Not everything is dark, and really, I'm quite cheery and happy to be back - even if I do now have to be ten times more careful crossing the street (in the abstract I knew how dangerous traffic in Baku was, but the concrete - and steel - reality is even more narly and perilous than I remembered). There are other little things that are contributing to my upbeat mood - besides the fact that we don't have to pack up all of our stuff every two or three days and go to another place and find antoher hotel - like the fact that the 50-cent chicken donar is just as good as I remembered (or maybe even a little better than I dared hope to remember), or that we live right in the middle of the city where all the action is, or that the guy in the Xerox shop remembered my name even though it's been two months since I brought in one of my ludicrously-hopeful photocopying jobs (this one to hand out to my brand new class at a brand new university where I'm still - as I ride the metro to school - holding out the hope that I'll be able to do some useful teaching).

Well, it's almost my stop (on the 25-minute metro ride to the outskirts of town where the school is located), and people are looking at me funny for writing on the subway (or probably just for writing at all), so until next time, Happy Valentine's Day and Welcome Back to Baku!

- Jack

Baku has changed a bit in the two months we were gone. First we noticed that the sidewalks seemed much larger than when we left, and then we noticed that the city was even more gray than before - which is truly remarkable. We soon realized that a good ninety per cent of the street vendors are gone. Gone are the beautiful displays of oranges, apples, tomatoes, pomegranates, fresh herbs every half block. I proposed that they may have shut down for the cold, windy winter, but I knew that for these people selling veggies and fruits on the street wasn't about comfort, it was about survival. We consulted our friend Troy to get the scoop. He told us that there is a new mayor in town and he told Heydar (l'emperor) to give him a month and he'll turn Baku into Paris. Well, I've been to Paris Mr. Mayor and Baku is no Paris. Personally I can't see what good it does to bring down the hammer on a bunch of peasants who don't have legal documents to vend. Especially when the reason they never got a license was because they couldn't afford to pay the bribe that came along with the contract. We did manage to find enough vendors to buy our produce yesterday. Though, buying lemons from the peasant woman with five precariously displayed citri in her overworked hand was a little more like a drug deal than an honest exchange of goods for colored paper.

- S

Coming back down into the city, the pollution was even more noticeable than ever. We pressed on through the ground-level filth and did some errands. When we got home, I squared away a bunch of pre-vacation papers that were piled up on a shelf - mostly teaching or not-teaching material that could either be thrown away or crumpled up and then thrown away. It feels downhill from here, especially since I'm only teaching two days a week instead of last semester's four. Plus, my students seem really good - not only is their English excellent, but they look like they're ready to work. One of the students even asked if I was only going to give them reading assignments for Wednesday and not for Monday too - it almost felt like he wanted more work, but I was too woozy from disbelief to figure that out at the time. So hopes are running high, we're both still cheery and committed to staying that way, and our $8 lunch was most excellent. Dare I say, "Yippee Baku!"?

- Jack

We've been back for one week now and we've had time to notice the effects of the new mayor's Paris dream. An even bigger change than the removal of street venders is the lack of cars on the roads. I assume they went with the vendors back to their homes in the regions - the regions refer to the areas in Azerbaijan outside Baku. We have been crossing streets without halting our conversation in favor of life preserving concentration. In the past, we had to focus on the the street, the cars and even the direction of the sun just to survive the crossing. While we'll never expect red lights and green lights to have much meaning to anyone, fewer cars mean greater ease.

On Monday I did some editing for a local newspaper. It was strange to be in an office again: people running around, phones ringing, water cooler gurgling, etc. There was even an employee kitchen in the back with the requisite cake on the counter. The classic sugar reward system that often works with small children. I have to say, I don't miss all that office stuff very much. In addition to not missing the environment, I don't miss having to depend on other people in the office to do their job. Of all the stories I edited only one of them was actually printed in the paper as the edited version. All the others somehow went to print in the unedited version - the exact version I was given to fix. I wasn't too surprised when I picked up the paper the next day, the place wasn't the epitome of organization. My friend, Troy, who is working there temporarily, seems to be running the show after only three weeks on the job. I don't know how they have managed without him. The bar isn't very high for local English newspapers so I suppose that helps.

- S

Speaking of the metro, it's by that dubiously-efficient, nominally-safe method of conveyance that I must make use twice a week to get to and from Khazar University - it's way out in the industrial boonies, or actually, it's perched on the fringe of a Stalinist-concrete-block suburb that's just on the other side of a blasted wasteland that's something like a Mad-Max-meets-Newark kind of place. From the window of my classroom I can see oil refineries and a hazy gray underbelly of broken chunks of concrete and pipes rusting into oblivion snaking over and around the crumbling roads back into town. On Monday I decided to try to take a mini-bus home - this is the local method of transportation that seems safest and is usually the most expedient, but even though I got a seat for the whole trip, I was bounced and banged and coated with a not-so-fine layer of dust as the bus wound its indirect way through the wasteland and the improbable residential districts located within. I thought some of the apartment buildings looked horrific to live in. There are lots of people living in what are essentially cinder-block huts, with broken cinder blocks and sharp, hardened-mud for a lawn. Still, life goes on there, and even though it seemed futile or even self-defeating, people were drying their laundry and going about the kind of daily business that just about everybody in Baku has. At one point I saw a herd of sheep grazing in a concrete-rubble-strewn "field" - it was more like the former inside of a former building of some kind, hard to tell with only ruins of three walls left. It's not exactly Roman ruins, though the sheep did lend a quaintly pastoral post-apocalyptic ambiance to the scene. All in all, it was the kind of thing I'm glad I did once.

So now I'll take the metro both ways. It's not as bad as it was before, because of the general emptying out of Baku - not only are there fewer cars, there are proportionally fewer people, a trend that includes subway riders. Not that it's not still dark and stinky and palpably menacing, but I do manage to get a seat once in a while, and while the 25-minute train ride isn't exactly a luxury trip, it beats the hell out of the mini-bus through Mad-Max-Newark. Luckily this is only twice a week. We're still deeply thankful for the location of our new apartment (and only occasionally laugh nervously at the memory of our original place and the terrible transportation machinations we had to go through to do anything while we lived there) - we can and do walk everywhere from our pad, and now that I've discovered the don't-look-at-anyone technique, walking the streets isn't as mentally or morally taxing as it used to be.

It is a bit weird to go about your day without looking into people's faces - yesterday when I was in the market getting oranges, I happened to glance up at the girl holding out the plastic bag (even in the non-Commiemart stores, there are still plenty of hovering clerks, some of whom are charged with bagging, weighing, and pricing your produce), and I discovered that she was staring right at me in that disturbing, ten-inches-from-your-face sort of way that only someone holding out a plastic bag for your oranges can ever pull off. It was a little shocking, but it reminded me that this was the sort of thing that happened to us all the time before we left for vacation and that it's probably still happening just as frequently, despite my attempts to wear dark clothes and look beaten down (I'm not going to grow a mousache no matter what) - knowing in the abstract that it's happening isn't at all like seeing it happening every minute that you're out on the street, so I'm going to continue not looking at people as much as possible and retain my generally upbeat mood.

- Jack

I also find myself trying to juggle some kind of variety in the foods we eat, mostly because so many other things that surround us are stultifyingly un-diverse, coming, as they do, in various shades of gray (either literally or metaphorically). When I'm out walking around, or coming home from school, I always ask myself, or Shanon, "So, what're we going to have for dinner tonight?" And more importantly, what do we need to buy make it? The internet's vast repository of recipes has been a great help here - we only brought one cookbook, a Middle Eastern one we bought specifically for the trip, thinking we'd use it to work with the kinds of ingredients and spices we'd get here. But with the restaurants serving local and regional food so cheaply, and the grocery stores stocking ingredients and spices from around the world, what I've been doing at home is mostly things like Indian, French, Italian, and - thanks to discovering refried beans for sale and finding a good homemade tortilla recipe on the internet - Mexican.

All this is just a prelude to the brief, pedestrian aneddote I set out to tell here. I was on the train coming bac from school, thinking about tonight's dinner and trying to picture the fridge and the cupboard so I know what we do and don't have to work with. I made a mental list of things to get - cucumbers and tomatoes for a salad (we already have yogurt for a dressing) and some spices for soup, maybe a little spinach for a salad tomorrow if there's any that isn't about to rot within 15 minutes - and I got off the train at the 28th of May stop, which is where the big open market used to be before the new mayor got ahold of the reigns of power. Some scattered vendors daringly remain around the fringes, so this is still the place to do the get-it-cheaper street style of shopping. The thing about this is that it requires the readiness to do battle on the field of bargaining - generally I don't like to squabble over the price of produce, but in the winter things can be too expensive if you just give them what they want, and I also think that the new situation with the vendor purge has changed the mindset of those remaining into the get-as-much-as-you-can-while-the-foreigner-is-here-they'll-pay-30%-more-if-you-just-ask variety that is a more common attitude among those who sell non-food items.at the bazaar. Plus there's this thing about them never wanting to give you only one kilogram of anything - if you don't watch out they'll fill your bag with two or three kilos, which you obviously need despite protestations to the countrary, because everything is about to rot like any minute and the thing your kitchen is lacking just now is a big pile of inedible vegetables. I do think this has something to do with the Azeri attitude about hospitality, which is of the anything-short-of-ten-times-too-much-is-an-insult-to-the-guest variety, as much as it has to do with smarmy vendor hucksterism - but I'm still influenced by those ubiquitous threat-warnings about the starving children in Ethiopa that seem to mark the childhood of everyone about my age (an unscientific survey bears this out - Shanon got it too, but people a bit younger than her weren't menaced with the Great Famine by parents concerned to instill the proper amount of liberal white guilt in their privileged offspring), and I'm just not able to buy more than I think we'll be able to eat within the narrow window of possible consumption of these delectable-but-ready-to-kick-it veggies.

Today, while I was picking out my five, nearly-firm cucumbers, the guy who was supposed to be serving me up one kilogram of tomatoes - my first mistake was trying to multi-task like this - piled three kilos into the bag, tossed the cucumbers I was holding in on top and gave it a weigh with his hand-held scale, registering a grand total of 13,000 manat that I owed him for this purchase. Now, I've already asked him how much both things are, and I do still remember how to count to three in Azeri (bir, icky, ooch), so I know that for I want to pay around 6,000 manat for my tomatoes and cucumbers, less than half what he wants for the bag he's thrusting good-naturedly into my hands, apparently figuring me for a chump who will simply fork it over and go. I can tell that he's also having a good time, showing his friends what a skilled pushy bastard he really is, a strutting smirk that falls from his face when I start putting back the extra tomatoes (and picking out the ones that have already started to rot as I do it). We get the weight down to the proper two kilos, and I hand him the appropriate 6,000 manat, but now he wants 7,000, claiming that the cucumbers cost 4,000 per kilo. Now, this is a minute difference in price as far as I should be concerned (about 22 cents over a total purchase of 4 pounds), but I'm deep into the struggle at this point and internally have promised myself not to come out a single cent behind - I was so resolved on this course that after bickering for another few seconds, I pulled out the okay-I'll-just-walk-away routine, grabbing for the 6,000 manat he was holding and making to give him the bag back. This is a common tactic in pre-exhange-of-cash bargaining, and one that doesn't always work (you don't want 50,000 for that, fine, I'm outta here - and sometimes they don't rush forward and grab your shoulder and shrug knowing that they've still gotten a better price than they should expect; sometimes they let you keep going) - but it seems to me that this sort of technique might not be appropriate for this type of transaction, especially after I've already given him some money and maybe he did really say 4,000 per kilo for the cucumbers, I'm not so sure anymore. But by the time I thought these things, it was too late - I'd already won; he threw up his hands and shooed me away, to enjoy the post-combat relief and contemplate how I was going to spend my 22 cents.

I think my behavior in this situation was mostly a response to the original attitude of the vendor, and one that I don't always engage in, depending on who I'm dealing with. Usually when I buy from the demure peasant ladies - the ones in all their colorful layers and wisdom-of-the-ages wrinkled eyes, holding out a handful of lemons or squatting beside a bucket of oranges or a wicker basket with dill, parsley, and green onions - I generally pay what I'm asked. They don't seem to want to get the best price possible out of each different, individual buyer, or maybe it's just that they almost never ask more than 500 manat for anything they sell, a price-range that falls below my threshold for letting myself get armed and ready for battle (even though, in comparison to everything else, it's probably a disproportionately high price for what is, after all, just a lump of fresh dill, or a skinny bundle of green onion). Still, if I saved 1,000 manat from one pushy guy who probably won't let his sister out after dark and who hassles every stylishly-dressed woman who crosses his path, and then turned right around and wasted it getting ripped off by someone who looks like they actually grew this stuff themselves (which I think they really did), then I'm satisfied with how this latest brief shopping foray went.

- Jack