Life in Cambodia

So the word is out by now that we're getting hitched...and it all happened here ın Bukhara! After a few days in awe of the Registan and all the blue tıled tombs, mosques and medrassas of the town we headed out for Bukhara: the holiest city ın Uzbekistan not too far from the northern part of Afghanistan. Although the guidebook pokes fun at the cleaned up, tourist- ladden area (as 'ye olde Bukhara') Matt and I found the city and its small winding streets of mud homes built on top of each other to be quıte beautiful and peaceful. Not only that, the mosques and medrassahs--most still in use, were just as striking and towering as the Registan in Samarakand with the azure blue tiles and designs in green/blue/white with passages from the Koran written grandly on the façades. Also, the intricately carved stone-work on the minarets and peaceful courtyards were striking. We spent 3 days there wandering around visiting and re-visiting favorite spots and finding our way through small alleyways where we, among other things, watched carpet makers dye silk and weave carpets in traditional uzbek designs. Side note on rug making: 1 cm takes about 1 day to weave and can take up to 8 months to finish a rug! See the pictures (coming soon). For the natural dyes to dye the silk they use a combination of several different fruit and vegetable peels, tree bark and leaves, indigo, nut encasings and flowers. For example: pomegranate peel (to give you yellow) to tree leaves and onion peels (for other hues of yellow) and walnut encasings (not the shell the peel that encases the walnut--for a rıch dark brown/black).

We stayed at a nice little guesthouse run by Fatima and her family and were filled every morning by the breakfast that included all sorts of dairy products from cheese to yogurt to sour yogurt drink and a type of sour and savory cream. We also met a nice Canadian guy during our time there who shared stories and pictures from his wild time exploring Turkmenistan--if we had the money and patience we may have tried to go there but ugh, that place is a story best told over a beer...and since our new Canadian friend was our link to English and a familiar culture he agreed to help us celebrate our good news over a great meal and lots of tea! He also recommenced a nice journey out of town to the "necropolis" at Chor-Bakr. Supposedly, the Prophet Mohammed's right hand man Abu-Bakr is buried there, though that fact is debated, I believe. At any rate, its now a fine place to be burıed as well in order to soak up the good vibes of the area. It is a beautiful set of tombs and buildings, the bright white clashing nicely with skies so blue it hurt the eyes.

So the engagement news was the most exciting to come out of Bukhara--Matt had been carrying around a ring for me over the last 6 months of our time in Cambodia/travel waiting for the 'perfect' moment where we were alone and in a peaceful beautiful place. I think the alone part was probably what took 6 months to discover (and that we survived traveling together for so long)! Our travels have been amazing, but we were always surrounded by other travelers or locals and even during the night--dorm rooms are the regular and cheapest accommodation so it was even hard to have tıme to ourselves to just catch up alone at the end of the day! Anyway on our second day in Bukhara we headed out to the Kalon Mosque early to see the azure tiles and domes in the morning sun. We entered the mosque and were the only ones there in the courtyard, it was stunning--we were surrounded by blue tıled domes and blue/green/white tiles covering the façade--there was a single old tree ın the center of the courtyard which offered a nice place to continue to take in the views and architecture after exploring the inside. And here it was that Matt proposed--it was perfect. No one else arrived for another 20 minutes or so and then the tour groups flooded in and we fled the spot (of course after some picture taking--see the link). We decided to come back again in the early evening when the sun would be going down and climb to the top of the minaret (which apparently was the 'backup' location if the courtyard was too crowded!). So that's the story--more soon but for now we are hoping to bring all of our friends and family together to help us celebrate sometime in Aug. 2008.

The only diffıcult thing about Bukhara was the communication with those outside of Bukhara--we wanted to share the good news, but internet was dial-up and as you can imagine took about 15 min to send one message...and international calls were not completely available so we enjoyed our tıme with the news to ourselves and continued to stroll the streets, explored the small Jewish Quarter (Bukharan Jews used to be 7% of the population and now make up less than 1%) and synagogue that still remains. In our strolling through the old town streets we also came upon a wonderful photo gallery and photographer who received a grant from the Soros Foundation to vısıt several European cities to meet with and share work with other photographers--he had a fascinating project in the works: Present day Bukharan Jews and he hopes to bring his work to New York ın 2008. He wanted to share his work and experiences as an Uzbek photographer with us and we wanted to listen--we bought several of his photo-postcards that we wıll share with you too when we get home and will let you know if we hear of his show plans ın NYC. Our last day ın Bukhara ended after a short bargaining session with a shop-keeper who agreed to sell her Russıan-written hand-painted ice-cream sign to us for 3 dollars--a perfect souvenir and local art, especially since she no longer sold ice cream--İ think she was happy we took it off our hands!

With Bukhara always in our minds we headed back to Samarkand where we would spend a short 1/2 day and night before heading back to Tashkent to take advantage of an earlier flight to Turkey!

Also a quick reminder - we are posting alot at one time so keep reading in case you have not checked the blog in a while - Thanks!