Maybe it's that New Country excitement one gets when crossing borders. Maybe it's being on the road again, the marshrutka dance, the wind trying to penetrate my hair, the grins and giggles at every turn. Maybe it's grappling with a new language, using the one learnt in the previous country to try and decipher new syntax, grammar and vocabulary. Maybe, but in any case a few meagre days thus far have shown Azerbaijan to be a land of constant juxtaposition.
Following a greeting of forced indifference at the border, I shook that off and tried my best to come up with something for my first Azerbaijan town, Zaqatala. I got stuck at Pleasantly Bland. It's like a bowl of self-raising flour that wants to be wholemeal, spiced only by a pinch of salt at the weekends. Moving on to Qax, I was welcomed over for beer, at high noon. But...this is a Muslim country? That it may be, but my new friends and I smash a couple of pints over pidgin discussions of geography, physics and mathematics, before the butcher and the baNker head back to work. I leave musing how a butcher comes to know Newtonian Mechanics and wishing that I made candlesticks, just to bring the juxtaposition full circle.
With 16 million Azeris living in Iran and only 8 million in Azerbaijan, the possibility that Scandinavians can trace their ancestry here, 9 of the 11 basic climate zones, the highest internally displaced populatiuon in the world, a land once home to the people of Caucasian Albania (declared a Christian nation in the 4th century AD, but no relation to European Albania), the first muslim nation to adopt democracy, a corruption perceptions index of 143 (out of 180) and today a place where I am yet to hear the muezzin and villages where the kids learn French at school (!?), it's not Asia, it's not Europe, it's Azerbaijan. Every turn here leaves a new perspective on what it means to be Azeri. Perhaps it's not only a humble passer-by that ponders such kinks and folds in their identity.
hugs and love from "the land protected by a fire deity", Ador Bad Agan
joe
