Construction

Everywhere in Baku is under construction. Literally. I've been here over a month and I've seen streets and buildings change before my eyes. I actually got my first preview to the Baku construction within my first hour of being in Azerbaijan. When I landed at the airport, the Embassy driver got us a bit lost trying to get to my apartment and started talking about how the construction changed all the routes so he ended up going the wrong way. I gamely agreed with him at the time and privately wondered if it was his macho way of trying to cover up getting lost. However, it turns out he was just being honest. A different road is torn up and closed down every other day, and if you don't go a certain way for a couple days once you return you will inevitably find something has changed. This is why the buses are always going different routes too. For about a week my trusty bus was going to weirdest routes since one of the main streets was closed, including hurdling down a gigantic one-way street and getting honked at the whole time. Sometimes I think they reverse the directions of the streets according to what day it is.

This is all part of a big project, I believe, to re-vamp Baku and make it prettier/ easier to walk around in/ attract more tourists. The Boulevard as I know it has only been this way for about a year, apparently it recently used to be a more shady area of town, and now it's super family-friendly and attractive. Even as I've been here, they're changing the Bulvar, tearing up the sidewalks and re-doing it and adding more trees and plants. They've been doing a lot of re-paving on the streets as well. Also, they've been re-doing a lot of the parks and fountain areas. This includes the main area of Baku called Fountain Square. This is the epicenter of town, and yet I've never seen it since it's completely surrounded by walls because of all the construction they're doing on it. Hopefully it will be done while I'm here and I get to see the new and improved Fountain Square before I leave.

These walls are also characteristic of Baku. You can see them in some of the pictures I put up on Facebook. They have advertisements of the different landmarks of the city on them, or what the new areas are proposed to look like. There's tons of walled-in areas all over the place. In addition to construction on parks and streets, there's also a fair amount of construction on buildings. In one area near Fountain Square, all the buildings are surrounded by scaffolding and you have to actually worry that wooden planks might fall on your head. A lot of the apartment buildings and other various buildings are undergoing such construction. The one thing about Baku though, is that they're much more efficient with their construction than anywhere I've observed in the States. I also come from Boston where the Big Dig took about 15 years to complete. As I said, they can finish certain areas of construction here within days. Sometimes they'll re-pave a street in a day. Or at least that's how it seems to me. I've heard some people complain about how it takes forever for any construction to get finished, but I think that some of it gets done relatively quickly.

The eternal joke here is that everything is under construction. I think once someone tried to give me directions with "the building that's under construction" and then they realized the fallacy of their statement. I like to think that it's indicative of the direction that Baku and Azerbaijan are moving in though. Most of the city is urban and modern and with continued construction, it can only continue to improve.