Tag Archives: resting
more work
I still hadn’t finished correcting the Chinese manuscript of my book “Neuschweinstein”, and the deadline was getting closer. So while she was outside doing all kinds of fun stuff, I sat on my bed and stared at my computer screen all day: This was work that I wasn’t going to get paid for. In fact, […]
the ten thousand
If you like food, Tashkent is the best place in Uzbekistan. Sure, other areas have their own specialties, but only the big city offers such a large variety of different flavors to choose from, including Korean, Georgian, and Vietnamese. So we ate and we ate. Sometimes we had exotic foods, sometimes we tried local stuff: […]
next pahlava in Baku?
Today was good. There was only a tiny hint of sadness, because I found out that the Azeri food joint where I would get my dosage of pahlava until just a few months ago had been closed and demolished: This was something typical of cities in this part of the world (China included) – everything […]
darker than… her
Today was Bukhara’s big day: The Silk And Spice Festival. It seemed as though the whole town had shown up. Plus a bunch of student volunteers in white shirts and white caps. There was a music show going on, and some people in the audience were dancing as well: Eugene was there, too: He’s a […]
fest prep
Woke up in Bukhara, aching. Went outside once, because there was some sort of noise that I could not quite identify: It was the final rehearsal for the Silk And Spice Festival parade. The real deal was going to take place the next day. To my untrained eyes and ears, it seemed as though everyone […]
forget about fast wifi
Uzbekistan, albeit being a very nice place to visit, didn’t have very good access to the internet. Actually, in most places it was pretty painful. Yet there is one thing I don’t think I ever told you: Jizzakh, somewhere between Tashkent and Samarkand, had excellent internet. And I mean excellent. Bukhara, well, not so much. […]
breakfast
Every morning when I went down to the breakfast hall, I would have two hard-boiled eggs and four little bread thingies: I’d wash it all down with some fruit juice, then ask for some hot water for my thermos. I don’t like being without tea. Then I would sit down and work on the translation […]
characters
I woke up with a bad head. Not terribly bad, just pulsing. So I had breakfast, then I stayed on the balcony for a while: And then I started working on the translation again: It took me much longer than I had anticipated. Chinese is more concise than German, meaning if you translate a German […]
hot pockets to funk
My German book “Neuschweinstein” was being translated into Chinese. Not by me, my Chinese was not good enough for that. But I had offered to read the translation and check it for errors. That’s what I did today: Or at least that was the plan. At around two in the afternoon I went outside and […]
night grill
Okay, neither one of my balconies was very spacious: But it was enough for me. After successfully obtaining a sunburn, I decided that my clothes looked disgusting and needed washing: I hung them all over the room: Then I went outside to a garden restaurant: Ali was working the grill: I ordered a bunch of […]
holiday
Had an awesome hotel room with two balconies: So I sat on my balcony (on one of my TWO balconies): And tried to get a tan: At 35 degrees celsius it felt a little bit like a beach vacation. Just without the beach.
…and my chair
I arrived in Samarkand early in the morning, and the first thing I did was check on the Caboose: Then I went to sleep in a calm and dark room of the hostel where I was staying: And then, in the late afternoon, I took a little walk around town. Samarkand was so much prettier […]
I want to sit next to me
I ended up packing my stuff in the morning. When I got to the airport, the lady at the counter told me that I didn’t have a flight from Hannover via Moscow to Samarkand. I had a flight from Hannover to Moscow and another flight from Moscow to Samarkand. Can’t tell the difference? Well, there […]
memento
Remember how we tried to see one of the world’s oldest surviving copies of the Qur’an, but we failed? That was more than two weeks ago. Today we came back, and we triumphed! First we bought tickets, then we inserted some money into this strange looking machine: I thought it was a dispenser for chewing […]
Hungry Steppe by train
We had to leave. So I asked the owners of the hotel if there was any way I could store my Caboose with them for a few months. “Sure”, they said. Then they showed me a place under a staircase in the yard: There was a large basement just under the hotel, and it was […]
honeycomb of expectations
I have to be honest: I was a bit scared of Samarkand before I came here. Not scared as in scared of the police or scared of a bear. But scared of my own expectations. I had been dreaming about Samarkand for almost a decade by now. Would the city let me down? Short answer: […]
wealth of fog
We were still staying in, innocently celebrating our newfound affluence: When we went out for dinner, a thick fog was covering Jizzakh: Anyway, we managed to find the place we usually went to. It was called Smile: So we sat down and ordered a bunch of fast food: When we were done, the fog was […]
broke/unbroke
We were broke. So we took a cab to some obscure place: And then we weren’t broke anymore. We decided to celebrate with pizza for lunch: And burgers for dinner: Oh, and we watched a lot of Simpsons, too.
smashing subaquatic soup
More unwellness meant more staying in the hotel. Well, we left our room once to go to a restaurant nearby. It had a sort of underwater theme, and the music was really fucking loud: We were not sure if we liked this or not (we kinda did: check out the soundtrack of the day), but […]
I like pink
We stayed in today. Watched some Simpsons. Read a little. Ruben was feeling unwell, so he wasn’t up to much. I had an interview scheduled, but since the internet in this place was so slow, we had to resort to sending voice messages back and forth via messaging app. It took a while. Enough time […]