Azeri birthday dares and off-roading in a Lada

What a weekend. On Saturday night I went out to dinner with two friends. We went to a really great Ukrainian restaurant that’s very close to my apartment. I figured it would be a relaxing dinner and we would probably walk around a bit after or maybe hang out in our apartment. Oh, how my expectations were exceeded.

Shortly after we finished our dinner a woman approached our table asking (in Russian) if we would give her friend a toast because it was her birthday. The whole time were in the restaurant we could tell there was a large party of all women in the other room, and figured that there was some sort of celebration. We agreed and thought we would just awkwardly stand in the room and wish this random woman a happy birthday. Once we walked into the other room the women pounced on us and started chatting with us and told us to sit down at the end of the table. Then we met the birthday woman (Lyama) and she told us to sit for a while. So there we were, 3 American women crashing an Azeri birthday party. One of the Americans I was with can’t speak either Azerbaijani or Russian, while my roommate and I understood a fair amount of what the women were saying because they were all speaking Russian. A lot of the women started talking with us about where we were from, what they were doing, etc. One of the women worked for BP, another had really excellent English (probably the best I’ve heard) and it turns out she worked in DC for a while. These women were probably in their late 20’s, early 30’s, with the exception of what must have been their mothers and relatives at the other side of the table (who looked at us rather suspiciously the whole time, I should add.) The women were all wearing pretty nice clothing and were all very attractive. The woman with excellent English (Uyliva) finally told us that they were playing a game, a sort of Azerbaijani ‘Truth or Dare’ except with just Dares, and the woman who told us to come make a toast picked a card that said she had to bring foreigners to the party. Ahh- so we were the token foreigners. Then they made us pick a dare, so obviously at this point we figured we would join the party so we did. Our dare was to sing a song, and we took the easy route and sang “Happy Birthday” to the birthday gal.

After this we were a little confused as to what we should do so we tried to get up since we didn’t want to overstay our welcome at which point all the women made us sit back down since they were going to start dancing. There were a bunch of CDs and they put on Azerbaijani music and started dancing together and then eventually pulled us up and made us dance with them. Of course the three of us have NO idea how to dance to Azerbaijani music. The women were all doing this flamenco-like dancing where they twisted their hands, arms, fingers and twirled around. I finally just threw in the towel and attempted to copy them, although I’m positive I looked like an idiot. When in Rome, right? Once I realized I didn’t care what I looked like and just tried to go with the flow it was actually pretty fun, and quite the experience. They were all having mini ‘dance-off’s’ in a circle where they would hold an ashtray in each hand and rotate their arms so that it never fell. It was really impressive and a very beautiful way of dancing. I asked one of the women where they learned to do that and she said “all Azeri women can do this- we are born like this!” Touche.

So then we sat down and tried to leave again but Uyliva (the one with amazing English) told us she was going to dance to ‘Thriller’ by Michael Jackson for us and we had to stay and watch. So we dutifully stayed. It turns out that Uyliva did the ‘Thriller’ dance at her wedding with her husband and it’s pretty famous in Azerbaijan. If you YouTube “Thriller wedding Azerbaijan” and click the first hit, the woman in the wedding dress is our friend from dinner. It has over 26,000 hits! The women all started bustin’ a move to MJ, but then the CD started skipping so we didn’t get to see the whole thing.

By this time we had been crashing Lyama’s birthday party for about an hour and we figured we were probably wearing out our welcome. So again we tried to leave and again we were hastily told to sit down because tea and cake was coming. We sang ‘happy birthday’ again to Lyama and ate tea and cake. I also saw the coolest candle I’ve ever seen in my life. It comes on the cake as this big pink plastic thing with a MEGA flame and since I had never seen one before I was trying to figure out why the flame was so big. All of a sudden, it started sputtering and then it turned into a flower with all these little petals with mini-candles. The candle also started spinning and had its own ‘happy birthday’ tune. Needless to say, it’s quite obvious why they don’t have these in the states since it’s a walking advertisement for a fire hazard, but it was probably the coolest thing I’ve ever seen. If I can take one on a plane (which is doubtful) I’m going to.

After cake was served the women started to leaving and we realized this was when we were supposed to leave as well. The women were all very nice and it seemed like they were quite the upper-crust of Azerbaijani society when they told us what various jobs they hold. One told us to do yoga with her (they have yoga here?!) and another gave us tickets for a British jazz musician for next Monday. It was probably one of the most random things I’ve ever done, but also one of the greatest. Who knew when we walked into that Ukrainian restaurant we would have danced to Azerbaijani music, made friends, found out about yoga, seen the ‘Thriller’ dance, or gotten tickets to a Jazz concert? Crazy.

On Saturday morning my adventure continued. I woke up earlyyyy and met up with one of my American friends from the night before, a British guy and two Germans to go to the mud volcanoes and the petroglyphs. We met at 9 AM down in Baku and started our adventure of getting outside of Baku to the town where all this stuff is located. We took a bus up to a location where we had to catch another bus, the 105 (but it’s also called the 195- typical). We get on the 105, which by the way should really not be classified as a bus because it’s a certified minivan with about 25 seats in it and where people stand up for an hour and a half, and start the bumpy hour ride off to Qubuston. It took a while to get out there, but it was pretty interesting scenery leaving Baku. We were traveling north along the Caspian and all of a sudden once we were outside the city, the landscape totally changed. It turned into a quasi-desert with small smatterings of villages and some random factories (hello, Halliburton). I saw a lot of oil rigs and there were a lot of oil platforms along the Caspian as well. The villages we drove past were all a series of one-story houses with simple windows and doors and high walls enclosing each house. I think I spotted some mosques as the center of most of these places, but I could be completely wrong. There were also a lot of random cows and sheep wandering around, or eating trash on the side of the road. Quite honestly, it’s probably what most of my friends pictured when I first said I was going off to Azerbaijan for the next year.

So about an hour later we end up in Qubuston. We get off the bus and I realize I’m the only one out of the five of who speaks Russian and obviously no one in this village speaks English. It’s my lucky day, I get to practice! So I’m stuck with the task of negotiating a cab to the mud volcanoes, which is probably the worst thing for me to do since I’m horrible at negotiating because I always get so frustrated that I just pay more. However, these Germans that we were with were not having anything over 20 manat for our cab ride out to the mud volcanoes and even that was too much for them. So I eventually talked the cab driver down from 30 manat to 20 manat for a round-trip and seeing both the mud volcanoes and petroglyphs. At one point he wouldn’t go below 25 manat so I said “Ok, we’ll just walk then” and all the cab drivers who were standing around starting laughing at us. I responded “well, it’s only 11 kilometers, that’s not very far” and they were still laughing. This should have given us some indication of the road we were about to get on to the mud volcanoes.

So all five of us squeeze into this little Lada that takes a couple minutes to turn on. Clearly, we’re off to a great start. Our cab driver speaks NO English so he’s chatting away with me and roaring down the road. We quickly turn off the main road and then we’re literally flying over a dirt road in the middle of the desert in these tiny Lada where we couldn’t even roll down the windows unless the cab driver gave us the window crank. I know I did a whole section on driving, but this driver was even crazier than the normal Baku drivers. We were going from 5 to 100 kilometers in the span of 30 seconds and he was served to avoid mud pits and bushes and who knows what else. For a while we were cruising past a pipeline. It was absolutely crazy and totally hysterical. This little car finally climbs this big mud hill and we end up at the mud volcanoes and all stagger out of the car.

Our driver aka tour guide for the day had us follow him around these mud volcanoes. We were the only people there for miles- it was really strange. The mud volcanoes are these little towers of mud but at the top the mud is gurgling, bubbling, popping and spurting all over the place. It’s really cool and really strange. In terms of temperature, the mud is quite cool. You have to be careful not to get too close to the top since obviously the whole thing is mud and if you take one misstep your shoe could end up in the mud volcano. The Brit we were with stuck both of his arms in the volcanoes, but was then left with the problem of being completely covered in mud.

After we sat staring at these bubbling mud pies our driver gestured for us to follow which no one was really listening to. He solved his problem by getting into his car and driving off to get our attention. Turns out he didn’t leave us he was trying to get us to follow him to this other huge mud volcano and this bubbling pond of water that was close by so that the Brit could wash his arms off. Guess he knew what he was doing, after all.

The really cool thing about the mud volcanoes, beyond that they’re in the middle of nowhere and completely unregulated, is their sitting. Visible to the east is the Caspian Sea, and then on the west side were these high desert plateaus. It’s really gorgeous scenery.

So we get back in the Lada and our driver takes us off to the petroglyphs. We had to pay one manat each to see this creepy little museum with Neanderthal figures killing various animals and then they let us wander off in the rocks. There were some ancient drawings of horses and cows carved into the rocks but that’s all we could find. Apparently there are more but clearly the trail is neither well marked or all that well preserved so we ended up just wandering around this huge park that overlooked the Caspian Sea. To be perfectly honest, the scenery there was worth a lot more than seeing an ancient drawing of a disproportionate horse. There were all these huge rocks and if you continued to climb up them, there were some gorgeous views of the Caspian and the strange desert-esque area that we were in. On our way back we ate some figs from a nearby tree. I had never eaten a plain fig before and it turns out I do like them beyond just in a Fig Newton.

After that we got back into our little cab and our driver dropped us off where the marshutka left us. We had to cross the treacherous road and then we hung out on a stretch of desert on the opposite side of the road, hoping bus 105 would come along soon. I was really hoping that bus 105 would have adequate seating so we wouldn’t have to stand in a tiny little van for an hour and a half. However, after about 3 minutes of standing there some guy pulled over and started yelling at us in Russian and again it was my turn to talk to him. He said he would drive us into Baku for 2 manat each, which obviously we weren’t going to do since the bus is 1 manat each if we were just to wait for it. He thought this over for a second and then agreed to drive us for a manat each. So we pile into his van, which is entirely covered in plastic wrap around the seats. It was really weird. I had to stop thinking about why he would have his car covered in plastic wrap after a couple minutes since I was getting creeped out and focused on the fact that I had an air-conditioned ride to Baku. Our driver also kept making creepy "googly-eyes" at my friend and she hastily had to climb in the backseat, although he moved his rearview mirror so he could continue watching her. Not one of the better points of the trip. He picked up about 4 more hitch-hikers on the side of the road, but it also took a good 30-40 minutes less than our marshutka ride out has been. In the end there were just 3 of us when we got off and he pretended he didn’t have change for 5 manat and could only give us 1 manat back, effectively letting him pocket a manat more than we had agreed on. I yelled at him in Russian but this didn’t work and we just left glaring at him. Next time this happens I have my Russian response rehearsed.

This whole adventure took about 7 hours total, from meeting time to getting lunch after. It was definitely worth it and a lot of fun. I liked traveling beyond the city and being able to see more of Azerbaijan. The scenery beyond the city is really beautiful and worth the travel. Plus… look at all the stories I got out of it. Definitely a once-in-a-lifetime chance to do these kinds of things. It was also nice to know that I can get around with my Russian and although it’s probably not grammatically correct, I can understand, communicate and effectively convey a message. Hooray!