2.02 PCT-SovHos

Let me explain how the outskirts of Tashkent are laid out. At least in my direction. I am about 20 minutes out side of Tashkent, center. So even though what I describe sounds very village like (and that it is) keep in mind that, really, I haven't seen anything yet. The rural villages are miles and miles away from the next village over or closest town. But now, I'm in a suburb. I live in a village of about 150 people. It has a two small stores (very much like wild wild west general stores, to give you an idea), a cafe (that only the men use, we are told), a bus/taxi stop (where the drivers try to charge us, the Americans, 2x as much for a taxi to the main road where we catch the bus to other PC sites or to our classes. Not to worry. For one, a 5 minute taxi ride is .15c and expensive is .20c and secondly, we say "tis, tis, tis (literally making that noise)." "Yoke (no)!" and they eventually come down or we wait for the crapy bus because once you say ok one time to a high rate, you'll never get them down again.), and then there are a bunch of houses that look like total shacks from the outside but most of them, some of them, are quite nice inside. Still, a lot of them have outhouses or outside showers or toilets and none have a great deal of furniture. I think that may be a cultural thing though, siting on the floor, not having decoration except a lot of very elaborate wall painting which I absolutely fell in love with. And rugs on the walls, on the floors. Everywhere. See pics of my room and Krista's (a fellow volunteer in my town.) whole house. Her house is courtyard style, as are a lot of homes. Very Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon like (sorry, that was a very American thing to say.). It is very impressive, in a way. The detail to the painting of the walls, the ceilings, inside and on the outside ceiling in the courtyard is fabulous. Anyways, check out the pics. It is so strange that the houses look really scary from the outside and then they are quite clean and nice inside. So strange to me as an American. Used to manicured lawns and special attention paid to what the outside of our houses look like. Here, there's chickens in the yard, stray dogs running around yapping at your heals, mud up to your eyeballs during the wet season (which is NOW. It rains or snows EVERYday.). Anyways, look at the pics named SavHos, pics of my town. Check it.
By the way, here is a story for you. Keep in mind, from the beginning we were told that the name of our village was named Yangyo (lets call it) but all four of us here in the village had our families either not recognize the name or didn't understand what we were talking about when we said Yangyo. We thought that was strange but hey. So, Tuesday, the first day that we went to another town for a teaching class, our language teacher showed us how to get there and then we said we could totally get ourselves back, no problem, for our language class in the afternoon. The way this works is that we take a bus from were we were for our teaching class back to the main road and then to the closest bus stop to our town on that road and then we get off and get a QUICK taxi to our village. You see where this is going. Yea. Well. First, we get off the bus, a little farther than where we caught it so we are a bit confused about exactly were we are. But we know we are close. So we see a girl who works for the PC, we tell her what's up, she doesn't recognize the name of our village and she is from the area, go figure, but she helps us get a taxi (she says let her help us, since we are American, they will charge a lot and then she can see if the taxi knows where this Yangyo is.) She hails a taxi, he knows where Yangyo is, its super pricey but at this point we say fine, we are already late. So we get in and right away, he turns the opposite direction from were we know our village is. I stupidly say, no, I think this may be right. And we say to the driver, "Yangyo? Yangyo?" and he just nods. Now, I don't know if it was just that we were secretly excited to be on a bit of adventure but we KNEW that the guy was not taking us to our village 10 minutes into this crazy ride but we just couldn't help but laugh at the absurdity of the whole thing. Dude drove us 20 miles away to a the CITY Yangyo and stops the car and says "Yangyo." So we get out, stunned at our stupidity of letting him drive us this far and get in another taxi to go back to exactly were we started, now 40 minutes ago and finally. finally find our way back to our village that we are not so sure is called Yangyo, AN HOUR AND A HALF late to our language class. Our language teacher said that our "community outreach adventure" was more of a lesson than she could have taught and in Uzbek, thats the way life goes. Come to find out. Our village was just recently, the first of the year, renamed Yangyo village but absolutely no one knows this and so really, what the heck is the freaking point. They all know it by SovHos. So after living here for 4 days, we find out the name of our town is not Yangyo but SovHos. Well, not really but...everyone knows it as SovHos so that it is. What the?!!#@! you say. Yea. No wonder everyone is always late for everything. So, this is just another example of the crazy uzbek way of the land. Wacky. And so it goes...

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