Shacked Up in Sheki

It think it's fairly important to note that my grasp on Russian is far from perfect.  And it was really put to the test when I was waiting for the octegenarian I was to stay with to come home and sitting in the restaurant across from his house.  I attracted the attention of the whole cafe and was invited to sit with two men who insisted I drink several terrible beers and eat plate after plate of smoked string cheese and boiled chick peas with salt.  This situation, combined with the heat, really tested my abilities as a bilingual communicator, especially when one of them--a fat, bald, middle aged school principal with a red nose and trouble focusing his fluttering eyes--asked me if sex was free in Canada.  I don't even know what this means in the best of linguistic circumstances and I wasn't sure if he meant free as in "liberal" or "at zero (monetary) cost" and I was so exhausted at this point that I just did what I always do after more than ten minutes of conversing in a foreign language: I smiled, nodded and said, "Da, da."

I wish I spent more time photo-capturing my colossal failures, but this sums up my cafe glacee debacle pretty nicely.

When the old man finally returned I was able to meet him and inform him I was staying with him.  What a pleasant surprise it must be when you're an 88 year old Azeri man with a granddaughter who lives in Moscow and has listed your place on hostelworld.com without telling you.  It cost 10 manat, was clean and well-kept, and had something in the yard that, years later, I am comfortable calling a shower.  In all, the city was nice.  It is located on the slopes of hill (towards Dagestan!) and there are lots of parks and terraces.  Cafes too, but just try ordering a coffee in one.  Just try to ask for a cafe glacee.  The result you'll get is the waiter rooting around for a tin of dried up instant Nescafe and scrape it out to mix with cold water that you will need to buy a pre-packaged ice cream cone and add to it while all the teenagers in the cafe get out their mobiles and send SMSes to their friends about what this crazy American is doing.

I also ate something that I think was a shish kebab made of fat wrapped in more fat, but the outside fat was really crispy and the inside fat bit was really soft and stuck to the roof of my throat and was really awful.  I can still taste and feel it.  The crispy fat was definitely worth it at the time but the longterm suffering I have endured as a result of memories of the softer fat has rendered that null and void.  It was in the park in the centre of the city and it had a lot of taxidermied animals around.  So that was definitely a memory worth recollecting.