I don't really know myself. I'm in Karabakh, a break-away republic from Azerbaijan which has formed it's own state - Nagorno-Karabakh. I wish that I could say that I was dodging bullets and hiding in bombed out buildings, but I'm really not. Although there are a LOT of bombed out buildings outside of Stepanakart (our driver gleefully pointed out all the destroyed Azari villages along the way from Armenia and how it's only Armenians that live there now), life here is surprisingly normal and actually it seems to function better than in most other places. I just had one of the best meals of my life - two other French people and I ate a massive meal - shashlik, salad, a bottle of wine, bread, vodka, roasted vegetables and then, we decided to tip the waitress a little too much... and the total came to 11 dollars each. Super - I'm so full I can barely walk.
Anyways, we passed the border without incident, filled out our registration cards and bought a Karabakh visa all inside Stepanakart within about 20 minutes. Oh yeah, and a lady at the visa department found us our place to stay, knowingly flouting the 'rules' and we stayed at a different place. Our place is awesome!!! The kitchen is outside (which is actually not that unusual for Armenia), our 'hall' doesn't have a wall (note, don't get drunk and stumble to the toilet) but I have a double bed all to myself with this cool painting on the wall. Plus breakfast is included.
Now, I think you'll find this interesting - the restaurant had a few incidents today that I want to write about. First of all, we had just sat down with this guy walks in and asks me for money. I was going to say no, when I realized the 20 cents would probably make a lot of difference in this poor guys life - so I give him that. Right after that, the staff start GLARING at me. They were not happy, especially when he walked over to another table and asked THEM for money. The girl angrily walked up to him and told him to leave when he told them that he had enough for a DRINK!!! So he sat at the table next to me, ordered a coffee and just sat there for like 20 minutes!!! I couldn't BELIEVE IT!!! THe guy asks for money from me and then goes and hangs out at a restaurant for like 30 minutes sipping a classy coffee. That's weird. Oh yeah, and a Saddam Hussein look-a-like was there. Finally, we walked in and asked for some food and the waitress told us that there was no Armenian food, but if we wanted, we could have pizza. We asked her to recommend another restaurant. She turned away and said she would be back in a minute. She came running back and said 'we have shashlik, we have shashlik' - super, we'll stay. We order and then like 5 minutes later, we see the manager coming back with a big bag of meat and a wide grin on his face - I looked at the menu again and saw that shashlik wasn't even ON the menu!!! They had gone out and just bought the food in order for us to stay. But it was worth it.
So I'm sitting in the cyber-cafe and I just had the hell scared out of me. The absolute center of the city and all of a sudden I hear these explosions - I kinda leaned down at my desk and people started giggling. Stupid fireworks.
Anyways, this city seems to work pretty well. Unfortunately, I think it's completely due to disapora money being pumped in to make the centre look pretty and clean. As a result, people will THINK that the city works well - leading to more and more support for Nagorno-Karabakh as a country to come into effect. For the time, it's completely safe, but whether it will stay that way after 5 years remains to be seen. Tensions are relatively high, the Armenians that I've spoken to here hate the Azeris (given how bad the war was, I can't really blame them - about 30,000 people died in an area that has the population of about 100,000 - of course many of those were soldiers from Azerbaijan and Armenia, but I think you get the point), and Azerbaijan seems to be getting a little more aggressive lately. That being said, Stepanakart is VERY safe, so there is no reason to be worried about me. Ok, mom??
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