Men in Black and Women in Shades

I have now settled in to a new job here in Baku, Azerbaijan and, as I write this blog, have been here for five weeks. Actually, this is the second time that I have been here, having visited Baku for a one week business trip back in 2000. Probably some time in the future I shall write a longer blog about this country but right now I have to relate to you my initial impressions about the people. As the blog title says, ‘men in black and women in shades’. It seems that nearly all Azeri men (and women) dress in black. Now I don’t have anything against black clothes but when you see every second person, irrespective of age, dressed head-to-toe in black, well, you do wonder. In the West, one normally dresses in black when one goes to a funeral, and most funerals I have attended are baleful, saturnine affairs. I have asked around and all expats I meet cannot explain it and if you ask the Azeris, they say that it’s their culture. But, hey, I still cannot get my head around it. And black shoes . . . nearly all men wear black shoes and then there are the women. Since I have been here – it’s now the first week in December – the weather has been good but we have had a few dull, cloudy days with light rainfall. So, if it’s dark clouds overhead and it is dull, would you ever dream of wearing a pair of sunglasses? No! But here in Azerbaijan I have lost count of the number of women I see wearing their shades even when it’s cloudy and grey overhead! I thought sunglasses were to be worn to protect your eyes from the sunlight? Yes, in most countries in the world this is the norm. Not in Azerbaijan. The other morning I was on my way to work. The sun was just above the horizon and there were dark, threatening clouds overhead and guess what? I saw this woman, who would be in her early 50s, stood at a bus stop, wearing the biggest pair of sunglasses I’ve ever seen. Why? Dunno! Further along the street that morning – it would have been about 7:45am, I came across another woman, much younger, very trendy, and she also is wearing these huge shades. As a rider, both women were dressed from head-to-toe in, yeah, you guessed it – black!

The colour black – what does it conjure up in your mind: black magic, black despair, black Friday, black nights, black deeds, black humour? It’s all doom and gloom, dark and mysterious, funerary, wicked secrets, unenlightened!

Anyway, folks, when I come to a fuller, more compendious understanding of this phenomena, you will be the first to know. Now, I wonder if Azeris dress in black for a wedding?

Saudi Arabia – A Fuel’s Paradise

I left my country for the first time on the 10th April 1980 to go and work in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. I will not forget that afternoon when, with about an hour to boarding time at London Heathrow airport, there was a bomb scare on an El Al airliner. Most flights out of Terminal Three that year were delayed by about four hours. I eventually set foot on Saudi soil the next day via Bahrain.

My company offered me married status after one year, so that my first year in Saudi was spent alone. I will never forget Christmas Eve, 1980, in my tiny room of the ACC (Aramco Construction Camp) although we called these hellish places Aramco Concentration Camps! I had gone to the canteen and had dinner, tried to phone my wife in Scotland but could not get through. Remember these were the pre-Internet, pre-mobile phone days. I cried that night as I lay on my bed and wondered what the hell am I doing here? It was the saddest, loneliest day of my life.

As time passed by I got to accept the expat life but I can tell you something for nothing, I hated Saudi Arabia.

So we fast forward to the present day and I recently came across this story of an American teacher on an expat website.

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“I taught my lessons in the English language. Most of the people I interacted with at the university knew English. So did most of the shopkeepers. But I also can understand a lot of the Arabic language . . . don't like to speak it, though.

“I was a visiting professor at universities in Oman (1996-97) and United Arab Emirates (2004-2005) and heard from the Western professors who taught there and that Saudi was the worst place in the Middle East, if not the world. They were correct.

“I found out the first week I was on the university campus that the only reason I was hired was because the professor who hired me wanted my wife and I to bring in a sexy Filipina maid - he couldn't, since he was going through a messy divorce. In other words, all this guy, who WAS a good friend of mine until then, wanted me to do was to be his pimp. My students took me to a beheading and crucifixion (without telling me where we were going.) During my last week there (June 2009), an Egyptian professor yelled at me during a final exam in front of 300 students, "Fuck you, fuck America, you piece of shit," over and over at me, tried to beat me up, but was restrained. I asked the university for protection. They refused. Next day, the Egyptian professor came to my office and beat me up. The university tried to cover it up by getting my wife and me out of the country within four days. I've written a 33,000 word book about my year there, and am now in the process of sending proposals out to publishers."

Expats often talk about going through the "stages of culture shock." Examples include the honeymoon phase, the irritation-to-anger stage, the rejection of the culture stage, and the cultural adjustment phase. Do you feel like you went through these or any other stages as you settled into the new culture?

“I knew what I was getting into before I left. I went there mainly because I owed the professor-administrator who hired me a lot of favors (he, like me, is an American citizen, and I've known him for years . . . we've co-authored scholarly papers together). I've written articles about culture shock before, so I know what it means. I was NEVER at the honeymoon stage, and I never adjusted to the ferocious anti-American attitude of almost all Arabs I knew in that miserable country."

What are the things you appreciate most about the new culture?

“Absolutely nothing. Saudi Arabia is the worst place I've ever been. Business Week annual survey says it's the 3rd worst place in the world to live (for expats)."
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In late 1983 I was contacted on the phone by a British technical documentation company who were looking for staff to work on a new project operating out of Singapore and East Kalimantan (Indonesian Borneo). By then, I was reaching the end of my tether working in Saudi, and applied for the job. I was offered the job within days and took the most extreme delight in handing in my notice to Aramco. A few weeks later I was on a Singapore Airlines flight to S.E. Asia to what was one of the best jobs any expat could wish for. I had exchanged Hell for Heaven in a matter of weeks . . .

Since then, and up to the present day, I have met hundreds of expats who have done their stint in Saudi Arabia and not one, I repeat, not one had anything good to say about that country. Believe me, it’s dire!!!