A Weekend Getaway to the Village!

This weekend I was lucky enough to have 2 wonderful guests visiting from Baku, my good friends Evangeline and Eric who work at the US Embassy.  They are the very sweet and wonderful people who let Beth and I stay with them whenever we come into Baku and I was finally given the chance to return the favor.  We had a hectic weekend trying to squeeze seeing everything of importance in the village into a 2 1/2 day trip, but I think we did a pretty good job.  Evangeline got cooking lessons from my mom (3 sisters dolma, plov, and paxlava) and Eric got a saz lesson from Beth's friend Estella.  Plus we went to a wedding where Eric narrowly made it out without having his new best friend Vaqif drink him under the table and we went up for a drive/walk in the mountains where we freaked out some locals who don't get many foreign guests and they watched one of my classes where they learned about real conditional sentences (very thrilling stuff).  It was fun showing them the "real" Azerbaijan and I give them serious credit for wanting to come out and see it!  Not many ex-pats do!