Azerbaijan 2003
Baku, Azerbaijan
June 2003
Draydst Vrootah from Baku, Azerbaijan!
Getting to Baku was half the fun. Our flight to Azerbaijan is through London with a quick stopover in Chicago. The flight was very calm into Chicago until right before we landed. Without warning, it felt like we hit something, like...maybe...Mount McKinley. The plane then dove and I would have been thrown out of my seat except for my seatbelt. They managed to level off, but the screaming, crying and yelling was horrible. They finally got me to stop screaming, crying, and yelling. Every flight attendant I could see hit the floor and one was injured to the point she had to be taken off in a wheel chair when we landed in Chicago. This was after a two hour delay for takeoff in Houston. They were probably waiting for a huge vortex to develop over Iowa in which human experiments could be conducted and blamed on "clear air turbulence."
Some things are very expensive and some things are very cheap here in the city formerly known as the "Russian Riviera." Caviar, which originates from the sturgeon in the Caspian, is about $3 a half pint bottle while the same bottle is about $100 in the States. If you haven't tried caviar, but would like to, mix up a cup of salt with a half cup of dog poop. The flavor should be very close. As virtual non-salt eater, the salt taste was so thick it forced a shudder when I tried a small bite at a dinner in our honor. The dog poop taste I am obviously unsure about, but would assume it would make up the smaller non-salt taste I could detect. Local vodkas are usually under $5 per liter with most under $2. Like the dog poop, I can't directly compare the taste, but most say they are very good. However, I haven't asked if the vodka tasters were using the vodka to wash down caviar. Such a relief would make a swig of a muddy puddle taste like the finest mineral water in the world. I guess since caviar is nothing more than sturgeon (fish) roe (eggs) and vodka is liquor made from potatoes, therefore, vodka and caviar together are basically Azeri fish and chips.
A buddy asked me to buy him a bottle of Stolichnaya Vodka. So one evening, I walked across the street to a corner store. There were dozens of vodkas and I managed to locate the Stolichnaya. I tried to convert the price to dollars – the last thing I needed was to overpay for it and end up with a bottle of vodka because my buddy wouldn’t reimburse me. I thought something must be wrong because the price converted to $1.32. Then I noticed Evian water was next to the vodka with a converted price of $1.59. No wonder Russians drink too much, they can only afford vodka – the water is too expensive!
The food is pretty good here. We ate at the Italian Restaurant frequented by Pierce Brosman during the filming of the "World is Not Enough." I don't know if we are welcome back, although it was not our fault that the table caught on fire. I was just upset that they charged us for the bottled water I used to extinguish the fire. There was a small candle on each table and I noticed ours was burning high due to an excessively long wick. What I didn't notice is that the waitress pushed the bread basket up against the candle when she brought our meals. A few minutes later I noticed a spark float by and thought it was odd that the wick was sending out sparks when I noticed the napkin in the bread basket was ablaze! Although the fire was relatively small and about to go out, I alertly blew on it causing it to ignite further and flare up. I then flung my water on it, my coworker's water on it, refilled a glass from the bottle and flung again before fully extinguishing it. My coworkers blatantly lied when recanting the story later saying that between each unsuccessful action (noting the fire, blowing, dowsing, re-dowsing, etc) they were most embarrassed about me yelling "Dough!" in my best Homer Simpson voice.
On Sunday, I noticed two guys on the street mowing the median on the four lane boulevard in front of the hotel. While, aside from it being a Sunday, that might not appear unusual, so I should add that they were using an electric lawnmower with several joined 100 ft extension cords plugged into the hotel lobby. One guy was responsible for holding the cord with about 6 feet in slack and following the mowing guy up and down the median weaving around the trees. When traffic would buzz by at about 40 miles an hour, they would have to stop because the cord was being run over and they couldn't pull it. And, traffic was pretty heavy during the 5 or 10 minutes I was entertained by watching this duo.
Observations in walking around town include huge grapevines growing out of a removed tile or hole in the sidewalks next to buildings of all shapes and sizes that have a single vine up to a patio or balcony where it is trained to fully cover with grapes just coming ripe. In the oil fields when flying in the 'copter offshore, I saw lots of jetty's built on piers out beyond the site of land with old derricks every few hundred yards, most leaking residue oil into the Caspian. Many are abandoned and some jetties and derricks have collapsed in the Caspian only leaving some of the piers exposed. One dollar equals 4910 Manats...no-wait 4925...wait-make that 4940-oh well, you get the picture. Owning Manats is just like owning most of the stocks in my 401k.
Hope to see everyone soon.
Das Vidanyah!
-Keith