#you builds you a beautiful train and western town and he’s DEVOTED TO YOU

[frozenjokes]

scar and jimmy are going to team up in the next life series AND THATBLUE HAIRED CUNT ISNT GOING TO SAY A GOD DAMN WORD

[thrivingmindsacademy]

Top 3 Attractions of Apache Junction, AZ

Apache Junction, AZ is a small city just outside of Phoenix that's known for being a great place to live. The city has plenty of things to offer residents and visitors alike, including many shops and restaurants. Here are some top attractions in Apache Junction:

The Dolly Steamboat

Nestled in the heart of the Superstition Mountains lies the spectacular Canyon Lake, home of the Dolly Steamboat. Continuing a tradition of cruising since 1925, the Dolly Steamboat now cruises the secluded inner waterways of this beautiful lake.

View the majestic desert bighorn sheep, bald eagles and a host of other wildlife, waterfowl, and birds. Experience the unique ambiance that is created by the sounds of plying through the waters of Canyon Lake. Listen as your captain recounts the legends and lore of the mysterious Superstition Mountains. Expect to be treated with outstanding service and personal attention to your every need. Feel free to ask questions, move about and mingle with the crew. Air conditioned lower and upper cabin during summer months.

The Dolly Steamboat has been operated by the Grimh Family since 1987, with Cindi managing office operations, advertising and marketing, and Jeff as the Dolly’s senior captain and manager of boat operations and training. Of course, our staff and crew members are what make it all possible. We all work very hard to offer a great cruising and dining experience that is second to none!

The Dolly Steamboat derived its namesake from the original owners, Dolly and Paul Kennedy. They started tours in 1983. In October of 1987, Roger and Margie Grimh purchased the Dolly. Jeff and Cindi came onboard shortly thereafter. We enjoy and take pride in providing a venue that allows people of all ages and abilities to experience the breathtaking scenery and wildlife of Canyon Lake.

Superstition Mountain

Superstition Mountain Museum is located in an area full of legend, history and intrigue. You’ll find us in the rugged 160,000 acre Superstition Mountain range in the Tonto National Forest in Central Arizona. Our focus is on providing visitors with an experience of the Old West. We provide an historical context that includes the region's Native American people, the life of early western settlers, local geology and industry as well as the legends promoted through film and media.

The idea for establishing a museum devoted to the history, legend and lore of the Superstition Mountains had been in the back of local resident Tom Kollenborn’s mind for a long time when he, Larry Hedrick, Clay Worst, and Ron Lorenz first began discussing the idea in earnest in 1969.

Goldfield Ghost Town

Reconstructed 1890s town including gold-mine tours, Old West gunfights, a history museum & more. Come and visit Goldfield Ghost Town today! Walk down Main Street, explore the many shops and historic buildings. Tour the historic Mammoth Gold Mine and visit the Goldfield Museum. Pan for gold then take a ride on Arizona’s only narrow gauge train. You’ll also get to witness an old west gun fight performed by the famous Goldfield Gunfighters! Spend a fun filled day, rich in wild west history!

Back in the 1890′s Goldfield boasted 3 saloons, a boarding house, general store, blacksmith shop, brewery, meat market and a school house. Just when it looked like the town would outgrow Mesa, the vein faulted, the grade of ore dropped and the town died a slow painful death.

After several unsuccessful attempts to reopen the mines, the town did come to life again from 1910 on and off until 1926. After more than 115 years, travelers from all over the world still visit this gold mining town located on the historic Apache Trail and enjoy the excitement and grandeur of Arizona’s wild west!

Welcome to Thriving Minds Academy! We are your one-stop shop for all things ABA therapy near me. Whether you need a therapist in your home, or you want to send your child to our facility, we've got you covered. Our therapists have years of experience helping children with autism spectrum disorders reach their full potential.

Thriving Minds Academy 850 S Ironwood Dr Ste #110, Apache Junction, AZ 85120, United States +1 480-806-8000 https://thrivingmindsaz.com/ https://www.google.com/maps?cid=9988130058033023683

[iugesorbust]

The city of Christchurch is a patchwork of pedestrian shopping areas and public art and empty construction sites. The town is built around the Avon River, and the entire riverbank is a beautiful green park with lots of public sculptures. The historical cathedral was one of the buildings that was split in two by the earthquake, and so Cathedral Square, a central park in the city, has a feeling of incompleteness. But the city is clearly trying very hard to keep Christchurch attractive.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Their main shopping area is made of metal shipping containers, which actually is a fun looking way to have lots of little pop-up stores. We ate lunch at one of the outdoor seating areas and walked around the brightly colored storefronts. After lunch, our group splintered again, with half of us going to find the Earthquake Museum, and half going to try to catch the mountain gondola outside the city in a town called Lyttleton.

Unfortunately, we found out that the museum was moved too late and it had closed by the time we had arrived at its new location. I’ll be going today, so it worked out. With a few more hours until we were planning to meet up with the rest of our group, we continued to walk around the city.

One of the things that struck me about Christchurch is how clean it is. There’s very little litter, the streets and sidewalks are nearly spotless, and the vast majority of graffiti was street art. I don’t have many pictures, but there are numerous giant murals all over the city. There was very little honking, though construction noises pervaded everywhere.  Additionally, there are no panhandlers or homeless people that we could see. I’m not sure of the politics behind this, but it made walking around pleasant.   In fact, I saw a public bench that had edible plants growing around it, with signs encouraging people to eat them. I don’t think such a thing would ever be built in NYC.

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Our next destination was the “Cardboard Church” a replacement cathedral while the old one is being repaired. It was designed by a Japanese “emergency architect,” and it is a very simple, large A structure with most of its main supports made of large cardboard tubes. It wasn’t very attractive. But there was a boy’s choir practicing hymns, and their voices gave the space an aura of serenity and reverence. Nearby there was a memorial to those that died in the 2011 earthquake, an area of empty chairs of various types, all painted white. The rest of the afternoon and evening was spent walking around the downtown, and then we met for dinner.

The following morning, we all met in the hotel lobby at 5:15 sharp with our bags all packed. We were ready to be sent off to Antarctica. Sometime overnight, the hotel’s internet network went down (allegedly caused by malware on a guest’s USB stick?). We had heard rumors that the weather down South was too rough and that we’d be delayed at least a day, but no news had gotten through to us. A shuttle pulled up, and we all started gathering our bags. The driver rushed out and told us there was a 24 hour delay, but that we’d have training at 7:30. We all shrugged and went back to our rooms.

We arrived back at the Antarctic Center at 7:30 for a series of powerpoint presentations and videos that taught us about fire safety, health, proper waste disposal, and the rules for driving light vehicles. The fire officer was entertaining, though he made it seem like fires in McMurdo occur daily. Antarctica is the driest, windiest place in the world, and there’s a lot of flammable material in a tight space in the research stations. Fire doesn’t really care if it’s 100F or -50F, and it always wants to get behind you. The medical officer sent in a video presentation of him talking at his desk in McMurdo. He seemed no-nonsense and glib, like Doctor McCoy from Star Trek. It’s probably not too dissimilar a job. Condoms cannot withstand extreme cold, so don’t keep them in the outer pockets of your parka! Waste disposal is complicated and rigorously eco-friendly, but it will take some getting use to all the very specific and enforced sorting rules. The motor vehicle presentation was a very snazzy government instructional video, with early 90s easy listening jazz and smooth male narrator. It was pretty funny.

Back near the hotel, me and a few of my group-mates had a very lackluster lunch of fish and chips from a hole in the wall across from the hotel, eaten while wandering around the suburbs of Christchurch looking for a spot to sit down (we eventually found a small park).

We journeyed downtown to go to Quake City, a museum devoted to showcasing information about the February 2011 earthquake, and the rescue and repair activities afterwards. We learned that in Maori mythology, Ruaumoko, the god of earthquakes, is still a fetus inside the womb of the mother Earth, Papatuanuku. When he kicks, earthquakes occur on the surface. There are records of large earthquakes from the start of European colonization of Canterbury region, NZ, two hundred years ago . Nearly every ten years, a large earthquake destroys parts of Canterbury. The most recent disasters, the Sept 2010 earthquake and the Feb 2011 earthquakes destroyed 80% of Christchurch’s downtown area. Historic cathedral spires, rose windows, and the historic City Council building all fell down. However, it seems like parts of these buildings fell down in previous earthquakes too. Without belittling the trauma and devastation, why did they keep building tall spires and stained glass windows that would then be destroyed? The museum had a number of testimonies of people who experienced the earthquake first hand. One father and daughter were at a public pool, and the water sloshed like a tsunami around the building. One office worker devised a way to repel down using ropes. A woman in an office building was trapped for five hours in the rubble and lost several fingers.

The efforts of numerous organizations and thousands of people have made the city of Christchurch a pleasant place to live. There has been a huge effort to fill the empty spaces with art. In many ways, it is inspiring to see the resilience and cooperation of the New Zealanders in the face of such a disaster. On the other hand, it should not be optional in these areas to build earthquake-resistant architecture, and I think the fact that some of these historic buildings have been rebuilt multiple times raises the question of whether it’s wise to rebuild things exactly as they were.

Our next stop was the Canterbury Museum, a natural history and history museum housed in a very stately stonework building on the edges of the Botanical Gardens and Christ’s College. Right across the street, there is a very beautiful building which I think is the art center, but there’s quite a lot of signage about Ernest Rutherford and his discovery of the electron. I hadn’t realized it, but he’s a New Zealander.

The Canterbury Museum is very similar to the older exhibits in the NY American Museum of Natural History. Musty stuffed animals, Maori artifacts, and historic Antarctic artifacts were the exhibits that we sought out and enjoyed. There was an exhibit devoted to the moa, a giant bird that looks like a mix between a kiwi and an ostrich that the Maori hunted to extinction. The next hall was split between Maori artifacts and early European colonial artifacts. There was a room that focused on Maori familial lineages, which was interesting just for having hundreds of pictures of Maori women over the years. There was a lot to learn just from the evolution of these women’s names and appearances over the last two centuries, from Maori to Western names and from Maori hairstyles and clothes, to Western dress in the early-mid 1900s and then back to Maori dress.

My favorite exhibit of course was the Antarctic history exhibit. There were old photographs and artifacts of the seal hunters of the late nineteenth century and of the heroic age of exploration. Apparently Scott did an aerial survey of the Ross Ice Shelf in 1904 from a hot air balloon, like our project but 100 years ago. I always have mixed feelings about Heroic-age explorers. They did incredible things and are testaments to human bravery, but their motivations were so nationalistic. The most glaring mistakes they made were because they didn’t listen to other people’s advice. Shackleton was told repeatedly that sailing to the Ross Sea so late in the season would get his ship trapped in ice, and that’s what happened. Scott felt sled-dogs were “unsportsmanlike” so he brought ponies and then when they died and had to be eaten, the sleighs were pulled by them by hand. I don’t know. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. Their old-fashioned cold weather gear is entertaining to look at.

That evening we had dinner at the hotel restaurant. We talked about our chances of finding Scott’s corpse in the Ross Ice Shelf’s radar images (none, so stop asking, a human body is way too small to be picked up by ice-penetrating radar). The day ended, and it was unclear if we would be traveling to Antarctica the following morning, or staying in Christchurch for an undetermined amount of time. I was ready either way.

Not Enough Time in Christchurch (but then we got more time, part 2). The city of Christchurch is a patchwork of pedestrian shopping areas and public art and empty construction sites.

[sunri3]

Everwinter

At the very northernmost point of the main continent of Sunrie, at the very end of the great mountain range, exists a city in perpetual winter. Hardly a day goes by when the town is not covered in a soft blanket of snow. The days are short and the nights are long, which, over time, led to an interesting cultural development - the use of magic to create synthetic, brightly colored lights. They’ve been used all around the city, for purposes ranging from artistic to advertisement. These lights were perfected over the years and turn the city into a beautiful kaleidoscope, complimented both by the stark snow and the pitch black night. Because of this, its nights are hardly considered dark, and have become known for their liveliness. It serves as a popular tourist destination. 

It is also the largest city on Sunrie, and has been for most of its existence. Its origin as a mining town gave it the economic kickstart to blossom into the jewel it is today. 

Graye 

The city of the orcs is the most ill-defined of the seven that exist on Sunrie. It consists of dozens of districts, nestled among the evergreen forest spread out along The Spine - the singular, gargantuan mountain range that runs through the heart of Sunrie. This is because Graye prides itself on being the prime destination for any warrior training to fight. Each district offers a complex education in different fighting and weapon styles. 

The orcs themselves are a disciplined and complex people - the only thing they value more than honor in combat are the codes of conduct they impose upon it. Their allowed maneuvers are strictly controlled, and failure to comply with the rules usually results in imprisonment or banishment. To be fair, most of their regulations exist to protect the combatants, and ensure a fair fight. However, there are some who would argue that certain honorifics and formalities have no place in the world of combat. Additionally, fighting is seen as the pinnacle of sophisticated interaction, and is deeply ingrained into their daily lives. Some families converse while sparring as if over the dinner table, others duel instead of negotiate to end arguments. Of course, not every citizen devotes their life to combat, but those who do hold it to the utmost seriousness. The laws of fighting in Graye are absolute, which make it one of the most enriching, yet dangerous cities to spend time in. 

Oceanfall

The most isolated of the cities sits on the cusp of a giant, oceanic waterfall. The cascade itself isn’t located in an actual ocean, but the Laenean Sea that pours into Sunrie from the Great Eastern Ocean. The sheer cliffside drop off the falls is due to its location directly along The Spine, if the mountains had continued to run through the sea. Its precarious placement upon an outcropping of land on the edge of the waterfall is made possible only by the aquatic races that call the Laenean Sea their home: mainly, the jinyu, the giant dragon turtles, and the merfolk. 

The citizens of this city value their privacy and their culture most of all, and are therefore extremely wary of outsiders. Nonetheless, this city is a popular destination for many, as it revolves around the artistic influence of its people; the whole city is considered a work of art, from the structure of its buildings to the way the very land is shaped around it.

Hogsbottom

Hogsbottom was initially a nickname, given because of the famous Hogsbottom Inn. Over time, the original name of the town faded away, and it became known as it is today. It is somewhat of a college town, situated directly beneath the immensely popular school of magic, Halo, up on the cliffs to the east. The school’s name originates from its appearance from the city as the sun is directly behind it - that of a giant spire with a ring of light behind it. Ironically, the forest that exists around Hogsbottom is one of the most dangerous in the continent, due to the aggressive nature of the wildlife. 

In utter contrast to Oceanfall, Hogsbottom is considered the most hospitable place on the planet. This, too, is because of the charitable reputation of the Hogsbottom Inn. The reputable nature of the inn spread throughout the town over its continued existence, until the entire city adopted its fierce compassion. You will go nowhere in Hogsbottom without being offered a soft bed and a warm meal, if you need one. 

Cloudsong

The City in the Sky is the smallest city on, or should I say above, the continent, for there is only so much room on a giant, floating kite. Eons ago, a forgotten group of travelling merchants decided to create what would eventually be the most famous city in the world. Dozens of years were spent building the huge, enchanted kite that carries an entire marketplace as well as five residential districts on its back. Each year, it weaves its way through the sky, stopping over each of the six grounded cities and even the other three kingdoms on its trade route. 

You will never find a bigger melting pot of races than you will on Cloudsong City. Even natural-born rivals put aside ill feelings for the sake of gathering and making trade. Cultural blending is the norm, and most permanent residents incorporate several different cultures into their daily lives. In addition, there are certain parts of the city devoted specifically to every race. Its ever-moving state also makes it popular with travelers who don’t mind taking their time getting where they want to go. The residents of this city are friendly, and always willing to lend a helping hand.

Suramar 

The most temperate of the cities, situated on the Western coast of Sunrie near the equator, is Suramar. It has long since contained the second highest population of elves on the planet and serves as a hub of elvish culture. Its library is unparalleled, and contains the most knowledge of the known universe. 

The citizens of this city are entirely devoted to their culture, and, although they get along well with outsiders, they have strict laws preventing any cultural crossovers. Despite this city’s prevalence, it’s rumored that no one has been to or from the city in years. Because of this, it’s widely presumed that the city doesn’t exist any more. 

J ne 

S  i  t e c p     of  u  ie  nd co ta  s  he        of t e r   l fa i  , us a  y c  led    rie       . H          mm  isn   en              s   it  nd g    f m        ri  g   ro  l      st e - 

(The very end of the scroll seems like part of it has been burned away. What text has been saved is indecipherable.)

[toldnews-blog]

New Post has been published on https://toldnews.com/travel/the-52-places-traveler-in-uzbekistan-encounters-with-a-dead-goat-but-in-a-good-way/

The 52 Places Traveler: In Uzbekistan, Encounters With a Dead Goat. But in a Good Way.

The 52 Places Traveler

Traveling along the fabled Silk Road to Tashkent and beyond, the 52 Places Traveler joined the festivities.

April 23, 2019

Our columnist, Sebastian Modak, is visiting each destination on our 52 Places to Go in 2019 list. He has been traveling in Uzbekistan, after a stop in Doha, Qatar.

I’m in the back of a rusty trailer attached to a Soviet-era tractor with six Uzbek men and a dead goat. The air smells of horses and sweat, and when my teeth hit each other, I can feel the crunch of fine dust in my mouth. The tractor moves into the middle of an empty field, a snow-capped mountain range dominating the horizon. We’re being pursued by a horde of men on horseback packed into a scrum so dense it’s hard to tell which man is riding which horse. Then, two men in the trailer lift the goat carcass, made heavier by the salt it’s stuffed with, and drop it into the dust. The shouts of the horsemen get louder and it’s a frenzy. With stiff riding crops in hand, they whip their horses, each other’s horses, and each other.

This is kopkari, also known as buzkashi, a sport originating at least 1,000 years ago with the nomadic Turkic groups who inhabited the Central Asian steppes. Versions of the game vary slightly from country to country, but here in Uzbekistan, the rules are few and straightforward. The 200 riders compete to pick up the stuffed goat carcass, bending down from their horses, and bring it to a target, a circle of hay placed in front of the announcer’s box. Each round has a pot of winnings to which spectators contribute; sometimes money, oftentimes a handwoven carpet or even a horse.

I was brought to the event by a guide-turned-friend, Hurshid Narimov, head of Tourbee’n, a tourism company, who drove me from the city of Samarkand, promising “something special.” The highway into the district of Bulungur gave way to dirt after about an hour, and coming up a hill, I caught my first sight of the festivities: thousands of men sitting on the hillside looking down onto the field. A comparatively small number of women were watching from a section on the other side of the natural amphitheater.

“You’re one of very few travelers to have a chance to enjoy this beauty,” Mr. Narimov told me, as we made our way to the field. “You will be the only foreigner among thousands who will be there.”

And that I was. I didn’t go unnoticed: My presence was quickly announced over the loudspeaker and at one point I was given the microphone. Instead of discomfort in the spotlight, I felt an overwhelming sense of welcome. People smiled and waved, encouraging me to get closer to the action. At least 15 people approached me throughout the day to tell me that their cousin, their sister, or another relative lived in New York City — actually, “Brooklyn.” They’d show me their phone number, with the area code +1. At first I thought it was proof, but I quickly realized they wanted me to jot down the number to call once I was home.

One young man, despite not speaking a word of English, devoted his day to looking out for me, more than once pulling me by the shirt collar in the split second before the herd of horses changed directions and came barreling toward where we stood.

But then, all of Uzbekistan had been like that. In Tashkent, the country’s capital, an Uzbek man living in South Korea had messaged me on Instagram with a recommendation for dinner. He recorded a voice message with directions to Kafe Bukhara, in the northern area of the city, so that I could play it for a taxi driver, and he gave me a list of exactly what to order. The staff, taken aback by my presence, laughed in delight as I dug into a plate of kebabs known as shashlik, perfectly crispy on the outside and juicy on the inside, and samsa, a cousin to the samosa, filled with meat and baked in a tandoor.

Traveling through Uzbekistan, and encountering practices like kopkari, can give Western travelers that sense of disorientation and novelty that drives so many of us to leave home in the first place. It’s not just because the country was long closed off to many travelers, first as part of the Soviet Union and then under a dictator who died in 2016. For many, the country’s geographical position, and subsequent history, as the center of the Silk Road has cloaked it in something mythical.

My own introduction to that history came as a child, hunched over the glowing screen of my computer for hours at a time, playing the 1996 strategy nerd-fest, “Civilization II.” Finally seeing the famed cities of Samarkand and Bukhara — so richly elaborated in my own imagination — was like walking through a dream. I wandered the narrow lanes, from mausoleum to madrasa, mosque to palace complex, with wide-eyed astonishment. Seeing the Registan of Samarkand for the first time, a town square boxed in by three towering madrasas blanketed in turquoise tiles, I imagined the past, when those blue domes filled the horizon and polyglot crowds — Jewish merchants, Persian Zoroastrians, Muslim students of astronomy — gathered in the Registan to watch public proclamations and executions.

Within Uzbekistan there has been a recent push to reclaim the country’s history after years of suppression under Soviet ideology. In some ways, the facts of that history — that the Silk Road wasn’t the single China-to-Rome route many assumed it to be, but rather an interconnected trading network more resembling a cracked windshield than a straight line; that Timur (known in English as Tamerlane), who once ruled an empire out of Samarkand, was as much a butcher as a tactical genius — matter less to people here than the pride of having it to tell.

Traveling from Tashkent to Samarkand to Bukhara (and I do recommend that order), my feeling of amazement only intensified. In Bukhara, I found even older vestiges of the past. The Samanid Mausoleum, a structure made of intricately carved brick, dates back more than 1,000 years. It was only spared by Genghis Khan and his army of Mongol horsemen, infamous for flattening entire cities, because it had been inundated in mud from floods.

Elsewhere in the city, the Kalyan Minaret, part of a mosque complex that is covered with Uzbekistan’s signature green-and-blue mosaics, was also spared by the Mongols. Legend has it — and the history of this region is buried under many layers of legend — that it was so tall that when Genghis Khan looked up at it, his helmet fell off. Bending down to pick it up, his troops thought he was genuflecting at the holy structure and so it was spared as the rest of the city was burned to the ground.

Things to know

The best way to travel from Tashkent to Samarkand and onward to Bukhara (and Khiva, which I didn’t have time for), is by train. A relatively new, comfortable, high-speed train connects the entire route. Tickets sell out fast though, as I discovered, and ticket sale websites are unreliable, unless you want to pay a premium through travel agencies. Book all your train tickets at the station the day you arrive. Worst case scenario: You’ll end up in one of the Soviet-era clunkers like I did, which are perfectly comfortable, but slower.

While traveling through the country, I received a lot of questions on Instagram from women about safety for solo female travelers. I’m not comfortable speaking authoritatively on that, but I personally never felt unsafe and I met solo female travelers who said the same. I was met with respect and politeness and, perhaps as a byproduct of decades of authoritarianism, rule of law is widespread. Thankfully, with recent reforms, police help more than they harass, which I gathered was a concern of travelers past. As always, be careful and know your threshold for risk.

Money — the Uzbeks use the s’om — can be a real headache. There are few high denomination bills in circulation, which means you can wind up with thick stacks of cash. Additionally, working A.T.M.s can be hard to come by and if you use an American card, they often only give out United States dollars. I’d recommend coming with more dollars than you’ll need and exchanging in small increments as you go to make sure you don’t end up with too much left over when you leave (changing back to dollars is harder than the other way around).

Whatever the facts, this land was a precursor to globalization as we know it today, a place where multiple currencies, languages and religious traditions were exchanged freely. You can trace this history in people’s faces. The shape of a woman’s eye might suggest a distant Mongolian ancestor, but her irises could match the light blue Arabic script that snakes up and around the towers of Timur’s burial place in Samarkand. The next passer-by wouldn’t be out of place in Tehran. To build an identity out of a melting pot takes endurance.

There are tourists who might bemoan the many souvenir shops that occupy every available nook and cranny of Bukhara and Samarkand’s historical sites. But these aren’t all the assembly line junk that fills tourist centers the world over. Outside the front door of his shop, a carpenter works on his next creation, a handmade rehal, the X-shaped cradle used to hold the Quran. In the unassuming town of Gidjuvan, about an hour’s drive outside of Bukhara, the Narzullaev family, currently in its seventh generation of potters, creates bowls, plates and tiny ceramic sculptures the old way. The potter’s wheel is spun by the sandaled foot of the potter, and the temperature of the kiln is determined by sight. In Koni Ghil, on the outskirts of Samarkand, Zarif Mukhratov has built a mill from scratch, where he is keeping the tradition of silk paper — made from the branches of the mulberry tree — alive.

“Many people who come here think it’s just for tourists,” Mr. Mukhratov told me in the idyllic cottage that doubles as a showroom and office. “I’m sorry, but it’s not. I was doing this at home for years before any tourist came.” When I ask what will happen when he and his wife are gone, he’s unequivocal. “My ancestors left this knowledge for me, and I’ll be leaving this for the next generation.”

In Bukhara, Davlat Toshev, a world-renowned miniature painter, invited me from his workshop into his home. He’s currently teaching two of his daughters how to paint the detail-filled tableaux of history and legend that the region is famous for, and is hoping to build a whole school for the art form. I asked him how he made sure the technique, which requires squinting at parchment, often through a magnifying glass, could be maintained.

“No television,” he said.

Uzbekistan was on the 52 Places list for 2019 because of its renewed openness after years of isolation. I think the kindness and enthusiasm I found are tied to where the country finds itself. English isn’t widely spoken, but everyone who knew even a few passing words was eager to practice, as if they sensed they’d be using them more in the years to come.

Painting Uzbekistan as “exotic” is all too easy a trap. This is history, lived in. Most of the “attractions” I visited are holy places for Muslims and were packed with far more pilgrims from across the country than Instagramming foreigners. In the shadow of Bukhara’s Kalyan Mosque, a group of children fresh out of school played a game of pick-up soccer, shouting nicknames at each other — “Messi,” “Suarez,” “Ronaldo” — as they used the centuries-old stone wall as a bouncing board.

The rush of the now in Uzbekistan is as strong as anywhere else, even as it tangles with history: Tashkent is a modern, strikingly clean and green capital with a metro system that doubles as an art gallery, each station more beautiful than the last. Its heart though is Amir Timur Square, featuring a statue of the ruler and, just behind it, the big block of concrete that is the Soviet-era Hotel Uzbekistan.

On the kopkari pitch, about two hours into the game, Mr. Narimov suggested that as a “special guest” I should contribute something significant to the winnings pot. My handing over a $100 bill elicited applause from the thousands of attendees. I shook hands with the winner and offered him my bottle of water. In between shallow, exhausted breaths, he drained the bottle and then climbed from his sweat-covered horse directly onto a fresh mount. Then he turned and galloped back into the fray.