Every vegetarian guide to Uzbekistan says roughly the same thing: say "bez myasa" (without meat), stick to bread, tomato salad (achikchuk), and hope the hotel breakfast buffet has enough. True — but none of them account for also skipping non-veg specifically on Thursdays, which in a country where "vegetarian" often just means "plov without the visible meat chunks" adds a second layer of label-reading most travelers never have to do.
What actually worked:
Balancing remote work hours with sightseeing during the day meant structuring days around evening work blocks — the same pattern later repeated with the horse riding course in Almaty.
The myths didn't hold up. Safety was never actually a question in practice — the real friction was a phone registration deadline, and a marathon fee that didn't get paid in time not because of any system failure but because of my own procrastination. The card option was right there; I just didn't fully understand it until the marathon was nearly on top of me. Traveling solo as an Indian wasn't complicated either — the invitation-and-connection pattern that opened doors in Zambia showed up here too, just in a different form. Russian did come up constantly, in menus, in signage, in conversations that started in Uzbek and finished in Russian — not strictly required, but genuinely useful, more useful than English most days.
Keep a running note of every card swipe as it happens, not months later. The single biggest time sink in building this page wasn't the travel — it was reconciling a card statement against memory, city by city, to figure out what half these charges actually were before cleaning the labels up into consistent categories (Food, Groceries, Local transport, and so on). The 11 June, ₹1,611 charge is still sitting unresolved for exactly that reason. A two-line note at the point of payment ("bus, Bukhara, card") would have saved most of that archaeology.