Day 3

We started with a bus tour. We went to Independence square and remembrance park. Yesterday 5/9 was a day celebrating the end of WW2 so these places were jammed but today was nice. There were many groups cute of little kids (kindergarten?) with their teachers there for a lesson of history and patriotism. The squares with their monumental statues (one was commemorating the heroism of people during the 1966 earthquake, another – mother crying for her sons and other family members who died in WW2 with names and eternal flame and tons of flowers and wreaths) were quite striking Then we went and visited a Khat Imam Complex with a madrassa, a mausoleum with one of the oldest Korans (from 7^th century) and the largest mosque in Tashkent. From there we went to Chorsu bazaar, but luckily hit different areas than yesterday. We went to a bakery and saw how they make their traditional bread and bake it in brick ovens. We tasted fresh bread and rolls with potato stuffing. We also walked through the sweets sections and saw them make a strange guey white paste in large pots. They let us taste it and it was very sweet. In the huge fruit section we bought some local strawberries, which as our guide Faruk told us, are only in season for two weeks and are delicious, and some fresh mulberries. Then to lunch at a new and very ornate restaurant, Menu: 3 kinds of salads, bread, solyanka soup, 3 kinds of grilled meat (shashlik) – chicken, lamb and beef, and desert of fruit. After lunch, we visited the Museum of Applied Arts that is housed in a beautiful former house of a Tsarist Russian ambassador and has a lot of interesting display of local crafts and musical instruments. Not too far from the museum (as Bo discovered from the city map) is a Polish Catholic church so she asked if we could stop there. It’s quite a beautiful church designed by a Polish architect and built in the early 1900. It still serves the Polish community of about 1500 in Tashkent. Unfortunately, there was nobody there to talk to.  After the tour we had about 2.5 hrs of free time before dinner so we decided to do an errand to recover a lot earring and look for a pharmacy. The errand was successful, but on the way, we saw a disturbing accident. A pedestrian was killed by a car, and the ambulance response and the way they dealt with the body was disconcerting. Dinner was in a nice “eastern” restaurant, but the problem is that they are feeding us way too much food.