I See White People

As much as we enjoy chatting up the locals while traveling (especially in the Caucasus, where they invariably buy drinks for their "guests"), on this trip we've been on the lookout for other travelers to compare itineraries with, or expats to swap stories about life int he former Soviet Union. Such people are tough to find in some places, but in other places it's easy. Too easy. While in Yerevan Tbilisi paleface is a rare bird, in Baku you can't go a block without seeing a flock of them.


They're everywhere!

Azerbaijan has huge oil reserves, and where there's black gold, there's white man. Hence Baku's sizeable expat community, dominated by Scots (did you know Aberdeen was a center of the oil industry?) and Texans. To infiltrate their ranks we went to some cracker-oriented establishments on Friday night, starting with a place called Tequila Junction.

There, after polishing off some nachos, we chatted up a group of Scots who worked for Schlumberger, which provides oil companies with equipment and consulting services. They pronounced it sklum-ber-ZHAY. In related phonetic news, Dick Cheney used to work for allez-beurre-TONH.

The Scots were kind of obnoxious, so we moved a table over and met two pleasant fellows who had just been conducting exercises with the Azeri army for NATO (Russia can bite it again). They were Swiss and Austrian, but didn't tell me that right away. When I rattled off Germany, Finland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg trying to guess where they were from, the Austrian said, "You know a lot of countries for an American!"

After that we took a short walk east, to a block that had been entirely colonized by pubs, saloons and alehouses. These were some pretty classy-looking joints.



But most of them were deserted. On our fifth try, we finally found The Corner, which was hopping. An Iranian I met later that night told me that Baku's expats pick a bar to patronize exclusively for two months, then migrate en masse to a new one. July and August, he said, were The Corner's moment to shine. It was a big place, with three bars - the noisy one up front had a live band and a small dance floor, the next one was packed with expats milling around and chatting, while a quieter, narrow bar with booths in the back seemed reserved for brown people (that's where I met the Iranian, and where the next night we befriended some Azeris, who whisked us away to an outdoor disco).

One Scotsman we talked to at The Corner on Friday (we'll call him Paddy O'Rourke) estimated the size of Baku's expat community at 5,000 to 6,000, and predicted that next year the number will swell to 30,000, because thousands of postings had been deferred and personnel shortages had to be corrected. Or something. Paddy was an accountant, so I guess we should trust his counting. Come to Baku next summer, and you might find simultaneously large crowds at The Corner and The Camel's Toe.

I was a little bothered (and after the first night, bored) by how segregated, packish and homogenous Baku's expat community was. Moscow's, which already numbers way more than 30,000, has a lot more diversity. While its hierarchy, like Baku's, starts with oil execs and goes all the way down to English teachers, in the middle it has a lot more variety: grad students, policy wonks, journalists and advertising types are all represented in high numbers. And you'll never walk 500 meters in Moscow and hear only English being spoken. Baku is a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to expatriate myself there.