Idk the customs in every region of Uzbekistan but most of them that I've seen always had the bride and groom stand like mannequins posing for pictures on the evening of the wedding. They cannot eat, they can drink I think? Like they have a whole platter of food but they cannot eat. Idk why this custom even exists? Like it's supposed to be your big day. Also like dancing, the groom can dance with the friends at like maybe a few songs, but the bride can only like once. We really need to have some changes bc weddings are lowk a fancy prom ball for everyone else except the ones who are getting married.
On Oct 17, at the Samarkand City Day concert in Yangi O'zbekiston Park, two young men walked past my girlfriend and me, then came back to make racist remarks while pretending to be friendly and shaking our hands. They returned later to mock us again, and it got worse once they heard us speaking Chinese. People nearby saw it, but no one stepped in. Only after the men left, when I asked the people around us, did they tell me how offensive those words had been.
We're a couple from Taiwan, and we've met so many kind Uzbeks on this trip, which makes this even more disappointing. Samarkand is a beautiful city, and as a Silk Road crossroads for centuries, it should be a place that welcomes every culture. Next time, we hope someone nearby will speak up.
I booked a refundable ticket to Uzbekistan for May for eight days. Flying into Samarkand, out of Bukhara. It’s a solo trip.
I’ve been following this subreddit a month, and really have enjoyed the diversity of opinions. However, I worry about it being a stressful trip. I’m well traveled and have been to 60 countries on every continent. While I’ve never been to Central Asia, I’ve travelled in Turkey and Jordan. I worry a bit about the homophobia; I’m a gay man, age 47, from the US with extensive tattoos. I don’t plan to advertise that I’m gay, or look for gay people.
My ticket itinerary to Samarkand was changed by the airline. It was a 22 hour flight, and now it’s 32 hours with an overnight layover in Istanbul. I can look for alternative tickets but is it still worth it? The photos are beautiful, the food looks great, and I hear people are warm and friendly. I like cities, archaeology, museums, and good food.
Am I going to enjoy this trip still? I can easily change to another country because it’s refundable.
I have been searching a job since the late september and looking for ways to earn 400k uzs in a day, i have reviewed these ways as an opportunity:
- delivering
- washing a car
- freelancing in upwork (it is too competitive, i am seeing only negative reviews about this platform from other upwokers in Reddit.)
- importing petrol (gasoline) from neighboring countries
What your thoughts, do you earn 400k uzs in a day or more, what do you do, what would you recommend, what other ways would you suggest me to do?
Uzbekistan travel tip: Afrosiyob train "sold out" doesn't mean sold out — plus a Yandex Go SIM warning
Just finished traveling through Uzbekistan (Tashkent → Samarkand → Bukhara → Khiva) and wanted to share two things that would have saved me stress and money.
1. Afrosiyob train tickets: don't panic when they show sold out
Five days before my Samarkand → Bukhara trip, the official booking site showed ZERO seats in both first and economy. I panicked and bought through an agent at a premium — 4 tickets cost me $250 when face value was $185.
Then I watched the site: seats reopen in batches at roughly 96, 72, 48, and 24 hours before departure. At one point 104 seats suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
So: if tickets show sold out, don't panic. Keep checking the official site (eticket.uzrailpass.uz) — seats will reopen in waves. The system seems designed to funnel tourists toward agents, but if you know the pattern you can book direct and save the markup.
2. Yandex Go needs a local number — buy a SIM at the airport
Yandex Go is the ride-hailing app here. It's available everywhere, anytime, and the rates are incredibly low. But registering requires SMS verification, which is a headache on a foreign number.
Don't bother with your home carrier's roaming package. Buy a local SIM at the airport (Ucell or Beeline — passport needed, cheap), register Yandex Go with it in minutes, and your taxi problem is solved.
One more thing: in the Yandex Go app you choose the payment method — card or cash — before booking. Make sure you pick the one you want, because the driver will expect whichever you selected.
Another suggestion. In Samarkand, apart from the walking tour of old city, you must visit “Eternal city”. You will not regret. This place is underrated.
Hope this helps someone. Uzbekistan is fantastic — the trains are comfortable and the people are great. Just don't let the ticketing system shake you down.
I recently traveled to Uzbekistan via TAS airport carrying a drone (DJI mini 4 pro) and wanted to share my experience in case helpful for anyone.
Bringing any drone into Uzbekistan remains VERY illegal, but it is entirely possible to surrender it at the airport and pick it up again when you are leaving the country. As far as I can see, it is only possible to do this if you enter & exit the country from the same airport -- I can only vouch for TAS airport personally. There is no clear process for entry with a drone via car or bus.
Process for leaving your drone at TAS:
After baggage claim, you need to surrender your drone at customs by going through the red line for "goods to declare". The staff at customs are very used to tourists surrendering drones, they will show you where to go.
I was taken to an area right behind the customs checkpoint where I had to provide my passport and fill out a form. The form was only available in Uzbek and the agent did not speak English, but almost everyone is fluent in Russian. It is helpful to use a camera-based translation app like Google Translate if you don't speak either local language --- consider getting a local SIM card before going to customs if airport wifi is not working.
After you fill out the form, you will be escorted to an office where the customs agents will fill additional forms, and might ask you for information like your flight details, accommodation in Uzbekistan, drone model etc.
The whole process took about 30-40 minutes. I only had 1 person in front of me in line, though, so it might take longer if the airport is busy.
The agents will then take your drone & package it. They will give you a piece of paper which you NEED TO KEEP WITH YOU to retrieve your drone when you return to the airport for your departure flight.
They also recommend calling a day in advance of your departure flight to confirm your pickup details and time. The phone number is posted on the wall of the office. I used my local SIM card to call them as the number wasn't registered on Whatsapp.
Process for picking up your drone:
Check in for your flight, drop your baggage etc. as you normally would and go through passport control. To the left of passport control, right before security, you will see the customs office / kiosk. It is very clearly labeled.
Give the agent there your passport & the piece of paper to retrieve your drone. They will have it ready for you -- it took <1 minute to retrieve.
Again, this might look different if the airport is busy or if the agent is missing from their desk. The agent that took my drone originally recommended arriving at the airport 3 hours before my flight to be safe -- I just did 2 and it was enough I think, it's a small airport.
Bacha bazi was a practice of sexually exploiting young boys, often around 11-12 years old. They were dressed up as girls in wigs, silk and makeup, made to dance for grown men. Then the men who paid for the show took the boy for the night and fucked him. That's it. That's the "art". It's child rape with extra steps.
Dance of a bacha. Samarkand, c. 1905-1915, photo by Prokudin-Gorsky.
I picked photos from different cities on purpose, so nobody can say "that was just one city". No, it was everywhere, and unfortunately, it is still there in Afghanistan.
Bacha bazi wasn't just a matter of a few isolated performances. Eugene Schuyler (1876) describes dancing boys as a recognized institution across settled Central Asia. He wrote, that men of rank commonly kept a bacha, while men with fewer resources pooled their money to maintain one. Schuyler, Vereshchagin, Count Pahlen, Mstislavsky, Ostroumov, Lykoshin, all of them wrote about it as a normal, visible part of life in Central Asia.
Mstislavsky (1900) describes a village party where a 16-year-old looked 11-12, was dressed as a woman, and grown men fought over whom he'd bow to. The crowd called him "she" the whole time.
Dance of the bachas in Tashkent, Le Monde illustré, 2 Sept 1893.
The most disgusting part is how "pious" everyone was. In 1884, Tashkent qazis produced a ruling saying bacha-play was against sharia. But Mstislavsky writes, that some qazis kept a bacha themselves, in secret. He also tells of a Samarkand official who raged about hanging all bachas and bacha-lovers, then ten minutes later happily took a bacha into his household while hearing a complaint.
Dance of the bachas in Kokand. Photo by F. Orden, 1884-1894.
According to Ostroumov (1896), there was an anecdote popular in Turkestan, set at the court of the Kokand khan. A bacha-lover is sentenced to death. To save himself, he claims he knows a secret of how to grow pure gold from "seeds" (semen). The khan, greedy, postpones the execution. When sowing time comes, the man says: "I'm a filthy sinner (slept with bacha), nothing will grow from my sowing. Let one of your courtiers do it while I supervise". The khan orders his courtiers to do it, one by one. Not a single one is clean of the same sin. So the condemned man says: "Then let the khan sow it himself, for the good of the people". And the khan has to admit he is a sinner too.
Celebration of Soli-nav at Afrasiab. In the tent. Honored guests and bachas. Portraits by Hugo Krafft, Russian Turkestan, 1898-1899.
Notice who sits next to the boys: the "honored guests". The rich and the respected. It was essentially systematized version of nation-wide Epstein Island.
It's in our own literature too. Take, for example, Abdulla Qodiriy's "Mehrobdan chayon", chapter 19 ("Iflos bir moziy", "A filthy past"). The future imam Abdurahmon is sent to Bukhara to study at his uncle's madrasa. He's a "silliqqina" boy and that's exactly why they lusted after him. The uncle locks the gate every night, but merchants lure him out through the window with a rope. He becomes their "Abdurahmoncha", dressed as a 16-year-old girl, serving wine and dancing. When it's discovered, the madrasa students take their turn. Abdurahmoncha becomes popular and gains a lot of "clients". But when the beard grows, the "market goes bad" and customers disappear, so he turns to a third group of clients in teahouses. Then he repents, comes back to Kokand and becomes imam.
Dance of the bachas. Karategin beglik, Emirate of Bukhara, Central Asia. Leon Barszczewski, 1890-1896.
Lykoshin (1916) documented murders over bachas in Tashkent in the 1890s. Rich men took two bachas to a garden outside the city, raped them, and one of the drunk men got killed by his friends in a fight over who would get a boy.
Look at the pattern. The qazis banned it on paper and kept a bacha at home. The official demanded executions and then took a boy into his house. The jokes people told said the khan himself wouldn't pass the test. The future imam was a former bacha and Qodiriy wrote about it over a century ago. Everyone knew. Nobody stopped it, because the people who could stop it were the customers. Doesn't this resemble the case in Khorezm in which pedophile officials who raped orphaned children received sentences of just three years? I don't advocate for execution, no. The law already imposes harsh penalties for child rape and the penalties were tightened even more just several days ago. The problem is that the law is not always enforced in Uzbekistan. That's... that's just sad.
We already travelled to a lot of countries; always in ways that would let us connect with locals. We hitchhiked around places like Japan and Iraq, slept in homes of locals in Mexico and Iran and connected to people via social media apps in Russia and Oman to hang out.
Now we are finally coming to Uzbekistan and are really excited!
However, as were now travelling most of the time with together as a family (with two small kids), travel has slowed down and we're usually using trains and stay in hotels far away from the homes of locals, which makes it hard to get to know the real country and make local friends, or maybe visit their favourite spot in the city.
We're from Berlin. Interests in people, history, culture and design (both in UX/product design-related jobs). Oh, and playgrounds now :D.
If anyone has time to meet up for maybe for a drink (potentially also me alone, in the evening) or a stroll through your corner of the city for an hour or two, let me know! Also happy to hear if you have any spot that you love, but we'd probably miss.
Has anyone here tried both mass-market hair pomades and Morgan’s? Is Morgan’s actually worth the extra money or are you mostly paying for the brand?
I’m choosing between a Nishman pomade for around 120k UZS and a Morgan’s pomade for around 200k UZS. Is the difference in hold, finish, texture, and washability noticeable enough to justify the price difference?
I am M40 years 6'3 260lbs. Work a physical job. Drive long distances between jobs. In the middle of the night I wake up with leg cramps on my calves and hamstrings. The next day my muscles are tight and extremely sore. Ive taken prednisone which usually helps. And now methocarbomal. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated
So I am interested in History. So far I have been to London, Ireland, Thailand and Taiwan.
Uzbekistan is next on my list because of all the silk route history, Mongolian history. A little bit of soviet history. A little bit of Islamic history as well.There are three major concerns I have with visiting Uzbekistan and I wanted to ask here.
From what I have been reading in this Subreddit, Taxis are a little bit of a pain. In most of the other places I have visited have very good public transport options. Here Yandex seems to be the only option and the Taxi drivers are a little unethical from what I have been reading. They will carry you bag to the car and demand that you pay them 10$ when the fare is 2$ or 3$. Paying an extra 7$ to the Taxi driver is not the end of the world for me. But it will be an unpleasant experience. How much of a problem are the taxi drivers.
I am a vegetarian. In London I used to eat exclusively in Tesco. In Taiwan I survived on 7-Eleven and Family mart. Gemini tells me that I can get vegetarian food in Korzinka / Makro. I will only be visiting for 5 days, so I wouldn't have time to go to a local Bazaar find out what the vegetarian food they have. Ask them if the food is vegetarian and all. I usually pick one grocery foods chain. Pick two or three items and only eat those things for lunch and dinner for the entire duration of my stay. It saves a lot of time. Can I get vegetarian food enough to make a meal in Korzinka/Makro. If so what would you recommend I eat there?
This is particularly a very problematic concern. But I am an Indian Hindu male albeit an Athiest. I will be going into really famous ancient mosques to take pictures. I won't disrespect anyone. I won't be noisy. I won't disturb anything. If there are any placards or something that provide historical context I will take my time to read them. Are there going to be any problems? I am trying to learn world history and I will be visiting Turkey, Egypt, Greece, Japan, Italy in the future as well. Will I face any problems with the locals. As an Indian, will I face any problem with the locals in Tashkent, Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva? Racism or any kind of hostility?
Hello everyone I’m a foreigner and I live in fergana Uzbekistan and I want to celebrate my friends birthday by using firecrackers so just wanted to know if it’s allowed here to do firecrackers ?
Hey everyone! I'm Egyptian, in my mid-30s, and looking to meet other expats and English-speaking locals in Tashkent. I'd love to find a friendly community and make some new friends.
I'm looking for halal-friendly social activities rather than the bar scene: things like coffee meetups, board games, hiking, language exchanges, or just good conversation over food.
I am visiting Uzbekistan in a few days on a group tour.
We have one afternoon free to do whatever we want in Bukhara. Is this enough time to squeeze in visits to some (if not all) the seven saints of Bukhara?
Shah Nakshband is a must visit, and I know this is close to the centre Anwyays, but what about some of the other?
Also is it easy to travel between the two or would I have to get a driver?
