12 Hours in Tashkent

Tashkent airport, what a strange and obscure experience this place has been, I don’t think I have ever seen an airport like it in my life, it has the feeling of an old world charm, like India is trapped in eastern Europe, with traces of old Mughal history, arches with the flavour of Akbar's time, with bathrooms inhabited only by Indian people…it feels like a glorified train station, with carpets on the floor and anal police. The woman at the immigration kept the ticket at the counter, looked at me very communist-ly and said “ Your flight is not till tomorrow afternoon, you veel get your tikeet then” As I type this, I get the feeling of this being the airport that time forgot. There is a very sweet harmless couple with a little girl not more than I would say 13. They seem Uzbek, don’t speak any English and are seemingly fascinated by the technology of this machine. The man stands over my shoulder staring intently at the screen as I type this in a language that he cannot read. There are people asleep on the floors, on carpets and on cold cement, their luggage serving as pillows. To my great amusement, this place has plugs that are not even Indian and not even western, and are instead of a strange german technology, with the plug pins so deeply inset that its impossible to plug in the charger for this machine, thus meaning that in about 31 minutes it will run out of battery and I will not be able to continue. Uzbekistan. I never thought I would ever end up spending 12 hours of my life in Uzbekistan