Registan at Dusk

I added three days in Samarkand to the end of an archive trip that had nothing to do with Uzbekistan, purely because the flight connections made it nearly free and I have a weakness for cities that were the point of an entire trade route once. The Registan at dusk, when the tour buses have mostly left and the tile work catches the low light, does not need me to justify being there.

I did not open a single archive box in that city. I drank a great deal of tea, got pleasantly lost in the old quarter, and let every ongoing research obsession rest for exactly as long as the light lasted each evening.

I am writing this down anyway, because most of what this blog is missing is the in-between: not the archive, not the manuscript, just a city that owes nothing to any of my books and asks nothing of me either.