The Most Dangerous Game

The strange thing about my time in Quba was that I arrived late on the last bus into town, which actually turned around and was the last bus out of town.  So I was, like, trapped in Quba.  There were no hotels and I couldn’t contact my brother and for some reason this didn’t bother me.  Even though it looked like it was going to rain I for some reason decided walking back to Baku was the best decision at the time.

And what a great decision!  I was about 100 paces into my journey when a red Lada Niva (my dream car) stopped and a man hollered at me and asked what I was doing.  He was an off-duty policeman and he asked if I needed a ride.  I figured at this point I should take what I could get.  He told me his son spoke a bit of English and he insisted that I come have dinner with his family.  He took me to a mansion in the outskirts of the village where his wife greeted me, took my things and they immediately began to be hospitable.  This family took care of me like it was their job.  The strangest thing about the former Soviet Union is that, aside from people actually engaged in the hospitality industry, they are the most hospitable people in the entire world.   

We had a barbecue of roast lamb (all parts.  I ate a kidney and have decided to never do so again), bread, salad, fresh raspberry juice, homemade wine and fresh kefir and fruit for dessert.  When he was removing the lamb bits from the skewers he used a huge chunk of break and I got to eat the bread after!  It was so good that now I refuse to eat bread unless it’s soaked in roasted lamb fat.  We talked about Azerbaijan, the Soviet Union, the English language, the Russian language, and he asked if I had been to Armenia.  I had not at this point and he told me it was a pretty nice place and that it was too bad the borders were closed now.  Then his 20 year old son asked me in English if I had been to Armenia and when I said no he said, “Don’t go.  It is awful. I hate all Armenians” and a few other nasty things for the sake of a war that happened at the time he was born and had not directly engaged him.

After dinner we piled into the Lada and went to get water.  This involved driving for about an hour up into the mountains (seriously, right to the Dagestan border.  I could smell Dagestan) to a natural spring.  While we were making the ascent deeper and deeper into the woods, and signs of civilization petered out, I thought to myself, “Aha, this is where they kill me.  This is where I find out that he is an eccentric Russian count who will give me a 10 minute head start before he hunts the most dangerous game."  In retrospect while this is a totally rational fear, I would make the least dangerous game.  Especially because I would probably get shot or destroyed by so many other external factors, like the Dagestan border guards.  In any case, all we did was get delicious spring water and went back to the house.

The son was apparently charged with the duties of making sure I was settled and driven to the bus depot the next day.  He grudgingly did so and told me about how he has exams coming up.  I asked him if he was studying and he said, “Well, I can study, or I can pay $100 and not study.”  While I have no idea how a police officer was living in such a mansion with a son who drove a Mercedes SUV and bribed his professors, I decided that sometimes I should just enjoy the few benefits life throws my way and hope that these corruption problems sort themselves out.  Don’t want to dip back into that Anglo-Saxon habit of colonialism, afterall.  So after the father hugged me and wished me the best and the little daughter bid me farewell, and the mother seemed a bit relieved that the stranger had been properly fed and looked after according to stringent Azeri hospitality convention, the son reluctantly drove me to the bus depot and seemed happy to have gotten rid of me.   Quba success!