We've had the car for a few weeks now and have done some, but not much, exploring of Tashkent. We've been here eight weeks now and my house definitely feels like home, but the city still is a foreign place. Dushanbe was small enough that it was pretty easy to get to know a good portion of the city, but Tashkent definitely will take a bit longer.
When we first got here, I would look at the map and estimate how long it looked like it would take to get to a place in the city. But there's something funny about the scale because it usually took three times what I thought it would take. What looked like a five-minute drive in Dushanbe would turn out to be a fifteen minute drive in Tashkent. It took a while to get used to that - there was hardly anywhere in Dushanbe that took fifteen minutes, much less half an hour. Drive for half an hour in Dushanbe and you could be at the head of your favorite hiking trail.
I've never had to navigate a large city like Tashkent before. Cairo was enormous - it took two hours to get to a wedding that was only halfway across town - but we hardly ever ventured outside our neighborhood, which was small enough that we could walk most places. Baku had terrible traffic - it could take Brandon over an hour two drive three miles home from work - but it wasn't a very big city. There were areas further out, but we stuck to a pretty small area and it was pretty easy to get to know that area. Dushanbe was just small. It had two major roads and that was about it.
But Tashkent is a big city - in fact, it was the third largest city in the former Soviet Union. I've discovered that one of the major reasons it is so big is because a whole lot of people live in houses (I have no idea what the percentage is, so I'm sticking with "a whole lot"). There are definitely Soviet-style apartment buildings, but I've been surprised at how many houses there are. If you look at a map, it looks like there are significantly more houses than apartment buildings, so that makes for a much more sprawling city.
Uzbek houses have a feature that I really enjoy - the outside-the-gate yard. In Dushanbe and Baku, the houses were all in walled compounds, with the walls going right up to the street. It made for very private houses, but pretty ugly roads. Here in Uzbekistan, the houses are still all in walled compounds, but almost all the houses have a yard outside the gate. Some foreyards (my very own term) are practically forests and some are carefully tended with lovely flowers and carefully trimmed shrubs, but they make walking and driving through neighborhoods very pleasant. Unfortunately our foreyard is just grass. But all of our yard is just grass, so I guess it makes for easy maintenance.
While driving around Tashkent, I've also noticed that the roads are very wide. Usually there are four or six lanes. This makes traffic less troublesome to deal with, especially since everyone isn't double-or triple-parking like in Baku.
And the reason that they aren't double- and triple-parking is because there are lots and lots of parking lots. I've never lived in a city with so many parking lots - the bazaars have parking lots, the grocery stores have parking lots, the malls have parking lots, the water parks have parking lots, and there is always ample parking on the street. I had friends in Baku who hired drivers just so they didn't have to park their cars because parking is so terrible, so I'm very happy to not have to stress about parking once I finally get to wherever I'm going. You people in America may laugh, but you never realize the beauty of parking lots until you live in a place where they don't exist.
Brandon and I are divided on the driving here in Tashkent. He feels that the driving is worse than Dushanbe, and I think it is better, but it's probably just different. There are speed cameras so there isn't as much speeding as in Dushanbe. But there are a lot more lights and turning left often is a bit of a scramble as everyone is trying to cross three lanes of traffic. There are definitely fewer pedestrians crossing at random points, which is nice. And since almost all of the roads have medians, nobody tries to pull the ridiculous red-light behavior that drove both Brandon and me insane in Baku.
I think that Tashkent is going to take a little bit of time to get to know. But we plan on staying here long enough that by the end I'll wonder how I ever felt like I didn't know this city well enough to feel right at home.