He's pretty glad to get out of that Baku's only hostel. it's just a family home and it seems the family isn't all on the same page when it come to turning their home into a rooming place for scraggly strangers. Most of the family doesn't speak English, and one of the daughters has a fit when she catches him washing my clothes in the sink (instead of paying the extra fee to use the washer). Apparently they don't have a very good understanding of what the backpacker/hostel culture is about.
He does meet a couple of interesting folks, like a young Swiss fellow who cycled here from his home country ...
Taking the Baku metro feels a bit like a trip through time. At the top the Old City station is an elegant, glass structure, where you can either buy a rechargeable card, or wait by the recharging machine and give someone money to recharge their card--and they'll swipe you in.
But as the escalator plunges into the bowels of Baku, it takes on a more old Soviet feel, with stern women in uniforn watching people as they go up and down the escalators. The signs are few, confusing and not necessarily correct. Even though there are just a couple of lines, you can easily get confused, as different trains run on the same line. 
Once aboard the crowded subway, he's squeezed against someone and the immediately starts brushing himself off. Suddenly it strikes the Traveler that he look extremely under-dressed here--people dress very elegantly here.  
He reaches the station where he can catch a quick minibus ride to the main bus station (no taxi ever again!) and here wanders about checking out his options. It's really nice to be able to read the destinations written on the buses .
The Azeri alphabet has an interesting history. Once written only in the Perso-Arabic script (and still is, in Iran), in the 1920s, they decided to follow step with Turkey and switch to the Latin alphabet... then just a few years later came the Soviet takeover and they switched to the Cyrillic script... then in 1991, they went back to the the Latin script.  
This is sort of symbolic of Azerbaijan's confusing identity search, here forever a country "in between".
Not wanting to be inefficient as other Latin alphabet languages like English (why the hell do we need 4 letters that make the "k" sound?) They decided to be more resourceful and put the redundant letters to use. So the Q is used for the "gh" sound, and the X is used for the throaty "kh" sound, and the C is for the "zh" sound. Makes sense to me...
They also taken their most common vowel sound the phonetic upside down e... and... kept it as an upside down e! This might've worked well if it weren't for the internet age. Trying to look up a Azerbaijani city on the internet can be frustrating--as there's the official spelling, then a bunch of alternate spellings on the internet for users who haven't fingured out how to type the upsidedown e!
Good try Azerbaijan. Too bad the rest of the world hasn't followed suit and uncluttered their alphabets and made them purely phonetic!
Anyways...
Wanting to explore the south of Azerbaijan, he goes ahead and hops on a van that's going all the way to Astara, the town on the border with Iran.  
Women in Azerbaijan

He notices a couple of things about public transportation. For one thing, people are very polite and gentlemanly. If a woman or an older person gets aboard, immediately someone will offer them a seat--or in some cases squeeze to the side to make a 2 person seat into a 3 person seat.  
Also, as they enter rural areas, you still don't see women wearing headscarves. Younger women wear modern--even revealing clothes, however men do not stare at them or disrespect them in any way. Never in his entire time in Azerbaijan does he see a man disrespecting a woman on the street.  
The irony is that, many Muslims in other countries consider Azerbaijanis to not be "good Muslims" because the drink alcohol (in moderation, generally), and many do not pray or fast in Ramadan. To this I would answer that being a "good Muslim" (same as being a "good Christian" or a "good whatever...") basically boils down to one thing: treating people around you well. And by this standard, I would say, Azerbaijanis are very good Muslims. 
Anyways... back to my trip south....
The landscape changes dramatically over the miles from a desolate moonscape around Baku to a lush, almost tropical feel in the south, with steep little hills jutting up blanketed in thick greenery. Gradually the minibus gets emptier and emptier as they approach Astara and he's starting to wonder if there's really a town there at all. Suddenly he realizes he might have some explaining to do as to why an American tourist is getting off at the border with Iran...
Finally they do reach a small town which seems to mainly consist of long walls alongside the road with no way to see what's behind. he walks a little further and a fellow asks him what he's looking for 
"Sehir merkezi?" the man sayshe can show me the way... but when when they reach a little plaza with a flagpole, the Traveler chickens out and decides not to go any further. He has this feeling that he's being watched, and he doesn't want to walk right up to the border and have to give awkward explanations
"Uh... no... I'm not planning to visit Iran... I just thought I'm come see what the border looks like..."
He finds another street he can loop back up to the minibus station. Seems like a bummer to come all this way and not really do much more than walk around the block.
A couple guys in front of a hardware store ask him to play some songs for them and he obliges... haven't seen anywhere to do a decent parkbench session/video clip--so maybe I'll just do a video clip with them and call this town finished.
Actually Astara does end up having a special significance that he doesn't realize until later: it's the Southeasternmost town of Europe... if you consider Azerbaijan part of Europe...