An unexpected extra day in Tashkent

We are in our hotel in Tashkent.  Breakfast is 7 till 11.  We go down at 10.30,  to find that it's a buffet style breakfast - eggs, meat, cheese, bread, pancakes, jam, but no butter.  Also black or green tea (we have black) and a pinky brown fruit juice - not sure what it is but the smell puts me off.  The woman who is overseeing things asks us if we'd like porridge.  Reg declines but I readily say, yes, please!  The porridge is actually more like semolina, but its very nice, especially when I've stirred in a couple of spoonfuls of runny jam.

We go to reception to see how we go about getting our train tickets to Bukhara tomorrow (Sunday) morning;  also to see if they can advise us about changing up some dollars into local money.  We are able to change up some of our money at the hotel.  $1 = 2000 Uzbekistan som (give or take 150 som).  Thus changing up $150 means you will receive about 300,000 som!  The largest note is 1,000 som - so you will receive at least 300 notes - quite a wad to carry around.  Reg jokes that he is a quarter of a millionaire - in soms!

A man who seems to be something to do with the hotel will go to the train station and get our tickets for us, if we pay him $20.  Everything has a price here, and if we went ourselves to the station, they wouldn't understand us, and in any case we'd have to get a taxi.  Off he goes, with copies of our passports.  He's soon back - they need our original passports, and by the way, they only have 1st class tickets left for tomorrow morning's train.  We say fine.  However, by the time he gets back to the station, there are no tickets at all left for that train, and only1st class tickets left for the overnight train on Sunday evening.  Off he goes again to get us tickets for the Sunday evening train to Bukhara.  This man is useful because he can also sort out a Uzbekistan simcard for Reg's phone, that will cost us a bit too, but never mind!  We need a simcard, and from our experience of trying to get one in Russia, it's not that easy ( you need passports, you need to register the simcard, and you need to understand the language to do this).

So instead of leaving Tashkent tomorrow morning, we'll go tomorrow evening - an unexpected extra day in Tashkent (or, Toshkent, in the local language).  We've learned therefore that we need to buy train tickets at least a few days in advance in future.   Reg  had thought there would be plenty of room on the train.  Reg has bought most of long journey tickets, it's only one or two shorter journeys where we still need tickets.

Our hotel in Bukhara is booked for tomorrow (Sunday) night, so we'll have to phone them and say we won't be there until early Monday morning.  We'll still want our room straight away as we've paid for it, also we'll be able to have breakfast.

Now that the helpful man has come back with our passports we can go out.  You need your passports and registration tickets (which the hotel give you) with you at all times, again, as in Russia, in case you get stopped by the police.  It's about 4pm and we haven't eaten since breakfast so we're a bit  peckish.  We order a taxi and ask the hotel receptionist if she can recommend somewhere to eat.  She consults with the taxi driver and together they come up with "The Bukhara Cafe".

The cafe staff speak practically no English and the menu is only in Uzbekistani.  The waitress mentions "soup" and "fish" and "salad" so we agree to all this, plus we ask for black tea.  The soup is tasty, a type of broth, slightly greasy, and the bread is lovely and fresh.  The salad is cucumber and tomatoes with a sort of sourcream sauce which we saw a lot of in Poland and Russia - it's delicious.  When the fish comes it's like battered goujons, and there's quite a lot of it.  Too much for us to manage as it turns out.  There's a red savoury sauce for dipping the goujons of fish, but Reg and I both don't like the sauce much.

The most  unusual  aspect of this meal for us is that although we are given spoons to eat the soup, when it comes to the fish goujons we each only have a fork - and we notice that the surrounding tables only have forks too.  So at that restaurant anyway, knives aren't part of the cutlery.

Taking a walk after our meal, we come across an outdoor steam and diesel train museum.  You'd have thought we'd have had our fill of trains, having just spent 3 days and 3 nights on one, but no - we decide to have a look around.  We get talking to 2 teenage boys, have a train ride, and take pictures of a bride and groom who are there having photos taken (as you do)

We are able to pick up a taxi at the nearby train station; this driver has difficulty finding our hotel, as did yesterday's taxi.  He finds it eventually, and we return to our room to relax.  Reg gets our thermos filled up so that we can havea cup of tea, and I collect our laundry, which I'd left to be washed earlier in the day.