The wonders of travel: spend 9 minutes in the surprising city of Tashkent, Uzbekistan

Visiting new places inspires wonder by giving us fresh perspectives on daily life (among other reasons). Join me for a few minutes in Tashkent and learn some things that may surprise you about this city that you probably don’t know much about.

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Uzbekistan Travel

Music: Jens East — Daybreak (ft. Henk) www.soundcloud.com/jenseast
Licence: Creative Commons Attribution V4.0

Transcription (remember, this is a direct transcription of what I said and is not actually how I write!</span):

Welcome to Nine Minutes of Wonder. I’m Betsy Hedberg. I hope this podcast will help you rekindle your sense of wonder for this awe-inspiring world. If you like what you hear in the next few minutes, please subscribe and share.

Hi there. A couple things about this episode. I am not recording on my usual equipment, and there’s a little extra background noise, so please forgive me for that.

Also, I needed to mention that the country I’m talking about and the country I’m traveling in, Uzbekistan, is not a part of Russia. Of course, the Soviet Union no longer exists, and Uzbekistan became an independent country in 1991, right after the Soviet Union collapsed.

Okay, enjoy the rest of the program.

[bird sounds]

That loud flock of birds is not the sound I expected to hear outside of my hotel in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, but that is what I heard every morning and every evening, right after sunset. And you could probably also hear the city noises and the road noises, I think the ambulance, for example.

So today I want to talk about my trip and just give you a few of the things that have inspired wonder in me. I’ve been fascinated with this country for several years and decided that this was the time I was going to go.

One of the things that I find inspiring about travel is going to places that are away from my center of the universe to other people’s centers of their universes. So going someplace and looking around and realizing that everybody else is just living their normal lives here and I’m the one who’s out of place — somehow that is really cool to me. It’s really exciting because it helps me put my life in perspective and remember that all the things that happen at my home are not the center of the universe.

So I’m here in Uzbekistan in a place that honestly most people where I come from have either never heard of or have only vaguely heard of, and it’s definitely not the center of their universe. But all of the people here have heard of my native country, so it’s kind of lopsided. 25% of Americans, though, have never heard of Uzbekistan, and, honestly, I used to be a geography teacher in the United States and so I actually think that 25% is pretty good based on some of what I saw as a geography teacher in the United States.

So a lot of tourists are coming here these days to see the magnificent architecture, and I will talk about that in my next episode hopefully in a couple days. But for me, I wanted to see all of that really badly but I also just had this burning curiosity to see what it looked like here. Like I had no idea really, because you only see the photos of the grand sites like the beautiful architecture in Samarkand, but you don’t really see what’s around the corner from those sites and just what it looks like here.

So I want to tell you just a few facts and observations that I’ve made about the capital city, Tashkent.

First of all it’s very green. That surprised me a lot because I know that this country has a lot of desert, yet that part of the country is not deserty.

In fact it’s got a lot of mature trees with a lot of birds, as you heard. And I asked my tour guide about this, and he said it’s all from the Soviet influence. So I grew up learning about the horrors of the Soviet Union, and I am not here to diminish the horrors — there were many of them — but I also grew up to believe that the horrors were so horrible that they didn’t even have nice spaces and they didn’t have parks and gardens, and that’s actually not true and I’m seeing the results of that when I’m here.

So it’s a city with a lot of walking paths with mature trees and some parks that have really tall trees, and it’s quite green, and I was really impressed with that.

The second thing I learned is how beautiful the metro or subway stations are. There’s one called the Cosmonaut, which has beautiful drawings (that are colored) of some of the Russian cosmonauts. There’s one called the Cotton Station. Cotton is the major crop and has been for a long time in Uzbekistan, so it honors cotton. It has these lamps that are shaped like cotton bolls, and many others, and actually Tashkent is famous for its subway stations. I’ll share a link to some of the photos in the notes here.

And then also there’s construction everywhere. The city is really booming and growing and developing, and they’re building a lot of buildings all over the place, and when I when I looked around, you know, I realized it doesn’t even look that different in some ways from where I live in Portugal. The main difference is that the roads are really wide.

It’s another product of the Soviet era. In 1966 Tashkent was leveled by an earthquake, and the Soviet government rebuilt the city in about three years and made these really broad streets and created the foundations for what exists and continues to grow today.

The other thing I noticed were a lot of English language schools. There were a lot of schools that said language schools in general, but English is the most popular language from what I can tell. And I walked by an English school. It was huge. It took up a whole city block, and in the early evening it was filled with young people taking classes in a bunch of different classrooms that faced the street.

So people are really trying to learn English because they know it’s the international language and it’s also a very young population. 30 percent of people in this country are under the age of 14. I think that’s kind of incredible, but honestly when I’ve walked around Tashkent I felt like the only middle-aged person. Everybody looks really young.

So these are some of the things that have helped me see what the center of the universe is like for people who live here, and I find that really cool, again because why not step into somebody else’s shoes even though I really can’t? Of course I’m an outsider. I’m just a tourist, but it’s really interesting to go someplace where you have no idea what to expect and then to just look around and take it all in, and the world is so very interesting!

So next time I’m going to talk a little bit about some of the things that I have seen in Samarkand. So talk to you then.

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