The Moaning Visa

The Moaning Visa

February 10, 2020

I arrived in Baku, Azerbaijan with my wife at the beginning of November. It has been an incredible adventure for me. Baku is a big, beautiful city with much to see and do. I love being here. This is a story about what we have to do to stay here longer.

We are required to have a visa in order to stay here. The significant difference between a visa and a passport is that a visa is an official permission which temporarily authorizes someone to stay in a foreign country and a passport is a document that certifies a person’s identity during their travels. I have traveled abroad, and my travels did not require that I have a visa. The key thing about the visa as it pertains to our being in Azerbaijan is the temporary authorization to stay part. A visa is good for a 30 day stay in Azerbaijan which means that we need to leave Azerbaijan after thirty days here and then apply for a new visa from the country that we go to in order to stay longer.

This is one of those good news, bad news things. First, the good news. We get do some traveling and go to other countries and make a nice weekend of it. There are lots of cool places just a hop skip and a jump away – Russia, Georgia, and Turkey are very close. (So are Syria, Iraq and Iran, but we’re going to skip those hot spots.) Israel and Eastern Europe are only a little further away. We can get to see a lot of this part of the world and we intend to, as well as the rest of Europe.

Now, the bad news. We must do this. We have to pack up our troubles in our old kit bag and smile, smile, smile our way to another country so we can go online and take care of obtaining another thirty-day visa. It can be as easy as a quick plane trip to a neighboring country, find a WIFI café, apply for the visa, hangout until the visa is approved which usually takes about an hour (it could take two or three), do some sightseeing and grab a meal, find somewhere to get the visas printed in color, and take a short flight back to Baku. Done deal, as easy as pie, completed in only a few hours at a minimal cost of a round-trip plane ticket to a nearby destination like Georgia or Turkey, and a few cab fares and a meal. So, what’s the bad news about this, you ask. We just did our third visa and we haven’t done it this way yet. We have found a way to miss badly at fast and easy.

Our first visa excursion involved a very long road trip to Tbilisi, Georgia. We had fun and a great time right up to when we reached the Azerbaijan Georgia border. A scenic car ride through the Caucasus Mountains with an extended stop for a fabulous traditional Azerbaijani mountain lunch, then crossing the border into Georgia at a remote crossing point and driving on unlit, unmarked country roads between the border and Tbilisi took about twelve hours. It was a beautiful ride when the sun was up. The real fun didn’t start until it went down. Suffice it to say that trip is story unto itself. My point here is that it wasn’t fast and easy.

Our second trip out of the country was a trip back to Houston for New Years and a week of work with some doctor appointments and some family and friend time worked in. That was a whirlwind trip that was more business than pleasure. And long hard travel that left us beat coming and going. Again, not fast and easy.

This time, we had a plan in place that should have been three’s a charm. But, of course, we had to prove Robert Burns the prophetic poet as “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” especially when I am part of them. Plans go awry even if I’m not involved in making them and I’m just along for the ride. In this story, it was quite a ride. And at this point I need to make a couple of disclaimers.

1. When I embark on this kind of adventure/excursion, I always go into them with the following attitude – I hope that there will be a good story coming out of this. This did not disappoint in the good story department.

2. And I also hope that the story will begin with this opening line – I CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP. It does

Our original plan was to go to Istanbul, Turkey with our friends and have a grand long weekend. Istanbul is about a two-and half-hour flight which is not too bad. As far as cities to explore goes, they aren’t going to get much better than Istanbul. It has as much history as any place in the world. And as an added bonus, three of the four travelers speak Turkish which really makes things easy as far as getting around and getting things done, like taking care of the visa. But alas, those plans did not work out and that meant coming up with a plan B. Though I did need to get a new visa for myself and I had to participate in the border hopping, I left the planning to the people who are involved in strategic planning on an everyday basis.

This is what they came up with. We would go back to Tbilisi, Georgia on a one-day trip, leaving on Friday night February 7th by train, arriving in Tbilisi on Saturday morning, have a nice day of sightseeing, process the visa at the same hotel where we stayed the last time we went there, have dinner and catch a flight back to Baku late Saturday night. We would have preferred to fly both ways, however due to the last-minute nature of this trip, we could not get a flight out to Tbilisi on Friday. They were all booked. So, the train seemed like a viable option. Our friend wouldn’t have to drive, and we wouldn’t have to endure two ten-hour car trips. We’d be able to sleep on the train. It certainly qualified the first of my two disclaimers. How could taking an actual midnight train to Georgia not have the makings of a good story? And it was a midnight train. I am not making that up. Departure time was scheduled for 23:15 which is 11:15PM and arrival in Tbilisi 10:35AM. And yes, I had Gladys Knight and Pips singing in my head the whole day before we got on the train. “Baku proved too much for the man….”

My Friday during the day was great. We had a couple of days of warm weather, in the low sixties and lots of sunshine and I wanted to take advantage of it. The weather report for the weekend was that a cold front would be blowing through, and I do mean blowing. They don’t call Baku The City of Winds for nothing. When it gets cold and the winds get to howling around here, it is a lot more like Cleveland than Houston. Plus, we would be heading north to Tbilisi which sits at 2500 feet and is surrounded by mountains. If it was going to be cold in Baku, it would be freezing in Tbilisi. I went for nice walk along the Boulevard to soak up the sunshine and the fresh sea air.

I was enjoying myself so much that I decided to treat myself to a special lunch. We had recently eaten at a Paul restaurant at the Port Baku Mall. Paul is a French chain of bakery/café restaurants. It specializes in serving French products including breads, crêpes, sandwiches, macarons, soups, cakes, pastries, coffee, wine, and beer. Paul belongs to Groupe Holder, which also owns the French luxury bakery Ladurée. They have locations in 27 countries. The only way a restaurant chain has that type of longevity and global reach is with great food or cheap food and golden arches. No cheap food or golden arches at Paul (though it is reasonably priced). When we were there, I saw an item on the menu that I had to have, a latke (potato pancake) with smoked salmon, a poached egg and crème fraiche dressed out with pickles and greens. It looked gorgeous. But they had just run out of the fixings and I had to have something else. I had been thinking about that latka ever since we ate there. Paul has another location in Torgovaya, much closer to our apartment; a slight adjustment to my walking route soon had me sitting in the Paul French café.

It was absolutely the very best latke I have ever eaten. And, I have eaten many a latka in my day. The taste was better than the presentation and the plate was a work of art. It was almost too pretty to eat. Almost. I savored every bite. And it was a bargain at twice the price, literally. At Kenny and Ziggy’s, the very overpriced deli in Houston, a big city severely lacking good Jewish delis, that goniff gets $4.95 for one potato pancake, $7.95 for 2oz of lox and $8.95 for two eggs any style making his version of this dish about $17.50. Paul’s latke is 13 manat or $7.80. My dad used to say that food tastes better when you get it for a deal. That makes this latka exponentially delicious. What a great way to start a weekend. I walked home with a big ol’ grin on my face singing “Midnight Train To Georgia.”

Our friends picked us up at around nine thirty. We were traveling light. We had no luggage. I took my laptop, and my wife took her purse. We were only going to be gone about thirty hours start to finish. It made for easy travel, and, spoiler alert, as it turned out, it was about the only thing that made for easy travel. The train terminal is close to our apartment and we were there with an hour to kill before “All aboard” time. The terminal was pretty busy for the time of day. But this late train to Tbilisi is the only train that goes there. It was your basic terminal, a few ticket windows, a few food court like counters where you can get something to eat and one place to sit down and grab a bite, which we did. Around 11:00 we walked out to the train.

The Azerbaijan railroad has some modern high-speed trains, but we wouldn’t be on one them. We would be riding the rails on older Soviet era stock. As we walked outside to the trains, I told my friends about disclaimer number one. Getting on the pre-Perestroika rolling relics certainly had the makings of a good story somewhere down the line.

I have traveled by rail in California on the Pacific Surfliner. Those were day trips from San Diego to Orange County. I had never slept on a train before. This was going to be a first for me. And me, being the delusional fool that I am, I thought that I might experience another first, but that wasn’t happening.

We had a sleeper compartment with two beds which was small. Since the train wouldn’t be pulling out of the station until close to midnight, the ambiance of the compartment was not important as we would be sleeping for most of the trip, though I can say that it was quite different from flying business class on Turkish Airlines. There were no chefs bringing us menus for the deluxe meal offerings that they would be serving. The food and beverage service was tea in the morning.

As far as sleeping goes, well that was a pipe dream, because I never came close to sleeping or dreaming. My friends told me that the ride would be smooth, and the sound would be muffled and soothing. It was quite the opposite. For me, it was a herky-jerky, clunky-clanky noisy sleepless night. And the bed was small, about 30 inches wide. It was so small that it made tossing and turning no small task. I almost fell out a couple of times. You can add taking the train in Azerbaijan to the long list of things “that now that I have done once, I never have to do again.”

But the tough night on the train story is not the story that meets all the requirements of my two disclaimers. In fact, after a long sleepless night and a cup of morning tea, that is where the I CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP stuff begins. We were on a train that was going to cross an international border. We embarked in Azerbaijan and we were going to disembark in Georgia, so we thought. If there are no snags, it couldn’t be any easier. There is a passport control officer on the train with a remote office in the front compartment. You take your passports to the officer and the officer does the same process that you do when you arrive at an airport. He scans your passport. He takes your picture. He checks your visa, if you have one. He tells you to enjoy your trip and have a nice day. That is what happens unless you run into a snag. Yep, you guessed it. A classic case of a day late and $51.00 short (the cost of doing a visa online).

It was the Midnight Train to Georgia that bit us in the ass. Our visas expired at midnight on February 7th. We needed to have been out of the country before midnight. We weren’t even out of Baku. With the busy schedules and long workdays that preceded our trip, this little detail slipped through the cracks and our travel options were limited. The back and forth in a car was going to be very hard on our backs so we took a chance on getting a grace period since we departed for Georgia on the 7th. We found out the hard way that there is no grace period. Now, are you ready? Here comes the I CAN’T MAKE THIS SHIT UP part.

Here we are standing in the remote office train compartment and my wife was talking to the officer in Azeri. Of course, I couldn’t understand a word that was being said between them, but I could read her facial expressions and body language. Not good. I could only imagine what was being said. And when I tell you what the passport control officer told my wife, you’ll be able to imagine what she was saying. Here’s a clue - WTF.

The passport control officer very politely told us that our visas had expired, and we could not proceed to Tbilisi on the train, as we could not cross the border with our expired visas. We would have to go to immigration control and straighten it out. Are you getting this? The dude told us that we had to get off the train. We gathered up our belongings and our traveling companions and we got off of the train. I guess we should be grateful that the train wasn’t moving when they threw us off.

I wasn’t really understanding much other than we were getting off of the train and going to some office to take care of some kind of paperwork. At the stopping point where they were verifying the passports, where they literally told us where to get off at, there were many immigration officers standing alongside of the train. They were dressed in military style camo uniforms and I thought they were soldiers. They weren’t and they weren’t armed. But they were ominous looking to this American. Actually, they tried to be helpful. There was a building across the tracks where we disembarked and I thought that it was a government building where we would zip in, take care of our business and zip out and get back on the train. I was wrong. It was an abandoned building and the four of us were being abandoned in a small rural village located one hundred kilometers from the border crossing where the immigration office we needed to go to was located. I also need to mention that the temperature had dropped into the low thirties and the wind was blowing when we walked across the track and around the abandoned building, adding insult to injury and verifying that our luck had run cold.

We weren’t exactly abandoned. Apparently, we were not the only people who were ever told to get off of the train. I’m guessing that probably it is a regular occurrence. I say that because there were four taxis waiting behind the abandoned building for the poor victims of bad documents. There were three Ladas and one Mercedes. Ladas are automobiles, allegedly. They were built in Russia and are the Soviet version of the Volkswagen Beetle, the Ford Pinto and Chevy Vega. They were built to be affordable, mechanically simple transportation for the people. Its design is very Soviet, form follows (very far behind) function. They have round headlights and square taillights. I would describe a Lada as a motorized six-yard rubbish container, only with less styling. They are four passenger cars. The Russians built millions of them in the 70’s and 80’s and there are still millions of them on the roads in the former Soviet states. There has to be something to be said about the mechanical engineering of the Ladas as the multitude of them on the road are thirty to forty years old. No planned obsolescence going on there. Being an old car guy, I am intrigued by them, but not so much that I would ever get into one. It wasn’t an option anyway. There were four of us and we couldn’t all fit in one Lada. We got into the Mercedes. My wife speculated that I may have been the first foreigner that our taxi driver had ever encountered.

At least we were moving again. Our driver did his best to make the ride through the countryside as thrilling as possible. He was speeding, driving all over the road and texting while he was driving. And, of course, we were back in the land of the serpentine road. He did us a favor and slowed down when we came up on livestock strolling down the road. In rural Azerbaijan, sharing the road has nothing to do with bicycles. He was kind enough to stop so I could take a picture of a group of oxen who were walking in the middle of the road through a very small village, but I don’t think that he had much of a choice in the matter.

Time wise, we were ahead of schedule when we arrived at the border. That would change very quickly as we entered the international travel immigration bureaucracy portal. Before we got to the immigration window, we had to make our way through a maze of currency traders and people hoping to find someone who would carry contraband across the border for them. We would eventually have to deal with the former before we could continue on our journey.

I was a spectator at this juncture. The Azeri speakers had everything under control, as much as that was possible. The immigration officer at the border did the same passport scan as the officer on the train with the same result – we had overstayed our official welcome. And now it was going to cost us if we wanted to leave the country, which we had to do so that we could buy our way back in for another thirty days. It was due to our own unintentional negligence and that negligence would come with a price – 300 manat a piece, payable in cash at a machine in front of the passport control center, which was a couple hundred meters from the immigration window. But before we could pay the fine and continue on our way, we had to wait for the immigration officer to prepare the paperwork for the transactions, which took fifteen minutes of us standing out in the cold. While we were waiting for him to prepare our papers, we went and converted almost all of the U.S. dollars we brought to convert to Georgian lari for shopping into manats for fine paying. So much for shopping. I guess I didn’t really need that flask with Stalin’s face on it that I saw at the flea market the last time we were in Tbilisi. Once the officer prepared the papers, we hiked up the walkway to the government payment kiosk and kissed 600 manats goodbye in return for a receipt that would enable us to leave and return. It was a real case of them getting you coming and going, or in this case, going and coming. What are you going do? We hiked back down to the immigration window, picked up our papers and hiked back up to passport control. And this time we did get the scan your passport, take your picture and have a nice trip we were expecting when this debacle started. I have to say that the four of us did a great job of not getting bent out of shape when we were getting thrown off the train and keeping our cool while we were standing out in the cold. What else could happen to make things any worse? Well…it did start raining 33- degree ice drops when we were walking the short distance between Azerbaijan and Georgia.

An enterprising taxi driver had spotted us at the immigration window and figured out that we were going to need transportation services. He also had a Mercedes. At least, we would have a comfortable ride for the last leg of the trip to Tbilisi, which didn’t take too long. Just another unexpected expense.

Now we were back on schedule with our planned itinerary. We had a room at the same hotel we stayed at on our first trip to Tbilisi. This was for convenience even though we weren’t going to be staying overnight. We wanted to have a place to chill…or, as we would use it for, to warm up. We thought we would check in, process the new visas online and have the hotel staff print them for us just like they did the last time that we were there. The applying for and obtaining the visas part of the plan was easy, but, uh oh, there was no one in the hotel office on Saturday and they couldn’t print them for us. We would have to find someplace where we could get that done. Just what we needed, a little more angst. We’d jump off of that bridge when we got to it. Now it was time for lunch and a guided tour of Tbilisi, which was part of the original plan.

We asked the hotel staff for a lunch recommendation, and they told us to go to the restaurant at Mtatsminda Park, an amusement park located on Mt. Mtatsminda, 770 meters above Tbilisi with a panoramic view of the city. From our hotel, you could get there by way of a twenty-five-minute taxi ride up an insanely turning, twisting mountain road or a five-minute ride to a cable car that will take you up to the top in another five minutes. I’m sure you figured out which way we got there. Nothing like a little motion sickness right before lunch. I was actually thankful for the cold fresh air when I got out of the cab. I must say that the panoramic view of Tbilisi from the observation area outside of the restaurant was impressive.

We had a very nice lunch in a café with a great view. By now we were all very hungry, having not eaten since a few snacks at the train station in Baku.

We all had Adjuruli Khachapuri, a traditional Georgian cheese and egg dish baked in a bread bowl in a wood-fired oven. It was great and the highlight of the trip up to that point. And, come to think of it, it may have been the highlight of the entire trip. You be the judge when we get to the end of this ICMTSU story.

After lunch, we took the five-minute cable car ride down to the street where our guide was waiting for us. How can I best describe him? This is a dead-on perfect description of him. He looked like one of those ceramic garden gnomes and he wasn’t much bigger. He was every bit as creepy and obnoxious. First, he loved the sound of his own voice, and he never shut up, not even to give my wife a chance to translate what he was saying. Second, and I cringe having to tell you this, he was soooooo loud. I was sitting in the front seat next to him and he was screaming in my ear the whole time in Russian. This was particularly painful to me because I was getting a taste of my own medicine. I am very loud. Not on purpose. But, nonetheless, loud. I have been loud all my life. My friends shush me before they say hello. To be on the receiving end of that noise for a couple of hours after not sleeping and the stress of the morning excitement was just excruciating. He might of well have been pounding on my head with a hammer.

What do you think he took us to see? If you guessed churches, you get to advance to the bonus round. Your bonus question is this – what do you think his commentary was? Let me fill you in. He was saying that the time would not be distant when all the Jews in the world would convert to Christianity. Thank God I couldn’t understand what he was saying. The three people in our party who did understand what he was saying were having a hard time holding it together and not bursting into laughter knowing that I would not be happy if I knew what he was saying. And, I would later find out, that that was not the only thing that would have pissed me off had I been able to understand him. That little creep was flirting with my wife the whole time. Our friends were giggling like little kids and I had no idea why. My wife had the good sense not to tell me until we got home. I might have tossed his gnome ass off the top of a cliff when we were at the first church that he took us to. Ok, I got that off of my chest.

I will say that the churches we went to see were very impressive. The first one, the Jvari Monastery, was built in the fifth century. It was built on a mount nearly 2000 feet above sea level. The overall height of the church is 25 meters. Considering the location on top of a mount and when it was built, it is an amazing engineering achievement. Going to see it was also an achievement. By the time we got there, the temperature was below 30 and the wind had to be blowing 20-30 mph. There were no safety rails on the very irregular stone steps leading up to the entrance. Being on the mount, with the wind whipping like it was, with nothing to hang on to just added to the overall discomfort of the trip.

The second church that he took us to is a famous church, the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. It was built in the eleventh century. Again, how these churches were built when they were built astounds me. This church is famous for containing Jesus’s robe. It also contains three crosses made from a cedar tree that grew from the place where the robe was buried.

When you are in Europe, you are going to see old churches. They are historical monuments to Western Civilization. They are architectural and engineering masterpieces. That said, and I don’t want to be crass and say “you seen one, you seen ‘em all” because it is not true, but on this trip, I would have been fine without a little living lawn ornament dragging us across the countryside to see them. Not that I was feeling lucky by any means, but I still had one more Benjamin in my wallet and I wouldn’t have minded checking out one of the many casinos in Tbilisi. What’s the worst thing that could have happened, I drop another hundred bucks? Hindsight being 20-20, I’m happy to still have the C-note with Valentine’s weekend coming up.

We finished up the guided tour and now it was time to find a place to get our visa’s printed. We had the Georgian gnome drop us off on the main street in Tbilisi where we would have our best chance to find somewhere that we could get that last little but obviously the most important thing that we needed to do done. We caught a break on this one. After going into a tourist center at the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral and a cell phone store on the main street, both with exposed computers monitors in plain view, and being told “sorry” or some other version of GFY, we found a little print center in the back of an alley with a sign advertising Xerox on the door. We finally caught a break. We had our visas, printed in color. Time to celebrate.

We went back to the hotel for about a half hour to rest and warm up. I mean we were all beat and dead on our feet. We were going to go out for a Georgian dinner before we headed to the airport to go home. We had plenty of time to relax and enjoy dinner and laugh about our misadventure. It is always easy to laugh after your troubles are in the rearview mirror. Our favorite tour guide gave us the name of a place near the hotel and we were too tired to look for a place on our own. It was the best thing that he did for us all day. The place was good. I wasn’t hungry but I had a bowl of a Georgian version of red beans and rice, a fav of mine back in Texas. We also had a pitcher of white wine that was very good. It was time to unwind. The place had live music. It was traditional music with lots of percussion and mandolins and an accordion; it was a little too loud, but it didn’t matter by then. Nothing was going to quell my headache, so, what the hell, pound and strum away. We hung out there for about an hour and a half until it was time to go back to the hotel, grab our gear, checkout and go home.

Our flight was scheduled to leave at 11:55PM. It was the midnight flight from Georgia. What a twenty-four hours we had just had. But our adventure was not quite over yet. We still had a little more discomfort to endure before we could crash in our own beds. The plane was not at the gate. It was parked away from the terminal and we had to take a bus over to it. By now the temperature was about 25 degrees and the wind was ripping. We made the mistake of being among the first people to get on the bus. We had to stand out there on the bus with the doors open for however long it took for everyone on the flight to check in at the gate. Then we had to get out and go up an outdoor stairway to get on the plane. I can’t remember the last time that I was so cold. Then, our flight was delayed while we waited for late boarding passengers. Our 11:55 flight took off closer to 12:30. And that gale wind gave us a very turbulent assent to our cruising altitude. I unsuccessfully tried to sleep on the one-hour flight. I had reached that stage of over tiredness where you are wired. And then we bounced down to Baku on our final descent before we landed. At least it was almost over. Once we were on the ground, it wouldn’t be long before we could call it a day, and what a day! But not before another trip to the freezer. Our plane did not taxi over to the international terminal. We had to do the bus thing again. And we were in the front row of the plane which once again meant max time on the bus with the doors open. Enough already.

But there is a happy ending. We breezed through passport control with our new valid visas. We had no luggage so there was no customs to deal with. And our driver was waiting for us when we walked out into the terminal. Thirty minutes later, at close to 3:00, I was popping two Aleve PM and that was all she wrote until two in afternoon. What a crazy adventure. At least I got to share it with the woman I love and our best buds here in Baku. And now I got to share it with you.