Busy Day, Late Night

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I walked around our hotel early this morning and saw a male Indian golden oriole! They’re usually pretty elusive. We heard one the other day and were determined to see it but we only caught a quick glimpse before it flew off. So I was lucky today and he sat still long enough for me to manage a photo through my binoculars! We left the mountains and headed back to Tashkent. Our driver played The Bee Gees the whole way, and not just their greatest hits either but some deep cuts. In Tashkent we went back to the bazaar where we went on our first day here. It was a huge disorienting culture shock then because we had just stepped off a 14 hour flight with no sleep into a totally different world. So this time we felt like we had a better sense of what was going on. We each got a watch from the Soviet era. Will have to look up details on them later as it’s all in Russian. We stopped at a somsa place outside the bazaar. They’re baked on the inside of a tall conical oven with a wood fire on the bottom. You can see the dark spots on the inside of the clay oven where they stick on the wall. I didn’t get it in the picture but there’s a long iron tool with a scraping/scooping shape on the end that they use to reach down and scrape them off. We headed back to the train station where we had stored our luggage and got ready to board the bullet train. It only took about 2 hours to get to Samarkand, which is about as far from Tashkent as Boston is from NYC. It is a very late night for us since we got to Samarkand around 10:15. Normally I’ve been going to bed around 8:30! We got some mulberries at the bazaar and they miraculously made it the whole day without getting smooshed so they made the perfect midnight snack.

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