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Currently I'm writing you in a highly air conditioned room in a country with outstanding paved roads and restaurants dedicated to slow cooking pork. I haven't left the Peace Corps, but am lucky enough to come stateside for my sister's wedding. Going home for a wedding in the Peace Corps is the best. There's no concern of not toughing out the full two years and everybody in your community is so excited the American is doing their favorite thing-going to a family member's wedding.
The strongest signal I was returning to my cultural homeland happened in the Moscow airport. As the agent notified passengers he would begin boarding people began to line up, to be helped, in order of their position in line. And I exhaled one of the largest sighs of relief in the past 10 months. Just hours earlier I was in a concert-like experience to check my baggage, positioning my body and extending my elbows slowly inching closer and closer to service.
See, lines don't exist in Azerbaijan. I don't mean this in a funny 'haha' way, I mean this in a fundamental, cultural psychological way. People don't line up to get service. Here's a couple real life examples to show what I mean:
I am waiting to get into the local fun center, a place with small carnival rides and food. I have my manat out and am in the process of getting a ticket from the man at the door. Someone walks right up to him, gives a dollar, and walks in right before me. The man then gives me my ticket.
I am at the post office paying my gas bill. There are two men in front of me, crowding around the cashier's window. I position myself about 10-12 inches behind them. A man walks between me and those men. I mean he literally, quite deftly positioned himself in the narrow space between me and the two men. And never gave a second thought to it.
I am in a crowd of people, waiting to withdraw money from the ATM. I am now in front of the machine fishing my wallet out. A man walks up to the crowd, sticks his card in before I do, and pushes himself in front of me to enter his pin. After he leaves I use the ATM.
First experienced it strikes you as the height of rudeness. Actually, repeated experiences continue to strike you as the height of rudeness. I mean, this is basic stuff people, kindergarden stuff: No cutters! Cutters go to the back of the line! Whenever I see this happen I go on red alert to administer some hall pass justice.
But the more I see it and the more I live in this culture I realize that its not actually rude, its not even considered. Lines, and serving people in a specific order based on the notion of time of arrival hardly exists culturally. There's no idea of 'next person' because there's no idea of 'line'; or maybe its the other way around. Whichever way it is, its really jarring. I am continually thrown for curves in 'waiting for service' situations because I have no clue how Azerbaijanis organize themselves, if they do at all, for service.
This is probably one of the more fundamental differences I've observed. Everything else I feel I've been able to learn, get used to, or accept, but this is something that continues to throw me off every time I experience it. No matter how often it happens I am not expecting it and I can't figure out what I'm not doing that leads people to do it. I don't know how Azeris wait.
Back in Moscow, I'm enjoying my sudden change of luck; waiting in line for the agent to rip my ticket, waiting in line to get on the bus taxiing us to the plane, waiting in line to board the aircraft. Oh yeah, it feels good.
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