[mappress]
After having breakfast at the hostel, walked to the ancient Samarkand site called Afrosiab, northeast of the Bazaar. It’s a 2.2 sq km site and there is a museum at the site.

Walked another 1km to Ulugbek Observatory.

A local wedding. Uzbeks and Tajiks marry pretty early, it’s not uncommon to see married couples who are just 18 years old.

So far in Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the local people I met will usually ask if I am married and looked surprise that I wasn’t because the marrying age here is quite young.

Uzbek Kids

I spent a lot of time looking for Plov for dinner yesterday and couldn’t find it. So that’s my mission for lunch today. (4000 Soms~USD$2).

The only shopping mall I found.

Took a Marshrutka to the train station and then got a 5pm train ticket (18,000 Som~USD$9, 300km 3.5 hours ride) to Tashkent.

Arrived at Tashkent around 8.30pm and took the metro to Gafur Gulom stop which is at the north west part of the city. Tashkent is the only city in Central Asia with a metro system and the architecture inside each station is different and very pretty. Every metro station has many police and since I have 2 backpacks, they knew I was a tourist and asked for my passport and questioned me. Being a police is a boring job in Uzbekistan. There are so many police everywhere and they just stand at the same spot the whole day without doing much. Found Hotel Hadra and it’s the cheapest hotel in the guide book and cost 13,000 Som~ USD$6.50 but it’s dirty and empty.

Later someone told me that the building is also used as a brothel.

Samarkand is one of Central Asia’s oldest settlement. Since it’s located right in the middle of the crossroads leading to China, India and Persia. The city had a few rulers such as the Turks, Arabs, Persians, Mongols. It was destroyed by Genghis Khan in 1220 but then Timur decided to make Samarkand his capital and built many nice buildings in Samarkand.
In Bukhara and Samarkand, there are many Tajiks and most people here speak Tajiks, which is a language similar to Farsi instead of Uzbeks. During the Soviet Union times, Russian is the official language so even though not everyone speak Uzbeks in Uzbekistan but most people do speak Russian.

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