Bill's Blog

Nadia and I really enjoyed the student-led conferences on Thursday morning. The secondary school scheduled 1-hour sessions for every student with their parents. The teachers set up the framework for them to reflect on their learning and share what projects were most impactful on them. We loved the fact that it forced our teenage children to talk with us for a full hour! Oliver would not let me film his conference, but thankfully Ocean did! It was such a special morning for us! We are so proud of the adults our children are becoming.

Oliver had a really good year overall. He has taken a leadership role in the school’s Model United Nations program, was the captain and a star player on the volleyball team and he designed unique Pokemon cards for his MYP Personal Project exhibition. Nadia has been outstanding as a mother, “guiding” Oliver to spend more time on assessed projects. Oliver’s challenge next year will be entering the IB Diploma Programme. He will need to develop research and writing skills, analytical thinking, time management and organization. I think he is up to it and hopefully,Nadia and I will have enough time and energy to support him.

Ocean is also maturing and she had a stellar academic year. She too played volleyball and basketball and participated in other extracurricular activities. She has an eye for art and design and is very creative.

Wednesday night my son Owen and I played tennis on the outdoor hard courts of the Olympic Tennis School. He of course beat me 6-3 and we had a good time working on different aspects of our games. We were walking to the front gate after playing and we noticed on one of the clay courts a tall player hitting the ball extremely hard. It is easy to spot an elite athlete immediately because we both had that “wow” reaction. ATP professional tennis player Dennis Istomin was getting a workout at the school, just a couple of courts over from us. Istomin was born in Russia but moved to Tashkent when he was 3 years old and plays for Uzbekistan. Seeing professional athletes up close is always a thrill. Watching him for just a few minutes makes you realize how difficult it would be to return a serve from a professional. He is on the tail end of his career, but he still moved well and at 6-1 with long arms, he seemed to be able to cover both sides of the court effortlessly.

It was interesting reading through his career overview as he was a mid-level professional player and that earned him $6 million dollars in prize money over the past 15 years or so. This despite have an overall losing record on the ATP Tour (230-266). He reached a ranking high of #33 (August 2012) in the world and won two ATP tour singles titles and 3 doubles titles. Another career highlight for him was beating Novak Djokovic (2017) in the second round of the Australian Open. He also won 25 Challenger and ITF tournaments earlier in his career. He participated in 251 ATP tour events, winning 2 titles, and losing in finals 3 times. In Grand Slams his career record was 35-45 and he made it to the fourth round three times. He is currently ranked 310 in the world.

Earlier this week I briefly visited Kazakhstan with my son Owen. His 30-day tourist visa was going to expire today and so he needed to leave Uzbekistan and come back in to get a fresh 30 days. It was a strange and interesting experience. We decided to drive to the nearest border from Tashkent, which is the highway 30 kilometers north of Tashkent that leads to the third-largest city in Kazakhstan, Shymkent. Thanks to Stalin and the Soviet map makers, the borders in Central Asia are a bit arbitrary and the capital city of Uzbekistan is very close to the borders of both Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan. The entire experience took around 3 hours, but a determined person could do it in 2 hours.

We drove 20 minutes to the border and parked in a lot designated for Uzbek drivers who prefer to walk across the border. Crossing in a car takes much longer than walking across due to extra security and document checks. I was told I could add three hours to the crossing if I did it by car. Hence we parked the car and walked 50 meters to the Uzbek exit gates. We had to show our passports at 3 different points, pass through a metal detector and get the exit stamp. After a short walk across “no man’s land” we did a similar process to enter Kazakhstan.

After leaving the last checkpoint, there were many currency exchanges and taxi vendors. I exchanged Uzbek So’um to Kazakh Tenge in hope of finding a nearby cafe or mall to buy a souvenir. Shymkent is a two-hour drive away from the border and we decided we preferred to get back home earlier. We went in search of a restaurant, but there was not much there. The only cafe had no one inside, including a waiter or barista. We saw a Toilet sign and paid $5 to use a rudimentary bathroom. A rectangular layout of bricks around a hole with a 1-meter drop to a cement floor below was what we got for the bathroom.

The walk back through the border crossing was easier than the first earlier crossing. Nobody asked us why we were returning so quickly after entering. They were more curious about Australia (Owen’s passport) and America (my passport) than the timing of our return. Both sides of the border crossing checked for our vaccine status and I am glad we had recent vaccine boosters. Overall the process was quite easy and a good option for people wanting to extend their stay in Uzbekistan.

Kazakhstan is country #68 for me. It is the first new country since I visited Turkmenistan in November of 2019. COVID really limited international travel and I am happy to be coming back to easy travel.

We had a fantastic night out yesterday. It is so nice to have my eldest son Owen back home to complete our family. We dropped off Ocean for a birthday party and sleepover with friends. Then Nadia, Oliver, Owen, and I went to a new driving range in Tashkent. It is a Korean business and modeled after what you see in East Asia. It is a netted range about 200 yards in length and probably about 50 yards wide. There are two levels people can tee off from. There is a Korean BBQ restaurant on the second floor and a little nicer Korean restaurant and garden on the third floor. Lots of cold beer and it makes for a good night out! The Koreans also have an 18-hole golf course in Tashkent, developed by the former president Karimov and the South Korean government years ago. I am not a big golfer, but Owen likes going to driving ranges and it gets us to spend time as a family. Prices are reasonable with 1 hour of unlimited balls for $6.30 USD. It is located out of the city on the way to Parkent. The city is developing out towards that area. It offers views of the mountains, the new airport is being developed out there and lots of flat lands.

After the golf range, we had a really good dinner at Roni’s Pizza Napoletana restaurant. Perfect spring weather and lots of people out! Tashkent is really turning into an exciting, pleasant city to live in as both Roni’s and the driving range were not here when we first arrived.

It was an exciting athletics meet last Saturday at Pakhtakor Stadium. The school was able to hold its first track meet since the spring of 2019. Oliver’s main spring sport is volleyball, but one of the coaches convinced him to participate in the athletics meet. I think he surprised himself with a silver medal in the 800 meters and a bronze medal as part of the 4 x 100 relay. He was a bit reluctant to participate, but Oliver has a can-do attitude and threw himself into the event and did quite well. I think with a bit of training, he can even be a stronger runner. He is good at both the longer distances and sprints, but I think his forte is the middle distance. 

I also forgot how much I love athletics and the rhythm of a meet. I remember my Dad used to be the Public Address Announcer for the meets West Iron County High School hosted at Nelson Field in Stambaugh. The schools had their encampments in different areas of the infield and cheers would go up around the stadium depending on what field event or race was finishing throughout the day. It was special for me to have Oliver participate in the meet and I hope Ocean joins him next year. 

Oliver’s team finished in second place in the tournament we hosted this weekend. It was three years since we last hosted a volleyball tournament and had a high school volleyball season, thanks to COVID. Oliver was one of the captains of the team and played every minute of every game. He is the best setter at making difficult saving hits to keep a ball alive. He is also developing his spikes. One area of growth is his jump serve, but once he gets that down, he’ll be an awesome, all-around player. He has two more years of eligibility and I can’t wait to see him play over the next two years. Oliver’s team, the Tashkent International School Owls won 8 sets and lost 5 sets over the three days. They scored 297 points and allowed 235 points. They lost all four sets they played against the champions, школа 166 by an average of 4 points per game. They lost one set 24-26. I think with less missed serves, they could have won two of those sets. They did have a tough season with a COVID outbreak earlier this month, halting practices and games for two weeks.

It was a beautiful Sunday with temperatures in the mid-30s (90s). Oliver had his friends sleep over after the volleyball tournament and they had a great time, eating fast food, swimming in the pool and watching movies/gaming. They went to bed early because I think they were exhausted from the full day of competition. I played doubles tennis at the Olympic Tennis Club with my usual friends, Dan, Steve and Matt. We played on the clay for the first time this spring and it is nice to get back to that surface. We also hosted a “birthday” party for our dog Obi. We invited friends with dogs to the school for them to interact. Nadia made “doggie bags” and cupcakes for all of the attendees.

It was a special evening celebrating my son Oliver’s 17th birthday! We watched him play volleyball in the TIS tournament and then took him to Maqom (“Status” in English) Restaurant. It was a lovely spring evening and the outdoor terrace overlooking the park was a relaxing setting. We like Maqom because of the delicious food and excellent drink menu. Oliver is so charming and sociable and he made us laugh for most of the dinner. He is maturing into a handsome and kind man and we are so proud of him.

Ollie excels at volleyball which is his best sport. Unfortunately, he inherited my height but he is still taller than me! He is totally locked in on every point and his intensity is infectious to his teammates. Oliver is the team’s best setter, is developing a deadly jump-serve and rarely makes mistakes. He is only in grade 10 and so has two more years of eligibility. His team easily defeated the Westminster International School of Tashkent yesterday in one of the round-robin games in the three-day tournament our school is hosting. The finals are today, Saturday, his actual birthday.

We love you Ollie! Congratulations on reaching your 17th birthday.

Uzbekistan is a former republic in the USSR and the Russia’s attempted takeover of Ukraine is big news here. Our school also has close ties to the international schools in Kyiv through our regional schools association. I wanted to read a bit more about the history of Ukraine and purchased Anna Reid’s “Borderland: A Journey Through the History of Ukraine“. She was the Economist correspondent in Ukraine shortly after independence from 1993-1994. Her book is a bit dated and the second half was written around the time Russia took over Crimea but it all applies today. The book had the perfect amount of depth for me, focusing on the most compelling stories from Ukraine’s long history combined with her own experiences and conversations with Ukrainians. I knew of the sad and tragic recent history of Ukraine in the 20th century. I am surprised there are still Ukrainians left after the Jewish pogroms, Stalin’s forced famine, the purges of the USSR, and the Nazi invasion of WWII. I was also looking for a sense of how much much the Ukrainians differed from the Russians.

I have never travelled to Ukraine but know many people who lived there. Some of my ancestry I discovered through 23 & Me is from western Ukraine near the Polish and Slovak borders.

I didn’t know much about how Kyiv started. It was a port city on the banks of the Dnieper River over 1000 years ago. Scandinavian tribes were the first to conquer and provide structure to Kyiv in the 800s. Their DNA can still be seen in the region in the physical features of many Ukrainians. It was fascinating to learn the patron king of both the Ukrainians and Russians (Vladimir/Volodymyr) actually chose the Orthodox Church as the state religion in the late 900s. He sampled Islam (can’t drink), Catholic/Judiasm (nice ceremonies, but just not doing it) and settled on the Greek Orthodox. He thought the splendor and awe of Hagia Sophia in Constaninople is what he was after. Hence today, the Ukrainians and Russians are Orthodox. I always thought that the world would be more interesting if Islam and Christianity had not swepted through big portions of the world. It would be cool to have Eastern European people today worshiping the Slavic god Perun or the other forest-based systems and have a more diverse religious environment globally.

The courage demonstrated by the Ukrainian people has caught the imagination of the world. I wonder how this will support the country in both the short-term and long-term future.

There were lots of interesting tidbits in the book that helped me understand Ukraine and the former Soviet Union. I put some of them below for my future reference. I recommend reading the book if you want to know more about Ukraine.

Many Ukrainians settled in my biological hometown of Freeland, Pennsylvania and I always wondered about St. Mary’s Byzantine Catholic Church. The Byzantine and Catholic churches split when Rome and Constantinople became two separate empires. The Byzantine/Catholic church came about when the Poles were running Ukraine in 1596 and a group of Orthodox bishops blended their church with the Pope in Rome, and that was the start of the Greek-Catholic or Uniate Church.

I am never surprised at the evil of the Nazis. Reid quotes Erich Koch, the head of the Nazi occupation in WWII-era Ukraine that Ukrainians were “the n-word” and fit only for vodka and the whip. War criminal Herman Goring’s solution was to kill all males over the age of 15 and and “send in the SS stallions”.

The book has a section on Taras Shevchenko, who single-handedly turned Ukraine into a literary language (see statue above). He was born in 1814 to a poor serf family south-west of Kyiv. His parents died before he became a teenager and he was raised as a “servant-boy” in the household of a local landowner. He was a natural artist and caught the attention of an art student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Kyiv and eventually, his friend bought his freedom from serfdom. He was introduced to Ukrainian free society and became a writer and poet. Because he wrote in Ukrainian, he was largely dismissed by critics and literary elites. He joined a Ukrainian secret society of intellectuals whose goal was the abolish serfdom/monarchy and unite all Slavs with Ukraine in the lead. Of course, the Tsar eventually found about them and jailed/exiled the group. Shevchenko was sentenced to 10 years in exile, but it was disorganized system and because of his connections and talent, the provincial governors allowed him to entertain groups with his singing, dancing, painting and comedy. For two years of his exile he was assigned as the official artist of a military expedition to chart the Aral Sea. He barely survived the journey and I would love to find his sketches from that expedition. I wonder what he thought about Uzbekistan? When Tsar Nicholas died, he was freed from exile, he took up his previous life as a literary celebrity and participated in poetry readings, etc. He died of “dropsy” (today known as a stroke) at the age of 47 and was immediately venerated by the intellectual elite. Today, he is the Shakespeare of Ukrainian and celebrated around the ex-Soviet world as a champion of the common people. The statue here in Tashkent should have a man with a smiling face and positive energy instead of the stern, serious look.

Other points to note:

• The Russian words for “chain”, “whip” and “money” have Mongolian roots. This comes from when many years the Mongols subjugated the Russians and Ukrainians and laid waste to Kyiv.
• Muscovites called themselves “Rus” the Greek word for Rossiya while the Ukrainians/Belorussians were referred to as the Rusyny, or “Ruthenians”.
• The Cossacks are like the cowboys of Ukraine and take a big place in the folklore and founding mythology of the country.
• Poland lost the Ukraine and its own country to Russia, Austria and Prussia in 1795.
• By 1989 the last Soviet census, Russians made up 11 million of Ukraine’s 52 million people. I didn’t realize the Ukraine was so big, both in area and population.
• Growing up on the Sea of Azav in the 1870s, Anton Chekhov saw the wilderness eaten away by windmills, telegraph poles, villages and ploughed fields. The sea of the steppe was lost forever to agriculture, similar to the Great Plains in the USA.
• I learned about historical fringe religious groups in Ukriane such as the Molokans, who were Orthodox Presbyterians and the Dukhobors, who rejected Orthodox icons and traditions and lived communally.
• Odessa must be a really nice city to live and probably feels like many of the Mediterranean cities.
• The Ukrainians are very similar to the Russians, but are kind of the country-cousins that live on the farm. (I am stereotyping.)
• Lviv was named in 1991 with Ukrainian independence. The Russians called it Lvov (1945) and the Poles called it Lwow before that. The city was not a Ukrainian or Russian city in the 1800s, but a Polish-Austrian-Jewish city. Reid described it as a shabbier Salzburg without Mozart souvenirs.
• In the 25 years before WWI, more than 2 million Ukrainians and Polish peasants left Galicia. At the Treaty of Versailles, Ukraine was not represented and lost everything.

After our hike in the morning, we visited the Institue of Materials Science, or as it is commonly known as “The Sun” Heliocomplex. It looks like a villian’s lair from a James Bond film. The complex was built from 1981 to 1987 when Uzbekistan was part of the Soviet Union. It is basically a solar concentrator that is able to take the sun’s rays, and focus them to create extreme (3000 C) heat. Scientists positioned 62 south-facing, giant mirrors (heliostats) which focus the sun’s light. Opposite the field is a concave giant (54m x 47m) mirror consisting of 10,700 mirrors that further focuses light to a 1 meter wide, solar furnace. In this furnace, the light of 10,000 suns creates the extremely high temperatures. It was used as an industrial plant to make alloys for military and space industries. It was only used by the Soviets for a short time and after the collapse of the USSR, it is used occasionally today to make heat-resistant ceramics for fuses.

The solar complex is located on a hill 1,050 meters that receives sunshine 270 to 290 days per year. It is just outside of Parkent, a city of 35,000 near the foothills of the Chatkal Mountain Range. The Soviets build housing for the engineers and workers and named the town Kuyosh, Uzbek for sun. It is only about a 90-minute drive from Tashkent and definitely worth the visit.

One of the scientists working at the plant took us on a tour. In the lobby is this magnificent glass artwork of a sun hanging from the ceiling. It must weigh tons and it has a diameter of 10 meters. From there we walked over the field of heliostat mirrors. They set up a miniature version on the side and had a tea kettle hanging over it to demonstrate how the mirrors can generate high temperatures quickly. We also walked up a windy, metal staircase 11 floors to the top of the concave mirror. The views of the mountains, surrounding countryside and solar plant are spectacular. It would be fun to make a movie on the premises. I can see Bond flying away while the plant is exploding and the villain’s plot to destroy the world is ruined. It would also make an interesting field trip for students combined with a walk in the countryside.