Baku Flat and Plants
When we arrive at our flat the first night, it's late, we are jetlagged and tired. The flat is overwhelming - HUGE - with seemingly acres of tall, white walls. I'm sure that it will never feel like home. It takes some getting used to, but somewhere along the way we come to love the huge walls and doors, high ceilings (15 foot), chandeliers, heavy furniture and old creaky wood floors. The entry-way, like most old buildings in Baku, is run down and dirty as no one seems to have ownership of it but the scale of it is magnificient and I can picture it in its glory days. The flat was once the height of luxury in Baku with tall ceilings, huge rooms of entryway, living room, dining room, kitchen, 2 bathrooms, 2 bedrooms, and a study, 3 balconies and is situated right in the center of the shopping/walking/eating/partying district of Baku. We are on the second floor and live over a restaurant (we call it our downstairs kitchen as we get take-out from there fairly often). We are told that the leading surgeon of Baku originally lived there and had fresh water piped in straight from the mountains. In the study, there is an enormous built-in bookcase with old medical books, some in Azerbaijani, most in Russian. It is the perfect house for plants with huge windowsills and good light, so we continually add more and more plants and it does a good job of livening up the place. We hang big colorful Azerbaijani clothes and some of our large mounted photos on the walls and that takes away the immesnse whiteness of the place. We even get used to the kitchen being at the back of the house (I'm sure set up for servant use in previous days) and the 33 steps it takes to get from the kitchen to the dining room - oh darn, forgot the salt - 33 steps through the entryway, down the hallway and back to the kitchen... Anyway, the house becomes THE party house for our stay in Baku and we host lots of gatherings: TGIF, game/puzzle nights, birthdays, celebrations, dinners, Thanksgiving, etc.
One difficult thing was to get used to the noise - luckily our doors and windows had 3 layers of protection - outer glass, inner glass and big wood shutters which helped to keep out the noise of the many people wandering through the streets. Since this was a walking-only area we didn't get road noise, just lots of people! We were located near lots of restaurants and bars, so the noise would last into the night... then just about 5:00 am our wakeup time it would be blissfully quiet! It's amazing how the brain filters out noise so that when we slept (with all the doors and windows shuttered) the racket melted into a blur of distant white noise.
In order to beautify the area, during Christmas time, the city strung lights outside our balcony and in the Spring just before the Formula One race the city put geraniums on our balconies. They did this with a big crane that lifted lights and plants up to all the balconies in the surrounding area.
One difficult thing was to get used to the noise - luckily our doors and windows had 3 layers of protection - outer glass, inner glass and big wood shutters which helped to keep out the noise of the many people wandering through the streets. Since this was a walking-only area we didn't get road noise, just lots of people! We were located near lots of restaurants and bars, so the noise would last into the night... then just about 5:00 am our wakeup time it would be blissfully quiet! It's amazing how the brain filters out noise so that when we slept (with all the doors and windows shuttered) the racket melted into a blur of distant white noise.
In order to beautify the area, during Christmas time, the city strung lights outside our balcony and in the Spring just before the Formula One race the city put geraniums on our balconies. They did this with a big crane that lifted lights and plants up to all the balconies in the surrounding area.
