Summer Travels

Pictures! The Literature Museum in Baku, Me standing in various places around the country, and MOSQUITOES! Gazillions of them!

The pictures of were taken in Ucar, Şirvan and Şamaxı. The one in Ujar is in front of a new massive building they are construction in the local park. I don't know what its purpose will be, but knowing this country it will probably serve as a massive museum/monument to Heydar Aliyev, the former president. If this is the case it will basically become a gigantic waste of money and space intended to convince everyone that Heydar deserves a place at the right hand of Allah because of his extraordinary greatness. The picture in Şirvan is with PCVs Jesse and Derek, standing on a mountain overlooking the river Kür, which has experienced severe flooding this year and basically ruined the entire town of Sabirabad. Derek was initially placed in Sabirabad with his wife, but due to the lack of organization of both the Azeri government and Peace Corps he had to return to the states after the town was flooded. Finally there's a picture in Şamaxı, standing next to the Tombs of the Shirvan Shahs. For a long time Şamaxı was the capital of ancient Azerbaijan, until an earthquake ruined it and the Shah decided to relocate to Baku.

News from "The Family"

Sorry to all I don't have new photos to post, although you can rest assured that you really don't want to see what it's like here right now. The rainy season has arrived, a bit later than last year, but equally as miserable. It's cold, rainy, dreary and dirty. There are weeds over six feet tall growing in my yard that my landlord has yet to come clean up because, well, it's raining all the damn time. Walking around in the streets is both gross and treacherous, and even the livestock wandering around town have a sort of depressed look in their eyes while they slowly ruminate and block traffic.

So, being the sharing sort of guy that I am, I decided to share the depression, in the form of this article. I know I've dropped a few hints about these sorts of dealings in corruption and such throughout my posts on the blog, but hopefully this will shine a bit of light on exactly how big and bad govt. corruption is here. I'm posting the article since I'm not technically allowed to say anything "bad" about Azerbaijan online while I'm here (silly US Govt. and their regulations...ugh!), so I decided to let the Washington Post say it for me. I have, however, linked the site on an Armenian website, which is by no means a breach of the limitations placed upon my blog, but a fun jab nonetheless. Enjoy!

In the Rainy Season

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(These pictures are from the beginning of February. A bit dated, I know, but it's hard enough to find a place with enough bandwidth to post at a reasonable rate, and I'm lazy. The one not snowy pic is from out March Mustache Madness/Ujar Fried Food Festival that took place during our Spring break. Rest assured, this is the first and last mustache I've ever grown, as I realize how ridiculous I look. Thanks to Dad for providing the wonderful shirt that topped off my award winning ensemble. The writing on my shirt says "My name is not English!", which I wear around town to let people know not to call me that, to marginal effect.)


Spring is here! Normally this would be cause for celebration. Flowers blooming, bees buzzing, critters running to and fro after a long winter slumber. And in a way, it is a celebration. In fact, here it's the biggest holiday of the year, Novruz. Originally a Zoroastrian celebration of the coming of a new year, the return of life to the Earth and all that good stuff, in Azerbaijan it has simply devolved into a mishmash of various ancient traditions combined with the two things Azeris love doing most: eating and drinking to excess. People jump over bonfires, sprout wheat in little dishes, cook pilaf and dolma, children collect candy from neighbors, men drink hurculean amounts of vodka, and generally a good time is had by all.

As for me, I had my own party, a reincarnation of a gathering I had last year known as the Ujar Fried Food Festival. Seeing as how I am one of only 4 or 5 volunteers from the South in this country, and the only one from Alabama, I felt it a personal duty to my fellow countrymen to introduce them to the best thing my state has to offer--namely, battering and frying pretty much everything. We had fried pickles, onion rings, chicken, and even some pork a thoughtful volunteer had the foresight to acquire from Georgia. We also had falafel, which I prepared for the wussy vegetarians who think that eating a huge pile of molten grease might not be "healthy". Bah! The way I see it, if eating deep fried yumminess is going to make my heart explode then clearly God intended for me to die young, otherwise he wouldn't have made it and me so wonderfully compatible. Throughout the day I kept getting various partygoers to help me in the kitchen, teaching them the alchemical arts of southern fried food, and after I got tired of cooking I did what any good chef does: I sent other people to cook for me. Despite making a complete wreck of my kitchen and nearly burning my house to the ground, they produced a passable example of fried goodness, and for the first time since I've been here I revelled in the wonderful feeling of teaching students and having them actually learn!

Adittionally, another gathering that had been planned for the same time was incorporated into my gathering, a fake holiday made up by another volunteer with impeccable facial hair and clearly too much time on his hands(pictured above wearing the big fur hat)--Mustache March. This is why, in the above photo, I am sporting a trash-stache that would make Kid Rock melt with jealousy. Since mustaches are the facial hair of choice for 90% of Azeri men (and about 10% of the women), my marriage proposals increased tenfold during the course of my anomalous facial growth. Alas, I got tired of looking in the mirror every morning and seeing a backwoods trailer park resident staring back at me, so I removed the offending hairs from my face immediately after the party was concluded.

So, is all this partying over a concept as simple as Spring really warranted? Here, definitely. That's because "Spring" really only lasts a couple of weeks here, followed by about a month straight of rain. The weather has been nice lately, but we had our first downpour yesterday, marking the beginning of a very wet, muggy, muddy, and generally gross month before summer. And once that ends, "Spring" is over, and summer comes right in with little regard for how I or anyone else feels about it. So in America, April showers bring May flowers, but in Azerbaijan they simply bring sweltering, overwhelming, inescapable heat. Wish me luck.

I've loaded these last two videos to give a bit of perspective into the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh, aka Qarabağ, between Armenia and Azerbaijan. While there isn't any real right or wrong answer to this whole mess, hopefully this video will at least give you some insight into how the conflict is viewed here. I take issue with some of the translations, as I know enough Azeri and Russian to know when they are simply making the subtitles fit the story, but despite that I feel this is a decent introduction to the conflict for people who don't know about it, or might not even know where it is. Don't hate on Al-Jazeera, them's good news peoples.

Older pics

A couple of scenes from Azerbaijan, a wedding, and a picture of me with my friends Sahib (standing) and Javan (sitting).

More New Year's pics

Some pics from New Year's in Tbilisi, including a picture of a sign on a khinkali restaurant, one of the national foods of Georgia. Check out the writing, the Georgian alphabet is really cool looking. I'm trying to teach myself some of it, so far I've got the alphabet down but the language itself is absurdly complicated. The big gold statue is of Saint George slaying a dragon or some other big evil lizard looking thing.

The Baku Blues

(Me at a winehouse in Tbilisi; bowing down to Heydar Bey; Standing in front of the mountains in Zagatala; My friend Josh giving the thumbs up to Georgian cuisine; Magnus, The Monstercat...may he rest in peace)




Under normal circumstances, being in Baku would be totally rad. Not being in Ujar, especially in winter when it's cold, cloudy, rainy, muddy, and generally gross in virtually every respect, is almost always a good thing. That is, unless you're in Baku for a Peace Corps conference. Under such circumstances I would almost rather be in Ujar freezing and bored to death than sitting here listening to government bureaucrats drone on and on and on about a bunch of nonsense. One fortunate part of the whole business is that PC is obliged to put me up in a nice hotel with a comfortable bed, English news on the TV, and INTERNET! YES!

Therefore, I am taking this opportunity to appease my poor, forlorn family members and friends who have been missing me and relentlessly begging me to post some pictures of my smiling countenance for them to coo and fawn over and such. So, here you are!

New Years Pics

Finally, some pics from New Years!

Sakartvelo On My Mind

(note: This blog is supposed to include pictures, but somewhere between my computer and this one the pictures disappeared off my flash drive. Still, I feel compelled to post something about my amazing adventure in the land called Sakartvelo...pics will come later.)

So, as some of you may know I spent my New Year's holiday in Tbilisi, Georgia. Some of you may also be aware that Tbilisi is not, in fact, a suburb of Atlanta. It is the capital of a small country in the South Caucasus, crammed in between Russia, Azerbaijan, Armenia and the Black Sea. It is also, in my opinion, the most awesome city in the world. As far as Caucasian cities go, it puts Baku to shame in just about every aspect imaginable. Since I'm currently a resident of Azerbaijan I'm not allowed to go to Armenia, but I imagine that Yerevan is probably about the same as Baku. Tbilisi, however, is about as amazing as a city can get.

The city itself is old...really, really, really OLD. There are castles and old churches sitting atop mountains scattered all across the city. The bulk of the city is centered in a valley through which a river runs, and travelling to any point in the city usually involves crossing the river at least once. This is a good thing, as there are countless examples of ancient and modern architecture, art, churches and all kinds of other stuff to see everywhere in the city. It is a bad thing because Georgians drive with an insanely homicidal lack of concern for pedestrians, traffic or themselves. I thought driving was bad in Azerbaijan, but Tbilisi takes the cake. Things like lanes, sidewalks, crosswalks and traffic signals have about as much tangible meaning to a Georgian driver as a Pollock painting does to a colorblind schizophrenic. Fortunately I managed not to become reduced to a greasy spot on Rustaveli Avenue, thanks in part to the fact that the local authorities had the foresight to shut it down prior to it being absolutely overrun by holiday revelers.

New Years itself was insanity. Imagine a frenzied warzone of wine-fueled partying, plus fireworks, clowns, puppeteers and concerts on every corner. After a while I just accepted that I was going to hear anything for the rest of the night after the 10th M-80 went off about 3 feet from my ear. In fact, I remember towards the end of the night people were throwing fireworks directly at my feet, my friends warning me "KEVIN GET THE HELL OUT OF THE WAY!" and me just walking on. I don't think I would do well in war, because after so many huge bangs in my general vicinity I tend to just ignore them. The whole night was amazingly fun, by far the best New Year's I've ever had.

Being a huge language dork, one of the most appealing parts of Georgia was their strange, almost unearthly language. Apparently named for Saint George in most other languages, the Georgian name for Georgia is "Sakartvelo". The Georgian name for Georgian is "Kartuli". I assume that whoever gave it the name Georgia probably did so because he couldn't understand what in the hell Georgians were saying to him. The Georgian language is ancient, and completely unique. The script, which Georgians claim was designed from the bends and curves of grape vines (it is, after all, one of the oldest wine making countries on earth), has been described by my fellow PC volunteers as either "The Language of Mordor" or wet spaghetti thrown on a wall. The language itself has enough consonant clusters and glottal stops to make a Klignon shudder. I know it's a very old language and that Georgians are very proud of it as a distinguishing feature of their heritage and culture, but really it just seems like a secret code they keep to annoy outsiders. When I was buying wine in a store, standing around looking like an idiot with a backpack on, some girl came up to me and started speaking Georgian and I almost wanted to scream. In an iconography shop some dude came up to me and started talking, without allowing me to interrupt, for about 5 minutes, before I managed to blurt out the only full sentence I know in Georgian: "Ar vitsi Kartuli", I don't speak Georgian. Also, my Russian has fallen into such a reprehensible state of disuse that every time I wanted to speak it I ended up speaking what I refer to as "Bakinese", namely the weird pidgin language that people in Baku speak that is a combo of Azeri, Russian, English and nonsense. Overall, I managed to get around fine, though not without feeling like an idiot every time I thought of a sentence in Russian and immediately said it in Azeri.

Overall, the best part of Georgia was just that, Georgia. It's so completely different from Azerbaijan that it's hard to believe that they exist right next to each other. Crossing the Azeri-Georgian border is like crossing from Mexico to the United States. And Georgians have such amazing things, like a working, democratic government, an uncorrupt police force, a non-oppressive, virtually equal culture, and really, really good wine. Azerbaijan is the polar opposite of all of these. In fact, it is pretty much agreed by every PCV in Azerbaijan that Georgia is paradise on earth, because after being here for so long and then travelling there it really does seem that way. The taxi driver who took us from the border to Tbilisi actually stopped and bought us all mandarins and coffee. The driver who took us from the border to Ujar overcharged me for my ride and kept putting his hand on Marina's leg. The apartment we stayed in cost less than a crappy hotel room in Baku, was a really nice place and in a decent part of town. The last time I stayed in Baku and payed for it my door had a hole in it and there was no running water. The people we met in shops were helpful, cheerful, and fun. People in Azerbaijan always look like they wish the world would end soon. In fact, Georgians buy their natural gas from Azerbaijan, but it is actually MORE EXPENSIVE here than there.

If there is any good reason for me to have my blog blocked besides the beauracratic nosiness of the American government it is this: Georgia is better than Azerbaijan, period. All the positive things I could say about Azerbaijan also apply there, but very few of the negatives.

Stay tuned for some pictures when I get time. Nakhvamdis (Goodbye, Georgian style!)