Have you ever been to Aserbaijan?

Have you ever been to Aserbaijan?

„Cuckoo Clocks in Baku – A journey to a land which really exists“

The Sprachenatelier Berlin is organising a themed night about Aserbaijan on Friday 29th September 2006 from 19:00.

Ingo Petz, a journalist and author from Friedrichshain, will be presenting his newest work „Cuckoo Clocks in Baku – A journey to a land which really exists“.

The reason for this journey was Ingo Petz' desire to flee the German daily grind, so he found a country which could not be found in any travel agency magazines; a country in which even the most hardcore backpackers get lost. A country, which smells like salt, oil and smog and in which you will be greeted with the words „Oli Kahn!“. And he made many discoveries. The first was that Aserbaijan is a land for rebels and adventurers; strange, bizarre and very very different. The second was that despite traveling thousands of kilometres from his home town, Ingo discovered that the German people were everywhere, on every corneer. "So I went to Aserbaijan, where they shrug at the name Che Guevara, where driving taxis is a kind of philosophy noire, where even today real Schwarzwälder clocks can be found at the foot of the Kaukasus and where Helmut Kohl is still seen as a hero.“

"Cuckoo clocks in Baku" belongs to one of the weirder, more amazing travel writings from an exotic country. Petz manages to reflect the German ways of life in the strange daily Aserbaijanian life. Ingo Petz studied East European history, Slavic studies and politics in Cologne and Wolgograd. He worked as a correspondant in New Zealand for some time, but had enough of the landscape and packed his bags aiming to travel to Aserbaijan as a scholar of the Gräfin-Marion-Dönhoff. Since then, this country has never ceased to fascinate him.