Besh Yulduz
Ottilie's Tourist Arc
I’m worried that Samarkand life has made me soft.
The city is, in a word, comfortable. My apartment has a bathtub, and heated floors. So far it’s lacking in both mice AND large, strangely intelligent cockroaches. There’s only one very nice spider (who I’m leaving alone, provided he continues to mind his own business).1
I’m a seven minute walk from my work. I can order a taxi with my phone. Or food. Or I can check the weather.
As eternally entertaining as Urgench’s giant memorial of Jalal Al-Din Manguberdi atop his well-endowed horse was, it’s quite exciting to live in a city with… more than one statue.
I left all my coats and cozy clothes up in Urgench with a friend, so I visited the city recently—Samarkand was PERFECT jeans and shirt weather well through October, but every taxi driver tells me that it’s going to snow next week.
For nostalgia’s sake (and certainly not because I wasn’t sure what else to do) I took a walk along the main road, starting from the giant memorial statue of Jalal Al-Din Manguberdi atop his well-endowed horse to the technical university.
My walk took me past the electronics store beneath my apartment, where I once bought a small pair of wire snippers. I had an infection deep in my toenail at the time—caused, I assume, by one of the millions of grains of sand that I walked through every day rooting itself inside of my nail bed and growing like a pearl in an oyster.
Unable to handle the pressure of the pus and wary of the hospitals that seemed overly prone to prescribing “injections”, I performed the extraction myself with the snippers and some pliers that I sterilized over my gas stove. Worried that I would pass out from the pain and have to attempt the extraction a SECOND time, I went for the ripping-off-the-bandaid method as soon as I had a firm grip with the pliers and accidentally sent them flying across the room with the force of the pull. After I woke up, I limped my way to the nearest pharmacy to buy some of the antibiotics that are over-the-counter here.
There’s a pharmacy across the street from me in Samarkand, too. I went a week ago when I couldn’t kick a headache. “I have a pain… in my stomach.” I opted for Russian, pointing to my head to alleviate any confusion. The physician stares at me. “Oh, shoot. I mean I have a pain… in my… head.”
“A migraine, or just a normal headache? Or did you hit your head?” He asks, in English. “Sorry, your wording was just a little confusing. No offense.”
“Oh.” I say. “Just a normal headache.”
He grabs a box off the shelf and hands it to me. “You have a headache.” He says, slowly. “A headache. That’ll be 45,000 som.”
The adventures offered to me by the Khorezm Region were, perhaps, of a heartier sort. Rarely nowadays do I find myself getting attacked by a dog, or wandering around in a random neighborhood for hours with a dead phone.2
Anyone who knows anything will tell you that Khorezm region has the best Uzbek food in the country. And the best Uzbek dancing, the best Uzbek music, the best Uzbek alcohol, etc. The only drawback about the region is that it doesn’t have anything ELSE.
My one semblance of routine non-Uzbekness in Urgench was meeting the English Language Fellow (ELF) who lived next door at one of the 2 cafes in town that served European style food, and then going to his place to eat snacks and watch a TV show in English.
I’m friends with the ELF in Samarkand too, but we don’t have to search hard to find non-Uzbek food. We could go to a new restaurant every week and still take ages to run out of new places.
So we do!
The Samarkand ELF is like my perfect narrative foil—quiet to my loud, light to my dark chocolate preference, no-coffee to my coffee, etc. Most importantly, she’s an excellent documentarian, as opposed to me and my tendencies to just kind of let everything fade into oblivion (oops! trying to do better with that!)
She’s taken to leaving reviews of the new restaurants that we go to—often with pictures of me.
I do miss the adrenaline thrills of Urgench. And of course, nothing in Samarkand can quite measure up to Urgench’s giant Jalal al-Din Manguberni and his well-endowed horse (most of the horse statues here aren’t even HALF the size 🙄)
But it’s pretty nice to live in a city with an Indian restaurant.
Hannah's Reviews, if you want to see more.
There might be more than one spider. But I’ve only ever SEEN one spider at once, so I’m hoping it’s a singular and very active one.
Just kidding, that second one still happens all the time. Old habits.
Glad Samarkand is more cozy! Are there any interesting liquors or liqueurs special to Uzbekistan?