Day 160 (Uzbekistan): Tashkent

This is the day when nothing much happened. My batteries on my camera (the small one) both died a tragic death a little while ago, so I had to look for replacement batteries and a charger. This proved to be much easier than I thought. Together with Islam we went to a street filled to the breaking point with electronics stores and sure enough after four “No, we don’t have this kind of stuff”, we found what we were looking for. I am now in possession of an original Canon charger and two batteries. Let’s hope they do the job until the end of the trip.

Internet cafe time was followed by a long and interesting and extremely enlightening discussion over dinner with Islam before heading home to catch up on some more sleep.

Here is something to think about. Internet censorship is just as rampant here as it was in other places during the trip. But instead of reading an official message that this site is blocked, what happens here in Uzbekistan is interesting.

As a reminder, this is what happened in Iran. Sometimes it was this …

and most of the time it was this …

Here is the Uzbekistan blocking message.

You get re-routed to the MSN website. Now, maybe someone in the Uzbekistan blocking administration is a fan of that company up in Seattle. But maybe - though unlikely - said company has entered a contractual relationship with the Uzbekistan blocking administration. Or maybe someone paid someone something, aka as bribing (as is so often the case here). You never know.