By Thomas Goltz

So, waking late and stone sober on Azerbaijani national day (May 28, 1918) a mere 94 years after that mainly forgotten fact, I ran into my old pal Sergie the basketball-playing oil guy (by his name he is a Near Abroad Ruskie, but with perfect Azerbaijani) at his two boys’ twin birthday bash along with all their pals (and mothers) at the roof-top bar-restaurant of my miserable jail/hotel. 

It must have cost him a chunk of change. Our language of exchange was a mixture of Azerbaijani, Turkish, Russian but mainly English, and mainly had to do with the oil industry in Az, the Caspian, Russia, Ukraine and off-shore, deep-water Romania/Black Sea drill points. Big drilling rigs and oil contracts are a language on to themselves; I speak pidgin-oilie; it is good enough. I told him about The F*!king Film, and then about the Bakken opera. He laughed aloud: “From the F*!king Film to the Fracking Opera,” he cackled. It was good to see him again.

Next my refugee adopted son Elnur showed up from the Frozen War (Karabkh) front lines to ask me for a favor; our language of exchange was up-country Azerbaijani (hick), a dialect which most folks in Baku have problems understanding. Turning my ‘Ps’ and ‘Bs’ into lisped ‘Ss,’ and cranking soft ‘Ks’ into hard ‘Qs,’ we got on just fine. Then I called Hijran in Istanbul to talk about complex travel plans. Oddly, perhaps, I write her in English, but we always speak in Turkish (as opposed to Azerbaijani or American.)

Next, I went downtown to meet a French oil-analysis pal who lives in Scotland, with both those lingual elements reflected in his voice. He was staying at the Hilton. Aside from the ambient noise-called-muzak permeating the revolving 25th floor bar (a glass of wine circa $15 a pop) forcing us to lean over the table, we understood each other just fine; the other well-heeled (and expense-account-bored) clients appeared (audio-speaking) to be mono-English speakers; the wait-staff polyglots.

My Edinburgh-based French/Strasburg (?) pal paid the over-pricey bill, and I then tried to find the Men’s Toilet through a true maze of stairs and dodge-doors, eventually succeeding, but stunned by what had happened to the top-floor bar of what had been the Hotel Azerbaijan back in 1991. They had tried to bring the dump up to some sort of ‘international’ standard floor-by-floor in the late 1990s and early 2000s, until someone said: ‘Hell with it—bring ‘er down!’ And so it came to pass: wrecker balls, crush-crush and Big Dust, asbestos and all. And then came the brand-new, spanking Hilton, slapped up without a trace or reference to what had stood there before.

(Or, not quite: the barman from the 1991 Hotel Azerbaijan’s 21st floor bar now slings cognac during intermission at the State Opera and Ballet theater, and remembers me from the bad-old-days…)

So, I jumped into a metered London-style cab, and rolled my way back to the Qafqaz Point Hotel, that few cabbies know, tipped generously, and then came up to my home-sweet-home room of nearly four months, pulled out my grocery-store food from the mini-bar (again, avoiding the insane room-service charges), and turned on the TV to further tickle the brain.

First up was about half an hour of German-language news/programming, split infinitives and all. This observation will make German-speakers smile. The old joke about excitement in the lecture-hall is that students are only ‘waiting for the (split) verb.’ Non-German speakers can never understand this HoHoHo! lingual humor.

The main point(s), of course, were the Euro elections that raised anti-EU parties to power-broker status in UK and France (but not Germany), and the collective European Zzzzz about what would happen next in Ukraine (and Russia, etc)

Zzzzzz…? NOT!!

Bored with the Mrs. Merkel’s Mitteleuropa mentality, I next clicked through to Russia 24, Vladimir Putin’s primary propaganda station to gain—if really needed—the Kremlin/Ruskie perspective on the elections in Ukraine, the situation in Donesk and the prospects of WWII.5 Assisting my less-than-perfect Russian (hey, it is much better than most reading this missive!) were the diverse graphics, charts and names (in Cyrillic) of the talking heads. Agree with their pro-Putin arguments or not, my tuning in ear and brain to the diatribe was a nice if disturbing exercise. Appearances, of course, are not everything. But Putin and his minions at least gave the APPEARANCE of extreme confidence; my favorite bit was his almost tearful distribution of medals to the Russian hockey team. (Which league? This was not clear; certainly, it had nothing to do with the long-forgotten 2014 Sochi Olympics!)

Finally, I decided to really roll the linguistic dice. Synapses spiked by (Azerbaijani), Deutsch and Po-Ruski, I clicked the channel thing and tuned into…Arabic…

I am listening to a talk show right now, and am happy to declare that I am working on a 50%/60% comprehension basis—and my brain is going passively crazy about news on Egypt and Syria.

Jolt: “…and when the people of Egypt…when the youth of the nation!...Easy, easy!...what about the new Israeli president?...Please listen, listen! [5th form Arabic verb ‘iti’amar…’ (brain fart on ‘insistive’ form of ‘to command’)….AND HERE COMES THE PASSIVE OF ‘EXPLOIT…!!!)…and what about a more generous approach to the situation in Libya? What about the emergence of the Kurds? And the Christians?”

Please do not hire me as your translator for –as an example-- negotiating an end to the travesty in Syria quite yet; only disaster would result. But it is a mental delight / tickle to be able to follow as much as I can…

Tomorrow, it is back to the Studio Salt Mine…and Azerbaijani…

Whew!!!!

Bakudaily.az