty piles of truck parts are separated from the ladies with new clothing by people selling small housewares and electronics. The spice sellers have the fruit people to space them out from the fish. It’s chaotic but harmonious. I wandered the stalls and found carpets and Soviet cameras but not quite what I’m looking for. One of the more interesting things I saw was a Gaz Volga with a utilitarian and not original roof rack. The Volga was the car for people “more equal” than Lada owners. Politicians, high ranking bureaucrats, cosmonauts, and the KGB. If you came home to a black Volga in your driveway, it usually meant your life was over. Now they’re just old clunkers hauling furniture from the market to a buyer’s house. The weight of capitalism slowly grinding it down.

Volga drive you

Done with Dalny, I traveled next to a paper factory that someone told me was interesting. If you happen to find yourself in Samarkand and are looking for an authentic experience, skip this one. This is a recreation of a village made by the tourism board to show how Uzbek handicrafts work. It can be interesting but this is not a factory making paper, this is demonstrations of paper making. The whole village is laid out along a creek and if you go too far you wind up in a construction site. An unfinished phase two.

Eerie construction site with a bike lane for some reason

Off for some real history. There’s a six hundred year old observatory in town that was built by Ulugh Beg, a local enlightened ruler. Maybe too enlightened. In fact he was so kind that he was deposed by his own son and murdered while making Hajj, ouch. When I arrived I was hungry and had to use the bathroom. The pay toilet was close by and seemed simple enough. There was a seven year old boy working a booth with a sign in the window that said 4000 som. About a quarter, a reasonable price. I hand him a 5k note and he looks at me, holding the note out and says something in Uzbek. I tell him that I don’t understand him and that I’d like him to take my money so I can pee. We go back and forth for a while and eventually I determine that he’s decided I need to pay 10k. Eighty cents is still reasonable if you’re in continental Europe and the bathroom is clean, neither of these things were true. I kept pointing to the sign and he kept telling me I needed to pay more. Eventually I told him that I was going away and that he could keep the thousand som his sign said he owed me. Good racket kid, that eight cents might be good for a handful of pistachios at the bozori.

For lunch I was hoping to enjoy some local horror and I got it in spades. A thick fluffy pita pocket, sliced cucumber, sliced tomato, a ton of thick slightly fermented yoghurt, top with a spicy sauce, and some chickpea flour chips. The real zinger, two hot dogs in there. After some research I determined that this is not in fact the traditional Uzbek hot dog, that one comes in a regular bun with a Korean carrot salad. A symbol of the two nations’ enduring friendship. I joke but Korea and Uzbekistan have taken care of each other on and off over the years. There are an outsized number of Korean tourists and many of the local monuments have Korean government funding.

The Ulugh Bek observatory is no different, the ROK having kicked in a few bucks to spruce up the place. The observatory is an incredible story. Ulugh was always fascinated with the stars from a young age and when he became king built what was then the largest observatory in the world. The structure is essentially a massive sextant, three stories tall. With this instrument, they were able to chart stars and make measurements of the universe with a degree of accuracy that was not matched for many hundreds of years. Ulugh measured the length of the earth year so closely that he was only 25 seconds off and outdid Copernicus’ efforts that occurred a century later.

The remains of the sextant

In my last job I worked managing food delivery drivers in SF. My time out here is making me realize just how many of them were Uzbeks. I can recall a handful of Ulugbeks that I worked with at that gig, interesting to see it all come full circle.

I still had some time and energy left so I made my last stop of the afternoon a visit to a local carpet factory. This place does the famous plush hand knotted carpets people go ga ga for and also my preferred (and cheaper) flat woven style. They managed to find an English speaker to show me the production floor and then take me into the showroom. Opening prices here are a sixth of what was being asked in The Grand Bazaar. Looking around confirmed my suspicions, the Turkish flat woven rugs sold there are in fact Uzbek. Buy local, save money, have a better purchasing experience. I found a lot of things I liked but decided to hold off. If I can get a few others from back home on board with this lunacy I can get some more buying power and push down the price. Maybe I have a future as a rug dealer.

After a nap I had a small toilet to errand to run. Normally I don’t travel with hair products and just rely on what is around. I have a dry scalp but typically if I leave with healthy skin, I’ll come back soon enough that I’m okay. After three months, this game is no longer working and I have dandruff. Looking for anything vaguely medical in a foreign country can be a daunting task and I dread doing it. Just figuring out where to shop is can be hard. Here it was surprisingly easy. I found the Uzbek equivalent of Ulta and walked into a friendly store with friendly staff who spoke English well enough to point me to what I needed. Funny enough, most of the products were labeled in English primarily for the American market. The outlier was the large selection of Korean products mixed in. Korean beauty supplies are all the rage in the US but can be difficult to come by, not the case here. I was especially tickled to see Cerave on the shelf, something that was not available in Turkey for whatever reason.

This store, like more high end stores in Samarkand, was in the Russian quarter. A part of the city built out in the late 1800s when the Czar took control of Uzbekistan, it has a distinctly European appearance compared to the rest of the city. Blocks are blocky, streets have trees, buildings have columns. It comes off as fancy, maybe even hip, and definitely imperialist. Since my internet connection wasn’t working at the time, I wandered the streets with my eyes peeled looking for something to eat. I saw an Italian restaurant and curious as to what that might mean here, I got a table. The menu was relatively standard aside from the pizzas which were an anything goes pile of insanity. I settled on a taste of home, the Tom Yum Pizza. Anyone who lives in Long Beach for a while will have heard of Thai Curry Pizza, a local joint that served burgers, pizzas, and Thai food. My order of choice is the Tom Yum with peanuts and a side of egg rolls. Seeing this on a menu so far from home made me laugh and I just had to have some. It scratched an itch like you wouldn’t believe and washed down well with a new drink to me. Orange juice served hot, watered down, and with thyme steeped in it. A surprising taste of the LBC in Central Asia. Who would have thought?

Back at the hotel a special treat was waiting for me. My laundry, washed and folded. Ordinarily I would never pay a hotel to do my laundry but at the prices they were asking, having them handle it was cheaper than some of the laundromats I’ve encountered. I felt like a silly giddy child opening the bag and seeing the stack of folded socks. There’s something great about getting old and appreciating the little things like being surprised with clean clothes. What a great end to the day.