Georgia, the Country

Georgia is mind blowing.  First of all the fact that everyone speaks Russian, or at least the older generation - it’s like visiting an exotic land with a full access to the culture.

My general impression of Tbilisi is of a city that used to be the capital of a great empire and then lost all its glamour and now stands in ruins.  Anna lives in the historic center, you could see that the houses were once very beautiful, with exquisite decorations, terraces and huge windows.  Now they are in such an advanced state of decay that many of the apartments stand empty because the ceilings are falling down and the stairs are broken.  Makes me think of Ayn Rand descriptions of gentry mansions taken by peasant families after the great revolution.  I’ve been to third world countries and I’ve seen greater poverty and misery, but there’s something really tragic about the city, which reminds me also how I felt in Havana Cuba, that these people can do much better and they’ve done better and they can still remember it.

Soviet memories are everywhere.  The subway looks exactly like in Moscow, only cheaper.  The same marble walls, super long and superfast escalators, and the clock that’s counting the time since the last train instead of the time left.  Soviet broken roads, Soviet cars along with the Mercedeses, Soviet faces.  Old grandmothers selling stuff on every street corner, sunflower seeds, cigarettes (€1 for a pack of Camels official price!) popcorn, little green Sauer plums, Soviet books in Russian and Georgian about the latest advancement of the five year plan.

My friend Anna told me that the new state has been implementing the most predatory form of capitalism, getting rid of such things as production quality control, import tax (thus the cigarette price) and vehicle pollution control under the pretext that the free market will regularize it by itself.  And it does in its own way, people get sick all the time and it’s hard to breathe in the city, which makes smoking and extra cigarettes not much of a difference.

When I asked my next seat neighbor in the airplane what George is like, he said something enigmatic along the lines of “I can’t quite characterize it, but maybe it will make you feel like a woman…”. Ha!  He was right!  Men stare at you all the time here, like you were both naked AND having horns and tail.  And it’s not like Georgian women don’t dress three times sexier than me, with their long hair, summer dresses and high heels.  But Anna said you can tell, who is a Georgian virgin, even if her hymen has only been technically repaired, and who is a slutty foreigner, better even from the “post-Soviet space”.  She promised that they only look and don’t touch, but it’s very intimidating, not least because of the bad fame the rough men from Caucasus earned in the Soviet movies of my childhood.

Anna is good fun.  She has a huge apartment with the porch overlooking the president’s private estate on top of the mountain with a private helicopter landing platform.  Downstairs there is a bakery, so you can smell the rising dough all night and dream of hot buns dressed in Soviet uniform staring you while munching on their Churchkhela.  Tonight we’re going to the Freedom Music Festival, hopefully to see some alternative Tbilisi scene.

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The music festival was a strangely anti-commercial experience.  The entrance was free, but you had to go to some place to ask some people to give you the tickets, who diligently wrote down your email address and transliterated your name in Georgian on the guest list, handing you four tickets at once, which canceled the ideal face control.

We met up with Anna’s friends at the main square, six of us, to catch a taxi to the venue.  Without further ado the guys thumb down a car and squeeze in, all the six, I follow without giving it too much thought because my mind is occupied by the attempt to rationalize the fact that the driver sits on the right side of the car. “Ah that? It’s because he imported it from Japan.  I told you, low income tax” says Anna.

The festival looks like a normal music festival, only that there are no sponsor ads, no one tries to sell anything, no Coca-Cola, Pepsi or Nike in sight, only nameless bier and cigarettes.  Why would you be selling so many cigarettes at a music festival?  How many cigarettes can a person smoke?  Probably less than hot dogs, hamburgers and French fries he could and would want to eat.  I catch myself on the thought that I’m actually trying to come up with a marketing strategy for the event.  Why am I doing this?  I stop.  I’m looking at men.  I notice that they outnumber women probably 5 to 1. Georgi, our Georgian friend, tells us that mothers often abort female babies.  He also tells us that it’s the first electronic festival in Georgia, rock music is more popular here.  Electronic music is played in only one club which became marginal since its frequented by the gay community.  Last month there was a huge anti-homosexual demonstration led by clerics, where people were beaten up badly, which left the more progressive youth in the state of shock.  People were afraid that the festival can provoke another homophobe reaction.

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The next day Anna took me to the famous Georgian mountains.  I know I have mentioned my Soviet childhood already, but this one was like a direct time travel, back to that summer when we took the train to the Black Sea, my parents and I, for three days and three nights sharing a tiny dusty cabin with a strange lady, eating boiled chicken out of aluminum foil, buying salted fish from vendors at all the train stations in the middle of nowhere, since for me any place outside of Moscow was a nowhere.  The trains are still the same, with the sign saying “stop-kran” in Russian and an electric socket with a picture of little electric shaver next to it, only the toilets got smellier, as if no one washed them since 1987, and the car conductor didn’t serve tea in the glasses with a metal glass holder à la bourgeoisie anymore - just another evidence for my growing certainty that life here was actually better under communism, for all the wrong reasons.

From the train station we took a minivan up to the mountains, four hours speeding up on a serpentine road, two times almost crashing into stray calves, forced to listen to a deadly mixture of cheesy Russian disco and Georgian folklore.  From the main village we still had to hitchhike to a more remote one where the aunt of Anna’s Georgian friend would let us stay overnight in the deserted family house.  On the first ride we learned that nothing can stop a Georgian man from trying to marry a blond woman (Anna).  The second driver who picked us up turned out to be Anna’s friend’s classmate, both called Georgi, two out of the six Georgis in a class of 17 boys, how convenient. Georgi nº 2 took us straight to number one’s aunt’s house “ah Margiani!  Of course I know where he lives!  Also if you want, after you settle down I can take you on a hike in the mountains , I was just about to show Lasha, my friends here , the trail that he has to take his British tourists on Monday ”.  Of course we do!

The views were breathtaking, just as promised by Google Images.  Our communication was strenuous at the beginning, but we quickly found a way to get along in a mixture of three languages out of the ten we shared between us.  It tuned out that apart from a basic English, a broken  Russian, Georgian and the regional Svan, Georgi also spoke an impressive German, thanks to an internships in honey production he did in Germany.  But some things didn’t require talking.  At the top of the hill Georgi  produced a 500 cc Coca-Cola bottle filled with homemade Georgian apple brew with over 40% alcohol, then he sliced up two tomatoes and set up for a feast.  After the first serving Georgi and Lasha started singing acappella traditional Georgian songs, on the second serving we all started dancing, after the third we realized that the sun was setting down and that we were starving.  Serendipitously, Georgi 2 had an aunt in the very same village, who, apparently like every other aunt, baked hachapuri for dinner out of fresh dairy products and was always happy to receive guests.  Tasting homemade cheese and feijoa jam was as amazing to me as the fact that I possessed a language in which I could communicate to an old woman in a place with no roads and no running water, and that the reason why her nephew could speak the same language was because Russian dubbed movies were much more widely available for download than the ones in Georgian.  Another surprising discovery was that all of these amazing fresh products could be easily purchased in the local grocery in the capital Tbilisi.  Just like that, with no list of ingredients or calorie count or expiration date, you just have to trust the lady at the counter when she says “this one is from the factory, but that one is from the village.  If you want that one you better come tomorrow, because today it’s a day old.” When I told this story to my grandmother in Israel, I tried her “granny, do you know how to make tvorog?” sure, she said, “it’s very easy. By the way do you know that they opened a store called “Tbilisi” in my building?  They sell matzoni and sulguni and all the other stuff, but our Georgian tailor says that their lavash is really bad.” This made a perfect economic sense. According to the man I chatted up in the Tbilisi synagogue, out of the 140,000 Georgian Jews more than 120,000 found their way to Israel over the last two decades, only 4000 have stayed in the city.  In fact Georgia has a very special relationship with Israel.  The official reason is that the Georgians just love the Jews, making the perfect neighbors for the last 25 centuries, never a scandal, never a ghetto.  The unofficial reason is that Israel has been selling it weapons, supporting Georgia against Russia.  The conspiracy theory version I learned from an Israeli backpacker is that the former minister of defense was a Georgian jew who returned from Israel back to Georgia for a political career.  At any rate, for the first time in my life saying that I am an Israeli was magical, like saying that I’m the lost daughter of John Lennon to a hippy or the adopted granddaughter of Martin Luther King to a lefty.  Taxi drivers gave me free rides, village people invited me to stay over, everyone had a classmate or a colleague who left for Israel, some went there themselves as pilgrims, others for medical tourism.  I made a meager attempt to explain the occupation and the militarism with no avail.

Back to the story, after filling our tummies we taught Georgi and Lasha to play charades, quickly converging on Soviet themes – we all remembered “zelyonka”, the green substance you smear on your chicken pox; we all read “The Twelve Chairs”, a post-revolutionary satire; and we all put “naftalin” odor  balls in the closet against the moth – be it in Russia, Ukraine or Georgia.

For me, Georgia seemed to exist in a different time and space, which made me connect to people on a different new level.  Back in Tbilisi I met an Iranian guy in a bar, a professor in industrial engineering researching renewable energies, hitchhiking all around South and Central Asia and the Muslim world.  We had a lengthy conversation about democracy and U.S. intervention, while I tried in vain to understand the intricacies of what is allowed and forbidden in Iran.  I’ve realized that I knew all about the Algerians and the Moroccans in France, the Turks and the Palestinians in Germany, the Mexicans in the U.S., Who moved where why and how, who does whose dirty job, who goes where for vacation.  But I had no idea that the migrant workers in Iran are the Afghans and the Tajiks since they all share the Persian language; I didn’t know that there are no diplomatic relations between the neighboring Armenia and Azerbaijan, so my Iranian friend had to cross from the one to the other through Georgia.  It’s funny that not being European at all I found myself so Euro-centered. The mental distance from Tel Aviv to Paris was so much shorter than from Tel Aviv to Amman, and Teheran was further than the moon.

Back in Paris I’m taking a Sunday off, finally finding the time to go to the city historical museum.  Miniatures of the Bastille, portraits of Marie Antoinette and Robespierre, elegant ballrooms, exquisite ladies with huge feather hats, pictures of Montmartre in the rain, literary salons and cafes – all so familiar, for me these are childhood memories from Moscow museums and the depictions of Russian aristocracy in Pushkin’s poems.  Tbilisi also reminded me that Paris was there before Moscow - the once beautiful old city art nouveau facades, the old post cards with French inscriptions underneath the Russian.  It’s funny how fast we forget.