After our free walking tour, I’m liking Bukhara more. The old part of the city, which has benefited from UNESCO funding, is very well maintained, and the historic sites are beautiful.
In the days of the caravans, relatively few merchants traveled the entire Silk Road. Instead, many would make long journeys, spending months in important trading cities where they conducted business before eventually returning home. Bukhara was one of the major destinations along these routes. It was also an important center of Islamic scholarship, with a large number of madrasahs and other religious schools.
After the Bolsheviks took control of Bukhara in 1920, traditional Islamic education was suppressed, and many of the old madrasahs ceased functioning as religious schools. Today, some historic buildings house workshops where artisans produce beautiful crafts, including embroidery, pottery, woodwork, and knives. I often felt like I was walking through an art show today.
Before, I saw these shops as souvenir shops aimed at tourists, but in reality, they sell beautiful handmade goods made by local artisans.
We see very few Americans here. On our tour of ten, there were people from China, Spain, and Germany. Our guide greeted many people along the way, placing his right hand over his heart. I’ve noticed people doing this quite a bit over the past few days, so I asked him if he knew all the people he was greeting.
“No,” he said. “But in Uzbekistan, we are taught to greet people who are older than us, and placing our hand over our heart shows that we respect them.” I love this tradition.
This man and his donkey are the Uzbek folk hero and trickster, Afandi. He gets himself into all kinds of ridiculous situations and then uses his wit to get himself out of them. When our guide said that almost every country has a character like this, I wondered aloud who ours would be. The German couple immediately said, “Trump!”
We had an amazing dinner at the kind of posh restaurant Jim and I would normally save for a special occasion—all for under $45.
