An Armenian Hobby: Jumping the Queue

It seems to me that Armenians’ favorite hobby is jumping the queue. Wherever you have to wait – in your car at a red traffic light, in a shop or at the post-office – you can be sure that someone will try to get in the queue in front of you. It really drives me crazy. And I cannot understand why usually no-one tells the perpetrators off. I always ask people more or less politely (it’s become less politely recently) to wait at the end of the queue. However, in doing so I am the odd one out. Even the salespersons serve the queue-jumpers politely and do not ask them to go back and wait.
According to my Armenian colleague this behavior is a legacy of the Soviet times, where you could not be sure to get what you wanted, if you waited in the queue. I think this is a rather weak argument some 15 years after the collapse of the evil empire. Also if this was true, why don’t the ones, who wait normally, tell the queue-jumpers off? To me it is one of the many mysteries of life in Armenia.
There is another famous Armenian habit related to queues. It’s the habit of reserving a spot. If you wait in a queue, it can happen that people in front of you claim that this is their spot (not in absolute terms, but relatively to your own position, i.e. their spot is always the spot in front of you). Then they disappear for a certain time to do their shopping or whatever and, when they come back, they step in in front of you to take up what is rightly theirs. So, sometimes it happens that you expect to wait for 10 minutes, but because of all the reservations it takes an hour or so. Absolutely fascinating.

A trip to Azerbaijan

Last week I had to make a work-related visit to Azerbaijan. I drove to Tbilisi first, and from there continued to the Azeri border together with a colleague who joined me in Tiblisi. He told me to mention Armenia as little as possible while in Azerbaijan and to leave my Armenian money behind as it was against Azeri law to possess Drams. Apparently they once had an intern in their project, who accidentally paid a taxi-driver in Baku Armenian Drams. Soon after the police turned up at their office to clarify what had happened. (The intern is still alive.)

My colleague’s words of warning and the armed guards at the border made me feel, as if I was an Armenian spy on my way to a hostile country. A really queer feeling. However, crossing the border was not a problem since I already had my visa and our Azeri colleagues welcomed us very warmly.

The 3 days I spent in Azerbaijan were actually very pleasant, although I had to try real hard to replace my habitual “Barev Dsez” by “Salam Aleikum”. I could even talk normally about Armenia with the locals, who work for our project in Azerbaijan, and it was really interesting to hear their opinion on the Karabagh conflict. On the one hand they referred to Karabagh and the corridor as “their land”. On the other hand, they said that fundamentally they did not care which country Karabagh belonged to, as long as a peace agreement was found and the borders were opened again. However, in public no real discussion is possible on this subject as deviating from the official line concerning Karabagh can lead to negative personal consequences. This is hardly surprising in a country where the presidential powers are handed down from father to son, and where you can see pictures of Heydar Aliev and his son Ilham everywhere – which is actually hilarious. Here is one example:



Whatever the political situation, I personally find it very sad, that the borders are closed and that there is a stalemate between Azerbaijan and Armenia. During my stay, I was thinking, what an amazing place the South Caucasus would be for tourism, if it was easier to travel around. Not to mention the potential for trade…

Well, well, the situation will probably not change soon, so for those, who wondered what lies beyond the Sevan mountains, here is a picture from the other side:


(Oops, I hope this picture does not contain secret information. In any case, don’t tell Ilham about this blog…)