Bringing Sexy Baku

You know how when you’re in Baku and you’re in the internet café next to Grandfather’s Chicken and you are on Google Maps and you zoom out really far to try to see where you are and you’re like, “Holy $#%&!” because you are far from anywhere even remotely resembling home?  Well that exact same thing happened to me when I was trying to do some online instant messaging with some friends and discovered they were a full 12 hours behind me.  Baku is really on the cusp. The whole city is quite nice, and certainly the old town is a sight to behold.  If I someone asked me what I thought a movie set of an ancient Arabian city from 1,001 Nights built with modern technology looked like I would have to say Baku’s old town.  It’s so clean, so perfect, and so manicured that it definitely fits into the “Orient” that I constructed in my imagination in kindergarten when Aladdin came out.   

But the one piece that I couldn’t quite reconcile was the heat and oppressive humidity.  It was foul.  I have been to Costa Rica but it was nothing compared to dank swampiness I constantly felt walking around Baku at 9am.  I felt like a wet plastic bag.  I felt like I was bathing in the actual Caspian Sea.* In fact, the only thing I really remember about my time in Baku was feeling constantly uncomfortable and hot and trying to avoid direct sunlight at all costs.  I did this by going to the completely renovated waterfront to stand by the fountains and enjoy the mist but be certain to avoid the revolting oil slicks that splashed up from the sea.  If Azerbaijan ever does run out of oil from pumping it surely they have a few more years’ supply from simply skimming the top of the Caspian.

One thing I did find and managed to make it to the top of was the large hill that overlooks the city and the harbour of Baku.  I owe this almost entirely to the help of the Funicular Railway.  It should come as no surprise, of course, because show me a hill in the former Soviet Union, and I’ll show you a funicular railway.  They love them.  Something about side-shuffling up a hill the Soviets really lived for.  The view from the top showed the massive parliament, the sweeping harbour, and I think I saw someone get arrested there but my memory is hazy and to tell you the truth it was so hot that I just kind of sat in the shade.  In fact not long after I seem to remember finding a park and passing out from heat exhaustion on a bench, in the style of the local senior population, after eating a kefir and deciding I wasn’t long for this world.

*Ugh. I felt like I was in that Britney Spears music video where everyone is sweaty and gyrating, except for the fact that it's a conservative muslim country and no one was gyrating at all.  Few even seemed to be sweating, but it's hard to tell when most of the women were wearing billowy linen burqas (which, given the billowiness, actually seem like a practical choice in this weather).  In any case this sweatiness had zero sex appeal, unlike that racy Britney Spears music video, or the subsequent response video by Christina Aguilera, Dirrty, which also expressed exactly how I was feeling at the time.  I honestly felt like I was covered in filth, like I was dirrty.  It's like Christina Aguilera wrote that song with my trip to Baku in mind.  But again, minus all sex appeal.  There was nothing sexy about me passed out on a park bench in the shade constantly readjusting my boxers and dreaming of sweet, cold death.