Ive seen lots of prictures of friends going to Baku- probably because flights to the city are cheap and it is a city that is quite comfortable to be in.
My first day I got up early, ready to explore geographicly widespread city sights on foot, only to realize that there was almost no pavements or pedestrian crossings in the city! Sure the bus and metro worked fine to use, but as the air was much cooler and pleasant than what I was used to I wanted to walk, and constantly found myself having to sprint between cars to get across the roads.
Baku also has an old fortified city with cobblestone streets that was a pleasure to walk. People were drinking wine and doing fine dining at cafés by the streets next to beautiful old buildings such as mosques, minarets and maybe most famously the Maiden tower used as an observatory for astrology and defense tower.
Baku has a bit of a bragging factor with all the fancy, lit up buildings built in the recent oil boom, which like Dubai, a lot of tourists apparently like, but it was not the right city for me. Azerbadjan shares a lot of its culture with the Turkish and except for more fine dining restaurants I only found places selling schwarmas/kebabs and sweet Turkish baklavas. Also the taxi drivers and Street sellers were as pushy as you would find in Turkey. Quite different from my experience in the neighboring Armenia and Georgia.
I also got to do a trip to the Yanar Dag Mountain where there is gas leaking from a mountain creating an eternal fire, which supposedly was accidentally lit up by a farmer in the 1950s who threw his cigarette on the ground. The sight was cool to watch for about five minutes, before I got in a bus back to the city.
