Salom and Rahmat
Hi, friends. And family. Hi, mom.
A military plane is landing in the sands of Cairo International Airport, where we’re waiting for a connecting flight.
The last two weeks, planes have shuttled us from Laos to Uzbekistan, Uzbekistan to New York, Spain and now Egypt.
Wherever they fly, we press our faces to the windows. The view is usually a 30,000-foot aerial of places we’ve never been. And more, it astounds us still that we can sit in reclining chairs in the sky.
Three generations ago, if people wanted to travel from Asia to North America to the Middle East, it involved caravans, boats, ten years and dysentery. Now it’s a few days, two Melissa McCarthy movies and some mild red wine.
That’s insane.
Plus, once you enter all the requisite information, cross reference flight codes, add the fare class, punch that into your Star Alliance account, you’ll find that - voila! - you still don’t have airline status. The magic of devaluing one’s own currency.
But we’ll get to that.
Off to Uzbekistan.
Where we were recently: Spain, New York
Where we were before that: Uzbekistan
Hello: Salom (“sa-lahm”)
Thank you: Rahmat (“rock-maht”)
Cheers: Oldik! (giggle)
Mere’s bonus phrase: Bu odam hammasi uchun to’laydi - “This gentleman will pay for everything.”
—
Uzbekistan is the first country we knew almost nothing about before landing there. We could barely point to it on a map. Our slate was clean.
That didn’t preclude us from having misconceptions anyway.
It’s a ‘Stan, after all. It’s formerly Soviet. Its flag has two streaks of red symbolizing human sacrifice.
Yet even with a long history as both conquered and conquerer, Uzbekistan may very well be the safest place we’ve traveled to date. The one-time centerpiece of the Silk Road has a peaceful aura about it, the crossroads and melting pot of Asia, Russia, and Persia. The people are kind and inquisitive. The service as slow as the heat dictates.
In fact, if there ever was a threat, it only came when I low-balled an enormous Uzbek woman over the price of silk.
There may or may not be a way to avoid carrying misconceptions into a country. When you know nothing of a place, you construct a vision of it anyway. The mind doesn’t let itself go blank. In our case, it pieced something together in an amalgam of news, movies and rumor.
Even when I was a kid - before I’d ever been on an airplane - I imagined that the plane would land right on Ramona Avenue in front of my childhood house, we’d get into it like a Volvo, and take off.
That’s about as right as we were about Uzbekistan.
—
The taxi driver has turned fully around and is waving large, rubber-banded stacks of Uzbek money (pronounced “soom”) in our faces. The car is swerving and we’re doing 50 through Tashkent city.
“You exchange cash through me, yes? I give you good price!”
“Sir, the…”
“5,000 so’m for dollar peanuts! Market rate 2,800. I offer you double!”
(honking, hand goes into glove compartment, more stacks of s’om)
“How much you want? Million? Two million? Maybe we start small - 500,000!”
“Honestly, we’re - watch out.”
(swerve)
“I don’t understand. You get worse rate at bank!”
“We’re not exchanging.”
“Why not? You crazy!”
(near-death experience, sharp turn, screech halt)
We emerged from his cab certain the cash was counterfeit. Why would anyone trade at double the bank rate?
Because, it turns out, the Uzbek so’m was in a nose dive. In response, national banks pegged the s’om-to-dollar rate low to make the economy appear stabile, but the black market had sniffed it out. If we handed our taxi driver $20 USD and he gave us 100,000 so’m one day, a few months from then his dollars would be worth quadruple in local currency. All he had to do was hold onto the 20 bucks.
Here’s the craziest part: that guy was ripping us off. The black market rate, we discovered, was more like 8,000:1. Nearly triple the bank’s. Meanwhile, restaurants and vendors kept their prices locked to the official figure.
What that meant was that the whole country of Uzbekistan was having an everything-must-go 70% off blowout mega sale while we were there. Dinners of sizzling shashlik, palov, beef jiz, manti, and local beer came in around $4 a person. A taxi across town, about a dollar. A $3 magnet, 75 cents.
Temporary black market economics. And if the national banks continue to ignore the street, a fiscal house of cards.
—
We’ve gone four long months without comparing a country we’ve visited to a stereotype from American film.
That ends today.
There’s this part in Aladdin voiced by Robin Williams that isn’t the genie. It’s toward the beginning of the movie. The “camera” is dollying through a market in the fictional city of Agrabah, past stalls of trinkets, knife sellers, and produce. Amidst blue-tiled domes and brown clay alleys, a man in long robes enthusiastically lifts fruit from burlap sacks and screams, “Sugar dates… sugar dates and figs! Sugar dates and pistachioooos!”
That happened to us recently.
I don’t mean figuratively. I mean an Uzbek man in a market and long robes literally dug his hands into burlap sacks and offered us not only dates, but dates and figs, in that order. Gorgeous, blue-tiled domes of mosques and former palaces lingering in the distance.
Jasmine - let’s call her Meredith - actually squealed.
Given Uzbekistan’s location and recent history, none of this really fits. The country is a former Soviet republic. It lies in the heart of central Asia and shares more in common today with Moscow than Disney’s vision of Arabia. In fact, its most famous citizen - a ruthless, 14th century despot named Tamerlane - notoriously stopped the Persian empire to keep his piece of the map intact.
But there we were anyway, in a market in long-ravaged Samarkand, and the blue-tiled domes, desert sands, the breath of ancient history rising and falling, were all present. All striking resemblances to a film trope portraying a different people and place.
This time, we were lucky enough to be whisked around the country on gleaming trains we didn’t know existed. To walk into hotels we didn’t arrange ourselves. To be surprised by what happened every day.
That kind of newness is new for us.
It happened because our good friend Alex made Uzbekistan happen. A gift we appreciate.
Still, when the Uzbek police arrived to quietly disband our midnight Disney dance party in the courtyard of a little house in dusty Bukhara, it was easy to remember that company is everything. To Cass, Kinz, Mike, Kala, Alex and Scott - you can, in fact, show us the world. Shining, shimmering, splendid. We ain’t never had a friend like you.
Two events sent Meredith and me sailing in different directions after Uzbekistan.
I flew Tashkent to Moscow, grumbled my way through red tape and a Russian Burger King, and eventually arrived in New York. Mere slept half the night on the floor of an airport, spent 4 hours wandering empty Riga, Latvia, on a long layover, and flew to Barcelona.
America for a retirement party, Barcelona for a birthday.
The man who defined my academic career at Wesleyan - Professor John E. Finn - was moving on after 30 years in Middletown. In lieu of a gold watch and awkward cake at a department function, he asked a group of former students to instead have dinner with him in New York.
I bought a ticket from Central Asia a few days later.
A Princeton P.h.D in Political Science and C.I.A.-trained chef, Finn mentioned to me in New York that he’ll spend his first stretch of retirement writing one book about meatballs and another about the alt-right’s reading of the Constitution. When we were students, he’d rock his tiny daughter Ellery in his arms while tearing our interpretations of Marbury vs. Madison to pieces. By senior year, I’d taken every con law class he offered and was writing a thesis with him about the possibility that Supreme Court justices disclose their innermost thoughts and fears on morally challenging issues (like Roe and Furman) in passionate, at times Victorian, disclosures.
It was as good as school gets. I’d only argue that by shuttering his classroom, Finn is denying every future Wesleyan student their 14th Amendment right to due process of law. Thank you, John.
New York was brief. Like an obedient alum, I saw Hamilton and sat next to a mother and daughter from Arizona who cried the whole time.
It was time to find Mere in Spain.
—
People hype up Barcelona. They are right to do so.
Mere arrived with our friend Kala in tow to wish her a happy 29th birthday and wonder audibly how it is that she’s only 29. Seems unfair.
She also came to sit by the beach, gossip about boys, repel Spanish men (RIGHT, BABE?), get a facial, revel in Gaudi, nibble on everything, order an extra bottle of rosé, wander through street art, take deep breaths, and not be somewhere difficult.
There was one continent and three countries we felt comfortable skipping this year: Europe; Italy, France, Spain.
We might not still be traveling without Europe. It’s like walking into a friend’s house knowing you can put your feet up, take what you want from the fridge and stay until you’re ready to leave.
To quote Meredith, “Barcelona makes itself hard to disagree with.” Or, put another way, if you’re not liking Barcelona, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Here’s the usual breakdown. Let us know if you’re going.
UZBEKISTAN
Tashkent
As Soviet as the country gets. The drab rectangularity of government buildings, taxis that hide the seat belts, a five-lane boulevard through the city that until recently could only be used by the president himself. We met the U.S. Defense Attache and his wife at a Georgian restaurant in the city’s hidden alleys who encouraged us to move on and see other places. That said, high five and thanks to the unflappable Azamat, a young local who took the day off to hang with us, pull back the curtain of Tashkent and feed us the city’s best palov.
Samarkand
Our friend Nick is a history buff, and the only person who was excited we were visiting Uzbekistan. “Oh mate, Samarkand!” His enthusiasm was appropriate. A capital several times over in its violent past, Samarkand was conquered by both Alexander the Great (329 B.C.) and Ghenkis Khan (1220 A.D.) and is a place of glittering madrasas, intricately-tiled mosques, and a massive public square that has seen more history than almost anywhere else on earth. At one point we were perusing carpets inside a space that had been - in its 2800-year lifespan - a prison, a hotel, a mosque, a bazaar and, today, a carpet store.
Bukhara
The ancient quarter of Bukhara is peaceful, slow and great. We got stretched and kneaded to shreds in a sweltering hammam, ate on quiet rooftops, and met artists in the “caravanserai” that once sheltered traveling traders and their animals. If it’s midnight and your friend is on his hands and knees recreating the Prince Ali entrance from Aladdin, keep the volume down.
Khiva
The last stop along the Silk Road before Iran is a walled town called Khiva, encircled by 10 meter high brick walls. On the inside are clusters of madrasas, mausoleums, mosques and minarets which make for incredible pictures of your friends when they’re playing cards and drinking beers atop a centuries old homestay in their new silk robes.
BARCELONA
Quite possibly the coolest kid in Europe. Street art, tapas, beaches, the best soccer team on the continent and an architecture that makes the city independent from everywhere else on earth. Even Gaudi still manages to be redefining cool a hundred years after his death and ten before the completion of his masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia. You can sip a stiff martini in a warehouse of diverse bars one minute, jog the steps of the beautiful National Gallery the next, then walk the very topless and at times stunningly bottomless coastline along the Mediterranean without knowing how you got there. A long weekend will feel good but, appropriately, unfinished.
---
Whoa. What just happened, where are we, what day is this. That was a lot.
The next installment will nonetheless be coming in hot: 8 days in Egypt in the middle of Ramadan.
As always, we love you for reading.
Mere & Pete
