Side trip to Baku

Hello from the Western Shore of the Caspian Sea at a beautiful city called Baku in Azerbaijan. When our company does the business trips to Tblisi, Georgia, we sometimes have business interests strong enough to take us to Baku. On this particular trip we spent just one full day in Baku and I took full advantage of this trip to a city that I had never been to before. At our hotel in Tblisi the marketing and tour director is a woman named Oksana and she has friends in Baku, plus she speaks Russian, Georgian, and English so she could really help us with what we needed when we got to Baku, where there isn't a lot of English spoken. Even the tower controller in this part of the world has such a heavy Russian accent that I would defy you to understand what they are saying - very challenging.

Anyway, while we were in Baku our company arranged for a car and driver to take us wherever we wanted to go. We took a few minutes to eat lunch and then went to Oksana's friends, who just happen to operate a travel agency and were only too happy to take us to the Old City part of Baku, which is built like a fortress with high walls and gates and so on. It is a very old city with a rich history and so cool to see. It was quite hot as even though the Caspian Sea is a fresh water lake, it is located right at sea level, which means that it gets hot this time of year. With all of our walking through the Old City, we were pretty much burned up with the heat. But, as you all know, I love going to new places and seeing new things I haven't seen before so we continued our tour despite the 40+ (100F) temps and quite high humidity near the water. This is a part of the world that I have never known much about. Azerbaijan used to be a part of the former USSR and has a very high Moslem population. The city itself seems to be quite prosperous and busy and you wouldn't really know what the culture or heritage is just by looking out the window, as it looks like any modern city and has a tremendous growth spurt going on right now. It's quite close to Turkey so there is a strong Turkish flavor to the culture and to the city.

Anyway, we got our city tour, ate some wonderful local food at a great restaurant that our tour guides told us about. I ordered a pizza with a Mediterranean twist and it was wonderful.

So now, get our your maps and see where this place is. We saw two Gulfstreams parked on the ramp, one Gulfstream 4 and one G-5, so there is some money around these parts as they had the local registration number for Azerbaijan on the tail. It starts with 4K-.

The airport people spoke almost no English, including our handler so it was so convenient to have Okasana to translate, I don't actually believe we would have gotten through the day with just English. And the people we were dealing with in Azerbaijan kept calling us and they would try to talk to me but then just ask me to hand the phone to her so we could actually figure out what needed to be done and what the schedule was for the day. I guess if we keep coming here that I will need to brush up on my Russian language skills. So far, nyet.

Will give another blog shortly with pictures from Tblisi, which is so beautiful this time of year, just amazing.

Dan