Tashkent
Wikepedia's information. Very interesting!
While we were in Tomsk Chap had made arrangements through a journalist friend for us to stay in Tashkent with a woman named Yelyena who was heavily involved in the Uzbek ecology movement. Given that Uzbekistan had reduced the Aral Sea to half its former size through agricultural abuse, there was a lot of work to be done. Tashkent was supposed to be the place where Chap and I would hop off the Trans-Siberian Railway and board a bus to Samarkand. Instead, we had to waste three days battling numb-nuts bureaucrats to get permission to leave the city. In spite of all that, we had a pretty good time seeing the sights and having an afternoon soiree, with lots of food and alcohol, with some very nice matrons we had met on the train. Their names were Manzura and Lyudyuva and they were from Tashkent, heading home from a vacation in Irkutsk. Their physical appearances were a striking contrast. Manzura reflected the Asian side of her genetic heritage with a broad face and brownish skin. Lyudyuva, on the other hand, had rather Mediterranean features and skin-tone. The soiree went on for a long time and it was the first time I had seen my son totally blitzed. I really enjoyed Tashkent with its mixture of the very old with the very new. In 1966 most of it was flattened in a huge earthquake. The USSR jumped in and arranged for its reconstruction with wide avenues, many parks, large plazas, and shiny new office buildings. Because of all this, most of the architectural heritage was lost. Yelyena and some of her friends took us on a tour of "old town". This was an area undamaged by the earthquake and was very old indeed. I was told that the canal we saw had been built 800 years ago.
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