ransvestia

I had another memorable experience in Tashkent. The plumbing in the hotel left considerable to be desired. I was in the bathroom comb- ing my hair when the water pipes began to chatter, fit to wake the dead - and it was about 10 at night. I quickly grabbed for the water faucet with the idea of relieving the pressure and maybe stopping the chattering. Unfortunately my roommate had left the room's water pit- cher standing by the faucet and I hit it accidently and it fell into the bowl and broke. Within about two minutes the key lady at the head of the stairs was at the door to find out what had happened. I showed her the broken pitcher and she promptly informed me that I owed her five rubles. Like fun, I said, we'll see about that in the morning. Well I won't take up a lot of space relating my attempts to beat that demand. I consulted our tour leader, the Intourist guide assigned to our group, I even demanded to talk to the hotel manager with an in- terpreter. The end result was you guessed it, I paid the five rubles ($7.50). During my complaint to the manager I was informed that the pitcher only cost 21⁄2 rubles and that if I'd been a Soviet citizen the charge would have been seven rubles.

Naturally I was pretty teed off to pay $7.50 for a cheap pitcher which would probably cost $1.95 over here. However, after about a week when my pocketbook stopped crying and my brain took over, I realized what was behind the rule. A lot of people from the hinterland travel in Russia and stay in metropolitan hotels. They could well be careless with furnishings, furniture, windows etc. so if they break something they not only pay to replace it but get a punitive ad- ditional charge to teach them to respect "the peoples property." It was a reasonable thing once I cooled off enough to recognize it. But it taught the rest of our group a thing or too also. Everytime a spoon would fall on the floor or a glass would tip over at the table everybody would yell "five rubles." We all were more careful after that.

We took a side trip to Samarkand and Bukara. These are very an- cient cities being on the old trade routes. It was interesting to have been in such historical places but there wasn't anything of special merit to report about the visit. There was an interesting experience in the hotel in Bukara where the elevators were all out of order. The hotel was pretty full so our group was scattered over a number of floors. My roommate and I, having more vigor and youth than some of the rest, were assigned rooms on the seventh floor and we had to carry our own bags up to the rooms. This was rugged but was helped by the fact that they didn't have a second or third floor.

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