A few random points about Tashkent:
- Police. There are far too many police in the town and their sole purpose is to annoy you. They love the metro and are tasked with protecting it from photographers, it is after all one of Tashkent’s strategic pieces of infrastructure and as such must be protected from spies taking photos. DO NOT TAKE PHOTOS OF THE TASHKENT METRO!
- Sim cards for phones are a fun hassle. I tried to buy an MTC (local Uzbekistan carrier) sim card and was requested to show an Uzbekistan passport. I tried at several other stores, one of them offered me a Beeline sim card instead. Apparently, foreigners will have difficulty purchasing sim cards from any of the three major carriers: MTC, Beeline and U-Cell depending on where they enquire.
- The house of photos is free. When we came in, the security guard said it was seven hundred cym. I asked for a student discount and he said five hundred cym. I paid the money and realised there was no signage for prices. When I’d finished looking around, the security guard was gone.
- President Karimov is a nutter, one of his great presidential decrees was to build a clock tower, replicating the one commemorating the end of the war, right next to the original!?
Original clock tower. From this vantage point, if you look to your right, you’ll find this.
What was the man thinking?
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