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Published: October 3rd 2008
We arrived into Tashkent after a pretty hectic day crossing the Kazakh/Uzbek border by foot. The border gaurds were seemingly pleasant on the outside, laughing and joking with us but were less amused when they looked through my bag for "guns and "narcotics"( or more likely some petty cash which they could pilfer for their own added tax) and all they found were postcards of Nantwich and Newark. I proceeded to tell them these were pictures our home towns and they could keep them as a gift if they liked, a momento of our impromtu meeting, unsurprisingly they didn't keep them and when they realised that money was not going to be found let us through!
Tashkent is a city spreadover a large area, with both old ancient parts such as the mosques and newer soviet style concrete parades and monuments. The roads are wide and rather perilous to cross, we played "dodge the traffic" as well our ongoing Uzbek game "dodge the police"(or as lucy called it Pacman) for three days whilst walking around!
The police here in this police state are naturally everywhere and are well renound for their strict policing, especially with tourists with ridiculous beards, so we
were constantly on look out and veered away from the guys in green whenever we could!
Whilst we were here, we visited the Chorsu bazaar in the old town, a neverending maze of vendors selling everything from pomegranates to pepper pots, brushes to bicycle tyres all of course at a very good price for you sir! We also visited some of the parks, monuments, mosques and russian orthodox cathedral as well as the Kazakh embassy for yet another visa.
At night we dined in a few of Tashkents excellent restaurants including wonderful Korean (there is a large ethnic korean population here) and some excellent shasklyk and local Weissbeer in a brewery set up by german monks some 500 years ago! Paying for the bill is always a joke though as the highest denomination note is 1000 Uzbek som, worth about 45p!, its great for a game of poker but not so when you almost need a carrier bag to carry the stuff!
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