Dear all,
this blog is my poor attempt of putting my
impressions and experiences of living in Uzbekistan into words, as well as
serves the purpose to give my friends, family and all interested the
possibility to join me in my Uzbek adventures.
I hope that this blog will spark your interest in Uzbek (expat) life. I
haven’t really decided in which language to write this blog, but since I will
primarily interact with German (or Russian and Uzbek…) speakers here, I believe
my English will most likely deteriorate to some degree.. I guess depending on
my mood and the topic of my post I will choose the language.
I arrived in Tashkent, Uzbekistan safe and
sound after a fairly quiet flight with a layover in Istanbul. My future
roommate Ulrike (she’s an intern at the Goethe Institut) had agreed to pick me
up from the airport and took me to our lovely but slightly trashy granny-style
apartment. The apartment’s “granniness” is not so much present in flowery
wallpapers but rather in the furniture as well as all sorts of china and
useless object standing and hanging around. Drawers are filled with trash
covered in dust that the owners haven’t touched for years. I had to remove some
of that stuff in my room, I was pretty sure it would have given me nightmares…
Arriving in Tashkent isn’t easy, as the
authorities try to make your first day as horrible as possible. Luckily Ulrike
and one of the German lecturers from my University stood by my side to help me
survive this day of hell. First you need all sorts of letters and confirmations
and contracts from your workplace which they should have prepared but which
they hadn’t even though they knew for months that you are coming. So, you sit
around and wait. Then, you have to communicate to your landlord with your hand
and feet that he (and his wife!...WHY) have to accompany you to the
registration office (OVIR) for no obvious reason. Then you have to find the
OVIR (we got lost). At the OVIR, you have to wait for the man from the
International Office (who does neither speak German nor English and who was late) to bring the
documents and THEN you have to explain to the impatient landlord
why you have to wait for the university guy with the documents. This situation obviously
inspired this blog’s title, as communicating with absolute basics is the only
possible way (better than nothing I guess…). Being at the registration office
involves signing a document you don’t understand, paying 100$ and people
dragging your poor, sleepwalking self from one room to the other in a building
that looks close to being knocked down every second (okay, it wasn’t THAT bad..but
still, pretty bad).
This obviously sounds like a terrible first
day, but I had a very warm welcome and a great first meal of the Uzbek national
meal plov which made up for the rest.
It’s difficult to put everything I have seen and hear into words, particularly
because people tell you a lot about Uzbek life and people’s mentality. I don’t
really know yet what to do with this information because I have just arrived
and absolutely everything to me is new. I think I will share these things along
the way as I make my own experiences related to them rather than passing on
information without knowing if it is true.
So far Tashkent seems like an interesting city
on the threshold between orient and soviet ways of living which is reflected in
the way people dress, food, how streets are organized as well as in which
language they speak. While I find Tashkent fascinating so far, it does seem
that the city’s infrastructure makes it a little difficult to achieve things.
There is a metro (which I haven’t tried yet cause I don’t really have a
passport at the moment due to registration procedures) but a lot of my colleagues
take (inofficial) taxis to their workplaces every day because the city isn’t
really built for pedestrians and because the metro stops still seem ages away
from the places you are trying to get to. Streets are enormously long and roads
are wide, which makes it hard for me to gain a sense of orientation because all
the streets look (more or less) the same and because Tashkent has a reputation
of being a centreless city (which is kind of true despite Karimov’s attempts to
change that).
The difficulty of achieving what you want is
not only found in the way the city is organized but also in the way people are –
communication is hard, particularly if you don’t speak the language. I am
writing this on day 4 of my stay here and I guess I am lucky that I am fairly
easygoing, though I find it quite annoying that I still don’t know what, where
and whom I am going to teach cause I still haven’t met the dean of the German
department. We were supposed to be introduced this morning, but he wasn’t in
his office and didn’t show up even after a couple of hours of waiting around. I guess a good advice to take would be: Be
persistent. This proved to be helpful in the case of our grumpy landlord. First,
he didn’t have a second set of keys for me and only agreed to get one after we
had asked for it like 5 times. Then, my room was initially locked and even
though he knew that I was coming for over a month, he said that he couldn’t
open it up just yet because it was still filled with (even more) trash. We were
persistent, so at least he got his wife to throw out the trash so that I could
have a bed to sleep in. When we got home from a little sightseeing tour in
Tashkent on Saturday, our apartment smelled of gas. We called him immediately
but he didn’t show up for over 2 hours, and then said that the technician would
check the stove the next morning 9am. The technician rang at our door about an
hour later the same day, said that everything was fine, and left. It still
smelled of gas. Another technician came the next day, also said it was okay,
and it still smelled of gas. We were about to call our landlord again, but he
showed up unannounced and was able to fix our gas problem after two technicians
had a look at it. Well, our apartment smells okay now.. because we were
persistent!
Surviving here without a word of Russian is
pretty much impossible, so far I think I am at least able to take a cab on my
own as well as do some shopping, but communicating with the technicians was an
absolute nightmare. Ulrike and I looked up random words in Russian like “stove”,
“smell”, “gas”, “to turn off”, but they would just keep on talking normal speed
so that we didn’t have any other choice but to call somebody who would
translate their “wordsalads” for us. I guess not being able to communicate is
the kind of experience my coordinator from back home wants me to make so that I
can understand what I feels like to live in a country without speaking the
language at all (“Hello what’s your name” doesn’t count). It
really isn’t pretty but, if you have a roommate to share your misery with, sometimes pretty funny :)
I am
very curious to explore the university and the city a little bit more. So far,
everyone I have met (mostly Germans) has been very welcoming and helpful and I
can’t wait to see more of this place :)
At this point I would like to note a couple of conversations
that kept me in stitches. Not sure if this is funny for people who weren’t part
of the conversation, but I guess this is just for me to make sure I don't forget it:
1) We live near a park named after Bobur. I
asked Nodi, an Uzbek guy learning German, who Bobur was, and his answer was: “I
think he was a scientologist and a king”…he meant scientist.
2) A Swiss guy named Mario does boxing and told
us that he was boxing with one of Nodi’s colleagues (I think). Nodi
asked: Hast du die auch schon geschleckt? … he meant “geschlagen”.
3) Apparently Russians/Uzbeks have the
perception that Germans have a very bad style when it comes to clothes. A woman
asked another woman at the Goethe Institut “Is there a reason why you are
dressing so carelessly or have you lived in Germany for a little while?”
(something like that, I can’t remember the exact quotation)…very charming
indeed!
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