Observations

There's a lot of things I've noticed so far that merit a paragraph or two of description, so I've decided that I'll post a list of them here and I will continue to post them as I come up with them. These run of the gamut of being great cultural aspects to customs I don't particularly care for.

Trash:
Everywhere around the city there are these small trash cans that are about a foot tall and shaped like a large cup. These trash cans are nailed into the sidewalks so as first you might wonder: how do they get the trash out? Well, they don’t. They simply burn it. On my drive in from the airport I observed burning piles of trash (and litter everywhere regardless of a trash pile or not) but I thought maybe that happened only in the outskirts. I was wrong. Every night I think around 8 or so they go around and fill these iron trash cups with oil and then set it ablaze. The smell of the oil is bad enough to give anyone a headache, but the truly awful smell is of the trash burning. This is nothing like your old American wood-burning campfire. To even compare the two is not giving the familiar campfire smell justice. Burning trash is disgusting. Really- just awful. The pungent smell of burnt plastic, food, clothing, any and all household items that permeates this city is completely inescapable. It seeps into my room at night, onto the bus, grocery stores, etc. Hopefully I will get used to it.
The other sad thing about this phenomenon is that is it so incredibly horrible for the environment. At least people are disposing of their trash in a vestibule, but the disposal of it is almost as deadly as just littering. It depresses me that there is no thought about how bad this is for the environment and that it is contributing to the pollution in this already oil-polluted city even further. My first night here I started breaking down some card board to recycle and I even walked into the kitchen to put it in the proper recycling bin and then I almost laughed at myself for doing this. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say they don’t even have a word for “recycle” in Azeri.
Maybe I could strike it rich teaching Azeris to recycle…

Bread:
An amazing thing about Azerbaijan is the bread. It comes in a large circle with a radius of about 7 inches. Most of the bread is sprinkled with some sort of herbs or something and it’s a little raised and completely delicious. You don’t even need to put anything on it, but adding cheese, hummus or butter is great. It makes good sandwiches as well, as I discovered this afternoon. I’ve never really had an equivalent of it in America, maybe seen something like it eaten with hummus. It looks like it’s cooked in a brick oven, but I’m not sure. Bread is holy to Muslims here in Azerbaijan so they can’t throw it away. Instead, they put it in a bag and hang it from a tree. I assume the stray cats eat it at some point because it usually disappears pretty fast.

Fruit:
There is a plethora of fresh fruit in Azerbaijan. Yesterday morning I went to the bazaar and explored for a bit with some other Fulbrighters and I was amazed at all the fruit in the market. They had everything- including many things I’d never seen before. It all looked very mouth-watering and it was all very cheap as well. Strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, peppers, apples, pears, the biggest watermelons I’ve ever seen, tomatoes, grapes after grapes, pomegranates, I could go on and on. It all looks amazing and delicious and I will most certainly be headed back.

Stray cats:
This is one of the more depressing aspects of Azerbaijan that I’ve noticed thus far. There’s tons of cats everywhere. Most of them are small kittens, and they’ll sleep under cars, chairs, stoops, wherever they can find a spot out of the sun. I haven’t seen many bigger cats and unfortunately I think it’s because a lot of these kittens don’t live to be cats. A lot of times I’ll see a kitten from far away and start thinking how cute it is until I get closer and it stumbles towards me and is coated in grease and grim and has infected eyes. Stray animals are always an indicator of poverty in a third-world country it’s just a really depressing everyday reminder. I remember seeing tons of stray cats in dogs in Pompeii, and large mangy dogs in Russia. Although in my memory these were always full-grown. I think the sad part here is that so many of the strays I see are only several weeks or months old, and clearly on their death bed.

Street noises:
Now this is probably an odd title, but I have no idea how to lump this into a single solitary thought besides just “street noises”. Azeris love honking. They REALLY love honking. In fact if I’m trying to nap between the hours of 4-7, I should really give up before I even start since it basically sounds like this city is all just honking together at once. If there was a bomb I don’t think the sound would be audible over the honking noise. I really wish I were exaggerating. Everyone honks. The funniest (and also most irritating) part about this is that people usually don’t even honk for a reason. They honk if they’re just sitting at a red light. Everyone knows it’s a red light too- but they honk just for the hell of it. I’ve been walking down a street with NO cars whatsoever to see a 1992 Mercedes come careening down and just randomly honk about three times. Not at anyone, not for any particular reason- just to show the driver’s masculine ability to assertively put his hand on the wheel. Congratulations- you pushed a button and know how to drive a car, pretty much everyone in the modern world over the age of 15 has accomplished this feat. The best part about this is that people even get special honking noises for their cars to distinguish them in the packs of honking cars. So people will get weird little sirens for their cars, or strange wailing noises. My room is perched over a main street in Baku with a lot of traffic and bus routes and for the first couple of hours I nearly jumped out of my skin every time I heard one of these special custom-honks.
Yet another aspect to my “street noises” category is that the police have jumped on this bandwagon as well, except they’ve taken it to a level that only police can. The police LOVE to use their megaphones attached to their patrol cars and will, in fact, use them for just about anything. Now I’m not entirely sure what they’re saying when they pull people over, but all I know is that they do it frequently and sometimes they sound very angry. Other times I think they’re just yelling at people to obey certain laws of traffic or more likely, they’re probably yelling at people to keep up the honking quota or bad driving regulation. (Quick interruption- just heard one of the custom honk noises… it sounded like something out of a Stephen Spielberg alien movie.) This leads me to…

Bad driving:
Now I come from a city where bad driving is as ubiquitous as Red Sox gear and beer. In Boston, pot holes are to keep you on your toes, one ways are to make sure you know how to back up in a straight line, rotaries are made keep non-natives out, and speed limits are for the weak. Trust me, I know what bad driving looks like especially considering I like wild turns with no turning signals, slamming on the brakes, and shifting gears like I’m in Daytona. I’ve been to New York City and scoffed (whether rightly or not) at their driving thinking it didn’t hold a candle to Boston’s bad drivers, since any way we can beat New York is anything worth fighting for. However, if admitting that NYC has worse drivers than Boston will help anyone understand how terrible these drivers are here, I will do it.
Now on to my point- take whatever you think the worst drivers are in the U.S. and multiply it by about 6,000. Even more if you’d like. Azeri drivers are just downright terrible. At home we pay off the staties for our license, I have no idea what they do here. They must give them out for free or something. At least in Boston we have to get in the car and do a right-hand turn. I doubt they make sure someone even knows how to work a car here. In fact, they probably give extra points for being deaf, blind, mute, or missing vital limbs that would make driving a car easier- like arms or legs or something. There must be some reason why they’re all so terrible but I haven’t figured it out yet. Actually, in all seriousness it probably has something to do with the fact that women don’t drive. If it were socially acceptable for a woman to drive on the road here, I think there wouldn’t be as many problems. But I digress.
Men will take any opportunity to floor their car so they can go as fast as possible, whether it’s for 100 yards or 3. So when they inevitably have to stop because there’s so much traffic everywhere, they have to slam on the brakes as fast as possible. Also it’s not the law here that pedestrians get the right of way, so pedestrians have to scuttle across the street whenever there’s so much traffic that cars can’t move or in the off chance that the drivers are actually obeying a red light. Since there’s so much construction in this ever-changing city, a lot of times cars will have to pull U-turns randomly, without care that they’re already on a one-way street. The one-way street lends another problem that most drivers don’t tend to really care about, especially bus drivers. These drivers zip around corners so fast you don’t even see them coming, and if you tenderly step out in the street when you think no one is there without looking there’s probably a 85% chance you’ll get hit, and the driver won’t care.
One of the interesting subsets within this category is that because of the terrible drivers, there’s a whole talent in being able to cross the street. Call me old-fashioned but I wait for the green light (if there is one) to come on to cross the street, but not most Azeris. I’m sure waiting for the green light is a sign of weakness but I value my life so I’ll sacrifice looking dorky. However, many Azeris possess the incredible skill of being able to step out into 5 lanes of 50 mph traffic and successfully navigate across it without getting hit. When I’ve had to resort to crossing the street without the friendly green light, I just lurk on the side of the road until I see an Azeri who looks like they know what they’re doing and then stick to them like glue. I’ve creepily followed packs of teenage boys, couples, and old women across the street. I would not be surprised if they literally thought I was someone’s retarded child who was let out by mistake to wander. Who else would get up on someone’s grill like that or creepily stand alone in the middle of pseudo-highway?

The bus system:
The bus system in Baku is actually really great for getting around, and really cheap too- only 20 geppik (so about 25 cents in America). However, it’s also only really great once you’ve mastered it. I have no idea how many lines run in Baku, but there’s got to be about 70 or something, and all they’re all completely arbitrary numbers. Nothing normal or sensible like a bus system numbered for where they go in the city. Of course that would be too easy. So I’ve seen everything from the 4 to the 306, with nothing to discern between either of them. Some of these are marshutkas, little buses about the size of VW beetle or something, and others are more legit city buses. Since the city is filled with one-ways, the buses can only go in circular routes. So if I wanted to get somewhere I could take a certain bus, but if I wanted to take it back I would have to let it go the whole route, I couldn’t just simply take it going in the opposite direction. This generally means in order to get one place you have to take one bus, (for example, the 90) and then to get back you have to take another (for example, the 106). (Yes, that’s a real example with real buses, I learned it the other day.) The buses are always incredibly packed, and you pay as you get off the bus so sometimes you have to get off and run up to the driver and give him your money. This always seems like a system that someone would take advantage of, and every time I ride the bus I’m surprised that this doesn’t happen. People in Baku like chaos, but they also value their honesty.

Promenade:
One of the things I really enjoy so far about Baku is the Promenade along the Caspian Sea. Although the Caspian Sea itself is dotted with oil rigs and garbage and sometimes has a funky smell, the layout of the Promenade is really quite gorgeous, with lots of trees, fountains and pseudo-American features. There are a lot of games and rides, including a ferris wheel and other carnival rides. At night it is all lit up with bright lights and flooded with people. There are more families, women, children and people out at night than I’ve ever seen during the day- probably because the temperature is so comfortable. There are usually no clouds in the sky and recently it’s been a full moon so the backdrop against the night sky is gorgeous. Adding in the various government buildings that are lit up at night that are along the Promenade that face the Caspian, and it truly is something spectacular and romantic to see.