Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

On one of the major downtown boulevards of Tashkent is the Central Asian headquarters of Huawei, the now highly controversial Chinese telecommunication equipment manufacturer. The blue glass-tower, split into an A and a B wing, both emblazoned with giant red flower logo of the firm, are truly conspicuous on the streets of the Uzbek capital dominated by faceless concrete apartment blocks. It is around noon, and Uzbek employees, company IDs hanging from their necks, stream out of the towers front doors for lunch.

The Uzbek word for "hello" and "thank you" are respectively "salam alaykhum" and "rakhmat," but in part of Tashkent, one will only hear "zdrastvuyte" and "spasiba," their Russian equivalents. Bring a foreigner makes hearing Russian more likely, as it is the "high" language used for communication with foreigners (just like French in Arabic-speaking Morocco), but unlike Morocco, many people in Uzbekistan, even if they are not ethnically Russian, choose to speak among themselves in the high language.

One thing that was great about the Soviet Union is just how much effort the state put in to popularize some of the canons of Western classical arts. From ballet to opera to orchestra, classical arts, within the limited, non-political forms, thrived even in the remotest parts of the USSR, helping to spread their reach and training a cadre of excellent performers, who found ready audiences among the urban elites, who had little alternatives for entertainment.