Tashkent Walkabout

Interesting doors and wall decor on unknown building.

The ceiling of the art museum.

One of the fabrics.

The Uzbekistan Art Gallery.

... and outside the local painters trying to hawk their pictures to the tourists.

An interesting and tasty kabab dinner.

Thursday, April 17th.

I had a crap night’s sleep. We had another good breakfast. Back to the room to get organized for the walk that John had been planning and researching using Lonely Planet. He had read that if you want to use the subway you need to bring your passport or ID as security is tight because there was a bombing years ago on the subway. So we decided to bring ours in case we wanted to use the subway, unfortunately John had forgotten the password to the safe and we had to get security to come and open it. Finally we were off. Unfortunately despite John’s work we couldn’t find a market that was reputed to be good, and the history museum was ‘temporarily closed’. However we did stumble upon the Art Museum of Tashkent and decided to go in. It was well laid out and housed a variety of art forms from painting to fabrics and pottery. We walked about 4 hours around the city center and found it to be clean and well laid out and very spacious with lots of green space. We walked through a long pedestrian mall lined with little stalls of shops and lots of ping pong tables. There numerous large interesting buildings that we could not identify but must have something to do with the government as there were armed security guards around them. We found a place for a coffee and an ice cream. The weather was warm but overcast. We got turned around a few times but Google Maps helped sort us out and we made it back to the hotel by 3:30. Eventually we got back to the room and relaxed before going for a swim in the pool. We had a beer at the bar before going to a restaurant we’d stumbled across on our walk. It was raining but we didn’t have far to walk. We had a good meal and returned to the room to organize for tomorrow’s adventure.