Baku, Azerbaijan

Our 9th country – Azerbaijan.

We spent our first day chillaxing – it is so good to have proper wifi!!!!  Hope you have been able to keep up with my multiple posts.

NZ butter on sale in the local supermarket in 2.5kg blocks

The second day we woke up to a cloudy day, first time in a very long time – it  soon burnt off though and it was very humid with being next to the Caspian.  We went walking around Baku – a very modern city in the style of dress and stores – only the visitors are in traditional dress.  Lots of Arab tourists with the women in their full chodor,  I was really enjoying seeing some window displays (funny the things you notice again) – its been a while.  In Russia because of the extreme cold in winter, the shop windows are very small and they have double doors, in many of the other countries they just don’t do shop window displays as we know them.

One shop this… (more traditional but modern clothing)

…then right next door, this

Lots of perfumaries

Local taxi

We made our way to the funicular but guess what, it wasn’t working – so 581 steps later we arrived at the viewpoint – the city of Baku

Reminds me of Sydney

I just missed the shot, but this lady in chodor was taking a selfie with just her eyes showing of course

Love the architecture here, so much detail

and the great thing is the new buildings have this detail too – a billboard for a work in progress

These are known as The Flame Towers – at night they have a light display and part of it is like flames of fire going up the entire building – looks really cool

Serious grate if you don’t get the barrier up out of the carpark

First time seeing the Golden Arches for quite a while – we did see Kentucky Fried haha

Shisha bars are very popular here

Oh, an escalator leading to a marble pedestrian underpass – we truly are back to western culture.  I know, seems weird, but again its surprising what you notice when you haven’t been around it for a while

We walked through the Old Town – a bit touristy in parts, lots of hotels, but also a lot of people still living here

We would have walked about 20km at a guess today.