Deep Cold and a Visit to Tashkent

Getting in a short burst of outdoor time one day

during the cold snap.  Our neighborhood, the

19th Microdistrict, is in the background.

Happy new year to my readers!  It's been a cold one so far in Central Asia.  Winters in Khujand are typically much milder than what I'm used to in the northeastern US.  While January is the coldest time of year, temperatures here usually don't dip much below freezing, even for lows at night.  So far though, 2023 has been pretty different: We're just emerging from a vicious cold snap that brought nine straight days of sub-freezing weather, including a particularly brutal couple of days flirting with zero Fahrenheit.  It was the coldest weather in the living memory of most people.  To put things in perspective, the coldest it got last year was 24 degrees and there was a five-day stretch during this cold spell when it never got warmer than that!  

Nothing here is built to endure extreme cold like this.  Water pipes aren't insulated or buried that deep, if at all.  Buildings aren't insulated.  Central heating doesn't exist.  It's all made Anna and I appreciate the comforts of our modern apartment more than ever before, with heavy floor-to-ceiling curtains, and, most luxurious of all, heated floorboards.  While our apartment was nice and warm, the classrooms in the language center I teach at were about 40 degrees!  I was teaching in my hat and jacket and multiple layers of clothing.  Schools themselves closed.  Students were already on a winter break when the cold hit, but the federal government extended the break two different times on account of the cold.  Slowly, the weather has returned to normal.  

In Tashkent with a statue of Alisher Navoiy, a 15th-century
man most famous for his poetry.  Navoiy is widely
celebrated and commemorated across Uzbekistan.

Just before the cold came, Anna and I traveled to Tashkent for a long weekend.  Tashkent is the capital of Uzbekistan and the largest city in Central Asia.  With about three million people, it's roughly the size of Chicago.  Tashkent is this region's travel hub, so it's a likely destination for anyone scheming about their own adventures in this part of the world.  Traveling there took us about five hours from Khujand, door to door.  We took a shared taxi from Khujand to the border and a different one on the Uzbek side on to Tashkent.  There's a bus, but it's not running much now during the winter and wasn't on our days of travel.  So taxis it was.  It all went well--shared taxis are one of the quintessential bargaining experiences here--and we felt good about the prices we negotiated.  Crossing the border took us about a half hour each way but went smoothly both times.  Between getting taxis and crossing the border, we were a little anxious about our journey beforehand.  It was great to get it done and feel good about how it went.

Tashkent is a diverse, cosmopolitan city.  We had loose ideas about visiting some museums, however we ended up doing lots of walking.  In contrast to the imminent arctic blast, the weather for our trip was quite balmy, with highs in the 50s.  As we walked and walked, we sought out tastes we can't find here in Tajikistan, which, for all of its riches, is sorely lacking for gastric variety.  We made some good finds, including great Lebanese and decent American-style craft beer.  Anna and I fell in love New York and there's always a place in each of our hearts for urban exploring.  Tashkent was new but familiar in all of the right ways.  We wandered through various neighborhoods, window-shopped and actual shopped, went to a movie--Avatar 2, in Russian--and rode the Tashkent subway, noted its for elaborate station designs.  Here's an example, from the station "Cosmonaut":  

"Cosmonaut" commemorates various Soviets associated with space travel, such as, here, Valentina Tereshkova, the first woman in space.  She flew solo on Vostok 6, a nearly three-day mission in 1963.

We'll be going back to Tashkent for sure and also plan to see more of Uzbekistan beyond the city.  In March we have plans to visit Bukhara and Samarkand, major Silk Road tourism spots.

Overall, winter has been a bit challenging without the comforts of family and familiar diversions.  That cold blast didn't help.  We did enjoy some more downtime in recent weeks though.  Anna had some time off from the university and we both took time off from our respective teaching at the American Space.  We are eager for spring!  If the weather does what it's supposed to it shouldn't be too far off either.