At the Caspian Sea

Hello everyone from the Caspian Sea

First of all I want to apologize for sending out the same entry six times in a row last week. We were in an internet cafe in Trabzon, which had a very Californian feeling to it with frequent rolling electricty black-outs which lead to multiple problems sending out the entries (or so it seemed).

Leaving Turkey was not as easy as expected. Somehow Azerbaijan Airlines gave us a lot of hassle, not accepting our 'international' ticket. Do you believe that we were so naive to expect to fly this airline without bribing every airline official along the way??? It worked without the bribes, but took a lot of patience and time. We were both ready to bomb Baku!

Baku/Azerbaijan is a very interesting place. It was a very rich city at the turn of the century due to its' oil, then became the fourth largest city of the Soviet Union, indeed was known as the jazz capitol in the SSSR and now is...a mix of everything. Western, eastern, islamic, upcoming oil city, postsocialist kind-of Russia. When you fly in you see hundreds of oil rigs and oil drills, giving it a very surreal feeling (if you saw the last James Bond movie you should be familiar with this and the city). The streets on the way in were lined by police 'on a fund-raising' mission. The Intourist hotel where we stay was not exactly welcoming and charming and everything took a while to get used to.

Despite all its' problems (it is a corrupt place, even school children buy their grades, it is fairly polluted, so 'room with seaview' is only a good idea on days the wind blows towards the sea, electricity and water are not always available and did i mention politics? Azerbaijan has been at war with Armenia and has feuds with Iran, Turkmenistan and Kazachstan), it definetly has its charming aspects. We love the promenade along the Caspian Sea (again on these days only when the wind blows in the right direction), there is a lovely old city with selcuc influenced architecture and the socialist years definetly made this an interesting place.

The food here is as ecclectic as the history of Azerbaijan. Especially the Russian food here is very good (doughnuts filled with a potato-onion mix, borscht/red beet with sourcream are delicious here).

We also met some very interesting and nice people here. We almost daily met with Rehan and his girlfriend Sabine. Rehan is a Pakistani citizen who has lived most of his life in Dubai/UAE and has been living here in Baku for the last four years. We met him while taking architectural pictures of a palace, which he also likes to do. Sabine was born in Tartaristan near Moscew and has been living here most of her life. She helped us pick up some Russian which was cool. We tried it out every night on our Russian floor concierge who got a big kick out of it. Spending the time though here with them was really nice!

The ten days here though have been somewhat quieter which has been nice, too. Our original plan was to travel inland to Seki which turned out not to be feasable due to the 'foreigner' price (which tended to be 2-3 times the azeri price with most things...).

Did we have caviar? No, as it is sturgeon will probably be extinct within ten years due to pollution and over-harvesting...

Now onwards to Uzbekistan!