The Nut Capital of Azerbaijan

Thanks for the hot tip, Georgian Interior Ministry!

I don't know if you know this, and I'm not too proud to admit that I had no idea about this, but te region right over the border into Azerbaijan from Georgia, adjacent to Ingushetia and Dagestan, is WORLD FAMOUS for its cashews.  People go nuts for them.  This is what I was told by the cement truck driver who picked me up and to this day I have no reason not to believe him.  Even when he had to stop to bribe a police officer and let me off because he had arrived at his destination quarry he acted perfectly honourable.  Especially during the bribing process.

Dagestan!

The policeman accepting the bribe was also quite a gentleman.  A gentleman with a full rack of gold teeth.  He refused to smile for the picture that he insisted I take.  And then the best thing about this corrupt young civil servant is that he stopped a car and forced the reluctant driver to both pay him and take me to the nearest city.  If I had even known what Twitter was in 2010, I would have somehow done something with a hashtag that was like #epicwin! or #thirdworldproblems (for the guy who had to both pay the bribe and then drive me to the nearest town.  This is about as big a third world problem as it gets*).  Then I guess I'd end it with a LOLz (pronounced "lawlz!") or something.

I was going to make some sort of Super Troopers-style "Who wants a moustache-ride?" joke but that's horribly inappropriate and probably dangerously accurate.  Unrelated but definitely noticeable is that fact that I hadn't washed my hair in about 4 months.

Anyway, the next town had more going for it.  It was, by all accounts, a town.  And it was a lot more Turkish than it was Soviet, with the exception of its bus depot.  But in terms of internet cafes full of preteen boys playing action games with guns (I assume in Azerbaijan the only games involve them going around shooting Armenians) it could have been it could have been anywhere in the world.  Anywhere.  Including the UBC Library where, for some reason, they let children into the computers to play games and be loud and f***ing annoying as sh*t and when you try to tell the "librarians" or library techs of whatever those people are who work in libraries are who don't have MAs in library science and subsequently end up making 1/5th of what a librarian makes and have absolutely no passion for the job and refuse to believe that there are children playing war games in the computer labs at Koerner because if they are in the lab then they must be students at UBC.  They are not students at UBC!  They are 11 year old fat kids who need to be sent to military school and get shot at so they realise it's not so much fun to shoot others, and also to get them out of my hair while I write the five term papers I have due that week.  Oh my god, UBC Libraries, this is exactly why I refuse to pay back that $30 I supposedly owe you.

Mixed grill.

But yeah, I had some delicious meat and then caught the bus to Sheki. 

*Don't even get me started on #firstworldproblems.  First of all, talking about cell phones not working or whatever is not a first world problem.  Cell phones are less likely to work outside of the first world and are ultimately a third world problem.  Second, I take technology and my ability to buy it cheaply entirely for granted.  I have a phone that hardly works (well, had.  As of November 2012 I have a Samsung Galaxy S III) and when Armenian teenagers on the bus ask me for my number they do not understand that 1) I don't have/need one, and 2) I don't have skype and I don't know how to use it.  No one understands this.  If there is such a thing as a #firstworldproblem it is having to explain to people in the third world that you don't know anything about technology because you're so jaded by its existence.