I enjoy scenes from people's daily public lives and I hope you enjoy these little fragments which I took in the few days we were there. These are places and things and events were are prefectly ordinary to them but extrodinary to me.
At that time all travel by foreigners that wasn't official was in the hands of Intourist. They provided our hotel and guides in Samarkand and Bukhara. After leaving Bukhara we were to meet our host in Yerevan. However, that afternoon we received word that we would not be leaving that day. We were very unhappy about this since people would be expecting us in Yerevan. So we decided to go to the post office and send a telegram to the "arranger" at the institute in Novosibirsk. Everything is known in the Soviet Union! We didn't even have contact information for Yerevan. After all, everything is taken care of for you in the Soviet Union. Yes, you can send telegrams in roman letters instead of cyrillic. We then walked back to the hotel and immediately, quick, your plane is leaving! When we returned to Novosibirsk we were told our telegram never arrived in Novosibirsk. This was not the first time we learned sometimes you have to make a little trouble to get what you want.
