We had a late-night flight out of Tashkent for a transition visit to Cairo, Egypt. We are preparing for a permanent move to Cairo in August, and these few days are for Nadia to sort out our living arrangements and for both of us to learn more about the school. We are not using a shipping container for this move due to the difficulty of large shipments to Egypt. Instead, we are taking excess baggage. This is the first time we’ve tried this, and it worked! We took a maximum of 10 extra pieces each, and all the bags made it from Tashkent to Cairo! Ocean’s boyfriend, Roman, was very sweet and helped us with the logistics last night.
On Thursday night, I was walking Obi in a tunnel under the Small Ring Road near our house. When we came out of the tunnel inside the Ring Road, we encountered a recent car accident. A badly damaged car smashed into a bus stop. It happened a few minutes before we appeared but I could not asses the extent of injuries and/or fatalities. It looked like a one-car accident with the damaged car facing into oncoming traffic. It struck an ATM and part of the bus stop shelter.
I see a lot of car accidents on the streets of the city. For many Uzbeks, they are the first generation to own private cars due to the end of the Soviet system and the opening of the economy. There are a lot of reckless and aggressive drivers. I don’t know if it’s “machismo” or the thrill of driving that inspires these drivers. I hope people eventually learn that high-speed driving results in life changing accident like the one above. Humans make errors, especially at higher velocities, which results in unnecessary deaths. I don’t understand why people are not more outraged at this. I wonder if any innocent pedestrians were injured? I wonder what caused the accident? With over 1 million cars moving through the city daily, I couldn’t find anything on the local news about the accident. It is another example of why autonomous cars will replace human drivers, probably in my lifetime, or at least in the lifetime of my children. I would like to check out a Waymo this summer in the USA.
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