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A Scotsman in Azerbaijan

12 November 2014 [13:53] - TODAY.AZ

/AzerNews/

By David Aitken

Teaching English in Baku was a piece of cake. Or to use another food metaphor, it was as easy as pie.

Apart from anything else, unlike other places I had worked, many of the students already spoke some English (thanks partly to movies and music) before they ever walked through the door of my classroom. I felt I had a head start on my job even before I started to do it, like a tightrope walker born without a fear of heights.

Azerbaijan had always fascinated me, ever since my history lessons at school in Scotland dealt with this exotic place "straddling West Asia and East Europe, with nearly half of all the mud volcanoes on earth." Which tells you how old my history books were. Also, Baku's partner-city was Aberdeen, where I grew up.

I disembarked at the Heydar Aliyev International Airport and took the express minibus 30-minute ride to the capital, where I found a guest house, food and shelter in a part of town that seemed relatively deserted at 9 pm. The food as I recall included Qutab, pancake stuffed with minced lamb, and Shekerbura, sweet pastry with ground almonds, butter, cream, sugar... Be still my beating heart.

The shelter was a room with a marvelous view of a picturesque old street, and was that the Caspian Sea? I thought it was. And was that a black London taxi I saw? The bottle of Xirdalan lager might have lent an added fascination to my outlook, of course. But any country that gave the world Garry Kasparov and Shirali Muslimov (who lived to be 168) was all right by me.

I pitched up in Azerbaijan with a remit to enlighten the students, or some of them, I hoped, on matters of language, culture and history -- the Scots are known for such things, apparently, in the eyes of others, modesty forbids me to say more. And as a Scot, I found the warm dry summers a very pleasant change, and freezing snowy winters were nothing new to a man whose domestic light switches went on in Edinburgh at 3.30 some December afternoons.

I made a lot of good friends from among the four million or so available in a city of civilized amenable people. As a language teacher, I have to admit that what impressed me greatly about Baku -- apart from its high literacy rate, low unemployment, and who wouldn't love Nizami Street? -- Was that so many of its inhabitants were so fluent in English -- which is a different thing altogether from merely speaking it. Might I claim some credit for that, I wonder? Well, I will, anyway.

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