Baku After Dark

 

The Maiden Tower lit up for the evening, with Azerbaijani carpets for sale

I slept through the supper hour yesterday and I was not going to sleep through it again today. The restaurant that was highly recommended both by the food and beverage director of my hotel, and by my walking guide from yesterday, was Qaynana.

Traditional Azerbaijani cuisine in the Old City. And that means: kebab. And "kebab" means barbecue. Skewers optional.

Non-pretentious atmosphere.

My beverage was a pear lemonade. It was good, but it was so sweet it tasted like pear-infused cotton candy. Art cotton candy, I guess.

Prices were ridiculously cheap. Seven manat (about $4.20) for the chicken kebab. At that price, I assumed appetizer-sized portions, so I ordered a main dish.  Here was the chicken kebab:

That's a lot of bird. As is typical for chicken breast meat in other parts of the world, the breast had flavor and, more importantly, did not have the rubberband texture of chicken breast stateside. Seasoned red onion on the side. I was full.

But I had a main course coming.

Azerbaijani style fesenjan. I love fesenjan. It's my "go to" order in a Persian restaurant. The Mediterranean Cafe in Las Vegas makes a particularly tasty version.  Fesenjan is a stew made with chicken meat in a flavorful sauce made from pulverized nuts and a pomegranate.

 

 A couple of interesting things about this fesenjan. First, it was much more "pomegranate forward" than the fesenjan back home in Las Vegas. This is not good or bad. It's just an observation. It did make the dish sweeter. And the rice was served cooked in bread for some delicious starch-on-starch action. All that for 15 manat. In U.S. dollars: $9.00.  It was excellent but, unfortunately, not knowing what the portion size would be, I could not finish it. Ate most of the chicken, a fair amount of rice and sauce were left uneaten. No dessert, of course, even though I am 100 percent certain the dessert options would have been outrageously awesome.

So to walk off all that delicious Azerbaijani food, it was time to walk around the lit-up Old City Baku.

Turn a corner and run into an old friend:

The Flame Towers. Or, a Flame Tower. Lit up in green!

Shall we zoom in closer?

I'm going to go out onto a bit of a limb here, but if the bar/restaurant has the name "Sultan" in it, it's probably not authentic. Might be a tourist magnet, don't you think?

The lights on the Flame Towers kept changing. I was too slow to catch it when it was lit up with the colors of the Azerbaijani flag. But I did catch this:

Even the archaeology is lit up for the night:

And the day (and the night) ends at the Maiden Tower:

Finally, the jet lag ebbed enough to let me experience Baku After Dark.

Fun Fun Fun Funicular Away

Funicular station with (two of the three) Flame Towers looming behind
("Looming" is a foreshadowing because the day also included a visit to the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum.)

What you doing on your bed on your back?

You should be tourist-ing.

I was feeling all jetlaggy, laying in bed (on my back) and then it hit me:  I should be tourist-ing. More importantly, I should be out doing the things that brought me to Baku. Not the Maiden Tower, although it's impressive especially given its age: built halfway up in the fifth century A.D. or so and completed to its full height in the 12th Century A.D., which is very very tall for its era.

Not this attractive building:

Much newer than the Maiden Tower by uncountable centuries.  This is the Art Gallery Hotel, I believe.

And not this building:

But we're getting closer.

The Swan Fountain is even closer:

Mini-Venice is even closer.

But we're not going to take a gondola to get where we're going.

The Carpet Museum is a destination, but not the first stop of the day:

This is where we are headed first:

Well, not the Behram-ı Gür Monument. But what's behind it:

The funicular!

Ain't no fun like FUNicular fun.

Baku has only one funicular. The entire nation of Azerbaijan has one funicular. And this is it.

The funicular to Highland Park and the Flame Towers.

The ride to the top was quick. Not especially long and high. Not really steep. Is it the best funicular I've ever ridden? Not the right question. It's the funicular available to ride today and that, my friends, is more than good enough.

Pop out of the station, look to the right, and there's a Flame Tower and a mosque.

That is the Alley of Martyrs Mosque. It's Friday, so the call to prayer was audible. This is being Azerbaijan, I suspected that the "martyrs" referenced in the mosque name were Azerbaijanis killed fighting the Armenians at some point in that multi-century conflict. So I googled it. Google AI said I was mostly right. The martyrs were fighting the Armenians. But they were Ottoman soldiers who died fighting the Russian Bolshevik and Armenian soldiers in the Battle of Baku in 1918.

The view from the top of the funicular route is impressive.

The most prominent building in that picture -- and you'll be able to figure it out when I tell you the building's name -- is the Crescent Hotel.

And here's a typical tourist touristing in the tourist quarter of Baku:

I asked the young lady taking my picture for me to use the "beauty filter" -- like all the cool kids do nowadays -- to reduce the size of my gut. I think it worked.

More Flame Towers juxtaposed with the funicular station:

Let's take a stroll through Highland Park and enjoy the magnificent views:

Do you prefer your view of the Crescent with or without?

With trees?

Or without trees?

It was about then I noticed window-washers on the curved side of one of the Flame Towers:

So many viewpoints:

So many buildings in the harbor.

The body of water is, of course, the Caspian Sea.

Which isn't really, technically a "sea." It's the world's largest lake. What's second, you ask? My tour guide Azay from yesterday googled this so I didn't have to. It's Lake Superior.

This is "Eye of Baku".

It's another one of those giant ferris wheels that're in all the cities everywhere. Baku is not bucking the trend, It's riding the trend like me riding up on a funicular.

So what is that building, you may ask, that from way up here, looks like a flower opening up?

It's just a shopping mall. Deniz Mall. It's funny -- curious way not ha-ha way -- the shopping mall concept is dead in the USA but thriving in the rest of the world. Baku, apparently, being no exception.

Zooming in on the Eye of Baku:

And as I wander back to the Flame Towers:

It's getting close to time to descend. The timing being dictated by the fact that this particular funicular goes on lunch break everyday between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. Actually, it's probably the funicular workers who take the lunch break, although the funicular itself is on break, too.

Time for one last selfie up top:

And back at the funicular station with the minutes to spare before the final pre-lunch descent.

Miss it and you have to walk down ten million stairs. It's probably actually fewer than that. But the knees will think it was ten million.

And back in the lowlands. And like the statue in the middle of the fountain, I'm looking at the Azerbaijan Carpet Museum. It's the day's next destination.

Free Walking Tour of the Baku Old City

The back entrance to the Palace of the Shirvanshahs. Or maybe some other really old building.

The afternoon agenda was a guided, free walking tour, you know, one of those walking tours where the guide is paid with tips at the end and you pay what you think is fair. They have them in all the cities. And Baku is one of those "all the cities."

My guide, Azay, did a great job. And I was the only one on his tour.

I'm used to these free walking tours getting cancelled at the last second if not enough people sign up. I can't complain about that. You get what you pay for.

I was the only one on the tour, but Azay, being the consummate professional, did not cancel the tour. He made a scheduling error making a tour available today and when I signed up, he followed through. Yet another example of how amazing the people in Baku have been so far.

This is the Maiden Tower.

Landmark. One of the signature structures of the Old City. UNESCO World Heritage Site. The name comes from a legend about a young lady being imprisoned there -- perhaps so she would not marry an unsuitable suitor -- who threw herself off the top of the tower.

There's plexiglas walls at the top of the tower to prevent wannabe-Juliets from re-enacting that scene when their own love lives go bad.

Let's take a look-see inside the nearby Muhammad Mosque. It's named for a guy named Muhammad. Not "the" Muhammad.

Don't forget to remove your shoes first.

This mosque has some of the girthiest minarets (the towers from which the call to prayer is yelled)

I've ever seen.

I'm used to see extremely slender minarets where major claustrophobia would ensue if I tried to climb the stairs to the top of the tower.  This one is more functional.  The extra girth is recognition of the fact that this is earthquake country as the Arabian plate is in a state of constant war with the Eurasian plate. Hence all those massive earthquakes in Iran and Turkey. And, occasionally, Azerbaijan.

Another view of the Flame Towers.

This better be some foreshadowing for a different day of tourism.

Next up: the Museum of Miniature Books:

The books are really tiny. There is no way these old eyes could read the text printed within. But, hey, people were smaller back then. Maybe being smaller people meant you could read smaller print.

The smallest "book" is basically a micro-dot, you know, the kind they used in all those old spy movies from the 1960s. It comes with a magnifying glass to be able to read it. I think I would need some more powerful magnification to even have a chance.

This is a statue of the head of a man who had people for hair.

This is the Statue of Aliaga Vahid, a renowned Azerbaijani poet. He didn't really have people for hair. Or so they say. It's symbolically metaphorical. He was a poet, after all.

The city walls that survived the Soviets:

A lot of the city walls -- again this not only being earthquake country but earthquake country populated by people who were smart enough to know it and to take proper architectural precautions -- were so solid that the Soviets knocked them down.

Fear that they could be used to protect a population in rebellion. But why would anyone rebel against the glorious workers' paradise that brought heaven to the earth populated by the Soviet people? </sarcasm>

We will end the tour by moseying down to the waterfront.

This is one of the kitschiest examples of tourism kitsch to be found in Baku.

I present to you:  Mini Venice!  "Canals" with gondolas.  But the gondoliers aren't singing "O Solo Mio" -- which you Elvis fans know as "It's Now Or Never" -- so the kitsch is lacking in the faux authenticity that makes the best tourism kitsch so irresistible. This was totally resistible.

But not this!

The Azerbaijan Carpet Museum. In a building shaped like a rolled carpet. This, my friends, is tourism kitsch done right. Form follows function indeed. Like the now-gone "Tail of the Pup" in L.A., a hot dog stand that operated from a building shaped like a hot dog -- this is a carpet museum in a building shaped like a carpet. And it's supposed to be a great museum. Another day.

More Flame Towers.

Tour ended. Guide tipped. Hopefully enough to reflect that this was a solo walking tour. Time to stroll back to the hotel or maybe get some dinner at one of the kebob restaurants everyone is telling me I need to try.

But, first, a walk past the Azerbaijan State Museum of Art. It's not supposed to be just a "modern art" museum filled with ugly trifles that could have been spat our by a four-year-old -- yes I do have an opinion on the subject of "modern art" that I have been known to express a time or two. But the lone sculpture outside screams "modern:"

I've seen worse. And I will probably see much much worse before my time on this planet comes to its end.

We end the tour with this building:

I like it. I guess I should find out what it is.

Postscript: I conked out when I got back to the room and went to sleep earlier than I should because I had zero energy. And what I expected to happen -- if I went to sleep too early -- did in fact happen. I woke up at 1:30 a.m. feeling as wide awake as I have felt in several days.