Wednesday, September 18
The Azerbaijan border agents on the train, without much English, asked us simply “Armenia?” We said no. We assumed they were asking “have you been to Armenia since you got this passport?” and not “are you ever going to Armenia, like the day after you leave here?” You can’t enter Azerbaijan with an Armenian passport stamp. (When we got to Armenia, they didn’t ask about Azerbaijan. Armenia won the war, after all. Don’t mention the war.) It was a nice overnight train ride. We passed a giant car junkyard on the way out of Georgia.
We were met at the station by our guide, Zabit, and his driver, and taken to our upscale hotel Boutique 19 at the edge of the Old City. It was right across the street from Hard Rock Cafe, always Ground Zero for any tourist area. The room wasn’t quite ready, so we left the luggage and went off into the adjacent tourist shopping district with the guide to find an ATM and breakfast. He picked an Italian restaurant, Cafe Il Patio, but whatever. Rouf, our mostly non-English speaking waiter, had a tattoo in English.
(My mother used to work at a restaurant called El Patio, during the 1930’s economic depression. She called it “El Pot.” She had many stories about it, although I’m sure her stint there was only a few weeks. Why do minor jobs make such an impression on you when you’re 20?)
Zabit and his driver drove us to the post office and Ray bought stamps with their assistance, and then back to the Old City for a walking tour. I had specified during the purchase of the trip, that we had to go to the post office at the outset. You can’t write post cards until you know how big the stamps are.
The tour began at a shrine where one makes sacrifices to improve one’s fortune. I noticed a man making the sacrifice gestures while talking on his cell phone. The man was multitasking but the goat wasn’t.
We walked through a palace, which had lots of things including a model of the city and graffiti dating back at least to 1827. It’s nice for people to date their graffiti.
We also climbed up the stairs inside the iconic Maiden Tower. The guide had some story about a maiden throwing herself off the tower, but we didn’t find this in the documentation inside. We stopped into the Museum of Miniature Books, full of various volumes less than 3 inches or so in height. Then the guide took us someplace for lunch, and sat at another table. At some point the waiter came over and asked a question which I misinterpreted as asking whether the guide would be paying for us. It turned out to be whether we were paying for the guide! Such a scoundrel!
We left the old city and walked down to the Carpet Museum, a huge modern building full of carpets and exhibits of carpet-making techniques. It was all quite artistic. We walked back to the hotel, to properly check in and have a shower.
All day, people were approaching us and asking for photos of us and with us. “Ali Baba!” we heard a lot. The guides get used to it after a while, as have we. I am not sure if beards have a political implication in Azerbaijan. Their government is trying hard to avoid sectarian violence, which could interfere with all the other kinds. Although the country is overwhelmingly Shi’a, with about 10% Sunni and a few other monotheists scattered around, it is entirely secular. The men look as if they could grow beards if they chose to, but mostly what you see is Castro clone mustaches, and among the twenty-somethings, generic international metrosexual eyebrow-threaded scruff.
The old men think the young ones are gay. In Azerbaijan, there is a saying that men should be “just a bit more handsome than an ape.” This mot must have been an inspiration to the early racists.
Do you know why “white” people are called “Caucasian”? It’s the notion of a dolichocephalic twit named Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, who lived at the dawn of the era of Scientific Racism, and decided that the most Beautiful People in the World came from the Caucasus, and their least degenerate descendants were Europeans. He was liberal by the standards of his day, believing all races to be the same species, and valuable to each other; his racial improvisations were taken over by demagogues more vicious. If he had lived three centuries later he would have made a tumblr blog featuring his crushes on shirtless Georgian taxi drivers and lived his life as one bear-lover among many.
We met Zabit again and drove up to Highland Park at the top of a hill, with a view of the city. Highland Park is notable for the tombs of recent martyrs. More than a thousand martyrs of Armenian and Russian wars are buried there. Russia has not been supportive of Azerbaijan in the dispute over the ethnically Armenian areas inside the provincial border of Azerbaijan, which have been retrieved by Armenia in the years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. (It’s easier for irredentists to recover territory from Azerbaijan than from Turkey.) The Soviets inherited this war in 1920 and hit Pause on it in the way that they did. When they left, it resumed, and has gone on to the present day. “That’s why our country we hate Russian president Mikhail Gorbachev,” said Zabit.
Also on that hill were the Flame Towers, three buildings which are essentially video screens. Sometimes they play videos of fire, and sometimes they play videos of citizens marching with the Azerbaijani flag (Azerbaijan does not rate high on the various “freedom” lists) but there are also lots of abstract color patterns. Yeah, the Bay Bridge has cute lights too, but even these buildings were all out-technologied by the skyscrapers we saw in Shanghai in 2009. So here, on the first night of the trip, the guide asked us “Which is better? Baku or Tbilisi?” What a ridiculous question! We certainly had an opinion at that moment about which guide was better, although Tatia had her needy moments as well.
When we got back to the hotel, we went out for a little snack, having had a huge lunch. We found Paper Moon, a wine bar featuring a special with a cheese plate, which sounded perfect. We ordered it. Their English wasn’t great, but it was good enough. There was basically nobody there, which was ultimately explained by the fact that they had been open three days. We wished them the best of luck. On the way back, we noticed “PAUL boulangerie & patisserie” near the hotel, and resolved to go there for breakfast.
I exaggerated my TripAdvisor review of Paper Moon. I would have put down Very Good instead of Excellent — you can’t declare a place Excellent on the basis of a cheese plate! — but this would be their first review on TripAdvisor, and they were empty. Apparently Grand Openings aren’t a thing in their b-school or maybe country. A 20 Manat 2 wines and cheese plate Large is what they were offering, and allowing for some weirdness in Azeri wine (they offered us the full choice of their bar) it was well worth it. Also the young bartender was crush bate.
Thursday, September 19
We went to PAUL for breakfast. It is a small chain, operating only in 33 countries. We had very delicious pastries, and the usual coffee/tea/orange juice. And a nice mutual photo session with the entire staff, they weren’t busy. Agil, the main communicator, had gone to school in Connecticut.
The day’s tour turned out to be a bit strange. We drove up to Yanar Dag, a hill north of town which has had a continuous flame burning for thousands of years. It was cute, we took pictures. Then to a nearby Zoroastrian temple which also was subject to flame coming out of the ground, but apparently not quite as consistent, and since the last century has been beefed up by petroleum products from elsewhere. Zabit told stories about converting the Zoroastrians to Islam, but there was none of this in the descriptive texts.
These weeks of touring came about by Ray doing a bunch of research of interesting places in the three Caucasus countries, and then working with the tour company in Georgia to make an itinerary. The next place we went was Absheron National Park, where nobody had ever asked to go as part of a tour. It is allegedly a nature preserve with wetlands, about an hour’s drive from Baku, over fairly rough roads.
There are walls on both sides of the road out of town, as with the boulevards in Orange County. Only the oil pumps loom above. Baku is like Dallas, planted in Midlands-Odessa. Oil money for major buildings, surrounded by suburbs, on a vast plain of rusty oil extraction technology, some of it still desultorily functioning.
Absheron was the height of absurdity. Two hours driving through industrial wasteland and 15 minutes at the end, where we were instructed not to leave the car because there were poisonous snakes. We left gingerly and stayed on the walkway, and wished we had brought the binoculars. Assuming the snake stories are made up for the travel office in the Truman Show, you should spend a whole day here, or not come at all. There don’t appear to be any facilities at the end. A little guardhouse. But it is pretty, in its desolation. Colorful shrubs and distant hawks, and an abandoned playground. Nothing says Decline like an abandoned playground, with a green algae concrete pond.
The driver never even turned off the van. Aircon not working anyway. The car has been having trouble starting, so it was perhaps a good idea.
Communism has not left their brains. They don’t care if you are enjoying yourself. All they want to do is get back to the office at the end of their work day and report to their bosses I mean comrades that they went to the places specified in the people’s contract, and gave the speeches there that had been prepared by the Party apparatus. But since there is no more communism, there is no longer the consolation for the guide, of knowing that he lives in a society that is residually committed to the welfare of the worker, provided only that he mention the accomplishments of Heydar Aliyev at every point of description. Well, you can’t simultaneously have a worker’s paradise and a consumer’s paradise.
In all that touring, we resisted being taken to lunch, so that we’d be hungry at dinnertime, although we were cadged into taking tea at a big group tourist restaurant near the second flame.
The reason the guide was pushing us to move on was that we had one more destination for the day, the Heydar Aliyev center. Heydar Aliyev was an Azerbaijani leader for many years, in both the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The center is a dramatic building, by Zaha Hadid. It was one of her last major completed works, before her death in 2016.
The building is swooping and marvelous. Streamlined in many directions at once. White, glass, the roof pouring itself onto the ground.
We began in a special exhibition of automotive history, taking place on one level of their parking garage. Good placement. The guides like to take foreign tourists there; I’m sure they like it more than carpets and invisible snakes and the life story of the ruling family. It is a fun collection, especially the eastern bloc cars that you didn’t see in America. And who can resist an Isetta, the original “bubble car”? Fun fact: When “Little Nash Rambler” was released in England, the BBC wouldn’t play a song with the name of a commercial product in it (boy, weren’t those the days?), so it was re-recorded with the words “limousine” and “bubble car”. I didn’t learn that at the museum.
Afterwards, we went upstairs to the main exhibits, celebrating Azerbaijani culture, and the events in the life of Heydar Aliyev. The culture exhibit had a brilliant installation showing various Azeri musical instruments, and when you stepped in front of each, speakers above you would play a recording of that instrument.
It is not mentioned in the architectural reviews, but the mezzanine has a feature that really looks like a cruise ship ploughing into the building, in the manner of an early scene in “Airplane!” Hadid must have noticed.
We were driven back to the hotel, and went off to Firuze, an Azerbaijani place underground in the tourist shopping area, with a menu in which every dish had a picture, as well as an English explanation. We ordered what we thought we could finish, and it was all delicious. The decor was very cute.
Friday, September 20
We went into the Old City for breakfast to have Tandir, bread made in an oven, and various things to have with it. It was good and authentic, but definitely priced for tourists. You want honey with the bread? Here, pay $5 for a bowl with more honey than you could ever eat! The few things we had turned out more expensive than the premium mediocre buffet offered by the hotel would have been.
Today brought another tour out of town, to Gobustan, a mountain with hundreds of petroglyphs. We looked at the exhibits in the museum, then drove up and saw many of the drawings themselves. One fascinating thing was that much of the rock was tafoni, and there was one perfect piece that you could make sound like a steel drum by hitting it with small rocks, it was so resonant.
I was particularly impressed by one comment in the museum: “Today, it is impossible to know how prehistoric people perceived their world and what they believed in. To a certain extent, we cannot truly understand them. On the other hand, we still use their discoveries and our culture has developed from theirs.”
When do you ever get to read that simple humility from a curator brought up in the tradition of an Abrahamic religion? For us, it comes automatically, to say it all started with Stonewall or Einstein or Moses or Rousseau.
Gobustan has lots of rock drawings of goats and sheep and aurochs and horses and hunters.
After exploring Gobustan, we went with a guy with a smaller car to go on the very rough roads up to the Mud Volcano. (Another instance of a surprise fee for transportation to one of the places on the tour.) The volcano was belching up bubbles of bentonite, which scores of Indian tourists were collecting for skin care purposes.
A touring Mumbaikar asked how I liked Azerbaijan and I said, “It’s interesting,” and he said, “I don’t think it’s very interesting.” An interesting thing for a tourist to say; but tour directors do their best to ensure that most of what you experience is frustration.
I have read there are mud volcanoes all over the area. It is good preservationist practice to take all the tourists to one site and let them overrun it, like Fisherman’s Wharf in San Francisco. Otherwise, the damage would be widespread.
On the way back we visited a mosque. Near the mosque is a cemetery from which all Armenian graves were removed by the government. Zabit said that when he was a child the beach south of town which we are passing was free but now it is all five star hotels and it costs ten manat.
We then went to see an art museum, originally scheduled for the first day. The itinerary said “Azerbaijan National Museum of Art”, but we went to the “Museum of Modern Art” instead. It was almost entirely Azerbaijani, late twentieth century, and had many interesting pieces. There were a couple rooms where a guard told us not to take pictures: a room with a Picasso and some Chagalls, and another room with Azerbaijan’s most famous artist, whose name escapes me.
The problem with the Modern Art Museum is that there is absolutely zero Pop Art influence. The pieces all give the same impression. Nearly all of them are dated after 1988, which was when painters seems to have decided that the Communist regime would be coming to an end, and they could start preparing to exhibit New Styles.
The Old Style, as represented in this collection, was not Socialist Realism, as under the Hoxha dictatorship (and embraced by the museum in Tirane), but rather Socialist Cubism, the heroic struggle of the little guy reduced to its basic structure and illumination with a tip of the Hatlo Hat to post-Academic trends in art up to circa the 7th Party Congress. At this distance from Moscow you could do that. When the Party was over, there was, therefore, less of a reaction. From 1991 to the present day, the artists collected by this museum are still producing slightly cubist, slightly expressionist, slightly collaged, slightly having penises (“Adam and Eve” is a big meme here — represented in numerous works), slightly feminist, if you count as “feminist” a male photographer depicting a girl trying to make herself attractive to men, which the curator seems to have done.
You don’t really realize how strongly Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein have influenced World Culture until you enter the alternate universe in which, you know, Jasper Johns was never born, and there was nobody to grasp the graphic impact of national and commercial images on perception. Instead, the technique-brought-to-the-forefront explorations of the early twentieth century keep circling around and around in a perpetual pre-operational phase.
Maybe it’s a religious political thing. Azerbaijan has been navigating difficult waters throughout its entire history, with Turkish populations east and west, and the Persians vs. the Russians north and south. Sunnis and Shi’a. Maybe in such a place, edgy hotel art is what you feel like making. Heavily gendered societies always seem pubescent anyway. Azerbaijan is the least so of any place in Islam — they are like the Sweden of Islam — tolerant but pecksniffian, and trying not to give offense and personally quite staid and upright.
Back to the hotel, and we decided we might as well go back to Firuze for dinner. As we got to the entrance, we noticed a tour bus unloading down the stairs, so decided to go to another restaurant, Nergiz, half a block away. A man wearing a badge that said “hostess” showed us the menu. It was virtually identical! So we went there. Clearly it’s all the same operation, with a centralized kitchen, and two sets of rooms with similar decor. Competent tasty food once again, including grilled sturgeon. And pomegranate wine, which tasted like juice.
Saturday, September 21
This was a free day, before our return to Tbilisi on the overnight train. We got checkout extended to 2, working in the room until then. After that we stored the luggage and worked in the hallway until it was time to go have dinner on the way to the train station.
I took a short walk in the afternoon and found a Hot Dog Man and some outgoing guys that wanted photos of me with it and them.
On the Internet I’d found a Yemeni restaurant near the station with some good reviews, and I talked the tour manager (the driver’s wife, it turns out) into going there on the way. Problem was, it didn’t exist. So we started walking to find a good place, and really never did. We found a bakery, and had sandwiches with the tour company owner, the driver, and their two kids.
The train was pretty much the same as it was when we came down three days earlier.