I thought I would show some things that we experienced in Bukhara that were not Silk Road highlights. These are just from walking about town for a couple of days on our own and just seeing what we could see. Bukhara was a nice place to wander.

The first photo was in the central plaza in Old Town Bukhara. We must have passed this table more than ten times during our stay here and every time there was a game of dominoes being played. Only four guys played at a time but there was always a good sized bunch of guys either waiting to play or just enjoying the game as spectators. And you have never heard such a lively game of dominoes. Most guys would bang down the dominos like they were trying to break the table and they would holler things out when they played. The crowd also got boisterous at times. Who knew dominoes could be such a lively game.

I don’t know how many weddings we saw in central Asia but enough that seeing one was not a surprise. The parts that we saw were always out in public. I’m guessing these are just photo ops but there were always lots of people milling around. They also never minded others taking their photos.

We visited a puppet shop in Old Town Bukhara. The owner gave us quite a presentation on puppets and how they make them and so on. It was an old established business. At one point, he stopped and with a gleam in his eye, brought this puppet over to me. He handed me the puppet you see in the third photo. I have no idea why he did that.

I walked out of our hotel early one morning, just to observe the area. The fourth photo is right in front of our hotel. I saw the fruit seller pushing his cart along the sidewalk. Eventually, several ladies stopped him. At the point in the photo, the lady on the left was evidently arguing either that the fruit was not good or that it cost too much. Right after this photo, the seller took a handful of fruit and shoved it in his mouth, as if to say that it was excellent. The woman eventually purchased some fruit.

We went out to dinner in Bukhara one night with our good friends Ron and Patty. We ate upstairs at the restaurant which was open-air seating. We had a nice cool breeze and a good view of the area. I believe that we all had kabobs as that was the specialty of the house. Dinner was excellent. I never noticed the cat under the table in the photo until I put it into this post. Too bad for the cat as we ate everything.