Quba Libre

If you were going to try to tell I spent a whole week in Baku, I would tell you you’re lying because I have almost no recollection of it.  I have a few memories, such as going down to the old centre after night fall to where all the fountains are and eating ice cream and watching Russian grandmothers yell at their grandchildren.  I also sat in my brother’s apartment watching Russian music videos with a huge plastic mixing bowl on my lap full of chilled coffee with an entire block of vanilla ice cream floating in it and picked away at with a spoon for hours. 

Azerbaijan is full of amazing and beautiful places, so I’d rather no reflect on it and remember all the places I did not visit.  Like mud volcanoes, and this really nice village up in the hills that apparently now one must pay to go visit.  So I seem to have missed my window.  I also almost went to the Iranian border, but idea got shot down pretty quickly.  I don’t know if you have ever tried buying a train ticket in Azerbaijan but it’s one of the most emotionally taxing experiences of my life. 

It got to the point where so many people were crowing around me screaming and waving cash and the ticket vendress started shrieking at me because I was in the wrong lineup and then everyone was yelling at her and me because I was a tourist and then she flipped her lid and shut down her counter and I was so stressed out after all the pushing and screaming for 45 minutes that a very cathartic expletive burst loudly from my mouth and I fought my way out of the storm.  Some laughing teenagers chased me down and asked me where I was from, which I think at that point was fairly obvious.

So I went to Quba to seek out some Mountain Jews.  I actually don’t even think I found any.  I think I saw some ornate tin roves which I assumed were done by Jewish tinsmiths, but I don’t even remember much of a synagogue or anything that really made me think, “Wow, these are some Mountain Jews.”  What I did do, however, was engage in the local economy .  Wandering through the bazaar trying to find a barber resulted in such wonderfully comical situations as:

“Boy, BOY! Come here!  COME HERE! Look at my vegetables!”
“WOMAN! I am without kitchen!  I am not needing your vegetables!”

That shut her up.

I also got a lot of hollers and from locals.  Soldiers and commoners yelled at me with such phrases as “Hello!” and “What is your name?!” and then kept going without waiting for the answer.  I wonder if they are taught that when they see a white person these are the sorts of things we love to hear.  When I did find the barber, I asked for the “local special” and then immediately changed my mind and asked them to take some more off the back to look like less of a Swedish Vulcan.