I love it when I get to drop Marx Brothers references in my blog post titles, but this one is especially apt. I just came off the perfect weekend in Seoul, and it wasn't even a holiday. Yet.
Here's what happened on Saturday, . First, Miss H and I went on our first double-date. It was one of my best buds from Sejong University, whom I'll call Sam, and his girlfriend JB. We went to Seoul Racecourse Park and bet on the ponies:
I even included a video for you schmucks, 'cause I think that highly of you: this is the final stretch of the 7th heat:
I was slightly disappointed. This was my first horse race, but even though I'd known in advance that they only ever made one lap of the track, it still went by too quickly and ended too abruptly. On the other hand, the palpable excitement we felt when the racers rounded the final curve and went flat-out on the home stretch, with the Koreans yelling and stomping all around us, and their cheers and shouts gradually building to an inhuman roar, was something to experience.
Then we went to our favorite Uzbek restaurant in Seoul (yes, we have one): the Fortune Café. Left to right: lagman (lamb and noodle soup); shiz-biz (bits of mutton and onion over French fries); and manti (enormous meaty dumplings, boiled or steamed); and there were at least five varieties of Baltika beer to go with it. (No. 7 is my usual favorite.) A steady stream of Russian pop music videos on the TV set guaranteed that we were never at a loss for something to listen to when conversation waned.
The Fortune Café is in Dongdaemun, which is sort of the Russian district of Seoul. So we also stopped by one of the many tiny Russian markets in the vicinity. We walk into the first one and see this:
Holy cow, ain't nobody got a selection of vodka like that around here. I nabbed some Parliament-brand vodka and a bottle of Napoleon brandy (French stuff; I've heard it's excellent). Score!
Then we walked back outside into the dying evening light. And lo and behold, what did we see but a grand parade! It was the Lotus Day Parade, an early celebration of Buddha's Birthday, which would be coming the next weekend. Take a look! It was an amazing spectacle.
Each group of people represented a different Buddhist temple in the vicinity of Seoul, and each had different flags and lanterns of all shapes and hues. And it wasn't just Koreans, either: the Chinese and Tibetan diaspora were out in force as well, with the flags of their nations and their own brand of Buddhism on display.
After the temple-goers passed in review, we moseyed down the road in the direction of the Dongdaemun gate, viewing the floats and moving sculptures people had fabricated for the occasion. The elephant dipped its head...
...and the lotus flower opened and shut, giving birth to Siddhartha over and over again.
When we'd finished viewing the parade, we slid down an alley to a tent city filled with cheap merchandise and street food.
This is a mixture of noodles, onions, cabbage, spicy red sauce, and sundae (noodles wrapped in the lining of pig intestines, a Korean favorite). It was surprisingly good. We got ripped off, though; these two plates and the four cans of warm beer cost us 40,000 won, or roughly $36.
And then it was time for the evening's crowning glory: a gem of a place I had no idea existed anywhere in Seoul. It's called an LP bar:
This one was called the Sam Cooke, after the American soul singer. It's near Hyehwa Station, north of Dongdaemun, near Seoul University. These LP bars are the bee's knees. Sam Cooke was no exception. It was quite dark (as you can see from the photos) and the decor was eclectic: photos of the Beatles on the walls, cubist paintings behind the booths, an image of Che Guevara by the door. We walked in, sat down, and looked around. The shelves behind the bar were filled with vinyl records. There were two turntables on the counter just going like the clappers, and sound—a sound I'd not heard played in public for 15 months—was blasting out of the speakers.
Classic rock.
No joke! These LP bars sprang up back in the 1960s when Park Chung-hee outlawed listening to Western music. Enterprising bar owners sneaked onto American army bases and bought LPs off the G.I.s, secreting them in their establishments and playing them after dark for willing patrons. Now these LP bars are old and scuffed, just like the records they play, but they survive as novelties, places where oldsters can go to feel nostalgic and young 'uns can go to feel hip. And that's surely what we felt as we scribbled arcane requests on slips of paper, giving them to the barman up front. Our eyes widened and our souls soared as we heard the familiar tunes piping out of the speakers a few minutes later. It was downright psychadelic to sit there sipping beer in a dark wooden bar while the Doors' "The End" oozed serenely out of the speaker grilles. And that was just Saturday. On Sunday, our old friend Joanna, Miss H and I went to Myeong-dong to go shooting (in and out, no pictures), had some delectable Italian food and then went down to Gwacheon to hit up Seoul Zoo. Another full, lovely day in the third-largest city in the world!
I'll just leave you with this bear to keep you company until my next adventure-filled post.
Can't get much more random than this, can you?
(This is Lake Charvak, an artificial lake in the Tashkent Province.)
Uzbekistan is located in Central Asia, surrounded by the rest of the 'Stans, just a hair to the right of the Caspian Sea. Like a lot of countries in the region, it was once part of the Soviet Union.
But I don't hold that against it. Uzbekistan has always been one of my favorites. Couldn't say why, though.
Maybe it's just the name. I mean, come on—Ooze-beck-i-stan? A country with a "u" and a "z" in its name? Right next to each other, no less? How many times has that happened?
Then I actually started to learn about the place. As I was telling Mary Witzl of ResidentAlien, I once had an Uzbek exchange student in one of my high school math classes. Mary and I both know how frustrating it can be for people from the 'Stans to talk with Westerners, because we know practically zilch about these countries. We view them as small, out-of-the-way, backwater countries whose people speak strange, nearly dead languages.
That's not strictly true. Kazakhstan is huge. Wikipedia says it's about 2,700,000 square kilometers. That's greater than all of Western Europe combined. Kazakhstan would barely fit inside the continental United States. And as Mary writes in one of her excellent posts, Turkish is actually spoken in the 'Stans, thanks to the old Ottoman Empire. It's the lingua franca of the Central Asia, as it were. That's a far cry from dead.
We're not even clear on the geography of the place. Even I couldn't tell you which 'Stans are where in relation to Uzbekistan. That Uzbek exchange student I mentioned earlier (a very short, round, cute girl) finally got tired of it. One day, before the bell rang, we all pulled out a map of Central Asia and had a look. Our abashment was complete when she began correcting things. On a National Geographic map, too!
"No, no, no," she said. "Bukhara is not the capital. Here, Tashkent capital."
These were cities I hadn't even heard of. Now, when I hear their names, an excited tremble passes through my body. What bewitchment in those strange places, the allure of the East, the mystery of an unexplored land. Tashkent, Bukhara, Samarkand...shining metropolises waiting to be discovered.
Uzbekistan is beautiful, wild, and rich in culture. The cities are full of ancient mosques and temples, and the scenery is rugged and diverse.
Take the Registan, in Samarkand, for instance:According to the information I found, the Registan was the ancient heart of the city of Samarkand. Registan, some say, means "sandy place" in Persian. The legends say its floor was strewn with sand to soak up the blood of the Timurid Dynasty's captured foes. This is where Tamerlane stuck the heads of his enemies on spikes.
This is the Shakh-i-Zindeh mosque, also in Samarkand:
Uzbekistan is also home to the eleventh-largest desert in the world, the Kyzyl Kum (which, declaims Wikipedia, means "red sand" in Uzbek, Kazakh, and Turkish). It's full of saiga antelope, camels, agama lizards, and Bukhara deer, plus sand dunes and a plethora of fossil-bearing rock formations.
Uzbekistan has changed hands a lot in its history; first Alexander the Great marched through it, then Genghis Khan overran it, then Tamerlane, then the Russians. The Silk Road traverses a good part of the country, and thus the cities of Bukhara and Samarkand prospered in antiquity. The ancient Uzbek princes held quite a bit of influence.
Their wealth and opulence found an outlet in architecture. This is the Samanid Mauseoleum in Bukhara...
...and then there was this little honey, the Kalyan Minaret...
...also known as the Tower of Death. Supposedly built in the 1100s, it was used to call Muslims to prayer five times a day. In times of war, it was used as a lookout point. And also...
Fitzroy Maclean, who I am insanely jealous of, was a Scottish-born English diplomat posted to Moscow before World War II. During his tenure as an ambassador, he traveled extensively around the U.S.S.R., even to places he wasn't technically supposed to go. He sneaked aboard a train to Uzbekistan one day and spent some time exploring the country, much of which was recounted in his memoir Eastern Approaches. (That book is now at the top of my Amazon wish list. You'd better believe it.)
Maclean found that the Kaylan Minaret had a darker purpose: execution. Enemies of the state were thrown to their deaths from the top of the tower, even as late as the 20th century.
Maclean went on to have many more hair-raising adventures during the Western Desert Campaign in North Africa, and behind enemy lines with Yugoslav partisans. Some theorize that Sir Ian Fleming, the famous author, used Maclean as one of the inspirations for the well-known literary character James Bond.
Sir Ian Fleming was also, as I mentioned, born the same year as my great-grandmother, Ruth. Coincidence?
Anyway, whether or not I ever get to travel to Central Asia by train and have hair-raising adventures, Uzbekistan sounds like a culturally rich, visually stunning and metaphysically satisfying place to go. Who's with me?
