Azerbaijan 2001
Baku, Azerbaijan
March 2001
Zdrast vooy-teh! (Phonetic spelling of Russian “Hello”)
It is easier to refer to my present location as the city of Baku instead of the country of Azerbaijan. It is only with considerable practice that I can spell “Azerbaijan”, but it still sounds like it tripped and fell out my mouth while I was pronouncing it. Azerbaijan is one of the former Soviet Republics located on the northern border of Iran. Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, sits on a piece of property that juts out into the Caspian Sea to the East. Flying in here, I went up to the British Airways gate in London on my boarding pass and saw my flight was listed over the doorway to the jetway with a destination of Tehran. Not really anxious to visit Iran, I must have verified with about 20-30 British Airways employees that the flight did, in fact, go to Baku, it went to Baku first, and that I would not die in an Iranian prison for the criminally satanic. (ie, a prison for Americans)
Baku was best described to me by the warehouse manager in Malabo who lived here for several years. He said it appeared that the city was a major resort and business center at the first part of the 20th century, then all the workers went home one evening in 1917 and never came back with architecture and technology now appearing just as they were then. That was when Azerbaijan fell to the Bolsheviks and became one of the Soviet Republics. An American friend that lived in Moscow for several years once told me that if I ever saw the technological state of the USSR during their peak, I would realize that the only danger to the US in the event of a full launch of nuclear weapons by Russia would have been radioactive waste washing up on our beaches after they blew themselves to pieces. I can now confirm these statements largely true.
To say nothing has been built here since 1917 is not true. The older shoddy-looking buildings are actually the newer buildings that were constructed by the communist. These stand in stark contrast to the buildings built prior to 1917 that look newer because they were built better. They communists did construct a lot of statues of good communists in many of the parks. I don’t mean “good” and “communist”, but “good communist”. I did not intend to imply any virtues existed.
While the town is clean but old, the oilfields that surround the town are rundown and polluted beyond belief. If you have seen the James Bond movie from last year, “The World is Not Enough”, (I can never remember if it is “underline a title and use quotes an article” or if it is “undermine an article and use gloats on a title.”) Bond drives his car down a road with an unbelievable number of oil derricks lining the road. I was driven on that road yesterday, and although some cleanup is underway and some derricks have actually been taken down since then, it is unbelievable the number of derricks you see on the horizon in all directions along with rotted tanks and pipelines. Across the road in the Caspian Sea, there are countless ships of every shape and size that are rotting, some mostly sunk or turned over on their side, and some still in use, although they could be condemned to the scrap pile if in the US. Oil is pooled everywhere. There are oil separators that haven’t completely rotted and are still in use with the separated brine water shooting out of the bottom and onto the open ground to pool up until they eventually flow into the Caspian. On the off-chance the water flow, with some oil still mixed in, happens to pool up and not find a natural flow into the Caspian, some Azeri environmentalist will arrange to have an automatic pump with a line to intentionally pump the water from the larger pools into the sea.
It is difficult to tell the abandoned equipment from the working equipment in both the port and the oil fields. We drove by one workover rig that looked like it had been abandoned for at least 50 years when I realized there were workers on it and they were actually pulling tubing out of a well. John, the manager who drove us around, pointed out that frequently the only way to tell if anything is abandoned or not is to see if somewhere on it, especially the ships, if it has a moon and star on it that are found on the Azeri flag. If it has the old hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union on it, then it probably hasn’t been touched in the 10 years since Azeri independence.
The buildings in the older part of Baku are mostly ornamental and old but well-kept. The streets are clean and free of garbage, which is a rarity for many countries outside of Europe, the US and Canada. However, when you drive around the mountains along the sea that separate the oilfields from Baku, you start seeing pitiful squatter shacks in nooks and crannies. Like many regions of the world, the oil here has some NORM in it. (NORM - naturally occurring radioactive material – is a real fact. Memorize it in case you ever get to be on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”.) The NORM is probably resident in both the Caspian Sea and in any soil around the oil fields due to the enormous quantities of spilled and standing oil. And, the squatter shacks are built out of bricks made from the soil in this area. So, you can probably tell the squatters from the standers (ie, non-squatters) by their glow. All along the shore of the oil fields there were people fishing and in one area a large group of adults and kids were swimming. (My boss actually shuddered when he saw the swimmers in the Caspian!!!) Of course, I am probably over-reacting because all the oil residue and radioactive material probably kills off the bacteria of the open sewage. Then again, it could make each bacterium the size of a Labrador retriever.
The Caspian Sea is the home of top quality caviar. Caviar is roe, or fish eggs, from the sturgeons found in the Caspian. (Based on the price, they must be neuro-sturgeons.) I have now tried caviar twice. Once on someone else’s tab and last night in the business lounge at the Hyatt, where I am staying. I managed to choke down one bite before I abandoned the remainder of the cracker. I have concluded that the reason Vodka is also from this region of the world is that you have to be stone drunk to eat the gunk. Plus, anyone that sees the Caspian Sea up close and personal, then voluntarily eats anything from it’s waters needs to be in rehab for either alcoholism or attempted suicide.
The currency here is the Azeri Manat. The exchange rate is 4,468 Manats to the dollar. No wait, it’s 4,470 Manats to the dollar. Oh, it’s now 4,473…OK, you get the picture. The locals spend their money as quick as they can upon receipt before it devalues. There are no checks accepted by the banks here. None. They do not have the ability to clear checks. They can do wire transfers between banks and fund transfer within banks. I was arguing with a local here about when a bank transfer or wire could be used in lieu of the enormous safe full of cash maintained. He was saying we couldn’t pay individuals with transfers because they don’t have bank accounts. I made the comment “then were do the individuals put their extra cash?” He looked at me like I had just mutilated into refuse from the Caspian and replied, “Individuals don’t have cash…they spend.” Considering the average salary is about $600/year, I felt bad about my question. The dominant language of Baku is Russian, while the dominant language of the rest of Azerbaijan is Azeri. The Azeri language is derived from Turkish and Arabic, so it’s not as if you speak one language you can understand some of the other. Roughly half the population of Azerbaijan lives in Baku (about 3 million), so half of the population has no idea how to talk to the other half. So, it’s like they’re married!
Being a new republic, our office here is continually struggling and protesting some of the new taxes. One tax we got hit with for the first time anywhere in the world was individual income tax for meals provided to workers on the offshore oil rigs. When the company went to protest that providing meals was the normal offshore oil industry practice, the official that had grown up here, became irate stating that we were trying to pull a fast one. It seems the confusion occurred because the Soviets did not provide food to any of their workers, including those assigned to an offshore oil rig for a continuous 2-3 months. Each worker was responsible for bringing food and fishing equipment and a way to prepare it. Not that this was a safety hazard or anything, having 15-20 grills made out of old barrels or cans with open flames burning at any given time around the walkways of an oil rig that is trying to perforate a formation with several billion BTUs of natural gas or several billion barrels of oil. And, we wondered how the Chernobyl incident could have occurred?! Basically here, if you smile at employees, then you have to maintain a count of the smiles and submit 40-50% of future smiles to the government. I would estimate that this office pays at least twice the taxes of any other office I have visited in the world. If you drive a vehicle, you have a road tax, a license tax, a police tax and a registration tax that come close to the value of the vehicle. At lease the first year. By the second year, these taxes have cumulative passed the vehicle’s initial purchase price. Everything is taxable. Everything. I will probably have to pay a per word tax for this email, so I had better wrap this up.
Das Vidonya! (Phonetic spelling of Russian “Goodbye”)
-Comrade Keith