After my last post about how great Samarkand was, Mike and I headed back to our hotel to hang out until our train left at 1:43 am. Mike and I started an epic card game tournament. We've played about 50 games up to now and he's still ahead. But not for long. Anyways, a taxi came to pick us up at 00:30, and we caught the train to Bukhara. Katy and Josh had a cushy 4-person sleeper car, but we opted for cheap and got 4th class seats, "obshy vagon" in Russian. Tickets were 5500 sum instead of about 20,000 for a sleeper cabin, but it became clear why when we got there. It was a mostly open train car, with 9 benches in each section. We got on midway during the train journey (the train had started in Tashkent) so it was mostly full- there were people sitting and lying EVERYWHERE. It smelled horribly of B.O. and socks, and there were no lights on so we were wandering around in the dark, trying to find a place to squeeze in. We finally found a spot on the end of a bench. It was a semi-padded bench, but there was no backrest or anything, and we just had to stuff our bags and shoes on the floor in front of us. There was barely any place for anything, and I tried to find a place for the loaf of bread we'd bought from a babushka at the train station. I tried to put it behind me and under my legs, but it wasn't comfortable. The guy sitting across from me took it from me and just put it onto the table, which was already covered in loaves of bread.
Mike fell asleep quickly, and I was just looking around, amused by the fact that it was the middle of the night and we were in a crowded train, surrounded by Uzbeks going home for New Year's to be with their families. The boys across from me kept saying words quietly in English, so I knew that it would only be a matter of time before they tried talking to me. Finally one of the guys said, "Excuse me, are you from England?" and then a semi-awkward conversation started, where I had to answer the usual questions... my name, my age, if I'm married (and then I have to explain in detail WHY Mike and I aren't married and why we don't have children...), if I have any brothers or sisters, and what I think about Uzbekistan. His English was mediocre, but he wasn't afraid to try.
Pretty soon another man walked by and heard us speaking English, so he stopped to talk too. His English was really good because he worked for an international bank in Tashkent. The boy across from me asked him to translate something that he didn't know how to say in English, and he asked me why I'd tried to put the bread under my legs. Apparently this was a big faux pas because bread is very very important to Uzbek people, and I disprespected it by putting it under my legs. I got a lecture from the good English speaker about why this was bad to do, and how I shouldn't do it again. He actually said, "These men here think it's just INCREDIBLE that you would do something like that to bread." I remembered having read in Lonely Planet that you never should put bread on the ground or throw it away in public, but I didn't really think about it as I was trying to find a place to keep the bread. I apologized and the guys weren't angry as much as surprised that I didn't have the same respect for bread as they did. Sorry Central Asia, I didn't mean to be a stupid ignorant American tourist...
The man on our bunk eventually got off the train, so for a few hours Mike and I had a bench to ourselves and we were sort of able to sleep. When we got to Bukhara we met up again with our friends. The same English speaking man from the train asked where we were going to stay, and when I told him the hotel that the man in Samarkand had recommended to us, he found a taxi driver that knew exactly where the hotel was, and he bargained a cheap price for our taxi ride into town.
We got to the hotel and Mike and I immediately went to sleep since we'd only gotten a couple of hours on the train. The room had single beds, but a space heater that made the room absolutely toasty. We ventured out of the room around 13:00 to find lunch. We went to a horrificly tacky touristy restaurant near our hotel, which had good laghman made with egg and tomato sauce, but was decorated like a place where you'd have a cheap wedding reception. There were bright blue satin seat covers, pastel decorations on the walls, and big balloons. Our hotel was in the Old Town, and it was super touristy. There weren't that many tourists per se because it's off-season, but every other building was a hotel or a money exchange office, and there were souvenier kiosks set up everywhere. Since Bukhara is basically desert, it was really cold and windy. Mike and I walked around and saw that best sites, but couldn't handle the cold for very long and went back to the hotel by 16:00. We had satellite tv, so we spent hours just lying around watching Italian, Arabic, and German channels.
For dinner we went out with Katy and Josh to a cafe nearby, and we had AMAZING friend meat and French fries. It doesn't sound like much, but it was the best meat I've had since being in Central Asia, and the French fries weren't cold like they usually are. We went back to bed and fell asleep unreasonably early.
The next day we went to buy night train tickets for our trip back to Tashkent that night. We found a ticket office in the city so we didn't have to travel 12 km to get to the train station itself. Then we had plov for lunch with Katy and Josh, specially cooked just for us since it wasn't usually on the menu. After lunch Mike and I set off to do some more siteseeing, and saw the Ark, which was mostly ruins and an archeological site totally not worth the 4$ admission fee, and a mosque with 4 minarets, which was pretty cool. We found a little cafe, drank tea, and continued our card tournament. Mike won some more. Blah.
We got our bags from the hotel and went to the train station, where, for the 12 hour train trip back to Tashkent, we "splurged" and got a 4-person sleeper car with Katy and Josh. I slept really well all night, and we arrived early early yesterday morning to Tashkent.
It's time for us to catch our train to Kazakhstan, so I'm off! More later... we'll likely be spending New Year's 00:00 in a night train from Turkestan to Almaty, so there won't be much going on with me then. Happy New Year's to all and have a great start to 2009!
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