I returned yesterday from my trip to Uzbekistan; thanks to Aeroflot's flight schedule - 0430 departure from Tashkent with an 0810 arrival in Moscow - I slept about half of the day and was up all last night reading at home. Even though I had only a week to spend there, my first trip to Central Asia definitely lived up to expectations, and fortunately failed to justify the misgivings of some of my relatives about traveling to an area which is portrayed so often in the press as "unsettled." The itinerary was 2 nights, 2 days in Tashkent; 2 nights, 2 days in Bukhara; 2 nights, 2 days in Samarkand; and 1 night, 1 day in Tashkent. Mainly I wanted to get just a small taste of life in this country which first drew my attention when I closely followed developments after the Andijan massacre back in May of this year. I also wanted to visit some of the country's "must-see" architectural treasures, although I wasn't able to make it to all of them (Khiva, for example, will have to wait for next time).
I didn't glean any particularly original insights into people's quality of life there - by "original" I mean observations which are not already conventional wisdom (e.g., people are friendly and hospitable, but this is a pretty poor country, everyone seems to want to emigrate, etc.) and/or have not already been bandied about on Registan.net - but that wasn't really my primary goal anyway. As for those observations I had which might be interesting to a wider audience, I may post them here later once I've had time to digest them a bit myself.
For now I just wanted to post a couple of photos from the Tashkent metro - the two which I had time to snap before being approached by a cop and told that photography in the metro is not allowed. Luckily, he was not in the mood to extort money from a guest, so he told me that while some of his colleagues might have berated me (he used the Russian word rugat' - the conversation took place in Russian, and I identified myself as being "from Moscow," as I did in many instances on the trip), he wasn't going to do that, and let me go on my way. This was probably as far beneath the surface of things as I got in Uzbekistan. Both of these photos are from the Hamid Olimjon station, which seems to have a cotton-related theme like so much of Tashkent's Soviet-designed architecture, and were taken around 1:30pm on July 20. In general, Tashkent's metro stations are beautiful and seem to be designed with the idea of echoing or repeating the grandeur of the Moscow metro. I saw at least one instance where Soviet-era wall decorations (mosaics? bas-reliefs?), whose message presumably did not suit independent Uzbekistan's ruler, had been ripped out of the wall, with nothing left in their place. My trusty guidebook, MacLeod & Mayhew's Uzbekistan: The Golden Road to Samarkand
, mentions the photo ban in the metro and directs readers to a website which I couldn't get to open for photos - perhaps this resource was disabled by the Uzbek powers-that-be due to security concerns. Other places online where photos of and information about the Tashkent Metro are available are the following: Tashkent Subway (in English), the Toshkent (Tashkent) Metro page on UrbanRail.net (in English), Tashkentskoe Metro (in Russian), and this photo gallery. None of these sites, though, has photos which do justice to the more spectacular stations.
This is probably the only Uzbekistan-related post for which I'll have time before leaving for Moldova tomorrow morning. That promises to be another interesting trip, although I've been to Moldova many times (at least once in each of the past 5 years) since it's my wife's homeland. For that reason, the trip to Moldova will have more the feel of a comfortable trip down memory lane, as opposed to the Uzbekistan trip's rush of new impressions.Since I probably won't have time to post anything while I'm in Moldova, further updates will come no sooner than next Thursday, when I'll be back in Moscow (leaving Chisinau at 0615 on the brutally scheduled Air Moldova flight).
Yulia Latynina (always a favorite pundit of mine) has a great column in today's Moscow Times about how dangerous it is that people surrounding Russia's leaders are afraid to share bad news with them. The final graf is right on the money:
The Kremlin is a lot like a driver whose windshield has been replaced by a television screen. Instead of the mountain switchback ahead of him, the driver sees only an open highway. Under such conditions, the joy ride won't last long.
I heard about this survey on Ekho Moskvy radio this morning and thought it was funny. However, the announcers reporting it seemed a bit concerned, as though a dislike of lawyers could be translated into a populace which doesn't respect the rights of the individual. Here are the facts, as reported by Mosnews.com:
Another group whom most Russians do not like is lawyers, according to the results of a survey by the Public Opinion Foundation published by the Lenta.Ru website. It transpired that only 55 percent of Russians believe that lawyers enjoy respect in Russia. 21 percent of respondents are convinced that lawyers are not worth any respect whatsoever.
Most respondents were critical of lawyers’ performance. 41 percent said it was unsatisfactory, while 14 percent said it was bad or very bad. Only 17 percent praised lawyers for their work. Half of those who had sought legal counsel in the past said they were dissatisfied with the quality of service they received.
25 percent said all lawyers were corrupt, greedy, incompetent and unscrupulous. Only one-third of the respondents believed that lawyers were honest and law-abiding.
Still, the legal profession remains one of the most prestigious in terms of pay in Russia. Nearly 70 percent of the respondents agreed with that.
What I'm wondering is, why is this news? Does anyone doubt that the results of a similar survey would be as critical or more critical of lawyers in the United States, where lawyer jokes proliferate and slurs like "ambulance-chaser" are common?
I feel like I've been falling down on the blogging job for a while now - something like 6 posts in the past 6 weeks, which just doesn't cut it. Happily, we're now fully moved into temporary quarters - a cozy apartment right next door to the Aeroport metro station. I'm blissfully unemployed and have caught up on sleep following a virtually sleepless few days in St. Petersburg last week, and I have some time free for blogging before undertaking some more travel: to Kaluga this weekend, then to Uzbekistan for a week, and then to Moldova for 5 days or so, which means I'll then have the middle two weeks of August in Moscow to say a long good-bye to the city before leaving for Washington on August 22. My only complaint about our new Aeroport location (that's actually just the name of the metro station, it's mercifully nowhere near the airport) is the lack of easy internet access in the neighborhood. The Zen Coffee around the corner has outrageously priced - 120 rubles, or about $4, per hour - and buggy wi-fi provided by the Time Online franchise. Happily, I remembered a place I had noticed several months ago that had free wi-fi - the Moka-Loka cafe near the picturesque Novoslobodskaya metro station - and a visit here today has shown that they still haven't caved to market pressure and started charging, as so many of the once-free Moscow hotspots have. Let's hope that holds for another month and a half at least.So, I'm sitting here with a bird's-eye view of the intersection of Dolgorukovskaya St. and Selezniovskaya St. (2 blocks from my favorite banya, in fact), and the fact that a vicious thunderstorm has just broken and all of the passers-by are sprinting for cover and hurriedly deploying umbrellas is doing nothing to dampen my summer spirits. I'm trying to take advantage of the free wi-fi to upload a bunch of photos for this blog and for my other neglected project, Moscow Graffiti. Probably I'll get the most recent ones up first, but hopefully I'll have time this summer to post some of the better photos from this spring as well, before I'm swallowed up by the demands of my first year of law school.
For now I just wanted to post a couple of photos from the Tashkent metro - the two which I had time to snap before being approached by a cop and told that photography in the metro is not allowed. Luckily, he was not in the mood to extort money from a guest, so he told me that while some of his colleagues might have berated me (he used the Russian word rugat' - the conversation took place in Russian, and I identified myself as being "from Moscow," as I did in many instances on the trip), he wasn't going to do that, and let me go on my way. 
