What I Did In Samarkhand – by Jim Gaffney

Day One

It’s always a wonderful moment. We’ve carefully chosen the suzanis, balancing our budget against the quality and range of colours. We’ve gazed at the truly beautiful ones we can’t afford but savoured the pretty damned amazing ones we can. Gradually the final pile takes shape on the floor of Umur Bek’s shop, an interesting and varied little collection. Gentle bargaining ensues. Gentle, because the prices were reasonable to start with, and by now we’re pretty good mates. Even so, he’s generous. This is looking like a pretty good deal!

As he wraps up the pile, Bek says “What you think about certificate?”

Certificate? What certificate?

“For export from post office. We must first go Certificate Office. My fren. No problem. What you think about dollar?”

I don’t know! There is no problem, is there? What’s this about problem? And what do I think about dollar? That I wouldn’t mind keeping as many of the ones I’ve got as possible…. oh.. here we go.

Bek, fiddling doubtfully with what are now our suzanis, and definitely not catching my eye, says “This one ……these three….. this one… need Certificate. “ He smiles encouragingly “Only $100 I can do it.”

I argue..a bit. It doesn’t help that my Uzbek really isn’t working very well in Samarkhand.

In Khiva, I managed quite well with my basic Turkish. The two languages are closely related, and in the west of Uzbekistan, along the Turkmen border, it’s not far off mutual comprehension. I say not far off…. The Uzbeks change the vowels dramatically: “Tashkent” is pronounced “Toshkint”

To say” Bukhara” (you can try this at home), you start with a crescendoing booOOH, interrupted with a loud hacking cough and finishing with “orra” to rhyme with liverpudlian “lorra”, (as in “a lorra laffs”). If you can do that quickly you’ll have it just right. So the vowel thing is like trying to do a Geordie accent in Turkish and the situation is further complicated by the fact that Turkish is kind of the “Mother “ language and sounds quaint and archaic to the Uzbek ear. Say like Geoffrey Chaucer.

So in this country I’m a Geordie Geoffrey Chaucer. Which is why when I’m talking, people look at each other with an expression that says “It sounds like I should be able to understand this guy and he clearly he thinks I should be able to understand him but….?”

So the bollocking that Bek gets for not telling us about the certificate until AFTER we’ve bought the stuff isn’t as pithy as I would have liked.

Day Two

As we are going to post stuff, I bring along some other things we’ve bought. No, no, no. We cannot mix certificate parcel with no certificate parcel. But Bek will help me. We can take my other stuff to his friend at the “Certificate Office”. We cross town in a hot taxi to an office block which is utterly unreconstructed Soviet: bare concrete, crumbling stairs and not a stick of furniture in the several kilometres of corridor it appears we have to negotiate.

The Certificate guys are staring at a version of Grand Theft Auto on their computer when we arrive. Their office is pretty well equipped. Well yeah, it would be given the price of their certificates. (By the way, the official reason for the certificates is so that valuable antiquities aren’t taken out of the country. Our stuff is lovely, but it’s neither particularly valuable nor remotely antique).

Some little bags and hats and market fabrics manage, after some discussion, to pass the “no certificate” test. I meekly submit to a bored thirty-something in the latest long pointy shoes on matters of handmade textile provenance. Surreal. But I do – he’s got the Certificate.

We cross town in a very hot taxi. At the Main Post Office in Samarkhand my much reduced box is the subject of further debate. The day is slipping away. Several post office workers are now comatose behind their counters.

“ What’s this ?” snaps the lady whose job it is to argue with people about whether they’re allowed to send their stuff or not. I fumble with the packet and get the pretty ikat silk out, trying to remember the word for ladies’ baggy trousers “Er..I know.. Shalwars!” I unfold them and wave them about. Everyone looks up in surprise – maybe I was a bit loud. “Sir, please close them “ hisses Bek. It’s the most assertive he’s ever been with me. A definite Geordie Geoffrey Chaucer moment. Not completely random, though – introducing a sense of the ridiculous brings the inspection to a close.

We fill out the customs declaration 5 times (there being no carbon paper) and we write a letter requesting Customs Clearance addressed to a Lieutenant Colonel Abimov. No I am not bloody kidding. No, we can’t post it today, because the police officer who will inspect the parcel doesn’t work on Tuesdays. Come back tomorrow. OK.

I need some dollars, for complicated reasons to do with the street value of dollars being 35% over the official rate. I’ve already been to three of the four cash machines in Samarkhand which issue dollars. They’re all broken (I bet you’re really surprised by that) so I have to go to the National Bank of Uzbekistan.

We cross town in a boiling hot minibus.

I decide to draw some positives from my day. For one thing, I’m losing weight. Yes, it’s so hot, say, 45˚ next to the glass with the doors closed, that if I look carefully and long enough I actually get to watch myself losing weight as the sweat pours off me. In real time, no need for a speeded up camera! Maybe 2 kgs. a day, at this rate. Secondly, this is good training. The patience I’m having to show today is as nothing compared to what I’ll need for a visa extension in Kyrgyzstan, for example, or even a train ticket in some parts of China, I’ve heard.

The National Bank of Uzbekistan isn’t giving dollars today. Their machine is broken. Ah four out of four!

Day Three

It’s the day that you can post parcels abroad. Bek and I head for the Post Office. Up to now he has been incredibly helpful, patient and informative, with the one exception mentioned above. If he has a fault though, it’s his excessive love of and pride in Uzbekistan and all things Uzbek. He asserts, for example, that every item he’d looked at in our photos was really of Uzbek design. “This NOT Turkey, this UZBEK”, he would insist. So much for our 25 years’ experience collecting and researching in Turkey, then.

“This one also Uzbek” pointing at an embroidered coat from Vietnam. We don’t argue. We do heartily agree with his assessment of his home village, his wonderful family, and their suzanis. “Uzbekistan good!”

But it’s worth trying to give people who don’t have the opportunity to travel some sense of perspective. I point out that we’re now on our second day of trying to post what is after all really just a few souvenirs and my third day of trying to get hold of some of the currency they insist on using. And this is Samarkhand, which through the millennia is practically bleeding synonymous with international trading. I look him in the eye. He sighs. “Uzbekistan”, he says “no good”.

It does me no credit, but this evidence of some sort of realism from Bek cheers me up. I become the optimist in the team.” Never mind, maybe today no problem”. My young friend is still very tense, though, perhaps worried about the embarrassment he’ll feel if the “post office policeman” makes a scene and I’m expected to produce more dollars. Which he knows I won’t do.

I realise that Bek is vulnerable because he does this quite a lot. There’s hardly any local market for his best stuff. Those Uzbek families with any means at all already have their own collection of heirloom suzanis. It all goes to tourists and Bek grapples with the “post office policeman” most weeks, sending stuff to America, Japan or Europe where his customers come from. I try to put him at ease by promising to be good.

Which I am, sitting patiently through the mayhem of the families who, working (like us) in teams, battle through the ridiculous processes involved in sending mail abroad.

The officer who checks the stuff shows up after we’ve waited for only just over an hour. And he can’t find anything wrong with our paperwork! Or our goods! It’s taken less than two days to post 9.4 kilos! Not bad going, huh? And the prize for making it over the line in the “Post Office Bureaucracy Marathon” is a remarkably cheap airmail rate. The courier companies who cater to the sensible grown-up tourists charge $80 or $90 per kilo, not counting “Certificate”. So I’ve been making quite good money if you look at it that way.

Oh, and I finally do get some dollars at a great big bank which has one hand-held Visa machine which the guy has to unplug his phone to connect up and then has to pull the printout through (which you don’t have to do even with the one in our shop ). However, it does have some lovely comfy settees to sit in while waiting the 20 or so minutes needed for the transaction.

Uzbekistan good! I love Uzbekistan!