Tashkent

We made it to Tashkent without any more dead bodies. The staff at the Osh Guesthouse arranged a taxi to take us all the way to Tashkent, so we didn't have anything to organize ourselves. The border crossing took about an hour, and we didn't have to pay any bribes. We stopped for lunch at an Uzbek restaurant, and ate some wonderful plov. I chipped off a big hunk of one of my molars, but I didn't expose a nerve, so thankfully I hopefully won't have to pay a Kyrgyz dentist a visit. Uzbek currency is ridiculous- 1$ is about 1500 sum, and the largest bill is a 1000 sum note. So we changed 50$, got 74,000 sum, all in 1000 sum bills. We are all carrying around giant wads of cash. It's comical.

We stopped at a car repair shop, and sat around for more than 30 minutes while our driver had something under the hood checked out- we think he was getting his lights changed (?). We just sat around in the car slowly freezing.

There was another mountain pass we had to get through, and it was blizzarding horribly for most of the pass. We had to drive slowly, and at one point the road in the other direction actually closed down. There were a few bulldozers plowing the road in the other direction, and quite a few dump trucks full of dirt, with men in the back shoveling onto the road. There were many cars that had 2 or 3 people perched on the hood or trunk of the car, covered in snow because of the blizzard. We weren't sure if they were just hitchhikers, or if they were picked up from cars that got stuck in the snow. There were also some lonely-looking donkeys wandering down the road, covered in snow. Mike made up a song about them. It was cute. We had a Daewoo just like most of the rest of the drivers in Uzbekistan, but miraculously we made it up and down the mountain without getting stuck.

We got to Tashkent around 20:00 and went to a hotel at the train station that Lonely Planet recommended. Rooms were 10,000 sum (about 8 dollars), and I was in a woman's dorm and Mike and Evan in a man's dorm. It turns out that we both had the rooms to ourselves, but we couldn't just stay in one room in case others came in during the night. Since it's close to the train station, locals seem to appear if they have hours to kill between trains. There were no other tourists there at all. There was a great housekeeper who spoke English and helped us out. We had dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant.

This morning we set out pretty early because we wanted to go to the Kazakh Embassy to apply for our transit visas. We did, and the process was painless and quick- we just needed to get copies of our passports. We have to go back tomorrow evening to pick them up. We got 5-day transit visas, so Mike and I will have time to stop in Turkistan and Almaty like we'd been hoping. The Kazakh Embassy in Bishkek is a nightmare, so I'm really glad we waited until we got to Uzbekistan.

The weather was terrible today- dismal, cloudy, cold, and wet. It turns out that both pairs of shoes that I brought leak, so I've had to suffer with wet feet the entire duration of our trip thus far, and for the next 10 days too, unless I buy new shoes at a bazaar somewhere. Blah.

Today we just wandered around. We had lunch at an amazing Turkish restaurant, where I had the best Iskender Kebab I've ever had. We then found the statute of Amir Timur (Tamerlane) and went to the Uzbekistan History Museum, which was fairly interesting and actually had captions in English! We're staying at the same hotel tonight, Tomorrow we're going to check out the Bazaar and the Old Town,and if all goes well with our Kazakh visas, we'll pick them up at 5 pm and then Mike and I will take the train to Samarkand, where we'll spend Christmas Day and then head to Bukhara.

Merry Christmas! I miss you all and I'm glad that you read my blog and are interested in my life here in Central Asia!