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!
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.
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