Experience Fulbright

This is going to be shorter post just because I am completely exhausted. I apologize in advance for any typos.

Yesterday was the big kick off event for my project. The Ministry of Public Education held a press conference and invited important members of the ministry and the Director of Cultural Affairs for the US Embassy. I was interviewed but the local TV station and had to give a presentation for all the officials. It was well received and everyone there seemed to enjoy the relaxation breathing exercise I ended with. The one bad thing was that the person assigned to be my translator apparently did not do a good job. The head of the project was very upset afterward with how he translated (she also speaks English, Russian, and Uzbek). We will have to get this sorted out before next week when we begin the trainings with the local school psychologists.

This press conference was really making me nervous so I’m happy to have that behind me. Afterwards, my team took me our for a traditional Uzbek lunch. As with many other buildings here in Uzbekistan, the restaurant was beautiful. The food was also tasty. I have some kind of lamb dumpling served with sour cream, a chicken kebob, and of course, traditional Uzbek bread. They have bread with every meal and it is delicious. It’s also considered sacred and cannot be wasted. Lucky for us that we love bread and have no problem eating it all.

The past few days have absolutely flown by. There’s been a ton to do to get ourselves set up here in Tashkent. I got my son enrolled in school. His first day is tomorrow and I’m hoping he adjusts well. It seems like a very welcoming place, at least as far as the adults are concerned. The bad thing about the school is that it is a bit out of the way. There’s no metro stop near it so I’ve had to higher a private driver to take him to and from school. That sounds so snooty, I know, but here in Tashkent a driver is shockingly inexpensive. It cost me $6 to have the driver take us to and from school yesterday for the tour and placement testing. To have him drive everyday to and from school costs just $10/day. Oh and while Dillon was doing taking his placement test, the lovely British principal arranged for tea to be brought to me while I sat in the office doing some work. I just love the British. This is the proper way to serve tea.

I also got to visit the US Embassy here in Tashkent and get acquainted with some of the staff there. My main point of contact at the embassy prior to my arrival has been one of the political affairs officer. Her name is Saida and it was great to meet her in person. She gave us a tour and introduced us to a bunch of important folks there, including the Chief of Mission. There’s currently no US Ambassador to Uzbekistan so the Chief of Mission is in guy in charge. Everyone we met was incredible friendly and helpful. There aren’t a lot of Americans here in Uzbekistan so I think they are always excited when someone new arrives. I’ve already been asked if I can help out with some of the US Embassy outreach programs, like American Corner and Education USA. I’ll post more about those programs later. One other observation about the US Embassy, it’s a fortress. I’ve never had occasion to visit an Embassy before so this was an interesting experience for me.

The next huge thing on our to-do list was to find an apartment to rent. We went out with one of my team members from the Ministry of Public Education (MPE) who has been tasked with finding us an apartment. She is fantastic and speaks great English. (BTW, many people here speak English and having only limited Russian skills hasn’t been a problem.) Zulfiya showed us four apartments the first day. One looked like it was in a sketchy neighborhood and the building felt like a WWII bomb shelter. The apartment inside was very nice but we passed on that one right away. The third apartment we looked at was very nice. My son’s word for it was “fancy”. It had nice oriental rugs everywhere and crystal chandeliers. It was on the expensive side at $1000/month but had 3 bedrooms, one more than we needed, which we could use for yoga/exercising. The landlady seemed like the stereotypical stern Russian woman. She never smiled and seemed generally unhappy with life. Still, it was a nice apartment in a good neighborhood next to the French Embassy. We agreed to take the apartment only to find out the next day that she wanted more money for rent. Zulfiya was pissed and very offended. She said this is very un-Uzbek. They had agreed on terms, at least verbally, so to try to ask for more money was extremely rude. Zulfiya said that I should not even consider renting from this woman now and we started the search over.

So, on Tuesday afternoon we headed out to see two more places. Luckily, we saw one that I liked even more. It is a bright and sunny two bedroom for $900 and it overlooks a park. If all goes well we will sign the paperwork and move in tomorrow.

The last big item on our “getting settled” to-do list is to get Uzbek cell phones. We brought our current phones and are using them on Wi-Fi but that’s not a good long term strategy since free Wi-Fi here is NOT widespread. My friend Jordan, who has been here since August as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant, told me to bring our old iPhones if we had them and just get them unlocked. This allows us to keep our current American phones for using iMessage and Facetime with friends back home (when we are on Wi-Fi) and use the old ones as local cell phones. All I need to do, assuming I was successful in getting AT&T to globally unlock our old phones before I left MN, is get a local sim card, pop it in, and buy some minutes/data from a local provider. This is on my list for today. I’ll try to post again tomorrow with another update after move-in day.

So we had a little stress at the beginning of the trip to Tashkent. We arrived at the London airport about 4 hours early to collect our luggage from the Excess Baggage Company where we left it upon our arrival in London. (This was expensive but well worth NOT having to lug 4 suitcases through the London Underground.) As soon as we stepped into the departures area to check with for our flight, I realized that I had left our passports and a bunch of cash in the safe in our hotel room. I was very lucky that my husband had decided to come with us to London and was staying a few more days in the hotel so it wasn’t a catastrophe. He immediately hopped back on the Tube to take the hour ride back to central London to retrieve the money and our passports from the room. My son and I spent an anxious 2 1/2 hours hanging out in the terminal by the ticket counter waiting for him to return. in the end we had just enough time to check-in, get through security, and even grab a quick snack before boarding our 6pm flight to Tashkent. Thank God we were so early and that my husband was with.

The boarding process for the flight went smoothly as the flight was only about half full. That meant my son and I had a window seat and an aisle seat with no one in between us. This was a much appreciated bonus after the stress of earlier in the day. The flight was smooth and we even got to watch a movie in English, Jumanji. There was no in-seat entertainment. Instead the plane had the drop down screens about every 4 rows. My son, who is an experienced traveler already, commented about the dated look of the plane. It really was like flying 20 years ago. But everything was in good repair and they gave us a ton of food. We were even able to get a few hours of sleep on the 7 hour long flight.

We arrived in Tashkent at 5:50am local time. Since it was so early the airport terminal was empty except for our flight. We only had to wait a few minutes at passport control to get our visas checked and our passports stamped. We made over to baggage claim before the bags had even started coming out. We had been there for only a minute or two before a man from the US Embassy come up to greet us. He introduced himself and gave us an emergency contact info card from the embassy in case we ever need it. Once our luggage came out he helped us get all our bags out of the airport and to a waiting minivan. In total we must have spent only 20 or less in the Tashkent airport. He drove us to our hotel and came inside to make sure we got checked in okay. I have never had such an easy arrival in any foreign country before. This could not have been any easier.

Out first impressions of Tashkent are that it is very clean and quite pretty. We’ve stayed pretty close to the hotel so there is much more to see but what we have seen is beautiful. The building are mainly white tile or marble with decorative accents. Today we ventured into a grocery store to buy bottled water and notice that the walkway into the store was fancy marble with decorative tiles every few steps. The floor inside the market was similar.

We also spent a few hours at the Amir Timur Museum. This place was stunning. The exhibits were interesting historical items from mainly the 1400’s. We saw old weapons, pottery, tapestries and a variety of other items. But the real beauty was in the building itself. Its hard to describe in words so I’m just gonna leave a few photos here, which really don’t do it justice.

We are spending the rest of the day hanging out at the hotel. We are going to hit the fitness center and then relax in the pool for a bit. Tomorrow we go apartment hunting!

We had a smooth first leg of our journey to Uzbekistan. Our flight to London was uneventful and we even landed a half hour early. Still, an overnight flight is always a challenge for me. We spent our first day in central London exploring and just trying to stay awake until a proper bedtime here. My hope is to let my body adjust to London time (+6 hours from Minneapolis) over the 4 days we have here in the hope that the jet lag won’t be as bad when we arrive in Tashkent. (It’s +11 hours from MSP.)

One day 1 in London we mostly just did some sight seeing to stay awake. We took the bus to Harrod’s and wandered around the store for a hour or so before heading into Hyde park. It was sunny and dry in the afternoon so walking through the park was lovely. it was strange to see green grass again. Dillon wanted to walk past the Princess Diana Memorial playground (aka the pirate ship park) since it was his favorite park when we were staying in London 12 years ago. Its one of the few things he remembers from our time in London.

After the park we grabbed a bite to eat at Bella Italia near the Bayswater tube stop and then headed back to our hotel for a bit of rest. We managed to stay awake long enough for a proper British fish & chips dinner.

We spent our second day touring the Imperial War Museum which has an amazing collection of items from World War I and WWII. This was a very interesting, if not depressing, museum. We required a little pick me up after a day spent learning about the history of war, so we stopped into a little pub called The Tankerd near the museum. This was some of the best pub food I’ve ever had. One of my favorite British dishes is the Steak and Ale pie and this one did not disappoint. Although I could do without the mushy peas.

Our last day was spent touring the Harry Potter Studios. This was a spendy tour but well worth the money if you are a HP fan. We got to tour many of the actual sets used in the filming of the movies and learn all kinds of behind the scenes tidbits. The enormous model they built of Hogwarts castle was the most impressive thing we saw. The model is massive and all constructed by hand. It took 90 artists 7 months to create and was used for all the exterior shots of the castle. Its hard to tell the scale of it from the photo but it took up an entire 2 story studio.

In between all of these fun tourist stops, I’ve been communicating with the US Embassy in Tashkent about my arrival and the Ministry of Education about my schedule for next week. It looks like I will need to hit the ground running as I already have two full days of meetings set up with ministry officials and and a press conference. (Yikes!) I need to give a formal presentation of my project to a team of Ministry officials and about 15 reporters. So, I’ve spent time in the mornings and evenings this week putting the slides together for this. It was actually a great exercise for me to do before arriving since it required me to read over a bunch of research I had been meaning to get to. I feel more prepared now having this done.

It has been a nice few days in London and certainly better than an 11 hour layover in the airport. I’m glad that we split the trip up. By the time this blog posts we will be on our way to Tashkent.

This past week has just blown by. I was lucky to be able to meet up with several friends for long lunches or breakfasts. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to connect with everyone I wanted to see.

We are all packed. The boarding passes are printed out and sitting with our passports on top of a suitcase. Despite my natural desire to travel light, there was no way we were getting everything we (mostly “I”) wanted to bring into just one suitcase a piece. Everything is packed and we we have two large suitcases plus one small carry-on sized roller bag and one backpack each. Dragging all that through the airports is NOT going to be fun.

I got all signed up for the medical insurance through Fulbright and finally completed an online visa application for the Fulbright conference in India for myself. I still need to apply for visa for my family.

I emailed off a bunch of materials to the person at the Uzbek Ministry of Education who will be doing the translation for me and confirmed that someone from the Ministry will be meeting us at the airport in Tashkent and taking us out apartment hunting.

I also received a schedule of meetings with various people within the Ministry of Education with whom I will be working. I’m definitely going to have a full first week in Tashkent, and that’s not even considering the jet lag.

Thanks for reading along this far. Things should get a lot more interesting from here. My next post will be from Uzbekistan.

Stay tuned.