The Interim Days

In between the girl’s wedding and the boy’s wedding we had two days off.  While that sounds like two days to rest up from all the dancing at the first wedding (and for the men, to get over what must have been a killer hang over given all the vodka they consumed), like the majority of my trip, there really wasn’t a dull moment!

On Saturday, Eric and Evangeline stayed in Tovuz since they didn’t have to be back to Baku for work until Monday morning.  We had a whirlwind day at the Tovuz bazar, kabobs at my house with meat left over from the wedding (and since I only got one lulə kabob at the wedding, I definitely needed some kabob in my life!), a trip to the river, a trip to the park in town, and a visit to E & E’s super swanky hotel room!  Our time down at the river was probably one of my favorite visits I’ve had to the Kür because we brought some of our uncles along (or I guess they brought us since they were the ones driving) and one who is visiting from Russia decided that we should blast music from his huge SUV, so we had a riverbank dance party.  Most of it was Azeri music (although a lot of it was the more fast stuff that I usually don’t dance to because it’s more of a guys’ thing, so that was fun) but then he tried to get us to break it down to some 50 Cent… that only lasted about a minute before he could see it clearly wasn’t going to happen haha.  Next was the park in Tovuz which has gone CRAZY since I left!  They’ve added all sorts of rides so my sisters got Eric and me to ride the pirate ship (that swings really high in both directions) with them.  I think they thought I was going to be all scared (I wouldn’t agree to ride it until I’d seen it, but it looked surprisingly stable and legit so I agreed) but then they were freaking out and I was the super cool one who was able to keep my hands up the whole time :)  The girl behind us was crying she was so scared so at least my sisters were more stable than that!  It lasted a seriously long time though, and I think their sound system broke on the ride before us because the music had suddenly stopped, so we were riding in silence.  You don’t really think about the music when you’re on one of those rides, but try riding in silence, it’s weird!  To end the night, we went to get a look inside the Ayan Palace hotel.  It was in construction when I left Tovuz a few years ago so I had never seen it and my sisters, while they could vouch that it was seriously qəşəng, hadn’t seen it either.  Well, all I can say is that I never expected a hotel like that in the regions of Azerbaijan!  It was ridiculous with all sorts of gold décor, and yet not as tacky as I was sort of expecting.  We had my two little cousins along with us and they were super adorable, moving between the chairs in the lobby just saying “Ay Allah, nə rahatdır!” (“Oh my god, how comfortable!”) and then on the ride home discussing how they could all pool their money to save up for one night there (one of them was like “I have 3 manat 20 qəpik!” – the room cost 125 manat a night, it was pretty cute).

On Sunday, Tamilə müəllim and my older former students had arranged a trip for us up to the mountains to hang out at the springs/river.  It was really sweet of them because arranging a marşrutka to take us can be annoying and with the kabobs and everything that we bought up there it can be expensive.  As we went for a walk after eating, Tamilə müəllim made my day by telling the students that we were now going to play a game where everyone had to speak English for an hour and if you spoke any other language, you’d get a point.  The person with the most points at the end of the hour would have to clean the table and cut up the watermelon for the rest of us.  Some of the students then just refused to speak, but others did really get into it (especially if they felt they could win).  At one point the kids went climbing up this little gorge while Tamilə müəllim and I hung back taking some photos and talking.  By the time the kids came back, Tamilə müəllim and I had one point each because I yelled at her “yıxılma!” (“don’t fall!”) as she was climbing down from a rock and she said to me “Al, baxın” (“Take, look”) after she took my picture.  The kids got a good laugh hearing that we, the teachers, were also failing at the game!

The photo that caused both Tamilə müəllim and me to slip into Azeri