About Vodka

I just want to say that we`ve been making alot of fun about the drinking habits of these countries, but in the bigger perspective it is of course mainly bad and tragic that people drink so much. It looks funny when a restaurant with nothing on the menu offer seven differnt vodkas or when someone pours you a drinking glas (as opposed to a shot glas) of booze at ten in the morning. But it is not funny really. We have seen so many people stumbling next to the highway or just sitting by the road all day long, apatic, drinking. It is a very horrible sign of the poverty in this area since it only creates more misery.

The intoxicated people are only men and at the houses we`ve been staying women are doing all kinds of heavy work, like carrying water and heating it up for the tourists as there is no running water in many places, while the husbands are out drinking. The effects are also (as you have seen) sometimes violent. I think this is a Soviet inheritance, even in Azerbaijan (muslim), which we just entered, it seems people drink. In some ways it will be nice to come to more muslim countries as poverty there does not take this expression.