Bilderverkauf aller 50 km / Pictures on Sale every 50 km

Sunday, December 6, 2009

Green Taschkent and The Sunny Boy Ambassador

14th of October:

 

First thing I recognise, the streets are good and almost all cars have a lot of gas bottles everywhere; on the roof, below the car, behind the seats. One reason is the price; it is much cheaper to drive with gas since Uzbekistan has large gas resources. Second reason you can not enter Tashkent with diesel car. At the police check point they ask us if we have a small piece of paper which specifies that your car is clean enough. We have not, so we have to buy, but nobody cares about our 14 year old car with its old Diesel engine. 

 

Quite fast we find the embassy of Azerbaijan. The ambassador a young guy gives us some documents we have to fill out and asks us to come back at 3 a clock. That means we have enough time to pick up the things Kotomi's friend left in the Japanese centre for us. One bag full with Japanese food and other things which were stolen with the car.  The place is located close to the big and shiny part of the city. Expensive hotels, skyscrapers, bank of Uzbekistan etc. Just in one in the hotels where I try to get money from the ATM there is an international cotton conference. Cotton is one more export good except the gas which Uzbekistan has a lot. I feel quite funny in there since all running around in suits and hunting for the free buffet.

 

As I said I wanted to get some money, but the only ATM machine in Tashkent, which accepts VISA  is empty. We asking for other ATMs but searching almost half a day we could not find anything. In all other countries it was no problem to get money at ATMs, but here it is. Later I understood why. The exchange rate between the Uzbek Sum and other foreign currencies are fixed by the government and the banks. This exchange rate is around 30% worse than the "true" one. ATMs are connected to a world wide system which would not allow the fake exchange rate. Well the only way to get the true exchange rate is to change USD on the black market, which is actually illegal. But getting USD is also not so easy and expensive too. Therefore, the best is to bring a lot of USD or EUR cash with you. Unfortunately we did not know that, we just had 80 USD. Anyway we got some expensive USD and went back to the embassy. It is 3 a clock but the ambassador is not there, it is 4, 5 and 6 a clock and he is not there. Finally he calls and tells us we should come back next day. Even so there are opening hours, it does not seem to matter. We try to find a cheap hotel. It is in the Old Russian style and cost too much but for this night we have no other chance and we get the "mandatory" REGISTRATION. This registration thing is again weird because everybody tells us something different. You have to do it every 3 days. Some say you have to do it in the first 3 days. At the border they do not check and even did not know about it when we asked. You can be just unlucky and be stopped somewhere. And dependent on the day the rule is like this or that. It seems to make it correct; just go to the hotel everyday. Of course we did not do that (:). But one thing I have to say: The police in Uzbekistan was much better than the Tajik one. This was totally opposite from what we heard before. But maybe they had now such a bad reputation in the recent years that the president gave the order not to stop the foreigners anymore. To us they were almost unnatural friendly. 

 

 

(N 41.2739 °, E 69.24057 °)

 

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