If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Urgench

I'm drinking coffee out of my own mug that bears the state seal of Albania.  It was a gift from a special mom in Tirana over two years ago.  The coffee came from my own stove-top espresso maker.  The dishware is my own, and it's Sunday.  That must mean that I'm back in Astana, my home-on-the-steppe.  Not only that, this is HHE-day, the first time I've had my own dishes and cookware, not to mention bedding, winter clothes, and photos, in three months.  For any Foreign Service Officer, the day one receives her household effects (HHE) is a veritable holiday.  This is my Christmas in November.  Given that the ground is covered by a light blanket of white and the Esil' River is starting to freeze over, it might as well be the end of December.

Two weeks ago today I was in Bucharest.  No, dear Bucharest friends, I don't mean that I came and went without seeing any of you.  I mean I was in Bucharest mentally and time-wise.  You see, the cell phone that I use as my alarm clock while traveling is the phone that I used in Romania.  It's still set to Bucharest time, and I'm not changing it.  I look at that phone and think about what you must all be doing at this time of day.  Since I knew when I arrived that the time difference from Bucharest to Astana is +3 hours, I just made a +3 hour allowance when setting the alarm wake-up time.

So there I was two weeks ago, stretching and yawning after the alarm began playing Eric Anderson's Violets of Dawn at 7:30am.  That's my wake-up song.  TN, my assistant, was to come at 9:30am, and we were to go to the airport to catch our flight to Almaty, Kazakhstan's large southern city and former capital.  I had lots of time to pack my suitcase and enjoy an unhurried breakfast.  It was only after enjoying my first cup of coffee that I did a double take.  The clock in my kitchen said 9am.  I checked my Astana cell phones.  They also said 9am.  I had only 30 minutes to get dressed and throw clothes into my suitcase.  What had gone wrong?  I checked my Bucharest phone again.  It was now +4 hours from Bucharest to Astana, not +3.  Then it hit me.  Romania had gone from daylight time to standard time that Saturday-Sunday night, and my Romanian cell phone had automatically adjusted.  Kazakhstan is on standard time all through the year, and thus I am now an hour further away from Bucharest friends than I was when I arrived.

So there I was, foiled by what I thought was my good sense of time zones.  Somehow I got downstairs just as TN and the Embassy car arrived to pick me up.  When we got to the airport, we learned that our flight was an hour and a half late.  If I had known, I could have stayed on Bucharest time for the morning after all.

By mid-afternoon we were in Almaty.  What a difference there is between Almaty and Astana!  It was so warm that afternoon that I could walk around with my jacket unzipped.  The air pollution was palpable, reminding me of New York City in the 1960s, but the Tien Shan Mountains could still be seen through the smog.  We checked into the Holiday Inn and looked for our U.S. colleagues who had come for a workshop on seismology.  When we found them, we sat together for an hour to go over last-minute organizational issues.  Back in my hotel room, I discovered I had forgotten to bring panty hose.  I inquired at the desk and was given directions to a nearby underground mall where I bought the most expensive hose of my life.  For three pair I paid about $90USD.  That extra hour time difference between Kazakhstan and Romania had acquired a monetary value.

I woke early on Monday morning in an Almaty that had changed dramatically overnight.  Snow covered the ground and continued to fall.  We must have brought the Astana weather with us, and it was time again for the winter coat.

The seismology workshop had its formal opening.  Everything was going smoothly.  After lunch I left our U.S. colleagues in the capable hands of TN and headed back to the airport.

The Top of my Head Peaks
Through in the Back Row

The flight to Tashkent took an hour and a half, but by my watch it was only 30 minutes.  Crossing into Uzbek airspace, we had moved one time zone closer to Bucharest.  The plane had rolled up to a stop, and we passengers were collecting our things and heading for the exit doors.  Before I could get there, however, I found that I had arrived not in Tashkent but in the Twilight Zone.  The voice over the public address system was that of a flight attendant, but could there have been a trace of Rod Serling in the words, "Robyn McCutcheon, the VIP bus is waiting for you?"

In all of my flights in and out of Uzbekistan in 2008-10 (see I Wish I Was in the Land of Cotton), I had never been met as a VIP.  I wasn't sure I wanted to start now, but I had little choice.  Once in the bus, I hurriedly checked my hair and makeup.  When the bus got to the VIP lounge, a Reasonably High Personage was there to meet me and usher me through entry formalities.  In the freshest and most official voice I could muster, I settled into diplomatic talk about the importance of the Aral Sea conference I was about to attend.  It really was important, after all, no matter how much I was yearning for a nice bed and a good night's sleep.  An hour later I was checked into my hotel in downtown Tashkent, a city I had left in 2010 and did not think I would see again.  Yet here I was in old familiar surroundings.

My escort having departed, I stepped out of the hotel to be met by my good friends F1 and F2.  We spent the next three hours in a cafe, catching up and marveling that fate had brought us together again.  For those hours I was no longer a VIP but just Robyn.  For the first time since arriving in Astana at the end of September, I felt entirely relaxed and at home with good friends.  For those hours the loneliness of the distance to loved ones in Romania and in the US receded.

* * * * * * * * * *

Where was I?  I started to write this entry in early November, and here it is, the last day of the month as I again sit at an airport boarding gate.  I'm writing long-hand in my travel notebook and have no idea where I left off in the draft that sits incomplete somewhere in the Internet universe of web journals.  So let's presume I was on Monday and had just collapsed into my hotel bed in Tashkent after my reunion evening with F1 and F2.  (Amazingly, post-fact I see that my guess as to my stopping point was correct!)

On Tuesday morning my next flight touched down in the Khorezm region of Uzbekistan.  The ground is frosted with patches of white, but I hear another passenger comment that it's salt, not snow.  We are in Urgench.

Ours was a charter flight filled with diplomats, international aid workers, water management specialists, ecologists, and journalists.  As we pulled up to the terminal, we could see men and women in traditional Uzbek clothes waiting to greet us.  The women were holding round loves of Uzbek flat bread, known to Russians as lyepyoshkas.  Everywhere there were TV cameras, microphones, and reporters with notebooks.  There were at least as many of them as there were of us.  It would be that way for the next two days.

As we descended the stairs to the tarmac, enthusiastic young greeters waited to sort us onto buses by language.  The route from the airport took us down the main streets of Urgench past gleaming white buildings and green parks.  Everything had a proud air of newness.  In less than fifteen minutes we were at our hotel.

Urgench

Within the hour we were on our way again, first to an oncology center and then to a urology clinic.  Both were so new that one could still sense the smell of fresh paint.  It is no secret that the disappearance of the southern portion of the Aral Sea -- that portion that is on Uzbek territory -- has had a huge negative effect on the people living to the east of what was once one of the world's largest inland seas.  The salt we had seen at the airport was blown there from the dry sea bed.  Dust storms carry salt and agricultural chemical runoff hundreds of miles.  An island in the middle of the Aral Sea had once served as the site for Soviet biological weapon testing.

NASA Imagery Documents the
Disappearance of the Aral Sea

Our next stop was outside the city where dozens of young volunteers stood holding trees next to pre-dug holes.  Our task was to plant the trees, shoveling dirt over the roots and watering them with pre-filled buckets.  There was a showtime air about this Uzbek Arbor Day with many camera shutters clicking, but the enthusiasm of the volunteers was genuine.  All hope is gone that the southern Aral Sea will return, but these volunteers were doing their part to hold the soil in place and break the winds by planting thousands of trees.  They may have been part of a show for this one day, but their work would go on without us.

A Tree Grows in Urgench

The rest of that day went to tourism in the ancient but now largely reconstructed city of Khiva, the capital of a once independent, powerful Central Asian khanate until it fell to the Russian Empire in 1873.  It was my second time there, my first visit having been with my son in 2009.

The next long day was taken up by the conference itself.  As I listened to one presentation after another, I couldn't help but think how little had changed since I left Uzbekistan in 2010.  If anything, the predictions had become more dire.  Late in the evening, after a ceremonial dinner featuring stars of the Uzbek operatic stage, we all rode a bleary-eyed special charter back to Tashkent.

Khiva

Thursday morning saw me on a flight to Almaty, where I arrived at the seismology conference just in time to deliver closing remarks.  The loop back to Astana closed early Friday morning, but the week was not yet over for TN and me.  From morning to evening, we escorted a U.S. visitor for a day's worth of official meetings.  Only when we waved goodbye to her at the airport at 8pm that evening was our week over. . . .

Well, not really over.  Saturday was taken up by my writing reports on the Aral Sea and seismology conferences.  Sunday was the day to catch up on all the work e-mails I had missed while traveling, and Monday dawned to a new week and new tasks.

If my readers wonder why I write so little in this web journal, my description of this one week should give a clue as to why.  Not every week involves that much travel, but many do.  (I am finishing this draft while between sessions at yet another conference in Uzbekistan.)  All weeks are intensely busy, and the concept of a weekend break is fuzzy at best.  My hopes for a slowdown center around the New Year holiday.

Meanwhile, temperatures in Astana have dropped to -25C, and the winds are sometimes so strong that I have trouble walking.  The Esil' River has long since frozen over.  The howl of the nighttime wind is louder than anything I have heard in my life before now.  Safe in my bedroom, I pull my blankets about me and listen.  It may still be fall by the calendar, but in reality, the long Kazakhstan winter arrived some weeks ago.