Leigh in Azerbaijan

I got home at 12 last night after the restaurant gig. It was very noisy, mostly TISA people but there were about 6 other parties of diners during the night. Wayne and I separately sat on a chair close to our long line of tables and sang with various degrees of success.  It was challenging without PA in a pub atmosphere.

I had Dorge from Nepal played Didgeridoo with a couple of songs in D.  People enjoyed the music, even though it was hard to hear. I wouldn’t mind doing the same thing with a PA. Wayne has a good singing style and wrote a warm affirming song for Andy who is a one-man party.

I hope Wayne made the connections via Moscow to Japan. He wasn’t in a good condition when he left.

When I was one block away from home, there were 7 cement trucks lined up delivering concrete to a building site. I have maybe walked past 100 skyrise apartment blocks on the way up. Of course you’ll rarely see protection for pedestrians or hardhats on the building site. I noticed one high, high, high building had scaffolding wrapped in green shade-cloth however. This place is changing fast.

I walked to the supermarket via the back roads this morning and found it very quaint and rundown with overhanging balconies, clothes hanging on wires above the street, insignificant footpaths leading to jousting with cars, but also showing enormous development happening. My guess is that they are very quickly going to regret losing so much of their history. Long timers here say it’s changed a lot in the last 5 years. I bought goyerti (various replacement greens for lettuce)(lettuce is a very European thing) from a wandering lady. Some locals helped translate but I can ask ‘how much?’ and answer small questions. There are many women, including the translating woman, dressed to the nines - maybe they only have one set of clothes.

That’s it for another small report from the city on the edge of the Caspian and barely on the edge of the world.

love

Leigh