Top Ten electricity substations of Central Asia

With the sheer vastness of the travel blogging world it seems incredible that there remains a subject yet to be celebrated for all the richness it truly deserves. Thus I hereby right the wrong of that criminally neglected, artistic treasure that is the electricity substation. I can only hope that others take up the baton in promoting the profoundly inspiring, cultural genius represented in these creations from other parts of the world. 10. Azerbaijan The lush patina of rust off…

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The New (and rather short) Central Asian Encyclopedia

As the popularity of the region increases it has become apparent that the guidebooks don’t always give you a complete picture of the region’s culture. Hence I would like to present some updates and revisions of relevant terminology. Circus We all know the circus comes in a tent, so with a region dominated by nomadic culture, where the tent like yurt has for centuries been the preferred form of accommodation, it seems entirely logical that the circus would be housed…

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The splendour falls an apartment walls and Soviet concrete old in story

We have an image of the Soviet city as an unremittingly dull, social wasteland of stained concrete and cheerless vistas but this is further from reality than you might imagine, certainly in Central Asia. For a start they often have far more trees than many European capitals and once the green of spring has arrived they do a lot to mask those architectural sins that do exist. The West was hardly short on post-war, faceless concrete monstrosities, so it would…

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Where’s the Islam Mr Karimov?

A typical lunchtime scene in Uzbekistan: a humble cafe, four men sit round a cheaply laminated table, in front of them a full bottle of vodka and some small, dainty, chipped bowls, commonly used for drinking tea. The first round is poured out and the earnest work of drinking begins. By the hour mark things descend into slumps, slurs, blurs and increasingly vague gesturing, the jolly affirmation of male bonding familiar to many of us from other cultures. But, this…

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Conversation with a taxi driver

What follows is an approximation of an exchange I had with a taxi driver outside Tashkent airport in Uzbekistan after I had already said no to a dozen other taxi drivers, but these details are almost irrelevant as other travellers on a tight budget will be familiar with all the salient points regardless of the country. “Taxi”. “No thanks I am getting the bus”. “I give you good price”. “I am getting the bus”. “I know good guest house”. “I…

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The most important book in the world?

The title may make a grand claim, so I had best state my case clearly. Looking at the picture below you may have rightly assumed it to be a Quran, but I am not making a case for the Quran in itself, although a reasonable argument could be made. If we are just talking about books as defined by their title, the competition is probably down to a three-way race between the Quran, The Bible and the Torah. Judaism may…

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Town on the edge of nowhere

On a wall in the Savitsky Museum of Art in Nukus, NW Uzbekistan, hangs a modest landscape painting from 1976 depicting the Moynaq fish canning factory. The factory itself is a relatively unobtrusive part of the scene and probably served more as a means of keeping the authorities from shipping the artist off to the gulag for the crime of rejecting the absurd values of Soviet Realism, as had happened to others. Art could not function as a means of…

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Uzbekistan: what did you learn at school?

In the golden age of education, that some politicians would still like us to return to, we were told that Europeans, preferably British, discovered everywhere, Europeans invented just about anything of any use and made the important scientific breakthroughs. When the rest of the world was mentioned it was likely to be with reference to what a marvellous job we had done bringing our enlightened values to their barbarian darkness. Of course I am being a tad facetious but it’s…

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Equestrian hardcore in Uzbekistan

If you thought that equestrian sports were for upper class twits and the nearest the working classes should get to them is putting a tenner on the 3 30 at Chepstow then you ought to get yourself to Central Asia. Here in Uzbekistan, kupkari, the local variant of the traditional, regional game more commonly known as Buzkashi, is a sport for real men, on the kind of tough horses, which, if in England, would probably call your horse a poof,…

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