Twenty Hours to Uzbekistan

It’s about 20 hours from the moment I enter JFK to the moment I emerge from Tashkent International Airport.

Back in December, when I was planning this trip, the easiest way to get to Uzbekistan seemed to be a direct flight from New York to the capital, Tashkent. Better than connecting through Istanbul, Dubai, or Doha. That flight, HY102, is operated by Uzbekistan Airways and runs two or three times per week. After a text to my incredibly well-traveled former thesis advisor confirming that Uzbekistan Airways is legit, I decided that HY102 was the way to go. When I bought my ticket, I had to choose “Mrs” as my title because the only other option was “Mr.” Then I fought with the Uzbekistan e-visa website until I turned it over to my very capable mother and she succeeded in securing a $20 tourist visa for me. I feel like I shouldn’t turn to my mom for help for these kinds of things, but she’s just…better at adulting than I am. I’m still a child mostly pretending to be an adult.

A few things have changed since I booked that flight in February. The world seems even more chaotic—the pro-Palestine protests on American college campuses, more bombing in Ukraine and Gaza, dead Iranian presidents, indicted American presidents. I worried that it was stupid of me to leave the safe, nuclear-protected cocoon of safety that is the continental United States, a place. And now I have a wonderful boyfriend, and I knew I’d miss him. And his cooking.

Despite all of that, I packed my very dented suitcase and backpack and got on a flight to New York two days ago. 

Terminal 4 at JFK hosts a lot of airlines that you didn’t know existed. I could have caught a LatAir flight to Lima or a Kenyan Airlines flight to Nairobi. Or, you know, I could have flown Delta to Fort Lauderdale. Uzbekistan Airways’ check-in counter is the first one I see when I arrive to JFK four hours early. It’s already open and already very busy, mostly with large Uzbek families returning home. This is my first “oh, shit” moment, when I realize that I am headed to a place where Americans don’t go.

HY102 is leaving from gate B18, which is its own weird room down two escalators. The screen behind the agents’ desk doesn’t show a departure time or information about boarding, only the airline, flight number, and destination, along with Uzbekistan Airways’ green and yellow ship logo. Ironic, because Uzbekistan is double land-locked, which means a) it’s land-locked and b) it’s surrounded by countries that are all also land-locked. The ocean is far, far away. 

The gate is filled with people, mostly with Uzbek passports (I always crane my neck to see which country is on the front of a passport. Uzbek passports are navy). There are a lot of children, too, in brightly colored clothes with floppy hair and big smiles. I see one little girl with club foot, her older sister holding the colorful corrective casts. Another toddler bumps against my leg and her mom apologizes in Russian. I say, “it’s okay,” and she looks at me.

“You do not speak Russian?”

I tell her, sheepishly, no. This is the first of many people who speak Russian to me. A good sign, I guess, because that means I don’t scream ‘Merica. My Russian vocabulary is limited to five words. Hello, thank you, excuse me, good bye, and tea. Tea is an important one (and it’s the same in Farsi, Arabic, Hindi). People loooove their tea. The flight attendants on the plane pass it out in paper cups, throughout the flight people walk to the back of the plane and return with more steaming cups. It’s a golden color, not deep red like Persian tea. 

My seat neighbor, a woman in her sixties, knows about as much English as I do Russian. I have the aisle and she’s in the middle seat, and she makes a switch motion. I smile, again sheepishly, and shake my head. But she is a good sport. Plus, I make it up to her by letting her use my blow-up pillow from the airline. Later, she and I chat using a translation app—I downloaded “Russian” on the app before leaving home. She asks how I’m able to type so fast, and I tell her, practice! This is what young people do! She tells me that Uzbek food is good but the weather is hot; I tell her that it’s hot in Texas too. You probably get a nice tan, she says, and I tell her that I burn easily and my mom wants me to use sunscreen. 

She's also worried that I’m alone, but I say that I’m meeting up with a group and that I’ve traveled alone several times. “Young, beautiful, and seeing the world” she types back to me with a smile. I tell her спасибо. Later, when I refuse tea from the flight attendant, she takes my empty water cup, pours half of her tea in, and puts in on my tray table.

map on my TV on the plane

New York to Tashkent takes eleven hours. The plane flies north, over Canada, Greenland, and northernmost Scandinavia before crossing into Russia near the White Sea. From there, we head south through western Russia, flying over Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan’s northern neighbor, before descending into Tashkent. For a second, I ponder what would happen if we needed to make an emergency landing in Russia. I’ve always said that I’d make a really bad hostage. 

When we were boarding the plane, it was chaos. Mothers handed the gate agents stacks of passports on behalf of their progeny then struggled to herd their respective groups onto the bus that took us from the gate to the teal-and-blue airplane. Strollers abounded. The children watched American cartoons at full blast. Everybody crowded the boarding area before their group was called. So I was a little nervous about what the atmosphere would be like on the plane, but the kids seem calm considering we’re trapped in a metal tube for a very long time, which could possibly be stressful for a child. On one of my walks up and down the aisles, I see that most of them are so small that they can curl up in their seat and go to sleep. I wish I was that small. A kid is stretched out on the floor. A baby (his dad right behind) crawls up and down the aisle, stopping to use my leg for balance as he sits up and makes himself comfortable.

My entertainment options are limited. I could watch movies with titles like “The Three Wise Kings vs Santa,” or “Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness.” The Russian influence is clear, there’s a Russian documentary about Yuri Gagarin, and a cartoon called “Three bogatyrs and the sea tsar.” There’s also a movie called “I Am Losing Weight” with a charming description that starts like this: “A chubby girl is left by her boyfriend. It turns out that she got fat and he is not interested in her anymore.” I could also listen to Uzbek or Russian pop if I wanted to. 

Instead, I switch the language of my TV to Russian, go to the map, and amuse myself by reading the Russian names of all the countries, because I do know the Cyrillic alphabet at least! “Central African Republic” in Russian is Центральноафриканская Реслублика. I also read and watch movies on my phone, because I can’t stare at a map for eleven hours, although that’s what my seat neighbor did. The plane food is also shockingly good. 

aesthetic salt, pepper, and sugar packets

By the time we land in Tashkent, at 10:30am local time, I am extremely tired, very emotional, and on the verge of tears. Fortunately, passport control takes all of five minutes, and after receiving a beautiful purple stamp on one of the back pages of my passport, I make it to the women’s bathroom to cry for a few minutes. Why am I crying? As I told my mom in a text: 

a) very tired

b) finally made it to Uzbekistan! BIG FEELINGS!

c) I miss the guy I knew I was going to miss

Crying upon arrival on the first day of a big trip is not unprecedented for me. It’s good to get it all out. I sit on the toilet and pull myself together, then go to wait at the currency exchange booth, which is open twenty-four hours but with four one-hour breaks scheduled throughout the day, including one from 10:30am to 11:30am. I exchange $160 for a stack of over two million Uzbek som. I am now rolling in cash.

$160 worth of Uzbek som

And then I get my dented suitcase and leave the airport, trekking through the waiting families and the old men who ask me, way too eagerly, if I need a taxi. I ignore them; I got a taxi on an app called Yandex Go, essentially Russian Uber, for under $2.

There you are, friends, that’s how you, too, can get to Uzbekistan! And if you’re an American over fifty-five, you don’t need a visa! What are you waiting for?