Got chai?

I was driving to a diner party in another town (in Azerbaijan) and got pulled over. I calmly got all my docs together etc and promptly handed them to the policeman. He unfolded one doc then refolded it, obviously barely glancing at it, and then he asked something about "chai". I don't speak Azeri but I know what chai means literally (tea) and thought he was asking me to have tea. I tried telling him in Russian I was sorry but didn't have time but his Russian was as non-existent as my azeri but he kept asking chai. It quickly became apparent that he was asking for money, while I wanted to get to my diner party I have a manic intolerance of being taken advantage of and this includes bribes. I told him that if he wrote a ticket then I would pay the fine (thus leaving a paper trail); he clearly didn't want a paper trail and I decided to just play dumb. After 10 minutes of this back and forth I suggested I call my embassy friend (who doesn't even exist) and she could translate for us via phone. Well fortunately he didn't call my bluff and hastily said "yo yo yo" (no no no in azeri) and sent me on way. Azerbaijan is extraordinarily corrupt (rates around 140 something out of 180 countries on transparency internationals corruption index). I don't usually have to deal with corruption directly but it is obvious to me that it is just about everywhere in many of the countries I am working in. Anywho, there are some interesting bits on the Planet Money blog about corruption as well.

Government Apathy

In my work in Azerbaijan one of the most frustrating parts is government apathy. I am working with a livestock project where we are working with feed companies to help them more effectively sell to poorer farmers who can't access thier products as easily (just driving to a feed shop to by a few hundred kh of feed is no easy task consideirng that many farmers don't even have cars). Anyway, one of the mandates of our donor is working with government trying to get them interested and helping etc. The problem with my project (in the government's opinion) is that we don't give out things, lots of development projects give out "Freebies" but one of the guiding principales of my type of project (M4P) is no free stuff so the government just doesn't care, especially since there is comparatively little money in livestock here.

From what I have heard it is not only a problem here but all around the south caucuses. My project's "sister project" in Armenia is working with the dairy sector. One of the major constraints there is the accessibility of the communities for milk companies. On the one hand the companies only occasionally help in setting up collection stations for milk collection and the government almost never assists (how many voters in a small village?). My organization's regional office is in Georgia (next door) and I am constantly hearing about how little attention the government gives to livestock (the particular issue is giving out vaccinations, they say they will vaccinate all cattle in the country against foot and mouth and a few other things but in reality they vaccinate a few thousand [in a country with hundreds of thousands of cattle] then pat themselves on the back). In the end, I guess there as here there isn't enough money to provide incentive enough to give any meaningful support/investment.

Got Cha'!!!!!!

Ok, so for weeks now there has been at least one uninvited visitor in my house (aka mouse) who has been eating my food, pooping in my shoes (on my desk, around my kitchen, etc) and has been generally annoying. I asked my staff to get the critter and the first thing tried was a humane (though seriously doubt the intention was to be humane) trap that i found totally does not work with small mice (later i found that if i balance the trap itself on something then when it tips the door will close) but regardless, the critter must have eaten 5 times its body weight out of that trap before i gave up on it. Next was the woodchuck trap, ok, not for woodchucks, maybe rats but it could easily have broken my finger (it snapped my sharpie marker in two when i was testing it), so i baited that and tried it... well like the other trap i think it was meant to larger critters (do Azeris just not care about mice?) because i saw the bait i put get smaller and smaller (nibbled away) but no critter. Finally in an act of desperation/irritation (after it got bold enough to start running around while i was in the room) I tried something that i totally didn't think would work, the ole box N stick N string trap. I have lost track of how many times i tried to catch squirrels, birds, and other animate objects using this method (30+ years of trying) and today it paid off!!! I put a box (ok, pot, i wanted something heavy that would fall fast) string and block up with some bread under it and waited, and waited, and waited then he came out, took a dogs age to inch up to the trap then tried making a run for the bread and GOT YA!!!!!

Damn, victory is sweet, even the small ones...

 

Meglomania

The president of Azerbaijan, the "benevolent-dictator" İlham Əliyev had originally expressed no interest in being "elected" to take the place of his father. A friend of mine pointed out an article that I was not entirely sure wasn't a photoshop job so I went to google earth myself and found it, pretty easy. So for a guy who didn't want to be president, it looks like he is filling out the shoes of his dead megalomaniacal father (whose face is everywhere) pretty well; and having buildings built in your initials is testament to that. sigh.

OMG U Drank Cold Water?!

This weekend I apparently caught a bug that didn’t go away by Monday so I called in sick but was informed there were a few small things that were really urgent so I went for those small things. Every one of my staff that I told I was going home due to a sore throat asked me “did you drink something cold?” Now there are two things #1 in the CIS it is widely believed that drinking cold drinks will make you sick, and #2 I drink cold stuff all the time; so, the question was not unexpected but still annoying. I have been in this office for more than a year and my staff has seen me quaff glass, after icy glass of iced tea, diet coke, etc and now, the first time in over a year that I get a sore throat, it must have been because I drank something cold (never mind those hundreds of other icy bullets I dodged over the past year). Sigh, as they will never understand my drinking cold stuff, I will never comprehend their belief that drinking cold stuff will make you all manners of ill.

Out of curiosity I checked on the web, found a myriad of sources saying the temperature of a liquid was not medically significant in catching or curing a cold but i did discover that this cold liquid phobia is equally as pervasive in South America. Strange.

Made in China

I was recently in a "big box store" in Georgia with a Georgian and an Azeri. They were scrutinizing every product and when they saw "made in china" they would wrinkle their noses and put the product back.

In many developing countries there are Chinese products that are straight from china and made to Chinese standards (or more accurately, made to the standards of the optimal price [ie cheap price and cheap quality]) whereas in the USA products are made by America companies to western standards but in China (hence they are better quality). I tried to explain this but the stigma was apparently too ingrained. Oh well.

Okawix

In working in various developing countries one of the most difficult parts has been the mediocre Internet access (hey, we all have our "must haves"). Bandwidth is a precious and often expensive commodity in the countries (a megabit connection in Kenya when i was there in 2006 was $500+/month). With these restrictions access to what the west would consider a bandwidth simple site such as Wikipedia is difficult at best. Another thing i have noticed is the lack of written material in native languages, i was noticing at Nangahar university in Jalalabad Afghanistan they have practically no written material and they are getting donations of *English* material (not particularly useful for the majority of the staff and students i am sure). Well Wikipedia is growing and while the entries in languages other than English are minuscule they are there, and something like Farsi (which is widely spoken in Afghanistan) has a few thousand articles (its a start).

The above thoughts lead me to a very very very nifty but simple peice of software, Okawix. It is a program that has an extraordinarily simple interface and "lets you download the whole content of Wikipedia, with or without images, so that you can browse it offline: Okawix is available in 253 languages and includes sister projects of the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikisource, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks). Okawix is a free software available under GPL licence; sources are available on the SourceForge project. It's featuring the search engine , developed by Linterweb."

A program like this and an old computer could really go a long way towards helping mitigate some of the disadvantages of low bandwidth.

The maturing of Linux… applications.

For years, since I installed (very very painfully) Slackware Linux v2.1 in 1995 I have heard about how Linux is “ready for the masses”, at the time it was totally untrue and now… well it is as ready as windows but… 

To sidetrack for a bit, I was recently ogling over a nice bit of freeware and gave a copy to my colleague who equally appreciated the usefulness of the software and my comment to him was it is nice to have someone around that appreciates a good piece of software (if we were more geek-inclined we would have been ogling over the code) and his response was “most people just use a computer as a glorified typewriter” which is not far from the truth. That is most people still don’t understand computers very well… it seems that nowadays if you can use facebook and an iPhone you are considered a computer savvy person but most of those people would have mental meltdowns if they were asked to do a fresh install of windows or Mac OS X not to mention Linux. I would argue that now Linux’s main weakness is not its usability but more the weakness of its application base. Now mind you, there are some damn good/rock solid Linux software out there but it is not accessible to the masses as there is still a lot of Linux software that requires a healthy dose of comandline kungfu to use (care to even imagine how to edit a video using a command prompt driven piece of software?). I have argued many times that that most people just need a browser, an office suite, and solitaire and they are set… Linux can totally do those things, but I digress.

But now, it seems that Linux applications are coming of age. I was recently looking for a good alternative to Adobe Premiere and found the Wikipedia video editing software comparison page and noticed, most of the free editing packages out there are… Linux only?! I went to many of these sites and without having used the software I can truthfully say these are very capable pieces of software, worlds away from MS Movie Maker for sure. I was floored that there were only 1 or 2 freeware windows video editing programs compared to the 8-10 programs for Linux. This is not a bad thing, as I think I have mentioned in a previous post, my primary reason for using windows is the availability of applications out there, but I am happy to report that gap appears to be narrowing.

Heating Issues

Heating Issues
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Well I am in the middle of a Southern Azeri winter, which is about like winter in the Southeastern US, pretty mild. This is my second winter in Azerbaijan so I had an idea of what to expect, of the weather and I thought of the heating in the house I am staying in. Many of the houses here are heated by steam radiators which would be ok if there was enough gas; the primary heater in this town, little surprise given Azerbaijan's oil but the surprise was that the gas pressure was pathetic last year and would often go out (which was a particular pain because here the water tank heating mechanism consists of an open pipe spewing gas that you just light a match and pray it doesn't set off some chain reaction throughout the town). The person that lived in the house before me apparently didn't like heating with wood stoves so I got through most of last winter with a dinky wood stove and the leftover wood reserves. When I was first told “there is a wood stove stored at your house” by my staff I envisioned a nice old cast iron stove… oh well. This one is made of sheet-metal and while it doesn't retain heat worth anything it does heat up the room. This year the gas pressure is pretty good AND I got a heater that has a auto-shutoff mechanism on it so if the town gas goes off then back on this stove shuts off and stays off (as opposed to just a pipe with no mechanism which would just spew gas as soon as the gas came back on). Anyway, after a bit of thought I don't really remember seeing cast iron stoves outside of the N. America and Europe.

Closed mind?

I remember in school very often people would form their groups, usually based on social class, life philosophy and race/nationality.

I look at the development community and am somewhat reminded of high school. Every time people find out that i am an American working for a European organization they are usually surprised and working in a European organization i very rarely run into Americans. Now i never hear (perhaps because i am American but i don't think so) oh i don't hang out with Americans or hear Americans say they don't' hang out with Europeans and indeed i can think of many exceptions but in general, i seem to see Europeans at parties, restaurants, etc hanging out with each other and the same for Americans... disturbing. 

In job hunting i have discovered that many of the "beltway bandit" organizations pay better than average European (and American for that matter) organizations but the disturbing part to me is that i see this separation even more in people who work for these organizations.

OpenOffice.Org demos ribbon-style UI prototype

I just read a bit "OpenOffice.Org demos ribbon-style UI prototype". I am totally not a fan of the "ribbon style" in MSO or (apparently) the up and coming open office. While i admit that my compu-kungfu isn't what it used to be I am still not bad with figuring out and getting used to new programs but this new ribbon style gui is beyond me. I actually installed MSO 2007 specifically so i could make myself get accustomed to it but after a year i still find myself hunting around trying to figure out how to do this or that function that was just a drop down menu aways in MSO 2003.

A Turning Point For Afghan War, And For Obama : NPR

I was reading an article on the NPR site (A Turning Point For Afghan War, And For Obama : NPR) and one line struck me: "While some U.S. officials say that Obama is considering a plan to pull back from daily battles with the Taliban to focus more strictly on counterterrorism options, Republicans are pressing him to approve McChrystal's recommendations." 

Why isn't this situation a bit of a win for him? That is, if Republicans are pushing him to accept the generals recommendations but are pounding him on healthcare then why not say "ok, you want more troops, let my healthcare plan go through" so at least the dems will get thier healthcare (even if they want out of Afghanistan) and the reps will get their war... of course all this begs the question, where will the money come from and more importantly how will we pay it back.

The death of Google's "Do no evil" mantra

I recently came across an article "Google's not fighting Gmail subpoenas" that tells about how google is just handing over the information of some of its users. I remember reading about an instance where google denied (but eventually had to cave) the DoJ (or was it FBI?) access to IP addresses or emails or something, either way it seemed like they tried to do the right thing; but now, this seems to be part of a downward spiral for google, hopefully privacy groups will successfully take google to task for this.

Fantasies of a computer hobbyist

Asides from the obvious (lewd) ones which I will not go into I am dreaming of an i7 Core with USB v3.0. Yup, those are the two biggies for me. Of course gratuitous amounts of memory (4+ gigabytes, which means i would need a 64bit OS which again means i would need a realtively powerful [or at least new] computer), a really fast hard drive etc but right now I need a fast processor and speedy external storage.

I am working on three huge tasks which require CPUs of the workhorse variety.

Task #1 Graphics: I have about 35,000 photos that I am sifting through and organizing. This involves everything from image stitching to geotagging to retouching to IPTC keyword tagging etc and in large batches.

Task #2 Audio: I have about 28,000 songs to sift through, the sifting is apparently the most laborious part as I have whole albums that I only one 2-3 songs out of but there is other stuff such as adding acoustical fingerprints, MusicBrainz IDs, finding duplicates, etc.

Task 3# Video: I have video from the internet, and tons of video from the past 8 years of digital camera ownership. I want to start chopping, cropping, combining, and editing this stuff into something watchable (to just string all the stuff together would be insanely boring to watch).

Geekness (techno geek, not the chicken head eating geek): This isn't a task but is a point dealing with techno-lust. I  love linux, i don't use it nearly as much as i would like primarily because the majority of applications i need are  windows  only (though the things i use the most , like Opera, are also available in linux). There is a way to run two operating systems at once (wrap your head around that!) with virtualization but that requires heaps of memory and a hefty CPU doesn't hurt. As I alluded to previously a 32bit operating system  has a 2 gigabyte memory limit, that is i don't think it can use more than 2gb of memory no matter how much memory you actually have installed so to run dual operating systems (running windows 7 inside of linux) would require alot of memory and in order to use all the physical memory installed you need a 64bit OS)... got it? Not to mention that alot of video/audio/graphic editing (especially batch editing) requires insane amounts of memory.

All of the above requires semi-to-very serious processing power (which the i7 will handily be able to provide) and serious storage (not to mention read/write speeds). A geek reading this might say “what about eSATA?!” but if you look at the USB v3.0 speeds (4gbit/sec) compared to eSATA II (3Gbit/sec) there is no comparison. Of course the biggest problems now are that 

#1 Due to my globetrotting line of work I need something semi-portable (which means a mobile Core i7 [Clarksfield] which won’t be out for another month or two and won’t come down to a price that mere mortals can afford until after the new year) 
#2 USB v3.0 isn’t expected to be out en masse until mid 2010, Windows 7 doesn’t even have drivers for it yet.

As painful as it will certainly be I am thinking I need to hold off until the second quarter of 2010 at least before I get something. By then hopefully USB v3 will be out, prices will have come down, software support will be out (with major bugs fixed)… but damn that’s a long time to wait.

İsanın doğum günü münasibətilə!!!

Isanin dogum günü münasib?til?!!!
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Ok, that was supposed to be “Merry Christmas” in Azeri but it actually (literally) means “With the birth of Christ” which is strange anyway since Azerbaijan is an Islamic country… but I guess the Soviets instilled a sense of yuletide cheer in Azerbaijan too (Celebrate, Be Happy, or off to Siberia you go!!!). My staff was telling me that actually Azeris use Christmas trees as part of the New Year celebration and for that one would say “Yeni il” (Happy New Year I think).

Anyway, I saw this Christmas tree (or New Years tree as it were) while I was walking through town, I had seen an Azeri Santa Claus (Ded Moroz in Russian) and most amusingly an Azeri Snegurochka (Amusing because Russians are a “bit” prejudice and certainly have their own concept of the Russian ubermensch, which is almost always blonde, not a big deal except if you are familiar with Russian pride/tradition/culture) while walking around town so the Christmas tree was not so much of a surprise, I guess its just that in an Islamic country one doesn’t normally expect to find celebrations of a Christian holiday around (though if you as an Azeri they say that it is not a celebration of a Christian holiday at all, its for new years!)

Nixon dug deep for dirt on Ted Kennedy - Yahoo! News

I just came across this article today "Nixon dug deep for dirt on Ted Kennedy". I guess it is not a surprise to some but the dispicable levels that Nixon sank to, levels that you thought "na, even Nixon wouldn't do that" are amazing. These phone conversations are quite an eye opener, I just hope that the same information has been collected about Cheney and that they are published before he dies.

Offensive Thriftiness

Yesterday one of my staff asked if I would mind meeting two European inters who were doing some sort of evaluation of cheese production in Azerbaijan. I will post another time about my thoughts on trying to push European cheeses and cheese making practices on cultures that are perfectly happy with their local products. This post is about how these two were operating, they were carrying backpacks, they came by marshutka (like a van/taxi/bus service found in many CIS countries, and is quite cheap [albeit very uncomfortable]), and they don’t seem to want to pay for anything. They came and had some questions for me etc but seemed to be wanting more assistance which I ignored at first but then caved and offered the organization’s vehicle/driver to take them around a bit. One of my staff put these intern in her house for the night (I was not willing to go that far since I already have to host consultants and regional staff sometimes) and my staff also found a student who would do translation for me (seemingly for free) and these two girls don’t seem (hopefully they will prove me wrong) to have any inclination to reimburse the organization or this student translator. While not reimbursing an organization is acceptable having someone help you for free, not treating them to a lunch or transport back home just seems irresponsible and rude and no, not thrifty, it is downright cheap.

I have seen some pretty obnoxious expats, and some locals that are hell bent on ripping off expats but thankfully most expats seem pretty willing to compensate locals for time/services in some fashion. Those expats who mooch off of locals who are much less fortunate (financially) than they are… are just loathsome.

The impersonal nature of the extra personal networking sites

I accept that networking can be pretty impersonal, and the masters are those who can network and make every networkee feel like there is a personal connection; I am not one of those people. Now comes all these social services, like FaceBook (which is a bit more personal since there tends to be a less business like air about it) and LinkedIn which is a bit less personal due to its business angle... but the gaps between the two are narrowing.

I just received another invite through LinkedIn from a person I know of but hardly know personally, which is a step up from those i have never even heard of, and it was simply a "X wants to connect with you". I got another invite via Facebook which was almost the exact same thing, which is a bit more insulting to me in Facebook because both of these are generic invites but facebook is supposed to be more personal and in facebook i *thought* the purpose was to make friends not contacts. Anyway, I have inboxes in facebook and linkedin full of unaccepted invites. I have made it a point that anyone I invite (very few so far) I include a personal message to, to at the very least not give the appearance of totally superficiality be it for facebook or linkedin... I thought these two services were supposed to promote socialization but they seem to have done the opposite with people taking the attitude of who-ever-dies-with-the-most-online-friends/contacts-wins... sigh.

Mud Volcanos?

Well Mud Volcano would be a bit of an overstatement but it is the first thing that came to mind. Anyway, i am almost hesitant to upload this considering some of the fairly critical comments i have gotten for other uploads (such as driving along in Afghanistan, sorry no bombs or anything) but hey.

Ok, this is an area near the capital city of Azerbaijan (Baku). There are no signs to it or anything so if you dont have an Azeri with you (or dont speak the language) then you are SOL trying to find it. Some of the mounds were not bubbling constantly (I timed one to be about every 7 minutes) so i didn't feel like waiting around for the "perfect shot" especially after i got this one. I had thought (for some reason) the mud would be hot but not even, it was actually cold. I was told that many Azeris come there to put the mud on thier skin (kind of like an open air spa... without the spa). That is about it, for those of you looking for dancing cats or bombs etc you might not want to wait for this video to load and keep browsing.

Google should take geocities

I recently heard on the futuretense podcast that Yahoo would be closing geocities sometime in the near future. The covered how some organization "Archive Team" is trying to copy as much of geocities as they can. The first thing that came to my mind was "isn't archive.org doing this?" (apparenlty they stopped archiving geocities in 2002) but today i was studying up on using regular expressions (regex) in the Vim editor and found a webpage... on geocities (I guess Yahoo hasn't taken it down yet). After i noticed this it popped into my head, hey, google should buy geocities! Google now has its own webpages for its users and i would think that Geocities would be a steal now (plus google has already taken another icon from the pre-internet bubble age "De Ja News" and managed to monetize it why not geocities?

Anyway, hopefully someone will take geocities, as the "Archive Team" mentioned, there are alot of pages on geocities (including one of my own which i haven't accessed in years) which ind of give one a peek into the days-of-internet-yore; it would be a shame to loose that.

Drunk Squirrel

Apologies to all for the lack of postings, its kind of hard to post when you just don't feel like it (and i haven't). Anywho, I came across this video on youtube, kind of typical but there is a bit of irony that you might only get if you are Russian. In Russian culture squirrel (белочка) can be a reference to being drunk (I think it is something like "you are so drunk you imagine squirrels") so that made this particular video quite amusing. Just thought I'd share that little tidbit.

An unrelated side note: I use the opera browser the most and one of my gripes (more with the website than the browser since opera is w3 compliant) is that it didn't work with blogger... now it does! I can just click on the add link button instead of having to manually edit the HTML or use a different browser. Horay!!!

Getting harder to be anonymous

I have a facebook account but prefer not to advertise myself too much but now i am finding that other people who have pictures of me (like group shots) are now tagging me in those photos. As much as i do online i prefer to keep things private like where i live, phone, and photos etc
but that gets a bit difficult when people start posting photos of me (so far group photos) online... grrrr.

I have been accused of wearing my emotions on my sleeve but people on facebook take it to a whole new level. Another observation is that i seem to be almost totally friend-less since i have under 20 "friends" and many facebookers seem to literally have hundreds! I think i have invited maybe 2 people to "be my friends" but all the others have contacted me and even of all those who contact me i don't accept. I don't think i am being a snob but i kind of think, did i ever talk to
these people when i was around them (or did they ever talk to me), does this person have anything in common with me (for the few random friend invitations i have gotten from total strangers), and can I stand being associated with these people? (the epitome of snobbery but hey, there are some folks out there who i view as repulsive, slimy, hopelessly annoying etc and i think it would be rather insincere to accept them as "friends" when i view them in such lights).

Anyway, this whole social networking internet thing is a bit much for me, i perhaps i "just don't get it" though i do see its utility so its probably more accurate to say its a combination of
online-anti-social-ness and not "getting it". oh well.

Nadof is corrupt its America's fault but...

So many people countries are blaming the "corrupt USA", but how many people would invest in Russia or China etc? Only a very *brave* few, why? because those places are risky

The latest scandal with Nadof is a great example of carelessness, everyone assumed those "greedy Americans" would not be corrupt so businesses/people/countries invested ****blindly***** you can find many examples of professional investors that didn't fall for the Nadof hype and looked at the numbers and said "something is off". The same for the sub-prime market, packaged debt where no one knew what was in the package... but invested anyway... wildly... and now everyone is crying that there is corrupt business in the US (duh, care to compare the US to some other countries?).

*Of*Course* I am not even attempting to justify any of the corruption here, one of the reasons i might have considered voting for McCain is his semi-tough (shall we say tougher than the average politician which is perhaps not saying much) stance on corruption, but this reminds me of the saying "lotteries are taxes on people that are bad at math" well perhaps this whole financial debacle is a tax on irrational investors (though of course the repercussions are much further reaching than just the jobs of those irrational investors).

Microsoft and refusal to comply

I have a pretty slow internet connection so I really like blogger's option to email my blog entries and have them automatically posted (instead of having to go to a website, wait for each page to load, and then deal with how blogger *doesn't* play well with my browser of choice Opera). The problem i have is that my main email program is Outlook mainly for its PIM features and my HTC TyTN II plays best with outlook compared to other PIMs. Outlook adds in tons of HTML and "MS HTML" (ie non-W3C approved html code) to its emails, normally this is not a problem for regular emailing but blogger apparently doesn't like it so my blog posts come out all funky looking, quite irritating. This is a something that MS does quite often, that is, taking a standard and modifying it (ostensibly "improving it") in a way that makes other standard-compliant applications have problems. They somehow (my guess is through lobbying) got the their XML based document standard approved over OpenOffice's xml document format which was totally open thus flubbing the process.

Man Manicure & Massage

Ok, so it wasn't a manicure (though i have heard of straight guys getting manicures i am not one of them) it was a shave which to me is perhaps the male equivalent of a manicure. I think i have written about something like this before but i am too lazy to sift through my blog entries. I am working in a not-so-large town in south-central Azerbaijan so make no mistake, there are no amenities here that Azeri's would consider "extravagant" but there seems to be a convenient convergence of two cultural customs here barber shop shaves and therapeutic massages.

I have had a b*tch of a time finding places that do shaves in the US which is ironic to me for two reasons 1) I have heard stories about how back in the 50s (?) men just went to the barber shop in the morning to get a shave and 2) In this day of gyms/spas/manicures etc i would think a nice hot/close shave would be in the mix somewhere... apparently not. Its not just the US though, in places where stubble is en vogue (Italy, a place where my German friend commented, even the national news reporters can have a 5'oclock shadow and be in fashion) or where spindly beards are frowned upon (Thailand) or a place where almost all guys are very well shaved and a haircut costs a pittance (Moldova), its hard to get a shave in all those countries. The exceptions thus far are Afghanistan and now Azerbaijan.

I was a bit surprised at how many places you could get a fairly good shave in Afghanistan but it later started making sense as some ("modern leaning") Afghans think that facial hair is a bit uncouth or just a rural thing and then there are those that want to look like "good Muslims" there but also want to "look good" so a good shave/beard-trim becomes important. I went to a dirty little place near my office that had a very sharply dressed young barber there (and he used disposable razors) I am thinking (this is only "Davidson theory" i am not an anthropologist) that a combination of elements like the one that causes Moldovans to be so clean cut and that causes Afhgan's to consider getting a shave at a barber shop which converged here in Azerbaijan resulting in barbershops that give shaves, good ones too (though i fear it is dying here just as it has in the US, what a pity). The barber i go to has a small little place, i mean really small, about the size of a large walk in closet but he has a steady hand (important!), uses disposable razors (insanely important), uses the good ole brush n lather foam, and finishes up with aftershave and some baby powder type stuff... one comes out feel'n like a million bucks.

I have a friend who is a masseur, charges a kings ransom($50 *minimum*), and last time i checked she was having a hard time of it (and my guess is she is having a harder time now with the economy such as it is). Being a masseur you must charge alot especially if you have one or less clients a day but that pretty much makes it prohibitively expensive for po' folk such as myself... unless you live/work in developing countries! In many of the developing countries massages are a maximum of $20 (that was at a expat place in Cambodia), it was $10 at a Chinese place in Cambodia (which was more for locals and IMHO was at least as good as the expat massage place), in Thailand the little old lady gumby massages were like $4 (I usually tipped an extra $1) and in Moldova it was about $7. Here in Azerbaijan it is 6AZN (1AZN ~1EUR) for 40minutes... not bad at all, even on my pathetic salary.

I don't think the massage thing is a cultural convergence thing really, I have noticed that most Russian trained doctors are trained in how to give therapeutic massages and there are also trained masseurs as well. Azerbaijan is a former Soviet republic and it is not hard to see how that has influenced many aspects of society here but not totally, they are still pretty socially conservative (specially regarding interactions between men and women, i had a hell of a time finding a Russian teacher because most of the teachers [or their husbands] didn't think it would be appropriate to teach a guy...grrrrr). Well i found out in Moldova that even the village doctors gave massages and so i thought i would check out here, and yup, they got em. It was a bit awkward at first because the girl (well 20s) didn't speak English and i only speak mediocre Russian so she put me in a room and i guess told me to undress but i wasn't sure how far was acceptable (the Russian tutor finding thing now makes me nervous about offending locals) so i stripped down to pants/t-shirt and when she came in she gave me what sounded like a "I'm supposed to give you a massage like that?!" spiel, i got it and went to my boxers no problem and got a pretty good massage. There are different nuances every place i go, in Cambodia i don't remember anything in particular but in Thailand the little old ladies would freak out if you took off any more than your shoes (this was at *real* massage places, not the brothels, people don't usually take you seriously if you are a guy and say "I want a massage", they just assume you are referring to its euphemism). The Thai massages usually consisted of an unnaturally strong little old woman (trust me, not brothel material) who would do things like put her foot in your arm pit and pull your arm, pushing the limits of ones ligaments (not to mention physics) and you would come out feeling like gumby reincarnate... didn't really help so much if you had knots in your back but i image would be excellent after a exercise workout.