Join Us for a Walk Down the Street

It's 4 am again and I am wide awake, learning how to upload YouTube videos and imbed them into Blogger--thank you, jet lag!

So I'm going to practice by taking you on a walk down the street from our hotel. Here are samosas being made in a tandoori oven (but they are called Samsa in Uzbekistan):

After they were removed, the second guy scraped the burned parts off, then the owner--a woman--offered us a fresh one to sample. We chose potato and onion (that detail is for EdmondsKindOfDay Maria, a person crazy for potatoes).

We read that you don't come to Uzbekistan for the food, but this potato onion Samsa made me think we did; I will happily devour these flaky, warm pillows for a month! We had just eaten lunch next door before this fresh, kind offer--shashlik (grilled meat) and a gorgeous beet/egg salad with shoestring potatoes on top:

I hate to leave the Samsa, but we need to move on. A few more blocks down this busy street we heard frantic yelling caused by a severe traffic jam; a bus was in the middle of the intersection and a plain clothed man was running around, gesturing wildly, directing traffic. 

This second practice video captures about 1/10th of the frenzy of what happened before, but we were too far away to get the real drama on film:

Yet further down the street, a carload of flour was stuck in the jam (I just hope the flour arrives to our Samsa makers in time for tomorrow morning.)

We ended up at the Khast Imam Complex, the religious and spiritual center of Tashkent's Old Town, but you aren't going to get any of those pictures for a few reasons: 1) You're going to get a lot of pictures of beautiful tiles and mosques as this journey takes shape, and 2) we were so jet lagged that I didn't really get great pictures, except of the Tourist Police.

We were trying to stay active until meeting our airplane friend for dinner, but I caved and had to go back to the hotel to rest. 

Here is walk number two--about three hours later--starting at the BeshQuozon Central Asian Pilaf Center, where they make the national dish, plov., for thousands each day. Plov is made of two main ingredients, rice and oil. It's best not to focus too much on the oil, although I am going to make you do that here:

Plov also contains chickpeas, meat, and vegetables, and it is quite good; however, I cannot happily eat this for a month. It is heavy and oily. Oily and heavy. 

This restaurant is enormous and has indoor and outdoor seating. The cooking area houses multiple cauldrons with plov masters at the helm.

This will give you a better idea of the vast cooking area, with our plane friend, Aaron:

Walking through this 10-acre restaurant you see nothing but people eating plates of plov, the simplest of menus.

I chose the beef/lamb classic combo:

I don't want to traumatize anyone, but the sliver of meat on the upper left is horse sausage. The little eggs are quail (my favorite, I ate these all the time in Vietnam).

I didn't eat the horse.

We walked for about an hour after dinner, here are some highlights:

An abandoned amusement park called "Tashkentland" -- a site begging for a photo shoot: 

And the biggest, sparkliest TV tower that looked like a space shuttle taking off:

And, okay, one shot of the roof tile work of the Islamic Civilization Center, the biggest museum in the world showcasing Islamic history,which just opened in the spring of 2026:

Here's the scope of it:

Speaking of Islam, one last note before attempting a little more sleep: when our plane landed in Tashkent and everyone was turning on their phones, I heard a few people playing Michigan's Senator-elect's victory speech, "My name is Abdulrahman Mohammed El-Sayed..."

Can you imagine the excitement of the Muslim world? I got to taste a bit of it up close, just when I thought I couldn't be more excited about what happened on Tuesday :)