Shaking Free of Sheki's Shackles

The rest of my time in Kis proved to be pretty disastrous for my liver.  I don’t like bad quality beer in the best of times*but you try finding a restaurant in a tiny village with one guest house operated by a family who wants to control all commercial activity.  As a result we ended up in some small café that adjoined to the only general store in town.  We foolishly were under the impression that it would be a lot more affordable than the monopoly on hospitality operated by the guest house, but as it turns out we were duped.  It was actually a combination of us being duped and the bartender being atrociously bad at algebra.  After about 8 beers each (yes, 8.  This is something we’re all going to have to deal with.  I drank 8 draught beers in one sitting.  This is binge drinking at its absolute worst.  While the first three I wrote off under the “I need to replenish my lost vitamin B reserves from all this heat” column, the rest I am purely attributing to British drinking culture.  The one saving grace is that they were very watered down and quite low quality), several plates of smoked cheese and boiled chick peas, as well as a platter of sliced vegetables and hot dogs, the total came to a whopping 52 manat.

It was actually a really nice guest house and there was another British couple there who bought a Range Rover and drove all around the FSU because they had taken voluntary redundancy.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I have been to France.  Several times.  And even when I order canard a’orange stuffed with foie gras it barely pushes the 30 euro mark.  So imagine my lack of delight when I was told this bill for this incredibly substandard meal.  But 8 watered down draught beers and an argument with the Brits about market-driven urban land economics or ants-as-inheritors of the earth or something and I was fired up and ready to confront the wily bartender.  I don’t know if you know this, but in Russian class in elementary school we played Bingo! almost every Friday and I was really, really good at the math component. Needless to say I recalculated our bill down to 28 manat, which was still an outrageous rip off but after doing the actual math it sort of made sense, and certainly at the tourist rate.  So after many warm and sometimes too warm conversations with the locals and declinations to join them for a 3am tea, we made it back to the guest house and crawled into bed, only to rise at 7am and hear from the owner, “So, I hear you guys went out last night.”  I think 28 manat was a good investment to make ourselves known.

We were served tea and dishes full of candied walnuts and other sweets but I don't remember paying for it.  I am sure they would have charged us, but you win some and you lose some. 

After this we headed back down to Sheki and to the bus depot where the Brits went towards Georgia and I towards Baku, with the advice that I should not stay at whatever hostel there was in Baku, it has camels in the name, due to lots of their money being stolen out of their backpacks and they being the only guests there.  The guest house owner also offered us a ride down to Sheki and we almost agreed until I asked how much and she said 5 manat.  This is one of those instances where you have to ask for the fine print.  Inevitably we opted for the 0.25 manat (kopek) bus.

I am not sure what this is about but I was just reminded that I met up with one of the Brits recently and we reminisced about the bathroom at the cafe we went to.  He said that it was so sketchy and that he remembers going down some sketchy pathway in the dark and using his iPhone as a light until he found the "bathroom" which was actually just a hole in the sidewalk.  This was my time to let him know that no, there actually was a bathroom there, just beyond the crack in the sidewalk. 

Buses in Azerbaijan are pretty standard affairs.  The bus I took to Baku was actually a nice recycled Turkish outfit from the 70s and the best part about it was the assigned seating.  On a 40 seater, all 11 passengers were crammed up in the first 11 seats and when the bus assistant came to check my ticket he told me I was in the wrong seat and needed to move up to the front and next to someone.  In a flash of one of my most entitled and Western moments I told him, “no.” The result was almost exactly like that Soviet joke about the two men digging the holes for trees and filling them back up right away and when confronted about why say that the man who puts the tree in is off sick.  I can’t seem to find that joke by a simple google so I can’t hyperlink for you and I’ve gone ahead and ruined the punchline.  Anyway, the point is that this bus assistant had absolutely no idea how to respond to my stubbornness.  His job was to tell me I was supposed to sit somewhere else but nowhere in his contract did it stipulate that he should actually make me move.  I take my victories whenever I can.

*the best of times is clearly when you’re 19 and you first go to a liquor store and are very excited by the most generic brands and say things like, “I think I’ll get MGD because I feel like having a classy night.”