Nukus, Uzbekistan
Disaster has befallen Bugs Meany: A dozen miles outside of arid Nukus, a Dayton, Ohio–size city that’s declined since communism’s fall, the team’s van starts growling, then dies.
“Guess that’s the price you pay for making your car fly,” says one of the two Jacobs on Team Bugs Meany. A few days ago, they took a sandy hill too fast and sailed through the air, crashing down on their van’s nose.
We tow the car to a mechanic. While awaiting the diagnosis, I head to Nukus’s central market. It’s a mazelike labyrinth chockablock with vendors, selling everything from knives and pans to socks embroidered with pot leaves to severed cow legs. It’s like Wal-Mart on acid.
There’s little rhyme or reason to the market’s layout. Old women in brightly colored dresses sell fermented horse milk out of old Coke bottles near butchers cleaning tripe. Instead of going bonkers trying to source particular foods, I allow chance to guide my meal choices.
I chomp cold cellophane noodles mixed with pickled carrots, served in a plastic bag. From a woman with a well-lined face I try a pastry filled with onions and lamb; it releases enough juices to sully my last clean shirt.
For dessert, I buy both a fistful of candy peanuts and an ice cream cone. Total tally for the day’s indulgences? A dollar fifty. I’m not in any rush for my friends’ car to get fixed.
It’s not “Wal-Mart on acid”. It’s a public outdoor market, the kind that’s been around for thousands of years in that very part of the world. You’re driving the Silk Road, and the best analogy you come up with when you run across Korean noodles, Vietnamese-made housewares and Russian-style rolls with Central Asian fillings all in one place is “Wal-Mart on acid”?
Incidentally, if C|Net had bothered sending assigning this gig to someone interested in the world around them, there could have been a fascinating post on how jap chae found its way to Uzbekistan in the first place.
Comrade Hatless, I agree our correspondent may not be well informed or a great writer, but he is there. Rather than curse the darkness, why not light a candle and let us know just how Korean noodles wound up on the silk road. I’m all ears,
Steamer
In the late 1930s, Stalin had hundreds of thousands of ethnic Koreans from the Russian Far East, some native and orhers refugees fleeing Korea during the Sino-Japanese War forcibly relocated to far-flung parts of the USSR, mostly to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. There are conservatively estimated to be somewhere around 300,000 ethnic Koreans in Central Asia now, a majority of them in Uzbekistan.
One consequence of this has been the adoption of a few Korean recipes into mainstream Central Asian cooking, and it’s why Russian delis here in the US invariably sell a Korean-style carrot-and-raisin salad, f’rinstance.
Hatless, cut the guy a break! Even those of us meaning to be well-informed Americans know very little about Central Asia. That’s why Sacha Baron Cohen chose Kazakhstan for Borat’s home country. When we were growing up, then entire CCCP was treated like a vast monolithic culture of evil. Perhaps it would be more accurate however to call Wal-mart a Silk Road Market on Quaaludes.
While I may be an ignorant American I was able to spot Kartuli on your Chow homepage.
If someone were paying me to write about food while I drove 8,000 miles, with the bulk of it in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, I’d at least look through some basic background info on those countries and their food. Maybe I’d even print off a few Wikipedia pages or rip the intro chapters out of a couple of Lonely Planet guides to bring along. No need for expert-level knowledge or anything, but jeez.
I look forward to Chow Tour Japan. Sample installment:
“Day 12. For some reason, no matter where we go, our Mandarin and Cantonese phrasebooks seem useless. Around lunchtime we went to a streetside stall that was selling pancakes! We ordered a stack of them. We spent ten minutes trying to get the vendor to understand he’d forgotten to give us any maple syrup and by the time we gave up, the pancakes were cold. It turned out it didn’t matter because they were full of bits of unidentifiable seafood! I know it wasn’t breakfast time anymore, but couldn’t they clean the grill a little better before they make pancakes? Needless to say, we didn’t get past the first bite. Disgusting!”
“Famished and depressingly sober, we went into a nearby bar. We ordered some cold Bud Lights and rubbed our stomachs to indicate that we wanted something to eat.”
“Once again, we were given plates of cold, grossly-undercooked fish laid atop leftover rice. Why don’t the bars serve any prepared food? Ravenous by this point, we chugged the rest of our beer and went back to our hotel so we could cook the fish on the hotplate we bought last week. Again.”
When I was travelling last year, I was distressed by how much petrol was burned in order for people to go away and lament why living conditions couldn’t be just like home.
Sigh, it’s not so much about jealousy as it is about the way travellers present themselves when they’re abroad. Is this person just perpetuating stereotypes about how horrible certain tourists are when they’re away from the mother land?
You people are way too annoying.. this blog is funny and interesting.