Several weeks ago, the land crossing at the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan opened to vehicular traffic for the first time since I’ve been here. It takes about fifteen minutes from our house in Tashkent to drive past the ring road and up the M-39 to the crossing itself. After going through immigration and customs on both the Uzbek and Kazakh sides, it’s about another 90 minutes (depending on weather and road conditions) to the Kazakh city of Shymkent (Шымкент). Oh Shymkent – where have you been all my Tashkent tour?
Month: December 2016
The World’s Your Oyster
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I boarded a two-thirds empty flight out of Tashkent as the snow flurries began to fall. As the doors closed and everyone raced to the middle rows to lie down, I reseated myself in an empty and quiet emergency exit row. As is typical, the plane’s interior was overheated to the point where I felt ill. “It’s cold near the door,” a flight attendant chastised me in Russian. “Super,” I replied, also in Russian, “Because it is very hot in here for me.”
Purpose of travel: Urgent dental work. Destination: Bangkok.
West to Khiva
A little more than a year ago, one of my former colleagues spent the last weekend before his packout from Tashkent hopping a domestic flight with his family. He told me that he couldn’t believe his two year tour had passed by without him ever making it to Khiva, an Uzbek city in the far west of the country. He told me, “If you get a chance to go to Khiva, take it. Don’t wait until the last minute when you need to pack and have a million other things to do.” So when the embassy’s Community Liasison Office (CLO) organized a trip last month to Khiva, my husband and I were among the first to sign up.
Collecting Postcards 