45C
It’s difficult to imagine the quality of this kind of heat from a remove. I know I’ve gone on and on about how hot it is here, but it strikes me down each and every time I step out of an air-conditioned hotel room, restaurant, museum…
When it is 6C hotter outside one’s body than inside, it tends to make you nauseous; in an ongoing and semi-permanent fashion. The closest parallel at home is when you open the oven door and feel that whoosh of heat strike your face. Like that, but having it with you constantly. Granted, I did choose to travel here at this time of year (had some accumulated work vacation days that would otherwise disappear at the end of August), knowing full well that the temperate months are September and October. It apparently does get down to -10C in February. But I could not imagine visiting this place swarming with tourism in the temperate months, as I’ve been told it does. I mean, *I’m* a tourist so what’s my beef with other tourists? Mainly, it’s a lack of respect for the indigenous culture in which we fine ourselves. There are very clearly people visiting here from Germany/Italy/France/etc who read *nothing* about how to behave when here (ie dress appropriately). But this is not news to anyone who has travelled pretty much anywhere. There are always bozos who waltz around without the slightest regard for local norms – wherever they may be. It is these tourists I loathe – getting drunk, wearing beach wear, talking too loudly… We all know the type and it’s a broad spectrum of western society, sadly.
I had been actually dreading today. We had a lovely guide today who conducted a walking tour with us about the ‘old city’. I listened as intently as I could, but she was quite soft-spoken and I eventually gave up and left her with Harold as I wandered areas she walked us to. I was dreading the day because of the walking nature of the tour in such heat. But I put up a good fight and lasted until near the end of the tour before I said my sorries and wandered off back to the hotel where I utterly collapsed in the AC of my room.
Harold returned some time after me and we ducked out about 2 hrs later for an early dinner nearby. The last thing I felt like doing was eating *anything*, but knew I needed to get some sustenance. At the ‘Joy’ restaurant, I tucked into what has become a staple here for me: chicken salad on a plate with sparkling water. There is almost nothing here that I can consume, as a celiac. Rice is rare and seems only to be served as a pilaf in their national dish: Plov (variation on ‘pilau’?). Most meals are meat-heavy or consist of green salad ingredients – the latter being something one should avoid in hot countries as you don’t know how it was handled or washed. But the chicken salad today was awesome, topped with true shoestring potato fries. And a side dish of regular french fries today was an indulgence. I was very hungry in the end and wolfed all of it, along with a litre of sparkling water.
As a result of being mildly-heat stroked all day, much of what passed before me was a blur and I could not hear our guide’s monologue anyway. So, here are a string of photos from today in no particular order and without much to say about each as I often had no idea what I was looking at.
This one’s worth a mention. Apparently, Genghiz Khan stood before this tower and refused to raize it the way he had everything else in the city, declaring it’s outstanding beauty. It’s not every day you gaze at something Genghiz Khan also gazed at. Infidels, long after Gengiz’ time were thrown from the top of this tower, including some early English explorers.
The Russians tried to knock it down with cannon fire in the mid 19thC, but were unsuccessful. You can see the cannon hits today as repaired spots on the column.
