every country or bust!
on my way from central asia back to israel i stopped for a full day in athens. i was extremely fatigued and still recovering from the bukhara heat stroke, so after climbing the central mount lycabettus for a glorious view over athens, i wandered the streets progressively slower and slower. it was easter sunday so everything was closed.
uzbekistan – what a country. first off, it has the wackiest currency situation you’ve ever heard of. the government sets the official exchange rate, but the uzbek currency is actually worth less than half of what the government says it is. so there is a black market currency trade on the street, on which you may sell u.s. dollars and get twice as much value as you would from an atm. because of this no one uses atms (even if they did, there are only about one in each city, and they are filled once a month and run out of cash by about the third day of the month). the problem is, selling u.s. dollars on the black market is illegal. and uzbekistan is a brutal police state, so you really don’t want to get caught breaking the law. but there’s not much of a choice on this one. most random people don’t want to risk changing money for you on the black market though, and believe me, i asked. i finally found my go-to guy in the capital tashkent. he owned the disco across the street from the hotel i was staying at, and i went to him first because it was the only place open and i needed cash to pay for the hotel. what goes down is he discretely takes my $50 bill and tells me to wait as he disappears. i wait for half an hour in this super shady, smoky club with lasers and strobe lights, having no idea if this guy is ever coming back. but even if every second time you try one of these shady illegal transactions the guy steals your money, you’re still better off than using an atm. he finally comes back, trying to hide the fact that he is carrying a huge bag of bills. the largest uzbek bill is the equivalent of about 20 cents. so any amount of money comes in stacks of bills held together with elastic bands. you need a backpack to carry $50. especially if you want to leave without anyone knowing you’re carrying money from an illegal transaction. fun stuff!
as mentioned, uzbekistan is a police state that has been run by the same despotic regime since the soviet union collapsed. the dictator’s name is islam karimov. despite his first name and the fact that 80% of the population is muslim, his main opposition has been from a group called the islamic movement of uzbekistan (imu), which is based in the volatile ferghana valley. thus, what is said in the mosques is a major concern for government intelligence; rumor has it every sermon in the country needs to be approved in advance, and every religious gathering is under the scrutiny of agents. government agents murdered several hundred protesters in 2005 in the main square of the city of andijan before burying them in mass graves, an example that is just the tip of the disturbing iceberg of complete government control of everything. despite these human rights violations, karimov has managed to keep himself off the united states’ bad list by allowing the u.s. military to use uzbekistan’s airports for the war in afghanistan. and despite being a police state, the police aren’t trusted to protect people; one of the biggest sectors of the economy is personal protective services for the rich. for everyone else though it is quite safe. every single car in uzbekistan is a taxi – one simply holds your arm out at a 10 degree angle from your body and every car will pull over and be glad to give you a ride for a small fee. got in with some sketchy characters but every one got me where i wanted to go!
uzbekistan is very poor, but one of the benefits of having a dictator is that they may feel free to squander the state’s money on a legacy high speed train through the central asian desert. the 250 km/hr train is called the afrosiyob, and goes from the capital tashkent to samarkand. alas, it was sold out when i wanted to take it, so i had to settle for the slow train. getting on the train in uzbekistan requires no less than five separate security and passport checks.
samarkand was the capital of the blood-thirsty warlord tamerlane, or timur, who controlled one of the world’s largest empires in the 1300s. after he died and his empire was imploding, his descendants built impressive architectural edifaces, mostly in the form of mosques. timur is now being hailed as hero of “modern” uzbekistan. the most epic place in samarkand and central asia is the registan emsemble, three mosques with massive facades that face a central square. it is truly awe inspiring. while there, a soldier approached me about a racket he was running to let people climb a minaret of one of the mosques for a small monetary “gift.” that’s just how things work in this part of the world, i was learning. i got to the top of the tiny spiral staircase and there was just a hole out the top of the minaret, providing absolutely beautiful views over the registan and all of samarkand.
other things i saw in samarkand included the tomb of timur. they wanted $5 to get in so i opted to just discretely enter through the back door for free. the tomb of the hebrew prophet daniel is in samarkand’s expansive cemetery, as is a much more frequented tomb of one of muhammad’s cousins who brought islam to central asia.
i also visited another famous ancient silk road city four hours further into the desert called bukhara. despite being in uzbekistan, the populations of both samarkand and bukhara are predominantly ethnic tajik, with tajik being the prominent language instead of uzbek. the political divisions that became the –stans were created by stalin and often did not correlate with the natural ethnic borders, presumably so he could pit local groups against each other to prevent uprisings against his central government.
i spent three nights in the ancient and amazing old city of bukhara. it is very much like it must have been like for the last 2000 years. the centerpiece of the city is a large walled mound called “the ark,” on which lived the local emir and a small city to support him. famously, in 1842 two british emissaries named stoddard and connelly were ceremonially beheaded at the ark for not bringing appropriate gifts to the emir. the emirate of bukhara was actually an independent nation-state until 1917. close by to the ark is the kalyan minaret, once the tallest structure in central asia. criminals would be thrown from the top to their deaths. when genghis khan razed the city he either spared the minaret because of its beauty or tried to topple it but was unable to do so – in either case it was the only thing in bukhara to survive his raid. below the minaret is an ancient madrassa (islamic school) and the po-i mosque, and miles of twisting market streets. nearby is the iconic char minor mosque, with four differently sized rounded minarets, making it look like something out of a fantasy movie. each of the minarets has incorporated symbology of another religion, including christianity and judaism. i stayed in such a nice guesthouse called rustan and zahara’s, which included an amazing, huge local breakfast of bread, yogurt, cheeses, preserved fruit and copious black tea. it was right in front of the center of the old city, a public water pool called lyabi hauze. these pools existed throughout the city as public water sources until most were filled in by the soviets for public health reasons. the second day i got the heatstroke bad wandering around all day but overall an excellent couple days in bukhara!
then it was back to tashkent on a long train ride with a college student who spoke english so we chatted the entire time and he taught me a lot, like how russia today (rt) is the least biased news source in the world. with a couple more days i would have loved to head further west into the desert in uzbekistan – there is a another famous silk road city called khiva which is right on the turkmenistan border. a couple hours further west from there is a theoretically autonomous region inhabited by nomadic tribes called karalpakistan, sometimes called “the forgotten stan.” in its decrepit capital nukus is the world’s second largest collection of avant-garde anti-soviet art, in the savistsky museum. time, though. back to israel through istanbul and then an all-day stop in athens greece. what a fascinating holiday!
from tashkent, uzbekistan i took a one-day impromptu trip to tajikistan. after much confusion thanks to there being two places in tashkent with the same name, by about noon i finally found the correct place to get the 1.5 hour ride south to the border. uzbekistan and tajikistan unfortunately haven’t got along particularly well, so the border crossings between the two are periodically closed for indefinite periods of time. it was open for me though, and went rather smoothly as there weren’t the crowds as at the other crossings. there appeared to be a sniper looking out from the top of a guard tower, but it ended up being just a mannequin. tajikistan is a small, oddly shaped country. the part i crossed into is in the ferghana valley, one of the most densely populated areas in central asia and also one of the most complicated, populated by kyrgyz, uzbek, tajik and russian ethnicities. if you look at a political map of the region, the borders are extremely convoluted. for example, there are dozens of enclaves of uzbekistan within kyrgyzstan, all in an area that looks like it is being hugged by one of tajikistan’s arms. despite all this, many people in the ferghana valley live in a country where they are an ethnic minority, which is kindling for ethnic violence. i went to the city of khujand, which is one of the most russian cities in the region. only in this part of the world: the most famous cities in uzbekistan are predominantly ethnic tajik and one of the biggest cities in tajikistan is predominantly ethnic russian.
the biggest sector of tajikistan’s economy today is unfortunately the smuggling of opiates, thanks to tajikistan’s long, mountainous border with northern afghanistan. indeed, even the uzbek border guard on my way out asked me: “you carry any guns, drugs, opiates?” most tourists who go to tajikistan go to trek in the remote pamir mountain range in the eastern half of the country, a semi-autonomous area called the gorno-badakhstan autonomous region (gbao), for which a special permit is required.
there was really nothing of note to see in khujand. i was looking for the market but forgot the name, and not a single person spoke a word of english and my phone was dead, so i ended up not being able to find it. so ended up just wandering around for a few hours and then heading back to tashkent before it got dark. the adventure was worth it though!
for my ten day passover vacation i went to central asia! the first hurdle was getting a visa in advance for uzbekistan, which still has an archaic soviet-style multi-purposeless-step expensive visa application process. once that was figured out though, it was actually remarkably cheap to get there!
i flew first into bishkek, the capital of kyrgyzstan. the airport, manas international, has been a major staging area for the u.s. military efforts in afghanistan. bishkek is a nice little-feeling city of about one million people. kyrgyzstan is arguably the most forward looking of the stans – for example westerners don’t even need a visa to visit. interestingly though, it is also the –stan most friendly to its soviet past, arguably because it was a relatively poor area that benefited significantly from being part of the ussr. bishkek itself was built by the soviets, evidenced by its wide tree-lined boulevards. the soviet legacy has its drawbacks too though – for example kyrgyzstan was left with more than its share of radioactive waste. i arrived in the middle of the night and hung out at the downtown ala-too square as the sun rose. my first order of business in bishkek was to attempt to procure a visa for tajikstan to be of use later in the trip. i searched all morning for the tajik embassy, for which online directions were sketchy at best. finally found it in a nondescript house in a residential neighborhood, marked only in cyrillic. got the visa easily! everything in kyrgyzstan is in cyrillic and i was quite lost most of the time. slept in a hostel room with, among others, an old russian guy who had a multiple drug resistant tuberculosis-style hacking cough. despite the cool outdoor weather, the room was kept so hot that everyone could wear no more than briefs to sleep. i think i’m getting too old for the hostel thing. bishkek had a really nice coffee house chain called sierra and some excellent inexpensive korean food. there was a gargantuan outdoor market called osh bazaar, where they were selling everything from sheep heads to the local delicious homemade delicacy of brown fermented carbonated mare’s milk with chunks.
i then headed west, across the border into kazakhstan (after showing up at the marshrutka/shared taxi station and waiting for five hours for the vehicle to fill). along the way we swiped another vehicle at high speed, sending it into the ditch behind us. arrived in taraz, kazakhstan at about 9pm, and wandered around looking for a place to spend the night. in the main square of the town i met some tobacco-spitting high school boys, one of whom spoke english and accompanied me on a walking tour of the expansive town until we found a hotel two hours later. kazakhstan is rich, thanks to oil. i saw more stretch hummers and escalades there than in the rest of my life combined. rich but traditional – there were also kids riding horses through downtown taraz. next day grabbed another marshrutka (shared taxi) to shymkent, kazakhstan, and then to the uzbek frontier. a seemingly-nice non-english-speaking uzbek woman who was heading in the same direction ostensibly took me under her wing in shymkent, offering to share a series of taxis and shared-taxis to the capital of uzbekistan, tashkent. well, lets just say she ended up conning me.
crossing the kazakhstan-uzbekistan border was one of the more chaotic processes imaginable. little old women can push! the uzbek customs forms are labeled only in cyrillic. there are some very aggressive “paperwork ladies” who presume you’ll be hiring them to fill out your forms for you and will grab your passport without your acquiescence; after some pushing and shouting i was able to retain my passport and escape them. instead i got some help with the forms from the uzbek woman who i didn’t yet know was conning me (she also expected me to help carry her luggage – should have seen it coming). i was also approached by an uzbek soldier who gruffly demanded that i log into my phone and hand it over to him. after some protestation, it was realized that he just wanted to delete a photo that i had taken outside the building an hour earlier which they must have caught on their ever-vigilant security cameras.
once into uzbekistan, it became clear that the woman was conning me when she wanted to continue sharing a taxi on my dime. so i got another taxi to tashkent. this english-speaking driver guy also ended up being a bit dishonest, dropping me off well short of the agreed-upon destination and demanding the full fare. he followed me into a metro station, shouting into my face about his kids who he claimed would be going hungry that night because i gave him $1 less than agreed upon for taking me less than half the distance agreed upon. a crowd formed, including a gaggle of uzbek police officers, and that was my introduction to uzbekistan.
then came the tashkent metro. uzbekistan is a police state. there are government people everywhere, watching everything. if you so much as glance at the single map that is in every metro station or say something (or don’t when asked something), they’ll know you’re not a local and demand to see your passport, and examine its every detail for the next 15 minutes. they will also ask you many personal questions, which you will feel as though you must answer as they are police and you are in a police state. the questions will likely be in russian and you will sort of have to guess what they are asking and act out the answers. then once you are in the metro there are cameras watching your every move. you may be incarcerated for taking a photograph in a metro station. the best part though is that all this only costs 20 cents per ride!
one of my medical school colleagues organized an evening talk with an english speaking holocaust survivor. her name was chaya, and she was a small child in poland when world war ii began. her jewish parents realized things weren’t looking good for her as a jew, so they gave her to another non-jewish couple to raise her as their own. during the war she had no idea she was jewish. she told us of witnessing some terrible atrocities including the merciless murder of children. toward the end of the war suspicion began to mount that she was indeed jewish, and the nazis came to murder her; she escaped only thanks to her “chutzpah.” after the war, her mother, the only family member who had survived, came to reclaim her. her adoptive family didn’t want to give her up, so her mother had to go to court and pay a large sum to legally regain custody, a cash cow for the government at the time. apparently there were huge numbers of jewish children being raised by adoptive parents. it was quite the story. she then moved to america, and eventually made aliyah (immigrated to israel) as a senior citizen. it is extra powerful hearing these stories from the very mouth of someone who lived it. those who lived through the holocaust are becoming more rare as time goes on, so i felt very privileged to be able to hear from chaya. may we never forget.
we went up and had a delicious dinner of chicken at a local restaurant on thursday evening, then stayed in an atmospheric ottoman era mansion-turned hostel in the old city called fauzi azar. while there i ran into a random friend from college! on friday morning we visited the church of the annunciation, the main sight in nazarath, which marks the spot where mary learned of the impending birth of Jesus. interestingly, various artists representing numerous countries around the world were commissioned to create artwork depicting mary and the Christ child: these culturally disparate visualizations are positioned around the church and the courtyard. there are many other less famous churches, monasteries and mosques sprinkled around the city as well. we then visited nazareth village, a replica/reenactment of first-century nazareth. though it sounds childish, it was actually very well done, and our guide had many an explanation of Jesus’ various parables and how they would have been interpreted in the context and customs of the time. i really enjoyed it. then i climbed a huge hill for a view over the city before attempting to return to beer sheva, which was complicated by the fact that shabbat was looming so the buses had already stopped. managed to get home via three sherut (shared-taxi) rides and eight hours later. nice weekend!
“match day” – the most infamous day in a medical student’s life – was in march, and in june i’ll be moving to philadelphia, pennsylvania for the next three years! for those who don’t know, the match is a computer algorithm that correlates the rank lists of applicants and residency programs. the process starts with applications, and then (hopefully) interview invitations to specific residency programs in the fall, which one then ranks in order of preference. on match day, every residency applicant finds out at the same time via email where they matched for residency. the mathematicians who developed the algorithm won a nobel prize for their efforts! it usually works out for the aggregate best, but there are never any guarantees that one will end up at somewhere near the top of their list or of matching at all for that matter.
i am absolutely thrilled that i will be doing my residency in pediatrics at my first choice, st. christopher’s hospital for children, which is the pediatric teaching hospital for drexel and temple universities. the hospital is in north philadelphia, in the heart of the “poorest zipcode in america.” the patient population is predominantly african american and very underserved, which is tremendously attractive to me, as on the whole i will much prefer the inner-city to dealing with upper-middle class suburban anti-vaxxers. also thrilled to get to move to the great city of philadelphia! it is a better residency program than i deserve objectively speaking and i am so very thankful to God for this opportunity! all are most welcome to come visit!
i’m back in israel. the last few months of medical school we’ll be doing four “selectives,” each being two week sections in different subspecialties. my first was geriatrics, which thankfully i will never again have much to do with in my life professionally. still good to know about on a personal level i suppose. the first week was in beer sheva, but the second week we were relocated to a wine-growing paradise between tel aviv and haifa called zichron yaakov! and the school payed for four of us to stay in a nice hotel! (that’s definitely the most generous thing my medical school has ever done for us). we were at israel’s largest geriatric facility, and got some great teaching. the israeli healthcare system is extremely well integrated and it is very impressive to witness the spectrum of the various levels of care within a multidisciplinary facility with the broad mandate of caring for the elderly.
an interesting sequela of israel’s status as a jewish state is how much say rabbis have when it comes to healthcare law. at the geriatrics hospital there was an entire building devoted to mechanical ventilation. in the rest of the developed world, people might be placed on a ventilator at the end of life, but if they are deemed to have lost brain function and the family agrees then they will typically be disconnected with little ethical equivocation. in israel however, once someone is intubated and placed on a ventilator, it is illegal to disconnect them for any reason if doing so would lead to respiratory distress, regardless of the patient’s prior wishes or the those of the legal proxy (also irrespective of the patient’s religion, despite this being an esoteric religious intricacy rather unique to judaism). what this means practically is that many elderly – basically just bodies – in vegetative states with no likelihood of a return to consciousness are kept alive on mechanical ventilators for indefinite periods of time. literally, this only happens in israel. an entire building of long-past brain dead elderly on mechanical ventilators, at tremendous cost to the state, for no reason other than that the rabbis say it should be so. this after watching otherwise healthy toddlers die preventable deaths in the philippines because the hospital doesn’t have any ventilators. after just returning from the philippines, i find it fascinating how this specific contrast could literally not be starker between any two other countries in the world.
the best part of the week was an inclusive breakfast at the hotel, with 30 types of cheese and made to order americanos on demand! my friend kady and i averaged about five americanos each every morning. also spent some good time in the hotel’s hot tub (a true rarity in israel)! we had a day off for the israeli elections, and a number of my classmates came up for some wine tasting organized by my friend jenna. we went to two unique wineries in the zichron yaakov area, israel’s wine heartland. also patronized a super-gourmet restaurant called uri buri’s in the seaside town of akko – i would never spend that much on a meal unless ladies made me do it but i must admit it was a gastronomic pleasure! it was match week so we deserved it:)
from hong kong i took a ferry to the world’s foremost gambling mecca, macau, for a day! macau was historically a portuguese colony and was recently returned to china. like hong kong, it is also a “special administrative region” with its own immigration policy, laws and currency. it is the world’s number one gambling city, with ten times more being spent there each day than in las vegas – most of the cash comes from mainland china. most of the older casinos are downtown, the most iconic of them being the grand lisboa, which is shaped like a sprouting flower. recently a huge area of land to the south of downtown has been reclaimed from the ocean, hugely increasing the jurisdiction’s small land area. this new space is being used to build the “cotai strip,” a modern gambling artery to rival or indeed eventually overshadow the las vegas strip. the casinos here are integrated resorts on a truly massive scale. integrated meaning that they are essentially cities in a building – you could live your life in one of these resorts and never get bored: hotels, gyms, restaurants, food courts, malls, wave pools, theme parks, cinemas, etc. the current largest, the galaxy, is the largest entertainment destination in the world, and awe-inspiringly houses the world’s largest chandelier in one of its lobbies. others include the venetian, which dwarfs the vegas venetian many times over.
the older area of macau has some interesting things to see as well. there is the façade of a church called st. paul’s. on it there are countless fascinating motifs and layers of meaning; for example a hard-to-find image of mary crushing a seven-headed chinese dragon under her foot. a nearby fort provides nice views over the city and has an interesting little museum highlighting the jurisdiction’s history. portuguese egg custard tarts prevent hypoglycemia, as do herb-flavored juice concoctions, the varieties of which are endless.
i was lucky to be able to arrange a five day stop in hong kong on the way from the philippines back to israel! it was superb. i hung out a few times during the week with my sister’s friend janae and a bunch of her friends, who were all very welcoming – thanks janae! on sunday we attended her church, which was so nice. there is much more religious freedom in hong kong than in mainland china, where attending a church of one’s own choosing is essentially not allowed. also went karaoking for janae’s birthday, and swing dancing, a sport in which janae is revered as a local celebrity! the food in hong kong was excellent, especially after exclusively rice and pork for two months in the philippines. i stayed in the cheapest option in the city, a tiny room (just about three square feet that wasn’t bed) in one of the two dozen or so hotels that exist in the bowels of a large apartment tenement in kowloon called “chungking mansions.” it is definitely hong kong’s gritty underbelly and the destination of choice for the procurement of illicit drugs and prostitutes, but i found the place actually rather endearing as it is profoundly multicultural (lots of south asians); indeed it has been described by people in the know as “the best example of globalization in asia.” good pakistani food for sure. assaults in the elevators have significantly decreased since they installed security cameras; you can watch the screens as you wait for 10 minutes with dozens of others for the single elevator that serves each “block” in the sprawling complex.
kowloon is a peninsula just north of hong kong island, the latter of which is the epicenter of hong kong. a pleasant old-school ferry boat ride or the subway connect the two. then there are the more expansive new territories further north, areas of which remain forested, and a smattering of outlying islands. hong kong used to be a british colony, and was ceded to china in 1997. it is now termed a “special administrative region” (s.a.r.) of china, retaining its own laws, immigration and customs policies, currency and democratic process under the so called “one country, two systems” policy. in recent months there were major ongoing demonstrations by university students, as the chinese government wanted to select the candidate options for elections. the protests have since been quelled.
one day i went out into hong kong’s new territories to visit the off-key “temple of 10 000 buddhas.” it is at the crest of a large hill, and despite the name, actually contains over 12 000 unique buddha statues. many of them flank the one kilometer path that ascends to the temple complex. as each are unique, naturally some of them have some very strange facial impressions and are doing some strange things – which is what makes it interesting! i also went to another elaborate taoist temple, wong tai sin.
one day i took the metro out to hong kong’s largest outer island called lantau and took a new cable car up a mountain. at the top was a giant buddha statue called ngong ping; which was beautifully cloaked in fog. the cable car ride was also quite impressive in itself as among other things it provided amazing views of aircraft movement action from high above hong kong international airport, which is on a reclaimed island.
mostly i just wandered around hong kong which was brilliant. there are countless amazing malls. in central hong kong there exists the longest series of escalators in the world, used by many thousands to commute to work each day. under one overpass, there is a spectacle where dozens of self-proclaimed sorceresses will beat a voodoo doll representing someone you hate for $5. they’ll provide the shoe, or they can use your stilettos if you prefer. i passed. there are entire streets devoted to selling fish in plastic bags and streets just selling pets, with cat-themed cafes. there are night markets in which to wander forever. best city ever!
also while in hong kong i pretended i was american hero edward snowden. i watched the excellent documentary “citizenfour” while there to discover that his first week in hong kong after leaving the united states and before being identified by the media was spent at the mira hotel, just blocks from where i was staying. then, i happened to take the same flight as snowden did to leave hong kong – aeroflot’s flight to moscow’s sheremetyevo airport! during my four hours at the airport in moscow i entered every airside restroom facility just so can now definitively say that i used a restroom that edward snowden used (he lived in the airside terminal for over a month). everyone watch citizenfour if you haven’t.