QAX

I admit to being a human who is mourning the loss of the familiar. Immersed in a bounty of unusual and exotic, I miss my "usual". I don’t like this  side of me. We are in a city with everything we could need - much we don’t and most we could live without. I'll get over it... but sometimes I close my eyes and dream of breakfast in the sun at Choice City, pizza at Caninos and the smiling faces of friends. I can live without the former, but find no replacement for the latter. Friends - we miss you and your familiar faces!  

 

I spent a few days in the western city of Qax (GOCK), a 6 hour drive from Baku on the way to Georgia. We left the busy city, through the dusty brown flat outer ring and started climbing into the mountains. It felt good…normal....to be heading up where the air is thin.

Discovered a new but familiar food with a name I can't remember – dried mashed fruit, sweet, sour, apple, apricot, cherry, feijoa…and always with happy hawkers trying to get me to purchase just one more thing, lady.

This looks like a table in the middle of nowhere and it is. Its common along the roadways out of town and around the country to find restaurants that are just tables by the side of the road with pretty plastic tablecloths and no one to be seen. But if you sit down at one of these tables, someone eventually comes and brings you a samovar of tea, tandir bread and maybe dushbara, a dumpling soup or gutab filled with meat or cheese that looks alot like a quesadilla. Whether you like it or not, be served fresh tomatoes and cucumbers!

We had time to stop and visit an old Georgian church on the top of a hill near Qax.

Downtown Qax is being revitalized a bit, but original areas remain where old men play dominoes, drink tea and sell watermelons.

Good food and Ferris wheels

We had a good day last Saturday – Paul’s birthday. Can’t ask for much more than good food and Ferris wheels. Sunset Café is a landmark, an expat hangout, a warm fuzzy in downtown Baku. AND, they have bacon. Maybe Sunset is what it is, BECAUSE it has bacon. (You with easy access to this most viscerally satisfying food probably can’t imagine what it is to live with out it!). Regardless… friendly waiters and access to maple syrup make this a most perfect breakfast place AND our waiter Rico brought dessert with a candle. Nice touch! 

Ruby caught a picture of this sweet dog with Opal eyes and snappy attire who greeted us on our way out. 

We hopped on the bus to Teza Bazar to pick up some plants to green up our apartment and ended up with a pile of fruit including a bag of fresh ripe green figs. Absheron is the name of the peninsula we live on and Absheron figs are coming into season. I am used to seeing 6 of some kind of dark fig in a plastic box at Whole Foods for exorbitant $/lb. Here the salesman pulls out the stem and squeezes it open and makes me touch, smell, eat and taste – fig after fig. “One kilo…. 2, 3 – what do I want, he asks? Who can say no to this? I think of all the things I don’t know what to do with figs…. and say yes to a kilo.

In the heat of the day we sat on the couch and watched Forrest Gump with popcorn and I thought of all the other things that life could be like besides a box of chocolates, cause you never know what your going to get in SO many situations...

We had dinner at Chinar – fantastic Asian restaurant we had never before been, but are sure to return and walked back home along the Bulvar, a strip of park that runs between our apartment and the Caspian. 

Weekends find the Bulvar full of people, young and old, hanging out, playing music, roller blading, walking hand in hand. I kind of like the impressionist shot I got as a result of not knowing how to all the features on my camera...

The Bulvar also contains the famous Ferris wheel we have been looking at for the past 2 months, longingly - and finally rode.

That and a chocolate bar made it all good!