Silk Road: Uzbekistan - News and Events

I walked across the Golden Gate Bridge on Sunday and, having done that, I walked back. It has to be a round-trip journey, unless you want to do some tap dance with shuttling cars. Have you noticed that it's a very attractive bridge? I think perhaps the city should use it on promotional posters and such. Get it some ink.

I saw lots of sailboats in the lee of the Marin Headlands, tucked between Sausalito and Tiburon. I saw a gigantic garbage scow (educated guess) being towed out to sea. I saw a container ship the size of San Mateo steaming into the harbor. I saw a helicopter fly underneath the bridge. I saw surfers and sunshine and a guy trying to light a joint while standing at almost the exact center of the bridge.

I saw lots of people power walking, or trying to. There were lots of families on the bridge, and it's hard to power walk when 3-year-old children are on a narrow strip of pavement. I saw bicyclists, too, so many - I got real tired of hearing "on your left." There is a walkway on the west side of the bridge reserved for bicyclists, and it would be nice if they would bloody well use it. There's the 3-year-old-child factor to be considered, as well as the visitors from other lands who do not understand what the continued repetition of the phrase "on your left" means.

That was the thing the surprised me the most on the bridge - the number of foreign languages I heard. Of course, many of the speakers were tourists (and we love our tourists, we do, and if you happen to be reading this in an effort to improve your English, why not stay a day or two longer and buy things? Hell, buy a newspaper; I understand that the entire Seattle Post-Intelligencer could be yours for 37 cents plus a 1991 Dave Winfield baseball card - and the card is open for negotiation), but still: Spanish, French, Italian, Dutch (probably), Swedish (Norwegian?), several Eastern European languages and what may have been Syrian or Egyptian spoken very rapidly by three women wearing hijabs that were fluttering madly in the wind.

Which reminded me of the day before, when we went to the Afghanistan art exhibition at the Asian Art Museum. There's some amazing stuff, but it's a traveling show, and it was a Saturday, and the room was just jammed. People shuffling through, mostly looking at the backs of other people, only to reach a case of artifacts with the captions on the other side.

"Oh, look, it's a metal statue of a something," we'd say to ourselves, knowledgeably. We had those explanatory wands, but in order to use them, you needed to know the number to enter into the keyboard, and of course the number was with the caption, which was not visible.

From now on, I am visiting all museums at 10 a.m. on a Tuesday.

A lot of the visitors were (I assume) Afghans, or at least people from Middle Eastern countries. They were looking at their cultural heritage, a heritage that had to be hidden in a bank vault for 25 years lest the Taliban barbarians destroy them because ... who knows what "because" is. Because they can.

This is what art is supposed to do, after all - engage passions. Art is always political; even apolitical art is its own statement. These mute objects, many of them dating from before the birth of Christ, many of them objects that had been carried along the grand trade route known as the Silk Road, still retained the power to engage the intellect and the emotions of 21st century visitors. Of course they wanted to move at an unhurried pace. It was the power-walking, power-bar-eating, power-museum-touring Americans who wanted to get on with it.

I saw another man having a discussion with a docent. It seemed to be about a ceramic fragment. He was questioning her facts. He said, "When I was a boy, I remember that my father found ..." and some people leaned closer and more people moved away, and the docent looked at her watch. A tour is no time for anecdotes, although maybe it should be.

And mostly people were happy, because the bright Pacific can pull almost anyone out of a funk, and the winter light was more golden than usual.

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