Traveling around Uzbekistan

I used to think mirror embroidery was just about making things sparkle. Then I watched an elderly woman in Bukhara’s old quarter spend seven hours

Zarafshan sits where the desert stops pretending to be anything else. I used to think cities at desert edges would be quiet, dusty places where not much

I used to think grass was just… grass. But then I watched my neighbor’s grandmother—she’d immigrated from Samarkand in the early 90s—sit on

I used to think proverbs were just things grandparents said to fill awkward silences at dinner. Then I spent time in Tashkent, roughly three years ago—give

The Amu Darya doesn’t care what you call it. For millennia, this river—formerly the Oxus, before Soviet cartographers got involved—has carved through

I didn’t expect to feel so small standing next to a pile of mud bricks in the Uzbek desert. The Hoja Berdibay watchtower sits maybe fifteen kilometers

The first thing you notice when the sun drops behind Khiva’s city walls is the silence. I mean, not complete silence—there’s still the shuffle

I never thought moss could be precious until I watched an elderly craftsman in Samarkand spend forty minutes selecting a single clump from a wooden crate.

I used to think traveling with kids meant resigning yourself to chain hotels and chicken nuggets. Then I spent three weeks in Uzbekistan with my seven-year-old

I used to think Khiva was just another Silk Road stop—gorgeous, sure, but mostly frozen in amber for tourists like me. Turns out the city bred some of