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.
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 Russian) greeted 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.
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?
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.
Perhaps the simplest way to explain to you what it is like here (your question before I left) and how I am doing (your question now that I've been here for three weeks) is to tell you what happened on the subway this evening during my commute home.
My office moved over the weekend, and so tonight I was at the Marjanishvili metro stop at 6 p.m. for the first time. The rush hour crowd was thinner than it had been at the Sameditsino instituti station, where I had gotten off and on last week. Nonetheless, upon the sage advice of a seasoned rider, I headed towards the dark and musty end of the platform, where the last couple of - generally empty - cars stop, and I backed up against a free spot along the marble-tiled wall.
A little boy, not much higher than my waist, came hopping up next to me and leaned back against the wall. Another boy stopped at his side and conferred with him. Wearing dress pants instead of jeans, let alone a Lands' End pinpoint oxford, I thought I was going to get asked for money or, worse, get grabbed by the arm and asked for money. But then I saw a man with distressed eyes turn and leave his front-row spot at the platform's edge. He saw the two boys and stepped against the rush hour flow but then stopped to accost one of the station's policemen, who was accompanied by the stout, elderly woman who had been sitting in the booth at the bottom of the escalators. Every Tbilisi subway station has a policeman or two or three, depending on the time and day of the week, as well as a woman in sort of a tollway booth at the bottom of the bank of commonly three escalators.
The policeman stepped up to the edge of the platform, bent himself at the waist, and looked down onto the tracks. The woman, too, stepped up to the edge of the platform and leaned over the tracks about 70 degrees. The father joined them, too. Amid the hustle and bustle of the oblivious rush hour crowd gathering near the end of the platform, there were three rear ends along the edge of the platform, staring back at everyone, as if Norman Rockwell were painting the picture!
I looked down at the boy next to me, still leaning against the wall. He had his right foot in a sock resting on top of his left foot in a sneaker. I surmised his right sneaker was on the tracks. As if she were the boy's own grandmother, the woman from the escalator booth came up to him, bent over to look him in the eyes, and maybe started to scold him but broke out into a wide smile and put her hand on his shoulder. I didn't catch the word "doozie" in what she said to the boy, but she may have congratulated him for getting her out of the booth.
As an approaching train stirred the air on the platform, the policeman pulled out his notebook to get the father's contact information, and I shuffled forward as much as I could, leaving the harmless, shoeless boy and his friend against the wall. It wasn't an iPhone or a Kate Spade purse that brought the woman out of her booth and the policeman to the edge of the platform but a child's tennis shoe that, probably at best, had three stripes to make it look like an Adidas.
There's always people out, amid a forest of Soviet-era apartment buildings, when I walk to and from Akhmeteli teatri, the metro station near my home. But we are just passers-by: they look away when I look at them to assess how "Georgian" they appear to me or to compare them with someone I know in Chicago.
In the metro, however, especially at 8:45 on a weekday morning, these same people take on discernible identities: school children with backpacks, university students in discussions near the door, men with HP laptop cases on their shoulders, women in slacks and skirts, grandfathers with newspapers, and grandmothers with bags of tomatoes and apples. Unlike the CTA's Blue and Red Lines, the Tbilisi metro appears to be the family car, even during the morning rush hour.
I have learnt much in the last two weeks about Tbilisian commuters during my 20-minute subway rides that explains why the old women would leave her escalator booth to help a father retrieve his son's shoe from the tracks. Routinely, men give up their seats to older women, and younger men may offer their seats to older men. Men and women alike give up their seats to mothers with children, who squeeze up to three kids into a single seat.
One time, during the evening rush, I was holding my backpack next to my leg; my Chromebook was inside. The metro was crowded, as usual, headed out to Akhmeteli teatri, and I was hot, as usual. I had either enough grey hair showing or enough sweat coming off my forehead that a 30-something woman in a dress, who was sitting down, took my backpack and set it on her lap, as I have seen mothers do for daughters with bulky purses and shopping bags. I said "Thank you" to her in Georgian, and then strategically moved my knees in close to hers in case she tried to make a run for the closing doors. I was excited over the unexpected success at "community integration" but afraid I was going to have to have a tug of war to get my backpack back - one of those scams, you know. She was wiping sweat from her temples, so perhaps she sympathized with me in a long-sleeve dress shirt. We made three or four stops, and the woman remained seated. Finally, the person sitting next to her got off. I dropped down and reached for my backpack, which, of course, the woman released to me. I whispered "Thank you" in English to her.
Although getting off the train is like exiting the third base side of Wrigley Field onto Waveland Avenue, the ride in the train is incredibly genteel.
Like the Red Line headed south to 95th, the Tbilisi Metro has entrepreneurs selling clothes pins and school notebooks. Musicians play until the train is moving so fast that no one can hear them. Little boys and girls distribute Orthodox holy cards and then pass by again to collect the cards or a lari. I had seen this routine before, so I was surprised - maybe even a bit concerned - when one elderly woman put the holy card in her purse, not knowing that the little boy was coming back for a coin or two. Some of these kids can be a bit demanding, walking briskly up to standing male passengers with their hands in their pockets and asking them for the change they are fiddling with. In this particular case, the boy let the old woman keep the holy card without any confrontation.
The contents of this blog are mine personally and do not reflect any position of the U.S. Government or Peace Corps.
