La Gringa y Su Esposo: Bukhara

Posting from a borrowed laptop in Tashkent.

Covered bazaars in Bukhara - a trading haven for over a millennium.

Apr 4-7, 9-11

A ninety minute bullet train ride took us to Bukhara, another stop along the Silk Road. We made it to our B&B near Lyab-i-Hauz, a square with a pool that’s been in use for hundreds of years, and is still hopping to this day. On seeing our passports, our hotel owner mentioned he had recently returned from an eighteen month management internship in NYC with his wife and three kids. He enjoyed it but was glad to be back home, the crowded streets of New York were stressful compared with Bukhara’s more relaxed atmosphere. His family is Tajik, highlighting the fact that the borders drawn around the central Asian countries were somewhat arbitrary.

We spent a day touring the city, visiting (yet) more beautiful blue tiled madrasas. One unique feature is the Kalon minaret, built in 1127 and was once the tallest building in Central Asia (150’ tall). They would execute people who had fallen on the wrong side of the Emir by throwing them off the top. It so awed the ransacking Genghis Khan that he spared it while razing the city in the 1200s. It’d be a shame to give up a good execution method! Russian artillery later left several marks that were repaired in lighter colored stone. We stopped by the Zindon (jail) to see the infamous “bug pit” where two British envoys were imprisoned for years before being publicly beheaded by the paranoid Emir in the 1800s, when each city in the region was the headquarters of a local kingdom. The local rulers were rightfully worried about British and Russian designs on the region, but were pretty ruthless nonetheless.

A long fall.

As in Samarkand the madrasas have been mostly filled with merchants selling local wares. My favorite part of shopping in Bukhara was the omnipresent antiques! So cool! There were a ton of old copper teapots, water pitchers, and serving trays, probably hundreds of years old. I wanted to buy them all. Unfortunately, the reason there’s such a glut of them is that nothing older than 50 years old is allowed to be exported from Uzbekistan - customs detains it. I talked to the antiques certifier dude several times trying to convince him to give me a cert that the antiques I wanted were indeed not antique, but to no avail. Alas.

We headed out for a few nights to Sentyab for some hiking, but returned to Bukhara to stay a few more nights in a converted madrasa. The hotel was a lovely mix of old decor (antiques aplenty…) and nice soft beds. Unfortunately while in Sentyab our laptop had kicked the bucket, so we spent most of the morning wandering the city in search of tools and repair shops. We managed to find a small screwdriver in an electronics shop to take it apart and unplug the battery, to no avail. We were then pointed to the shop worker’s brother nearby, so we hopped on a bus and ended up at a pc gaming cafe. Eventually an older guy with a full repair shop pulled out a multimeter and started assessing voltage and continuity across the motherboard, but again no luck. At least it’s still under warranty, so Asus helpfully offered to let us ship it to get repaired...in the US. Sigh.