Yes. I am in Tashkent. As in “Uzbekistan, capital of.”

The places that the game of soccer can take a person! It may be the greatest gig in sports writing.

A “dateline” is what American journalists call the name of a city/town (and sometimes its country) that is placed at the very start of a story. That information tells the reader where the reporter was when he or she filed that story.

Reporters love exotic and unusual datelines. Me included. And Tashkent is pretty exotic and unusual, even by UAE standards. It’s not like anyone arrives in Tashkent by accident.

It was the UAE Olympic soccer team that brought me here, 3.5 hours and about a mile of red tape from home.

The Olympic team is at the top of Group B in Asia qualifying. If it can manage a victory or a draw over Uzbekistan, here in Tashkent, on Wednesday night, the UAE goes to the London 2012 Olympics, which would be a very big deal. (If the Uzbeks win, they go to London.)

The UAE has played in the World Cup only once, in 1990. Thus, qualifying for the London Olympics would immediately be the second-biggest accomplishment in the country’s soccer history.

So, the tricky part of this …

If you are going to Uzbekistan, a former republic of the Soviet Union, you need a special visa. Of course you do. Can’t have any old tourists dropping in; the Soviets taught them well.

Beyond that, you need a letter of invitation from someone in Uzbekistan before they will give you the visa. It’s a long process, which was handled for me by the UAE Football Association, and eventually you end up at the Uzbek embassy in Abu Dhabi and get a visa that takes up an entire page.

One of the few ways to get from the UAE to Tashkent directly is via Uzbekistan Airways, which has not had a fatal accident since 2006. Furthermore, all the fatal accidents in UzAir history involved planes made in Russia or the old Soviet Union.

Leaving from Dubai, I rode in on an Airbus 310 — an ancient plane, no doubt, but it didn’t fall out of the sky, despite being packed out by passengers and loaded to the gunnels by Uzbeks bringing home tons of consumer goods they apparently can’t get at home. A couple of the flight attendants looked like Rosa Klebb, but they were much friendlier.

So much to tell about Uzbekistan, even after a few hours here. It’s one of the “stans”, of course, and a curious one. It has some really weird borders. Check the map. That looks like a gerrymandered U.S. congressional district. Note where Tashkent is — at the far end of the country. (I flew over Iran and Turkmenistan to get here, and maybe clipped Afghanistan airspace, as well.)

Also, Uzbekistan is one of only two doubly landlocked countries in the world. The other being tiny Liechtenstein. A twice-over landlocked country is one in which someone has to cross two borders to reach salt water that ships can reach.

The president, Islam Karimov, has been in charge of the country since it declared independence, and when a guy has been president for two decades, you have to wonder about the electoral process. So.

I visited East Germany in 1990, just before it went out of business, as well as Hungary when it was still part of the Eastern Bloc, but I never got to the old Soviet Union, nor to Russia. So this is a good start — one of the outer marches of the old Soviet Empire.

The place definitely has a Cold War feel to it. Lots of police and soldiers standing around, many of them far less than friendly. Lots of ugly little cars (including some, like the Lada, built in Russia) belching lots of pollutants. People lining up for things, or not lining up very well, that is. Pushing. I saw an old Uzbek man and a 30-ish Uzbek women nearly come to blows over an airport cart.

I am in one of Tashkent’s leading hotels, and it is $80 a night. The public areas are nice, but the room is a bit tatty. The toilet seat is about to fall off, and the drain in the sink is askew, and the water comes out in a trickle.

The architecture is fairly dreary (think Soviet concrete), but maybe that’s because the weather has been dreary, too. Barely above freezing. Overcast. Cold.

As soon as I struggled through passport control and customs, and after paying some random kid $20 (yes, dollars; they seem to prefer them to their local currency, the som) to bring me to the hotel, I banged out a couple of stories on the upcoming game.

One piece was on how the locals seem every bit as confident about victory on Wednesday as do the Emiratis back in Abu Dhabi and Dubai.  The second was a brief recap on how a particular UAE player has given the Uzbeks lots of trouble, over the years.

The staff at the hotel has been very nice, and most of them are quite adept in English, which is their third language, at the least (after Uzbek and Russian).

And I bought 30,000 som here — a stack about half-an-inch thick which is about $15 worth … so I can pay for cabs and metro tickets. If I ever use the metro, which apparently is quite handy. More about Tashkent to come; I’m here until Friday morning, inshallah.

So, back to datelines. I know reporters who will take certain assignments just to get a new dateline. Especially a new and weird one.

Like, say, Tashkent, an ancient city on the Silk Road where, thankfully, they also play soccer.