Experience Fulbright

I sent off my one page project summary to the Ministry of Education and am waiting to hear back from them. So, in the meantime, I decided to distract myself this week by  looking at flight options. So if you’re not interested in exploring all the ways you can to Uzbekistan, you should probably just stop reading now.

Let’s start with the flight options.  Tashkent is not an easy place to get to from Minnesota. I’ve done some preliminary research on the best routes for us to take and am a bit flummoxed.  Due to the “Fly America Act” we have to fly on a US carrier or one of its partners for as much of the trip as possible. That’s fine with me as I’d prefer to fly Delta over Turkish airlines anyway.  I started with a basic search on Travelocity without much success. Nearly every option that comes up goes West to South Korea and then to Tashkent.  This is not a good option. The flights require multiple connections and take anywhere from 32 to 46 hours. That’s right folks, almost 2 days of just flights and layovers.

Another option is to fly to Europe on a US based airline and then connect via Uzbek Airways. This option is a little more complicated for me to sort out though as the Uzbek Airlines flight, as far as I can tell, will have to be booked directly through their website AND our return flight date isn’t until sometime in June. Right now Uzbek airlines is only booking out through March. This means that I can’t look at actual flights that are available.  Still, I can see the flight routes and the European cities that Uzbek Airlines has direct flights to Tashkent. My best options appear to be to fly from Rome, Milan, London, or Frankfurt directly to Tashkent. If we connect in London the flight to Tashkent is about 7 hours.  A flight from either Italy or Germany is about 6 hours.

Now a plan is forming in my mind. Because of the long travel time and the need to connect in Europe, I’m thinking we might be better off flying to Europe early and spend a few days being tourists before getting our connection to Tashkent via Uzbek airlines.  That sounds that a much better option than spending around 40 hours in airports or on an airplane.

And by the way, as I’m writing this, my son is watching an episode of “Air Disasters” on TV. I just watched all about how an Asia Airlines flight dropped out of the sky and plunged into the ocean, killing everyone on board, due to pilot error. Um…So I’m not feeling so great about all this flying after all…