Home » Uzbekistan » bulk thoughts: the black market (7)

From: Anna Kirtiklis
Date: Sun, 16 Jul 2000 03:01:09 -0700 (PDT)

bulk thoughts: the black market (7)

Anastasia Kirtiklis
2006-06-29 10:05:50

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It’s about 2,000,000 degrees here and thank heavens I have no tourists to faint in the heat. My currently scheduled tour has been cancelled because no clients signed up. Yes, yes, yes this means two weeks off! You can’t imagine my delight. A rest is needed to balance my flora anyway.

This wouldn’t be a bad job if it were two weeks on two weeks off. And, crikey, it would average out to a legal workload.

My last tour was a lovely one, although I’m still a little peeved that I wasn’t tipped. How is it that my favorite group yet didn’t tip me? Oh yes, because they are Australian. But before I tell you about them, I want to catch up on that economics lesson I promised you. It’s high time, as the government moved last week to wipe the black market out entirely.

There are two exchange rates in Uzbekistan, the official rate and the black market rate. The official rate is about 230 cym to $1 USD. The black market rate hovers around 680 cym--the riskier the source, the higher the rate. So, you, a happy tourist, would be insane to exchange at the official rate because you would have to change $100USD at the official rate to obtain the same amount of cym that I get for $34 on the black market. The risk really isn’t that high if the source is known. For example, if I run around the bazaar and change with strangers I’ll never see again, I may get an excellent rate of 720, but as the notes are impossible to count inconspicuously (this is after illegal, so I can’t sit outside and count 72,000 cym note by note without arousing some attention), I may not receive all my cym. Nor will I never find the changer again. At the other end, a happy tourist could go to his trusty tour guide (who can obviously not escape) and receive a solid rate of 600 cym to the dollar.

In the middle, where I get my rate of 680, are people of all sorts: the cashier ...