Tashkent Local Custom Tips by TheWanderingCamel Top 5 Page for this destination

Roll up! Roll up!

Little boys everywhere love the circus, and the lads in the photo here were no exception.

This was a travelling show set up outside the entrance to the Chorsu Bazaar, an old bus and a handful of acts, a clown and a spruiker, a couple of benches and a ring of people standing watching as an impossibly slim young man went through a strongman act that had us gasping, and wincing, as he picked up one, then two, then three solid lumps of lead tied together with a cloth, with his mouth. Ouch!

Not far away, the home of the Uzbekistan State Circus sits like a newly-landed flying saucer. The acts there may be far more polished and exotic, but I'm sure these little boys were every bit as enthralled with their ring-side seats at the show we were watching as they would have been under the big top.

The grieving mothers

Tashkent has its share of monumental statues - Temur on his horse in the pretty park on Amir Timur Square, the Earthquake Memorial to the thousands who died in the great quakes of the 1960s, the statue of the Uzbek blacksmith and his wife with the 15 Russian children they fostered during the war outside the Palace of the Friendship of the Peoples, the huge globe with only Uzbekistan marked that has replaced Lenin on Independence Square - all share a degree of grandiose swagger and bravado.
The you come to the Statue of the Grieving Mother, part of the monument to the Fallen of World War II , keeping watch by the Eternal Flame, and your heart breaks for all the mothers who grieve for their sons and daughters, lost to the ambitions of men and the madness of war.

leyle

High rise or low rise?

No once-Soviet city is complete without great blocks of faceless apartments. Tashkent is no exception. What is more surprising is how much traditional housing there is in the city. From the mud-brick houses of the oldest part of the city near the Chorsu bazaar to houses like these much newer ones, there are streets and streets of traditionally built houses, many in quieter back streets with vegetable gardens along the street frontages and even chickens running around.
leyle