Samarkand & female friendships

Here we are again from our favourite Internet cafe (Batman Cafe') in Samarkand...

Spent two days around here staying at Antica Guesthouse, a pretty nice place managed by a nice lady & with a wonderful garden where you can enjoy a tasty breakfast. If you happen to come here as well, do ask suggestions to the managers: they speak very good English and can give plenty of useful tips to visit the area.

As everyone can imagine, Samarkand is impressive, with plenty of monuments that we will not list here.... Maybe we'll post some pictures if we manage to.
(Found one more mistake on the Lonely Planet, as the Ak-Saray Masoleum, which was supposed to be run down & closed, is instead fully renovated, open and definitely worth visiting)

Today, we went also to Shabrisatz, some 90 kms from Samarkand, which used to be the main capital of Tamerlan's empire (not much is left, but there are usually plenty of Uzbek couples getting married in the main square).

Managed tonight to find some meat-less laghman (some uzbek version of the noodles), which made Giulia pretty happy.

Got in touch (via email) with Andrew, a third traveller who will join us at least for the Turkmenistan leg of the trip (and that therefore the readers of this blog will get to know soon :-).
For the moment we have arranged to meet Andrew in a restaurant in Khiva at 8pm a few days from now; looking forward to it!

Met three very nice ladies from Italy (Ferrara), also on their way through Uzbekistan. They have been on the opposite route than us, so they have already been in Bukhara & Khiva. We plan to put into action all of their useful suggestions!
Just spent a very nice evening with them after having listened to a not-so-super-interesting concert of Israeli music that happened to take place in our guesthouse (long story...)
One of the ladies speaks some Russian, and thanks to this we went visiting some old Russian movie theater, a beautiful extra on top of everything else we saw around here.

We concluded the evening (and the stay here in Samarkand) chatting with them and with a few Tajik kids under a full-moon night in front of the Registan, and thinking that female friendships always have something special (Lorenzo doesn't fully agree to this...but Giulia could not care less)

(written by Julie & Lorenzo in Samarkand)