Please excuse the delays between these posts, I’m technically homeless (thanks to the government who have denied me all benefits) and I am trying to look for a job and a new home in a new country, as well as come up with my research proposal for my M.Phil. It’s difficult.

But Samarqand! As I said before, Samarqand wasn’t the dream that I expected, however, it was majestic nonetheless. We took a shared, long-distance taxi from Tashkent, which was a total luxury but yet only cost about $15 each. The spaces between villages seemed so Soviet and it was often hard to remember we were in Central Asia.

When we neared Samarqand I looked to my right and saw a range of mountains (giant hills?) which suddenly pulled me straight back into Andrei Platonov’s Soul, in particular the village scene at the end of the book. The sharp pull was powerful and remarkable, but in some ways characteristic of my trip: it choked me with memories that I’m not entirely sure were mine. There was always so much textual association swirling around the dust and the people and the land before me, always pulling me somewhere, and always further in rather than away.

After we had arrived and found our home-stay (an informal and cheaper kind of hotel), it was early evening and we walked towards what I assumed was the Registan. (I was the monument guide, C the overall guide.) I was humbled by the size and the beauty but kept thinking to myself that it was smaller than I imagined, more ramshackle, less than what I was expecting. Later that night in the darkness as we searched for food, we stumbled upon the actual Registan, gasped and realised that I was a moron. What we had looked at earlier had actually been the Bibi Khanom mosque!

Below are some photos of the Bibi Khanom mosque, but as I said before, none of them are very good. I wasn’t able to capture the colour nor the scale of it all, and certainly all the feeling is gone. But… maybe you will get a small sense anyway.
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April 29th, 2009 | Tags: architecture, asia, fauxtoes, Islam, mosques, pictures, samarkand, samarqand, tiles, tourism, travel | Category: Shitey England, Uzbekistan | Comments (3)

Since airports look the same the world over, I only realised I was outside of Europe when I stepped off the plane and walked through some doors and into a cloud of cigarette smoke. I’d forgotten how disgusting it smells when trapped inside and even though I’m fundamentally against all those anti-smoking bills, I secretly am really glad that I don’t have to smell that any more.

The second thing I noticed was that the airport security were even more officious than the moody bastard in the London embassy. The third thing was that women with giant prams are a nightmare the world over and that the Uzbek rule seemed to be that they could jump any queue they wanted, when they wanted, and we would be all happy to let them do so. When in Rome and all that.

Next came the Tashkent streets - my how wide you are - and the overwhelming sense of space which is utterly absent from London and so was very well received. Tiny cars, new Daewoos and old Ladas, darted around whilst enormous Soviet style buildings glowered over us in the night.

I couldn’t sleep that night, nor the next, possibly because of jet lag which is always a beast when travelling east, or (more likely), possibly it was due to the fact that the old Soviet building was bugged by the secret police and I was resisting the mind-control programming they do to you when you rest at night. What was that humming..?

But look at that cash! I brought dollars with me and we went to the bazaar to change them the next day. I picked up my little Art Star wallet that eb gave me moons ago and C looked at it and laughed. ‘Bring a bag’, she said. Now I know when everyone in Uzbekistan walks around with a plastic carrier bag - it’s the only thing large enough to function as a wallet. The stack in the picture is around $200 worth of sum and each note is worth 500 sum. Things cost (tens of) thousands of sum and between 15,000 to 18,000 sum (depending upon where you get it changed) equals $10.

Overall, I had a wonderful time and would certainly go back if it were possible. However, like many places (including the UK), the government is becoming more repressive, so I am not sure how easy it would be to go back since VISAs can be hard to obtain.

It’s a strange place where to talk politics (in the broadest sense imaginable) you should turn off your cell phone and take out the sim card and the battery, and still then, it is only safe to talk amongst family. As a tourist I was to register every day with the authorities so they would know where I was, although in practise the hotel does this for you. It was odd to give up my passport for days at a time in a foreign place to people whose language I could not speak. But I’d rather the hotel manager deal with the police than I: they know what to say, how exactly to (not) meet the eye. Plus I look weard and would easily attract negative attention from the police.

Despite knowing it was once colonised by the Soviets, I didn’t expect it to be so Russian. Russian is the lingua franca and it’s the language the elite are educated in, rather than Uzbek or Tajik or what have you. I was quite shocked by that, since I had assumed that there would be an outright rejection of the former coloniser once independence had been achieved, but that did not seem to be the case at all. So much of the place - especially the buildings (I refuse to call those hideous boxes architecture) in the new parts of the cities - was Soviet and most of the signage was in Cyrillic. Also, on the roads between cities were giant monuments erected to proclaim Soviet power.

The metro in Tashkent is pretty fantastic though. Mood lighting and sculptures - reminiscent of both Ayn Rand and Art Deco - which for some reason invites a gentle mockery, the kind that intimates can do to one another, since it’s all in and out of love. The clocks count up from the last train, rather than down to the next and the guards, again, are officious.

I did not, alas, make it to Khiva and only saw Samarqand and Bukhara. To go to Khiva meant we would have to cut everything short and fine and so we decided to save it for another time. (There will be another time!) I didn’t want to ram everything in and have some weard, speeded up, Protestant experience of Central Asia, so we decided to be languid and slow and take things in. Oh, I also happily let go because we swapped Khiva for a Bactrian camel ride in the Kyzyl Kum desert with some Kazakh nomads. (PS: Yurts stink.)

I did take photos, but unfortunately none of them came out very good. My old digital camera is, well, old, and has been dropped too many times to take very good pictures. I took a film camera too, but that broke almost immediately. If you click below, you will see a few photos and I’ll write at least two more entries with other photos as well. However, don’t expect much; I am disappointed with all of them since they do not convey the size, splendour, scope or colour of anything. And certainly none of them contain the spirit.

The only obvious solution here is to go visit yourself.

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April 14th, 2009 | Tags: asia, exploration, fauxtoes, pictures, police, tashkent, tourism, travel | Category: Shitey England, Uzbekistan | Leave a comment

I went to Uzbekistan because of Amin Maalouf. I first read his Samarkand about 5 years ago when I was living in France; it captivated me and if I imagine myself as a being with worlds turning around me, the world the book created has lived - spinning, alive and warm - just above my head, in a centre-right position above my skull. I can touch it and I can taste it, I can see it and I can know it, yet I can’t go in unless I read the book. But let there be no mistake: I know it, it’s real, I belong to it - it is a portal through which I can slip.

As a world, it’s not alone. It is nourished by the history classes I took at SOAS and the text books I still read. It’s nourished by the poetry of Hafez, Mowlana, Khayyam and ‘Attar; it’s fed and kept company by a heart that yearns for colour but is trapped in a gray, dead world - a heart that dreams of escape and plans.

I imagined that everything would change when I saw Samarqand. I imagined that the world would become bigger and more real and I hoped that I would be able to slip though that portal more often and without picking up the book, but that’s not quite what happened.

Samarqand is beautiful, but Bukhara is a wound. No, that’s not quite right either. Samarqand is majestic, but Bukhara has a wind that blows dust across the spirit, tugging gently at old wounds, making everything harder again: open, fresh, clean. And so the tears come every time I think of anything worth remembering and everything worth forgetting.

I wanted to say that I don’t even know if that wind is real, but I know it is. It carries with it the river and how else can I explain the way my skin felt and how much I knew? The wind is real and with the dust it carries, it cleanses, washes clean, comforts; there is a new portal now.

Samarqand is breathtaking, but when I stepped out into the old city of Bukhara and I met that wind and the river, a veil was lifted and I felt safe. That river is beyond time, or maybe it is time, and there is a dervish and he is washing his arms and his face in the water and he turns to me and he smiles with his eyes. The first stage is now completed.

And so there is a new portal just in front of my heart and in it is the river and it flows. It is a cup from which my heart can drink and any time I want, I can just reach in and wash my arms and my face. I can cup the water in my hands and slowly bring it to my face and I can wash and keep washing until I’ve gotten back to the place I want to be. Should have been. And all the while the dervish’s face is turned towards me and he is smiling.

Amid the ramshackle mahallas of Uzbekistan, the dust and that constant wind, life is more real. It sparkles in snatches of colour: purple clothes along a washing line, set against the gray and the brown of the broken down and crumbling mud-brick-wood houses. Yes, it is more real and although I moved through it as a tourist moves through the world, it spoke to me and gave me something akin to patience and acknowledgement. I met it as a friend and it closed its eyes and nodded.

What is proving difficult is not the adjustment to Uzbekistan, but rather the adjustment back. I feel so much sorrow for nothing in particular, except perhaps the past. I don’t know how to tell you what it’s like because I can’t show you what I breathed in. You can’t see the wind and the dust and the river; you can’t know what timelessness really means.

It means an unmooring; it means free.

April 12th, 2009 | Tags: asia, dervish, dreams, dust, exploration, glorious monsters, love, river, travel, wind | Category: Blood and Guts, My Life Love, Shitey England, Uzbekistan | Comments (7)

I like making things. When I was a kid, The Female Monster That Created Me was really supportive of any creative project that I might want to try, and as I got older, I pretty much gravitated towards having artists for friends, although I mainly stopped making things myself with any gusto. Everything I did was a bit half-hearted, mostly because I have a natural tendency to defer to people whom I respect and think are better than me, and I was surrounded by them.

(That’s also why, despite working in a bike shop with the sole intention of learning how to fix my own bike, I never bothered. It was easier and quicker to let someone else do it, and, of course, they achieved vastly better results than the novice I. That’s my other problem: I’m a perfectionist.)

When I lived in France, I made things all the time. I actually just remembered the hand-made paper I used to make - some of it was so pretty! That was a really creative time and I am so lucky to have had it, and it has left a lasting legacy in the form of the collages I make now; but it’s not enough, I want more.

I’ve been having a deep urge to make things for a while and I’ve been thinking about the ways in which I can do this. The importance of this urge was recently solidified by watching this video on Jon Snow’s blog: making things is the way forward.

I don’t really ever want to have to work in an office again. It’s shit and an office job is an office job is an office job and I don’t value any of it. I want to live a life of production, where I make things which are real and tangible: things I can value and love.

So why am I still pursuing the Ph.D.? My brain is too active and sharp - it needs an outlet - and if I don’t use it in a rigorous form of critical thinking, I turn it on myself (or loved ones) and that’s always bad news. So, the Ph.D. is phase one of Operation Dream Life, and after I have it, I will be able to get part-time work doing research and/or in-depth journalism. On top of that, I’ll be Dr. Tank Green and that will be the funniest thing ever.

With the rest of my time, I am going to make things. I am still mulling over different ideas, but I am quite interested in the idea of furniture restoration since it marries several important factors:

1. I’m a hoarder, so I can learn how to restore the things I can’t throw away, making them beautiful enough to have a new life.
2. I really hate waste (hence the hoarding), so I can stop things being thrown away that could live again.
3. I just love the idea of giving things a new lease of life.
4. I’m practical and like to make things that I feel are useful: furniture is useful.

But that is, most likely, after the Ph.D.; in the meantime, I’ve decided that I want to start sewing.
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March 27th, 2009 | Tags: art, creativity, dreams, happy happy joy joy, important things in life, love, making things, masters, plans, sewing, take me away from here!, w00t!, work | Category: My Life Love, Shitey England | Comments (1)