First Week in Uzbek!

Hello friends, family and welcome to anyone else out there reading this!

It has been SIX years since I have written a blog about living overseas (or anything else for that matter) so I might be a little rusty for a while, bear with me. I used this account when I lived in Cambodia for a few months back in 2017, hence the name of the page. For simplicity sake, I didn't want to start a new page but I thought blogging again might be a cool way to document some of our adventures since we will be traveling a lot this next year. And I kinda like the title, because even when you are living in a big city like Tashkent, there are always small neighborhood nooks and village-like pockets :)

This week we moved from Monterey, California to Tashkent, Uzbekistan for Carson's job. (Side note: at the time of my last blog entry, we had pretty recently started dating and now we've been married for 4 years so that's kinda crazy to think about!) I think the reality of actually living here hasn't fully sunk in for either of us yet as we have been in temporary housing since we arrived early Tuesday morning. But we are moving into our permanent house tomorrow, so definitely looking forward to feeling more settled and making our new house a home. 

The last two days we had orientation at the Embassy where we met lots of people from different offices and departments. Really cool to learn more about the work they all do and the ways they are working toward the mission of making Uzbekistan a more democratic, independent and prosperous nation. Everyone has been so welcoming and kind too. I'm excited to form new friendships with the wonderful people in this community and looking forward to getting involved with different volunteer opportunities.

We have explored our neighborhood supermarket and a small bazaar (bazaars are local markets that sell everything from  household goods and furniture to street food and produce) that's about 1.5 miles from us. It's fun to see all these commonplace items that are so different here. Like they have toothpaste that comes in flavors you would not believe, including coffee and seaweed! Everything is so affordable, especially moving here from CA. You can get 30 eggs for less than $2, a liter of bottled water for $0.30, fresh fruit and vegetables are also plentiful and pretty cheap (just have to reeeeally clean them). 

We learned quickly this week why Uzbekistan is called The Land of the Sun, as it's been over 100 degrees F every day since we got here. That has also been quite a shock coming from the constantly cool Monterey Peninsula. Everyone says it starts to cool down by mid September, so at least there are seasons.

We really felt the heat a couple days ago when our power went out in the middle of the afternoon. By the time we went to bed that night, the house was roasting. We were able to fall asleep for a couple of hours, and then the power came back on! (Yay!) I woke up in a stupor and thinking I was using the remote control for the AC unit in our bedroom, when I was in fact hitting the panic button on a fob connected to the security system in our house, which is the exact moment I learned that we had said security system. Immediately, this deafening alarm starts piercing through the house and that's when I realized Carson wasn't in bed. Power goes back out (noooo!) and we're in the dark again but alarm is still going strong. I frantically start calling out for Carson and hear his faint voice coming from downstairs letting me know he was in the bathroom. He has no idea why this horrible alarm is going off, poor guy has a bad case of food poisoning and went downstairs to not wake me up. I come running down to the first floor (in the dark again) and realize that Carson is sick, we can barely hear each other because the alarm is SO insanely loud. I try to explain what happened and am feeling sooo dumb. The fob and remote don't look anything alike, I still don't know how I got them mixed up, blaming it on the 90 degree room effecting my brain, heat-induced delirium? I do remember Carson saying ever so calmly "I am not having a good time." I didn't laugh at the moment but when I think about it now it's pretty funny. After 5 minutes of these screaming sirens, I open the door to the entry way where we found the security system was located and it abruptly stopped. Sweet blessed silence. We were both dazed, confused, sweaty, nauseous, having zero fun, would not recommend. Some time in the midst of this chaos, the power had come back on. We wearily climbed the stairs back to our room and were able to fall back asleep eventually. Until about 4 AM, when I woke up to discover it was my turn at food poisoning. Woof. That was a ROUGH night.

By the next day we were both laughing about all of it. What a ridiculous combination of bad things, as Lemony Snicket would call it, a series of unfortunate events. But also pretty comical. The resiliency building started a little earlier than I expected but hey, that's something you can never have too much of. Tashkent Tummy - 1, Wrens - 0. We will overcome by Liquid IV packets and probiotics and keeping our sense of humor in tact. I'm sure many more challenges lie ahead of us this next year, but we will get through them together :)

I think that's all I got for now. We have some upcoming trips planned which we are getting excited about, some in Uzbek and some to other countries. The world is so big, like do you ever just get overwhelmed thinking about how many people are on this planet? All with their own stories, sorrows, joys, thoughts, feelings and dreams. This entire region of the globe has not been on my radar for most of my life and it really is fascinating to learn about. If you are curious about Central Asia, there's a great series on Amazon Prime called The Silk Road. We started watching it recently and we're really enjoying it.

Dasvidaniya ("Goodbye" in Russian) for now!