Azerbaijan

Baku’s sister city is Houston, and you can see why. Hot, humid but bearable now in October, with oleanders and olive trees and oil. And more oil. It’s on the landlocked but salt Caspian Sea and has been a crossroads forever in recorded history. It has a wide palisade park along several miles of waterfront, along Oilworker’s boulevard, and in the park is a children’s canal-city with bridges to climb, etc. Many benches, many young lovers.

The shops across the boulevard have plentiful goods. After we arrived I walked a bit, came back and had a HOT bath!! That night another folk show in a charming part of the restored “old town.”  Arabs playing strange instruments around a pond, ladies dancing with arm-wriggles, clowns - all in a little courtyard where I sat on a stool on the second level. Tonight we will go back there, to La Caravanserie - a restaurant nearby. 

Our excursion yesterday morning was to Gobustan, 60 km from Baku. We drove along the Caspian, desolate and ugly landscape, with oil refineries, ship-building plants, etc. Refineries and oil fields have never been things of beauty. Out to sea were tiny fisherman huts on stilts in the water. These aren’t private fishermen’s huts; they all belong to cooperatives which govern the season and sell the fist/caviar. Housing we drove by looked as bad as say, parts of New Mexico, or Greece, the very worst parts - but grape arbors, fruit trees, TV antennas.

I chose an optional trip to a caravanserie for dinner - only two couples went with the eight “singles” - 6 tourists and the two guides. Caravanseries were set up all along the silk routes to India, one day’s journey by camel apart. They are the way you’d expect them - rooms grouped around a single courtyard, the rooms themselves dark and cool, hung with rugs and decorated. Our room was the Casbah. So what would have been a “hotel room” was our private dining room. 

We had a feast of food - all varieties of zakuskis - hors d’ouvres, vodka in a water pitcher. wines. Fruit so perfect it looked unreal. Pickled tomatoes and meats - tongue or liver pate with shredded cabbage. Meat’s never great, but tomatoes are vine ripened, and a favored side dish is one of leaves of fresh purple basil, scallion tops, and a radish.  Great garnish for the inevitably good soups. Both here and in Georgia we’ve been served yogurt for breakfast with good plum jam to stir in. Sometimes salami or eggs or blinis. Ice cream’s not as good as in Moscow, but pastries are good. Luda has seen to it that we have fruit for dessert as often as possible. Food is served promptly at the time announced, one course following another. Today, our last in Baku, we had a lovely meal with shashlik.

This morning we went to a market and a mosque. The market was interested in a couple of items: pickled vegetables - eggplant, green tomatoes, etc. A lady gave me a head o pickled garlic to taste, and some onion grass. For every pestering young man offering to trade for cigarettes or pens, there was one asking me to photographs his magnificent pile of fruit, his wagon load of eggplant. I got some of the spice that is used a lot - sumac? The mosque wasn’t very interesting but now I can add it to the variety of houses of worship we have entered on this trip.