Another day on the road has ended. It started at 5am in Samarkand. Mr. Furkat, the owner of the b&b where we slept was kind enough to prepare us a take away breakfast with sweets, fruits and boiled eggs.
The drive to the border was a bit longer than expected and we arrived at Chinaz (50ish km west of Tashkent) at around 10am. it tooknus ages to clear the exit Uzbekistan exit border control as we had to wait for another car to be checked and the border police wanted to open and search every single bagof the guy who was driving it (and this guy was basically traveling with his whole house in the car).
We then spent a good hour in the no man's land between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as both borders shut down for lunch and we ended up trapped:in between together with a bunch of truck drivers. I took the opportunity to learn some russian and now I'm kind of able to say goodmorning, good evening, please and hotel. hopefully my vocabularynwill expand as we drive up north into Rusia in the coming days.
We cleared the border After the now usual 4 hours and after giving up some mongolnrally tshirts away to the kazak border policemen as they insistemtly asked for some "souvenir".
Beautiful drive in Kazakhstan as we were moving east toward Almaty driving close to the Kyrghystam mountains on our right.
I got stopped by a policeman for speeding and as I stepped out of the car to pay the ticket and sign whatever I had to sign I used some of my Ruski, basically repeating "good evening, please" over and over again. he then pointed at our radio and we thought he wanted to hear some music so we turned the volume on but his expression ckearly showed that we misinterpreted his words... in this moment of confusion I decided to sing him the Italian anthem and at that poimt he laughed and told us to leave without the need to pay anything, that's niiiiiiiceeeee (Borat accent).
Now we are in Taraz, a nice town 500km west of Almaty. tomorrow is going to be a big day as we are planning to drive for 36hrs as we need to be in Mongolia by the 5th or max by the 6th of August.
The drive to the border was a bit longer than expected and we arrived at Chinaz (50ish km west of Tashkent) at around 10am. it tooknus ages to clear the exit Uzbekistan exit border control as we had to wait for another car to be checked and the border police wanted to open and search every single bagof the guy who was driving it (and this guy was basically traveling with his whole house in the car).
We then spent a good hour in the no man's land between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan as both borders shut down for lunch and we ended up trapped:in between together with a bunch of truck drivers. I took the opportunity to learn some russian and now I'm kind of able to say goodmorning, good evening, please and hotel. hopefully my vocabularynwill expand as we drive up north into Rusia in the coming days.
We cleared the border After the now usual 4 hours and after giving up some mongolnrally tshirts away to the kazak border policemen as they insistemtly asked for some "souvenir".
Beautiful drive in Kazakhstan as we were moving east toward Almaty driving close to the Kyrghystam mountains on our right.
I got stopped by a policeman for speeding and as I stepped out of the car to pay the ticket and sign whatever I had to sign I used some of my Ruski, basically repeating "good evening, please" over and over again. he then pointed at our radio and we thought he wanted to hear some music so we turned the volume on but his expression ckearly showed that we misinterpreted his words... in this moment of confusion I decided to sing him the Italian anthem and at that poimt he laughed and told us to leave without the need to pay anything, that's niiiiiiiceeeee (Borat accent).
Now we are in Taraz, a nice town 500km west of Almaty. tomorrow is going to be a big day as we are planning to drive for 36hrs as we need to be in Mongolia by the 5th or max by the 6th of August.
I'd rather focus on more useful russian words and try to hook up with better looking people than policemen
ReplyDeleteThe question is: why did you start singing our national anthem?Is it because you realized that people in that part of the world like us, and hey, let's give it a try?
ReplyDelete