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Travels rarely begin where we think they do. In a bar around Timur Square, a Punjabi man in a turban suddenly began to throw banknotes to the sky. Though a note of 1000 som was only worth 80 cents yuan, this was the first time I had ever seen such an extravagant scene. Uzbek dance girls were wearing sequin skirts as if they had nothing on and kept grinding their bodies around the Punjabi man. The rhythm of Russian pop music added to the lavish and decadent atmosphere. At first, the Punjabi man only threw one note at a time. As the girls started to scream, he finally decided to throw a whole stack of banknotes into the sky. A cash rain fell. Under laser nights, notes flew everywhere. A barman could not help but pick up a few notes that were blown to his feet. He was tall, skinny, and still a child. Azama belted down the vodka in his glass. There was a flagon on the table with a half-liter vodka, but now it ended up in our bellies. “What you have seen before was all damn fake,” he was muttering. “This is reality! The Uzbek reality!” I had met Azama at another bar earlier. It was a glamorous international bar. There was a band, but no dance girls. At the time, the businessman-like Azama was sitting at the bar. He was drinking with a bald fat guy. Obviously vodka had helped to increase his interest in strangers, so we started to talk. Azama told me that earlier on he had been in the export business, “to export Uzbek dried fruits to the US.” Then “the economy collapsed, and the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt,” and his dried fruits business had been “destroyed.” At the moment, I was still more or less sober, and I had tried to figure out the long reflex arc between the Lehman Brothers and his Uzbek dried fruits business, but to no avail. I asked him what he did afterward. “Then I began to buy real estate in Tashkent.” By now, he has had seven or eight apartments that were scattered around Tashkent. With rents from these apartments, he was able to live a carefree life. Everybody was getting high in the bar, and the dance floor was filled with young bodies. Azama asked me whether I was bored. He said, he did not like the pretentious international flair of this bar, and had a better place to go to. He promised me: “That would be the real Uzbekistan.” The bar had no signs. A few bouncers stood at the door. We went into the dimly lit bar. Dance girls with long hair were everywhere. Without exception, they had very little on but were all very pretty. They sat on the clients’ laps and moved their bodies to the music. The price of a lap dance was only two US dollars. Azama looked left and right and around, and finally pointed to a dance girl, saying it was his “ex-girlfriend.” They had lived together for a year. At the moment, this “ex-girlfriend” was sitting on the lap of a Punjabi man. “They love Uzbek girls,” Azama said, “Have you seen these dance girls? 200 to 500 US dollars a night. Expensive? Yes, but they are well worth the price.” I asked Azama whether what we were seeing made him sad. “No, no,” he denied, “the world is the way it is.” At this moment, the Punjabi man started to throw banknotes into the sky. At first just a few notes, then he threw a whole stack of notes all over the place. Azama belted down his vodka, stood up, and congratulated me on seeing the Uzbek “reality.” He was completed stoned, and I was also surprised at my own wobbliness. Azama and I parted ways in front of the bar. As he cranked down the window of an illegal cab, he shouted something to me. Tashkent at midnight and a drunkard’s confession. In a second, I was a bit sober and realized I was in a foreign country. My travels started right here.