Gypsy Attack!

You read that correctly! The most ridiculous attempted bus journey began with a gypsy attack. 

So after New Years in Baku, I stayed with my northern neighbors up in Balaken for 2 nights. It was awesome! Stephanie and Bailey are hilarious. Bailey's family plays this ridiculous game that's faux monopoly. It has many rules that are very difficult to understand and the properties are written in English because the kids are cool. Well you start with $2000 but the cheapest property is about $10,000, also only one die so you can see this would take forever. However if you jump to that conclusion you are wrong because you can play one of many games. You can roll a six and get $80,000 or roll a 4 and lose the same amount! Why? Because children taped four pieces of paper together and called it monopoly. Bailey bought a property called, "Baby Shoot," brilliant! Needless to say I had to leave because school starts tomorrow, so I left a bit before noon in hopes of returning to Qax by 2p. 

No dice! I get to Zagatala to do my little switch-a-roo just fine, but of course I'm five minutes late:( So I call up my Zag-town friends because I have a bit over an hour to waste. We hang out, get a bit into our dominoes game and I decide to take the second to last bus home. I believe this is where people decided to mess with me, that action was just just asking for trouble. After a bit more fun Mr. Bionical and Jessica walk me down to the bus station where we meet a cool little chick who lives in Qax and was all about speaking English. However there were also two gypsy women and about six or seven gypsy kids. At one point we tried stepping away from them and they just kept their bodies pressed against us following where we stepped. I busted out the azeri"don't touch me," and I think they realized that we weren't giving them anything. Well I head over, with my new little Qax friend to where the bus normally picks up as it rounds the corner. It stopped dead center and nearly all 50 or so people at the bus stop start running. I kid you not, cute little old people had to watch out because the gypsies were shouting and throwing their children in the bus. Kind of like crowd surfing. They got the kids and everything in seats and wouldn't stand for the elderly people which is NOT OKAY in this culture. Anyways, as we pull away I'm in a make shift lunge and the gypsies and xanim's are all yelling at each other, while Mr. Bionical and Jessica give me the most sympathetic looks I've seen. Thanks guys, too much crazy.

After we travel about one mile with random men jumping in the still open doors we stop so the driver can talk with the cop. That didn't go so well. I hear shouting and the driver jumps back in the bus, steaming mad, as the police car pulls up door open yelling at the driver. My driver yells something along the lines of expensive, as in hey hey hey I am not paying your bribe, and we drive away. of course the police car drives super slowly in front of us trying to get him to stop but he just honks until the police man moves, which he does. We're rockin' and rollin' now, and we get to the first random stop on the side of the road. We all smell something funny, but the driver keeps going. Next stop, all of the men pile out as about 7 more people add on. This happens a few times until we, meaning the women folk, realize that the tires are burning. Next stop was a quick one, just long enough for a nice muslim man to leave some money in the hole of the church wall. Of course the quickest little gypsy ran to get it and spent about a mile running behind the bus as the driver wasn't going to let him back on after that. Next stop, Güllük.

About halfway between bus station, in a random little village called Güllük, we are all told to get off. So I do, just in time to see the gypsies booking it so they don't have to pay. Joke's on them, none of us did because he left us there for 1.5 hours to wait for the final bus. WHAT? I stood at the road and talked with some folks. I'm glad I was good entertainment for them. You know, 23, unmarried, super weird it was a good wait. Had some Georgian friends and of course my cute little Qax girl and her mom. It was good times. The final bus came, we arrived at Qax and I even got a free taxi home because he was so talkative. All in all, I got home at 7p, really super dark, but very glad not to be in the village with those gypsies.