Best Eastern Grand Mir Hotel Tashkent

... me and again, a very quick goodbye to avoid the tears. How odd that you get so attached to people in such a short time. And I have been on trips where the groups have not gelled and it’s been a problem to remain civil to people. But this group was topnotch and the guide was topnotch as well. Loved it all (except of course the aforementioned yurt camp)

... and she agreed. She was fairly typical of a lot of the Uzbeks we have seen in that she had most of her front teeth capped with gold crowns. Makes for a glittering mouth.<br><br> We stopped at a market then. The market was full of fruits and vegetables and also some of the Korean-Uzbeks who were selling their traditional Kim chi. What a delight to find this familiar food so far from Korea. I purchased some ...

... Lovely fruit. Glorious fruit. I haven&#8217;t had good fruit in several days.<br><br> Walked back to the hotel and decided to rest my feet and hips as I&#8217;ve been giving them pretty hard usage the last few weeks. My first impressions are it is a delightful country that is trying hard to overcome a Soviet past and friendly people all around. Fell asleep.

... as other stations have come on line, they have continued to build them with a theme, sort of, or at least decorated each one in some fashion.<br><br> One station was Cosmonaut station. It had large almost abstract drawings from photographs of different Cosmonauts and the people who had designed the rocket engine and the one who built it. Another station was dedicated to cotton and was covered ...

... 8220;it is the middle of the night&#8221;. They discuss which hotel as B.C. guy says he&#8217;s never heard of it but the taxi tout says he knows it. I say let me walk through the crowd one more time and see if I find my driver and I did this time. So I go back and thank British Council guy. Taxi tout had already disappeared into the crowd.<br><br> So I managed to get to Tashkent and am now in Uzbekistan.

Summary:<br><br>By now 2 weeks in Uzbekistan&#8230;what a great country, offering the old Silk Road cities with their madrassas and other beautiful building and village life with street sellers, donkey and cart drivers and lots of people working the cotton fields as it is harvesting time! They love meat here, as it seems to be in every dish and the Lepyoshka (Uzbec bread) is sold on every street corner! The bread is made in special clay ovens, where they stick to the ceiling! It ...

Silk road cities<br><br>In Khiva doen we voor vertrek nog een kopje koffie bij het theehuis ;-) Leuke stad maar het is nu toch echt tijd voor de volgende silk road city: Bukhara. Onderweg komen we langs een enorm water dat schittert in de namiddagzon dus we besluiten te overnachten in een dorpje aan dat water. Op de kaart ziet het er heel simpel uit, er is maar 1 weg heen&#8230;..In werkelijkheid&#8230;??? Hebben we het dorp nooit gevonden&#8230;.:-) Overal zandpaden en kronkelwegen en ...

... barren expanse of nothingness you can imagine. <br><br>When we at last reached the Uzbek border, the immigration guy decided that my passport photo was not me, and a minor interrogation ensued, as I tried to explain that my hair looked brown because it's a black and white photo, and that I got bangs after the photo was taken. All I could think was "please don't leave me stranded in Kazakhstan!!!" Apparently his job is very boring, so he ...

... and was housed in a climate controlled glass cabinet. The book was enormous; each page was made out of smooth leather and etched with beautiful calligraphy drawn in thick black paint. The other rooms in the mosque had many other examples of antique Qurans and their evolution over the centuries.<br><br>We enjoyed a long lunch at Al Delfeen, the Syrian Restaurant we had tried to find the previous evening. The restaurant was set in a rundown Soviet-era building but we ...

... Farmland was mostly used for extensive cotton growing with some maturing wheat crops and barley crops ready for harvest. Once again labour was mostly women chipping the fields by hand with a few of the larger farms housing tractors. The main livestock we saw were goats, dairy cows and sheep. A lot of local transport was by way of donkey carts. In the distance was the snow capped Pamir Mountains.<br><br>Probably due to my complaints to poor Odil about the horrible Tashkent ...