Comedy interlude. We arrived in Samarkand by train yesterday evening.
(It is forbidden to take pictures of locations/items of strategic importance, but this is what the train looked like)
It was January 1, and apparently there are no restaurants open, EVERYONE is on holiday. The Hotel restaurant isn’t open either. Mr Limey and I had noticed a grocery store nearby, so we suggested that maybe our best course of action is to buy something we can eat in our hotel room.
This is what we did (last loaf of bread, 4oz cooked sausage, 4oz cheese, 1 bottle 10% alc. by volume beer and a bottle of red wine $4), managing to snag a corkscrew, plates and cutlery from Hotel reception on our way back.
But ... but .... it’s not as though this holiday was unexpected. I find it mildly comic that neither the tour agency nor the Hotel had made advance provision for this.
Buying provisions
It certainly helps that I speak a local language. It seems that alcohol is not displayed for sale in corner stores so if you don’t ask you’ll have to go without. In Tashkent we had found a grocery store cum bar, and bought wine there. They uncorked the bottle 3/4 of the way so that we could just pull the cork out.
In Bukhara I asked in the grocery store where we could get wine and they fished some out from under the counter. They also had a corkscrew and were able to “do the honours”. But here in Samarkand the shop had no corkscrew, but fortunately the hotel did.
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