City Hotel Samarkand

... across the square and the mosque between them. Marat was giving us too much information for me to retain it plus I was really one of the bad ones who were more interested in getting photos than paying attention and for that I am not a bit sorry because what information I did hear was quite good and I enjoyed but I seem to have quite a small attention span these days and want good photos but my camera and my skill ...

... he quickly pulled out his money and paid for it and then got up and walked out so I was left in the room and everyone was leaving so I did too and good thing because I was caving. So no carpet for me. We thanked them very much as we had spent about 3 hours there, from 2:30 to after 5. They provided a car for us and we got back to the hotel at 5:30.<br><br> Oh I do love carpets. NEXT time I am going to get some.

... an earthquake, the minarets had fallen because the base and foundation wasn&#8217;t very good. He told us a fine tale on how the mosque was constructed. Timor was gone and his favorite wife decided to build a mosque for him. The engineer hired to do the construction fell in love with Timor&#8217;s wife. He kept working very slowly and coming every day so that he could look at her and talk to her. Finally she heard that ...

... be loaded onto the cart and off loaded at the train. For some reason, the porters are not allowed to board the train so we all had to take our own luggage on board. I had a backpack; I also had a large collapsible bag full of my food and water for the train ride, my purse, and my walking stick. I got stuck immediately in the passage way into the train car and had ...

... was surprisingly interesting. The master craftsmen lay the pattern out on a 300 metre roll of silk and resist dye in the patterns that will be later used in the weaving. Resist dying uses ribbons to cover the weft (the long bits) to stop the dye taking to the silk and the weft is put through a series of vats for each colour, retying the ribbons each time to create the pattern on the weft. After dying is completed the weft is loaded by a different master onto a hand loom and the young girls ...

... as we thought we had seen most of the wonderful sites in the Registan, we were led to the knock your socks off huge Mosque of Bibi-Khanym. Constructed just before Tamerlame&#8217;s death it was named after his Chinese wife Bibi-Khanym and was one of the Islamic world&#8217;s largest mosque with its main gate being some 35 m tall. Sadly the original mosque was destroyed in an earthquake in 1897. Once again, it was impossible for us to comprehend how these massive buildings were ...

... it didn&#8217;t really help us when I asked about current safety issues in northern Pakistan. One group said it was &#8220;quite safe&#8221; in the Northern Areas, the other group looks grim and sadly shook their heads. Alan said it served me right &#8211; we were going there anyway&#8230;.. <br><br>The next day Alan was still sick and I was still queasy. I could not believe that he downed two fried eggs for breakfast though&#8230;.. <br><br>We found the ...

I want to say thank you to Rustam, a friend of mine in Tashkent, for his input into my journey, because without him providing me information about places to stay and ways of transportation, my trip would be much, much less interesting. He's making a virtual Samarkand project (www.e-samarkand.narod.ru/), where you can learn a lot about this beautiful place. I came to Samarkand from Tashkent on a fast train ...

... a lesser amount to the taxi mafia. "Tashkent people are ****," spurted Borat as we had left the capital, heading south past more militsia checkpoints. "All they care about is money, money." "My town is a beautiful town. People are good there." "It's like that, life." Borat was a truck driver, but not in Uzbekistan. In Uzbekistan the militsia take bribes at checkpoints. "Too much trouble here ...

... will be living for then next two years and what our jobs will be. I am going to be living in Bukhara and working at a medical institute there! I will be helping to change the medical curriculum from the soviet version (treatment based care) to a more western version (preventative based) Can you believe it? There are three of us out of the 12 health volunteers who will be working on this project. In addition to the main project, I ...