31 October 2015

Good Talk

It is indeed a good day when you get a cork out of a bottle of Saperavi wine from the Kakheti region of Georgia without a corkscrew.

Halloween Saturday without any of Target's Halloween hype began with the metro to Liberty Square. Liberty Square or Freedom Square? It's called both, and every time I hear one of the two I debate whether it sounds better than the other. Freedom and liberty are not really synonyms, are they? Tallinn has a Freedom Square, and Walt Disney World has a Liberty Square. So I lean towards Freedom Square. However, Patrick Henry said, "Give me liberty or give me death", not give me freedom. Wikipedia files this spot in the heart of Tbilisi under Freedom Square with a monument to liberty (since 2006) in the center.

There are more people at the Liberty Square metro station than at the square itself, which today is a roundabout so wide USAC could hold a special midget race on it. Walking out of the metro station is like emerging from customs at O'Hare: everyone is facing you and groups of three and four are sizing you up, wanting to make eye contact with their tardy friends or delayed relatives. These are the local, everyday greeters to Shota Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilisi's Paris-like thoroughfare lined with imposing classical, Moorish, and Rococo theaters; a vacant Parliament building in "Soviet classic" form; and an early 20th-century Orthodox church that commemorates the site where a woman gave birth to a stone in retribution for falsely accusing a monk of impregnating her. Ouch.

The National Gallery, originally built "to showcase the power of the Russian Empire", is one of the smaller monoliths along Rustaveli. I walked into the museum like I was meeting an old grade school classmate, Niko Pirosmani. The somber cashier, whose hair, I later thought, was the same black as many of Pirosmani's backgrounds, took my five-lari note and stapled a receipt to a ticket and then handed both to me without ever parting her lips, let alone uttering a welcome. 

Pirosmani is my new favourite artist, just behind the Estonian Jüri Mildeberg. The National Gallery's Pirosmani exhibit includes Arsenal Hill at Night, purchased over the summer of 2015 at a Christie's auction for $1.5 million and then gifted by the buyer to the people of Georgia.

After two or three reverent, measured, silent pauses in front of each Pirosmani, I walked from the National Gallery up Rustaveli (away from Freedom Square) to Smart, the Mariano's-like supermarket chain that has a Wendy's and a Dunkin' Donuts in each of its stores. (The fries and Frosties are the real thing, but the hamburger patties are very thin.) I realized that I had been living in a country for six weeks that has been producing wine for over 7,000 years but had not been drinking any of it! So I picked up the bottle of Saperavi and met my host brother coming from the National Parliamentary Library, of which I, too, am a card-carrying reader, just a block off Rustaveli.

Only within the last year or two had a Dunkin' Donuts and Subway opened up in Chicago's Little Village community, where I worked. Here in Tbilisi I am working within walking distance of a Dunkin' Donuts, a Subway, a McDonalds, and a Whittard of Chelsea English Tea House. Go figure. Of course, I prefer the local Cafe Sapore with its cold pizzas, sandwiches, hamburgers, and Turkish sweets.  

From our Akhmetelis Teatri metro stop my host brother and I dropped by a friend's flat; he had invited us to stop by for grapes fresh from eastern Georgia. As we were picking them off the stem and popping them into our mouths two and three at a time, his flatmate came home and offered us a trip to East Point. I looked at him with a blank face. It was disbelief, astonishment, and elation trying to thwart personal failure. There was another mall besides the Tbilisi Mall with the Carrefour hypermarket! No, wait, I mean: There was? What a great developing country I live in.
  
To get from our Gldani community on the north side to Varketili on the east side, we drove along the Tbilisi Sea, passing the athletes' village for the July 2015 European Youth Olympic Festival and the new Hotels and Preference Hualing Hotel, which are both part of Hualing of China's "New City" development and Tbilisi's future as a logistics hub. It looked a bit deserted. 

Before sailing over the smooth asphalt of East Point's lighted, landscaped parking lot, we bounced up and down and swerved left and right on wet, dark, pockmarked neighborhood backstreets to a cemetery. It was Halloween after all, and, on the eve of All Saints Day, rather appropriate - in reality, coincidental - for my Georgian friends to visit a buddy, born in the 1970s, I realized, deciphering his tombstone, who had passed away over the summer. As we drove out through the cemetery, I saw several ghosts, that is, five-foot-tall, black, marble slabs standing beside grave sites with the head-to-toe images of, I presumed, the dearly departed etched on them!


The first time I saw an Estonian cemetery, I was caught off guard by the short benches at the foot of many graves, where relatives and friends sat while visiting with the deceased. The graves themselves looked like feng shui sand gardens. This Georgian cemetery had benches and a few small pavilions for relatives to picnic graveside with their lost loved ones. Walking through Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria in 2008, I was a bit spooked by the unknowing faces of individuals bereft of life who stared out from home-made "death notices" stuck to boarded up storefronts throughout the city. (A random blog on obituaries calls them "necrologs".) So intrigued - I mean imagine 10 or 20 obituaries from the back of the local newspaper stapled to the community bulletin boards at the Starbucks or Family Dollar - I took one down and still have her, I mean it, in a file cabinet in Chicago, waiting to be permanently mounted in a collage of Estonian memorabilia. The life-size slabs here in Tbilisi with the life-like images of those who had breathed their last are the latest in a short list of eerie customs I have seen, but perhaps they are all characteristic of the never-ending relationships Orthodox Christians have with the deceased, which is sort of what All Saints and All Souls Day is all about.

Although costing $100 million East Point, built outdoors like Westfield Old Orchard in Skokie and a portion of Stratford City in London, was underwhelming. While Domino, the "Home Depot" of Tbilisi was open, the Carrefour, the biggest yet for the Georgian republic, was not. So we drove back aking the sea to Tbilisi Mall, where, at the Carrefour, had they been selling hot waffles in the front of the store, I would have thought I was back in Brussels.


No, it wasn't that "great" of a day, but indeed it was because I felt comfortable alone on familiar ground (a museum is a museum is a museum) yet excited to be with Georgians in new territory and unnerving situations.

29 October 2015

"Gamarjobat" & "Bodishi" in the Same Day

This evening, an adult Georgian male apologized to me (ბოდიში, that is, "bodishi"; I heard it clearly) for stepping right in front of me as he took four quick steps from the door of the market to his black crossover idling awkwardly on the sidewalk. Earlier, a მეეზოვე (that is, a "meezove" or дворник - "dvornik" - in Russiangreeted me (გამარჯობათ, that is, "gamarjobat"; I even heard the "t") as I walked to the metro. Meezove-s are the men and women who dutifully sweep the streets in between the apartment blocs in Gldani every weekday morning. While they may very well be the Shudras of the Georgian labor force, they seem to me to be some of its hardest workers, sweeping up everything from dry leaves to plastic bottles to the butts of cigarettes and shells of sunflower seeds.

Even though the Peace Corps recommends "XXXXX" in the name of safety and security, it is difficult to integrate into a community without an established commuter route or a favorite grocery or bakery. So I walk to the metro station at about the same time every morning, down the same streets, passing the same distracted grandfather walking his little grandson, the same corpulent, 40-something woman with earphones in and trainers on, the same tall mother and even taller teenage son headed towards school, and the same street vendors setting out their oranges, potatoes, and cigarettes. I know whether or not I am on schedule based on where I pass these individuals. I smile politely or nod slightly when I see them and wonder where they are when I don't.


I usually walk pass the meezove - a man probably in his 30s who looks a lot like my Uncle Jody did and probably has as many stories to tell - along one of the many nameless roads that are only as long as their towering apartment blocs are wide. I walked by him this past Monday and Tuesday - maybe his back was turned for the few seconds it took me to walk by or he was bent over brushing trash into a dustpan - until I finally got up enough courage yesterday - he was sweeping up alongside a parked car - to say "Garmajoba" to him. It was step, step, eye contact, step, speak, step, look away, step, step.

Had I just crossed an unseen line on the streets of Gldani? Had I broken an unnamed law of the church or violated an unwritten code of the 'hood? This morning, I found out. At about the same time, almost in the same place as yesterday, the meezove looked at me and said "Garmajobat" to which I replied, and, after 10 or 15 steps, I was relieved that no dusty, black Mercedes with tinted windows had rushed to the bottom of the street to set me straight. 

24 October 2015

e-i-g-h-t Is a Cruel Thing to Do to an 8-year-old

In Georgian, like quite a few languages save English, every letter in a word is pronounced. And there are a lot of letters in almost every Georgian word, especially when they are written with English letters. Two- and three-letter combinations, often all consonants, are used to express the sounds of letters that we do not have in the English alphabet.

For example,

დილა მშვიდობისა
sounds like dee-lah mshvee-doh-bee-sah,
which means good morning, but try lining up the "mshv" correctly at 9 a.m. before you've had your first cup of coffee (when you're 54 and a bit deaf; a bit daft as well, Nils would undoubtedly add).

ნახვამდის
sounds like nakh-vahm-dees,
which means good-bye, and requires "kh" from the same place in the throat where you gargle and "ah" as if you were fogging up a window from the inside.

ღრმაღელე  
or Ghrmaghele, is a metro stop that I hear pronounced over the train's public address system two times going to work and another two times coming home. I believe it is pronounced Grrr-mog-he-lay, where the "he" is like the "he" in "help". I like the straightforward Tony-the-Tiger "Grrr" with a silent h rolling into an m, but I bet a Georgian will instruct me to lighten up on the growling so that I can blow out an h with the g, like high, aghast, daughter, laugh, and aargh?!  

So some help I was in writing e-i-g-h-t on the board to help a boy in our first English class together tell me how old he was. I could see something like ee-eye-ga-ha-tee forming in his eyes. Realizing my cruelty, for the next student I erased "eight" and wrote "8", thinking that that would be easier to pronounce! Yeah, it's been more than five years since I've been in the classroom.

And what's with things down on the farm, like field, haystack, scarecrow, and farmhouse. How do you sound them out when you are eight-years-old? "Tractor" saved us all because it is pretty much the same in Georgian (ტრაქტორი) and Russian (трактор), but why did English change the k to c?

14 October 2015

A Georgian Was at Christ's Crucifixion

სვეტისცხოვლობა (or მცხეთობა), a Georgian Orthodox Church holiday, is celebrated every October 14 in Mtskheta, one of the oldest cities in eastern Georgia. Eliazar, a citizen of Mtskheta, was present at the crucifixion of Jesus. He managed to procure some of Jesus’s robe and brought it back to Mtskheta with him. Sidonia, his sister, touched the robe, and, overcome by the emotions of belief, died with the robe clenched to her breast. Unable to remove the robe from Sidonia’s clutches, the townspeople buried her with it. From her grave, a spectacular cedar tree grew.

When King Mirian asked Saint Nino of Cappadocia, the missionary who converted Mirian to Christianity, where to build a house of God, she pointed to Sidonia’s grave. The builders tried to use the cedar as a column for the church, but the tree did not move. After prayers from Saint Nino the cedar rose to the height of 12 meters (almost 40 feet). Seven great columns were made from the tree to support the structure of the cathedral, according to one legend.

Today, the Svetitskhoveli (meaning "miraculous or life-giving pillar") Cathedral is one of the holiest places in Georgia. Ten of Georgia’s kings are buried here (but only six of the tombs have been found).


Overlooking Svetitskhoveli, way up in the hills, above the confluence of the Mtkvari and Aragvi Rivers, is the Jvari Monastery, or the Monastery of the Cross. St. Nino was here, too, praying and erecting a cross back in the sixth century. In the night, when I visited, with just the monastery lit up and this tree right in front of it, I felt like I was in THE Holy Land. It makes sense, then, I guess, that there was a Georgian at Christ's crucifixion.