Signs of Something Big

Wednesday, on my way home from work, I stopped at my neighborhood's friendly tone for my customary purchase of two loaves of puri. I put my one lari coin down on the glass service window and confirmed visually and vocally that I wanted two loaves, each 50 tetri. An older gentleman, whom I believed I had not seen in the shop before, told me that I could get only one loaf for a lari. The younger baker, with whom I had exchanged a few Georgian and English words previously, came out from behind the toni to show me that they were baking loaves twice the size they normally bake. I let out an admiring "Whoa", dug into my pocket for another lari, and proudly carried off two loaves of bread the size of snow shoes. It was December 30.

On Tuesday, the day before, a colleague drove me home from work. We took the same road I take to get to one of the schools I have lessons in, a road a bit off the beaten path, I'd say, a good walk from the metro station, with a few shops that look like they sell goods in bulk. Tuesday night, however, both sides of this street were lined with tables with chunks of raw meat on top and men with black beards, leather jackets, and axes behind. Today, Gio, my host brother, took me back to ground zero on foot. There was still lots of really red meat but, curiously, no pools, or jars, of blood.  

Monday evening, walking home from the metro station, near Bingo Bridge, where old men and women sell fresh produce throughout the year, I unexpectedly passed a table of red meat with a calf's head sitting on top, eyes still in it. These are all Georgian signs that New Year's is coming.

I have always thought that New Year's comes too soon after Christmas to be a major celebration. Here in Georgia, though, where 84% of the population are Orthodox Christians (according to the CIA's World Factbook), New Year's comes before Christmas. After watching four or five continents celebrate Christmas December 25, Georgians are ready to celebrate come December 31.

Four years ago, on a wet December 30 made for tea-drinking, Cindy and I met Tiit and Lairi on Baker Street in London, and on December 31, the four of us stood in the middle of Waterloo Bridge with two bottles of sparkling wine and watched the fireworks from the London Eye. Sixteen years ago (when Walgreens was developing the photos I took with a cardboard camera), I stood in Senate Square in Helsinki and welcomed the twenty-first century eight hours before my friends and family in Illinois. I still vividly remember adults holding Roman candles, as long as rolls of wrapping paper, in their hands and a little too close to my head. Even more frightening were the teenagers on the streets holding bottles of beer and vodka. I grew up many, many years ago launching skinny rockets from a glass soda bottle in the middle of Queensway Road and staining the sidewalk in front of 2304 with charcoal snakes. 

Just as loud, glittering fireworks, exploding high in the sky, launch the New Year, so, too, does a smorgasbord of homemade dishes crammed lovingly onto the kitchen table by Gio's grandmother.

Up front, to the right of the bottle of Coke Zero, which is omnipresent the world over, is a cold plate of pkhali, that is, minced spinach with garlic (and sometimes pomegranate seeds or chopped walnuts, depending on the season). To the right of the juice carton is a cold plate of pickled sundry garden leaves and stems. They may have been flavoring a jar of pickled green tomatoes. (First okra in Kurdistan and now green tomatoes in the Republic of Georgia. I thought they both came from Mississippi.) 

Directly above the stems are pieces of churchkhela in a bowl, which is a string of walnuts dipped repeatedly in a grape paste. Reportedly, soldiers carried them into battlefields for quick bursts of energy. Just on the other side of the wire cage from a bottle of sparkling Georgian wine is some of the pizza Gio and I made from scratch earlier in the day. Above the pizza is pea salad with dill, just like the teachers in Estonia made. On the plate to the left (as well as behind the Coke bottle) is khachapuri, the Georgian cheese bread that children eat as they walk home from school with their mothers or grandparents.

On the plate back against the wall, shaped like diamonds, is the holiday favorite gozinaki, which is incredibly delicious for just being nuts, honey, and a bit of sugar rolled out. Next to the bottle of rose sparkling wine is, I believe, a bowl of satsivi, which is almost like an Indian sauce. Utskho suneli, translated as "blue fenugreek", is a uniquely Georgian spice in satsivi that I will no doubt have to introduce to Tapa, Estonia and Springfield, Illinois.

So, indeed, New Year's is something big in Georgia. New New Year's, that is. January 14 is Old New Year's, or Orthodox New Year's. (It's that Julian and Gregorian calendar thing come to life.) Let's hope there's more gozinaki and fewer calves' heads. 

My Many Faces in Istanbul

Istanbul, my London of the East, was just over two hours from Tbilisi by way of the unexpectedly refined Turkish Airlines. The somewhat Far East-themed Manesol Boutique hotel had a fantastic breakfast buffet that included figs and a lovely terrace at the end of our corridor that offered a peak at the Rustem Pasha Mosque. I think; mosques viewed upclose in the daylight and seen illuminated at night from afar seemed magically like different places.

Istanbul, like London, moved. Its people walked resolvedly along Siraselviler Avenue, and its metro, trams, and buses appeared frequently from the Bosphorus Bridge in the northeast to Ataturk Airport in the southwest. I was unexpectedly smitten.

First row above: Rukiya's left eye; my Irish nose, not shaped quite good enough to be a Turkish one; and Rita's smiling face sans eyeglasses on a random park bench overlooking John F. Kennedy Avenue.  Second row: Rita and I are under the enormous chandelier under the even more enormous dome of the cavernous Hagia Sophia. Third row: (l) I am standing with my back to Asia, the Istanbul Strait, and the Bosphorus Bridge, right outside the Ortakoy mosque. (r) We are sitting at Murat Muhallebicisi in Karakoy, a cafe and bakery with kebabs, maybe with a 1920s look, and definitely with a creepy waiter. Fourth row: I am getting my Turkish Oyster card at the funicular's Kabatas station. Fifth row: (l) I was abandoned at the elegant Karakoy Lokantasi but only for as long as it took to smoke a fag on the nearby balcony. (m) When in Rome (or on Edgware Road in London).... (r) The screen, window, and wall are circa sixth century; I am circa the 1960s.  Below:  Rita and I trying to record the powerful allure of Constantinople's waterfront and skyline.

And for These and All of the Blessings I Have Received I Give Thanks

• For celebrating Ava's birthday with Kristi, Eric, Chloe, Ava, and some 36-inch doll at the American Girl Cafe in Chicago.
• For visiting Oleg and Sirle in Brussels (and the sauna in the Estonian embassy) as well as St. Nikolaus in Monschau, Germany.

• For laughing with Gabriel Inglesias and Ed, Doreen, Emily, and Shahin at the Rosemont Theater.
• For seeing Mannheim Steamroller with Mom, Dad, and Shahin at the Rialto Square Theater in Joliet (and watching Shahin eat the biggest pancakes he had ever seen).
• For eating Christmas dinner with Kristi, Eric, Chloe, Ava, Mom, Dad, and Sue in Springfield.
• For having lunch with Claudette in Little Village and drinks with Dave in West Town.
• For swimming in the Atlantic Ocean near West Palm Beach, Florida with Maija, Enni, Henri, and his brother (and watching the Super Bowl outside on Clematis Street).

• For attending Taller de Jose's Sixth Annual Builder's Day celebration.
• For spending spring break with five of my former sixth grade students (now 12th graders) and a week with Ed and Rita #1 and #2 in London.
• For dining with Rukiya, Shad, Sammy, Shahin, Arvand, and Suraj in Turkish, English, Indian, and Italian restaurants in London.
• For spending Easter with Mom, Dad, Kristi, Eric, Chloe, Ava, Sue, Stacey, and Dean in Springfield.

• For attending the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo with Tameeka and Josh (and innumerable super heroes).
• For seeing The Book of Mormon with Christy, Victoria, and Cindy (and drinking at Monk's Pub afterwards) and Kinky Boots with Rita (and having drinks at Monk's Pub beforehand).
• For distributing hundreds of eggplant-coloured tchotchkes with my Saint Anthony Hospital colleagues in Chicago's Cinco de Mayo parade along Cermak Road.
• For helping 250 children make tie-dye shirts with my Saint Anthony colleagues and some of their family members at Summer Fest.
• For riding Divvy bikes to the 31st Street beach with Sammy and his friend and eating at Nando's first-ever restaurant in Chicago with Sammy, Christy, and Victoria.
• For introducing Fabio and Nabhaan to Rita, Christy, Jim, Paula, and Marty at La Taberna in University Village.
  
• For attending the Grant Park Music Festival and the Newberry Library's annual Book Fair with Mom and Dad.
• For spending a weekend with Cian at the Fort Worth Stockyards and the Deep Ellum neighborhood in Dallas and watching his friend eat Rocky Mountain oysters for the first time.
• For catching up with my old Y colleagues Odell and Toby.
• For making my connection in Vienna to Tbilisi.

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.

"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 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. 

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?