PLOV 3 - Live from the Many Bags Room
PLOV
Good morning, friend. I have woken early. I have taken the VIP Elevator. I have walked by the Many Bags Room. I have been to gym YesBody, which features a plush velvet couch and 270-degree mirrors for optimal self-ogling. And now, after my waterfall shower, I am writing to you from my soft cotton bathrobe in my hotel suite's living room, looking over the three-kilometre rowing pond that divides three luxury hotels from the Eternal City (b. 2024). Yes, my friends, this is PLOV, and I am Bernard Soubry, and what do you mean, lifestyle drift?
We get to Samarkand on the afrosiyob from Tashkent, a duck's-bill-nosed high-speed train that is the lovechild of a rocket and a q-tip. The train station in Tashkent is completely dark when we get there. We walk towards the security entrance and click, a light is on, and someone who has been sitting there for who knows how long is there to scan our bags. Was he napping? Does he just have night vision?
On the train station platform, the air tastes like dust and coal. The ride through the fields--swift, painless, incredible considering Uzbekistan is still eligible for development assistance--is orange-gold, the mountains of Tajikistan showing up like far-off teeth; sunlight filtering, I soon realize, mostly through smog. The landscape looks parched.
There's a young guy waiting for us when we disembark, UN lanyard around his neck, who's clearly been told to look for whoever seems most confused. He brings us away from the main entrance towards the VIP Exit, where our hands are swiftly shaken by impeccably dressed staff, our registrations written down, and our baggage loaded into a private car to head toward the hotel. Uzbek handshakes between men are elegant, loose, the thumbpad gently resting on the top of the metacarpal. Precise in execution. Embarrassing to both parties if you go--as I do--for the standard UN Business Death Vise.
Our driver doesn't speak any English, but is clearly a fan of Korean power ballads. He cranks the volume on a Céline Dion cover as he cuts through the traffic. I haven't downloaded Google Translate yet, but I really want to ask him if it's what he's into, if he knows I'm Québécois or what he thinks Very Important People want to hear.
Actually--a word on Google Translate. It's insane that this software exists. I think about Star Trek's portable translators, or the TARDIS' interpretation field, or the Babel Fish, and how I used to wish that if I had a superpower it would be to speak every language in the world: functionally, I have this power now. It doesn't do accents, and it doesn't have Uzbek, but if you speak slowly and deliberately in English and Russian you can actually have a decent conversation with, say, a cab driver who's bringing you to Registan Square. Where before my two-weeks-of-Pimsleur-Russian would have struggled through I would like wine, please and what time shall we meet at the restaurant, I can open the app and learn that the guy has a brother in Ohio, and that he speaks Tajik and Azerbajani and Uzbek and Russian, but that he wants to go America to be a taxi driver; that he has a Youtube channel; that he finds the summers in Samarkand stiflingly hot.
What does it take to think of someone as human? Not talking about wants. Not telling someone you don't understand. Weather, the people we love, the things we do when we're not working. Looking at someone in idleness and seeing them without their sackcloth utility.
Learning a language, you can get to these places and feel satisfied from the work. But the world moves fast, Russian has six cases to learn, and a bunch of people stuffed some code into my metal box to make it possible for me to ask the cook who made us plov if he likes to sear the meat before he braises it. We took a picture afterwards--that arm around my shoulder? He flung it on there with real warmth. So geeze. Thank you, developers. You cut the heart's span in half that day.
We had a day off before we started, and I spent it eating plov. Truly terrible for the narrative arc of this newsletter--to be at its most satisfying, I should hold off on you for weeks, only eating plov as a final meal, a pilaf of all my Uzbeki experiences--but our logistics coordinator offered it and there was nothing to do and I was hungry, anyway, so off we went.
The Eternal City folks put on a cooking demonstration for us. Which is to say: plov takes three hours to make at least, so they made plov in the morning, and waited for us to come, and then set up some peeled carrots and a knife on a cutting station next to the wood stove and invited us to try julienning some carrots. No one spoke much English. My Russian was no help. My colleague got big points for speaking some Korean to the chef.
I felt embarrassment spread into the whole setup like a slow wine stain. The feeling of being so clearly a tourist, someone who will give money for a service, in this Russian- and Chinese- funded compound with fake madrassas and half-finished electrical wiring. Not how I like to do things, wizened traveler that I am. Clearly they weren't ready for us. Clearly they were rushing to get the thing done, and we had asked to do this cooking thing, and they wanted to make a good impression but were caught on the back foot a bit. I squirmed in my seat when they asked us to sit and wait and it became clear that there would be, in fact, no cooking lesson, no real way to engage.
Clinging, clinging, the little voice in my head went. Pretending you're the best person here. Clinging. And it was right; I was trying to be all haughty about plov, a dish I had not yet ever eaten, and whose existence I had learned about only three weeks prior. I was trying to do something I had never done the right way. As if such a thing existed.
I gave myself a talking-to. You're being a snob. You're dangerously close to being a jerk about it. Stripped down to the situation's bone, some people were having us over and making us a meal, and we were paying them, and I could either be curious and nice or I could stew in my own discomfort.
So out came Google Translate, and I poked around the kitchen station, and the cook was a good sport about it all and came to grab me by the arm when he was going to remove the braised lamb from under the cheesecloth--wanted to show me how much oil was left, how it would all mix in with the rice and carrots and peppers. He smiled a lot. I laughed. It smelled good. I smiled, too.
And when we sat down to eat it, oily rice and vegetables and braised lamb in cumin and linseed, tomato and pickled onion salad, sour cherry juice by the litre: reader, it was food, and fucking good, and I was very grateful.
Negotiations start today. Getting my head in the game. Breakfast, first; then, real work. See you afterwards.
Plov'd up, ready to go--
B
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