Mir-i-Arab Madrasa

There's something you should know about Uzbekistan. The historic sites are all very walkable, and they make for fantastic settings to enjoy the sunrise. Even when the sites are a bit spread out, you'll probably only pay a couple bucks or so to take a taxi between them.

When I plan out my trips, I try to maximize the number of opportunities I have for catching the sunrise and sunset. Of course, there's occasionally the day I might set aside just to sleep in, be lazy and recover a bit if I'm hopping all over the place. The normal routine of trying to locate great spots for sunrise and sunset continues as much as possible.

It's definitely possible to do this in the giant metropolises as well, but unless you happen to be staying super close to that amazing vantage point, it can be surprisingly challenging to get to where you need to go early in the morning when the public transit system is not running as frequently as you'd like, relegating your options down to ride sharing services or a taxi. And even then, it can still take you quite a while to navigate to your destination given the sheer sizes of mega cities like Seoul and Tokyo.

In Uzbekistan, there's a decent number of tourist hotels located around the historic sites, which makes it really easy to hop out of bed in the morning and walk around before dawn. My routine was pretty much wake up, shower, head out for about an hour and a half, then come back to the hotel for breakfast before carrying on with my day. It's really convenient when the sun rises at a time that allows this kind of schedule.

While on this day the sun had only rose just 12 minutes before I took this photo, you couldn't actually see it peek above the horizon for several more minutes until after this shot. This actually gave me plenty of time to explore the area and get a number of good shots of the beautiful Po-i-Kalyan complex.

Bukhara (or Buxoro in Uzbek) itself is one of the must-see cities in Uzbekistan. Ok, if you can only visit one city, you go to Samarkand and spend a day or two, but you should make time to visit Bukhara as the architecture and detail of the historic sites is amazing. If you have a bit more time, you also toss in Khiva, some time to explore modern Tashkent and next thing you know you're in Uzbekistan for a week, trying numerous types of plov and becoming a bread expert.

If you come to Bukhara, you definitely will end up making a stop at the Mir-i Arab Madrasa shown here. You can't really fully go inside and explore it unfortunately, as it is a functioning Islamic institution training future imams, but the outside alone is worth spending some time to marvel at. In addition to the immediately obvious big blue domes, for those less familiar with Islamic architecture (myself included), the domed enclosures on the front are known as Iwans, of which there are two floors worth.

One particularly interesting fact about the Mir-i Arab Madrasa is that it was the only madrasa allowed to operate throughout the entire USSR after World War II. Originally constructed in the 16th century, today you can only imagine what life was like along the Silk Road as you explore the area on foot.