"The Georgian Times" is looking for a copy-editor for their English-language edition.

If you are looking for some pocket change, if you relish forcing diverse subject matter (ranging from regressive stray-dog management in Tbilisi to conspiracy theories surrounding the murder of a certain nationalist academician) through the tight sieve of proper English grammar, if you're not doing all that much with your Saturdays anyway, then this is the job for you!

You can work from home or at the GT office (located on Kikodze Street). They need someone who can start June 23.

Interested parties may contact GT Editor Keti Khachidze directly, or contact me with any questions.

Labels: Georgia

We lost internet due to being flaky people who never ever paid our telephone bill (though in our defense, we never received a bill, or instructions on where to go to get it or pay for it). Our phone line is in the week-long process of being reconnected, so in the meantime we are getting acquainted with Wi-Fi options in Old Tbilisi. These are, happily, numerous, though not all connections are equal. The steadiest -- and easiest to get to -- signal has been at The Hanger Bar (expat sports fan hang-out of "Our Balls Are Bigger Than Yours!" fame).

I spent all of Saturday (which happened to be May 26 - Georgia's equivalent of July 4) at The Hanger, eating potato skins, drinking beer, and editing "The Georgian Times" while clowns, mummers, and men on stilts walked by outside.

Highlights of this week's GT included an article about stray-dog management in Tbilisi (the city dog-catchers snag the dogs with a back-breaking lasso, then crush their bones with "iron pinchers," *then* kill them with "electrical appliances" before pitching them into a hole at the local landfill) as well as a run-down of "theories" surrounding the recent murder of a nationalist former politician (these included a "Lost"-like scenario in which the murderer was taking revenge for a stolen kidney!). Let me just say: the beer helped me through it. I told the paper that I'll stop working for them on June 16, and am looking forward to a short month in Georgia of free of bizzarro copy-editing.

Yesterday C and I did a short hike up the hills around Tbilisi in the hot hot hot hot sun. The hike felt really good, but I found myself wishing I could do it in shorts. Capri pants and short skirts are commonplace in town, but no shorts on men or ladies, yet. People here are too fashionable for their own good. After few hours of tromping around in the scorching sun, we returned to town to attend the supra for a friend's new baby girl. So that was 5 hours of good wine and good food. Our friend Shane stayed with us over the weekend, and when we got home he was eating a big bowl of popcorn and taking shots of vodka. (This is not typical - I can only attribute it to the lack of internets). I too maybe two ill-considered shots of cheap, cheap vodka, and spent the rest of the night wishing I hadn't.

I woke up this morning at 6, cleaned the kitchen and took out the trash (I was hung-over, and anything with any kind of meek smell attached to it was making me ill), then went back to bed and dozed until noon. Then I convinced Chris to join me back at the expat rugby bar, where we have enjoyed some coffee and wi-fi, and are presently awaiting a modest platter of fried potato-skins while the Indy-500 blares from the adjacent room.

Ah... Life is okay.

Labels: Georgia

This fall, my husband and I are both heading to graduate school. Chris will be going to Syracuse University, while I am bound for NYU. Chris is out of town for about 48 hours right now - visiting Kutaisi with Didi John - and I'm suddenly realizing that living apart has major bummer potential. That, and everything that I've heard so far says finding a place to live in New York City is a nightmare.

My husband's apartment-mate-to-be, who is moving from Brooklyn to Syracuse, said that people posting available rooms on Craigslist often receive 100+ inquiries on the day of their post, and suggested (helpfully, I think) that I think of looking for a room as an experience analagous to auditioning for a reality-TV show.

Gulp.

Add to that this essay at Lost Writers and I find myself reconsidering whether it might better behoove me to move in with my Dad in NJ and just commute into the city and forget the whole thing.

But part of the draw of the NYU Journalism/Cultural Reporting and Criticism program was the opportunity to live in (and study in, and write about) what is arguably the greatest city in America (corny, complicated--maybe also true). Of course, that's what draws most people to New York, and why it's such a horror show to find a place to live there.

Labels: journal

Turkish-Iranian Restaurant 'Urfa Sofrasis'
76 Agmashenebeli Avenue
Tel: (995 32) 96 50 94

Urfa Sofrasis, the most recent addition to the Turkish culinary strip on Agmashenebeli Avenue, has pretty good food—and a formidable bar—in a comfortable setting.

In spite of its unique niche (Iranian and Turkish cuisine) Urfa Sofrasis makes no attempts to invoke—whether through low lighting, acres of oriental carpets, or an over-abundance of pillows—either Persia or Turkey. Rather, a two-story-high drop ceiling vaults above a sea of enormous dining tables, each of which is bracketed by long thickly-padded benches. (Somehow this combination gives the restaurant the feel of a furniture showroom.)

Rather then perusing a menu, you place your order at two glass display cases — one containing raw meat for Turkish and Iranian-style kebabs and other grillables, the other containing everything else (meze, etc.)—then take a seat and wait. While this approach allows you to eyeball your entree ahead of time—and also permits the Turkish-Iranian culinary novice to point and grunt in the absence of lexical familiarity with the dishes in question—it does not give one a good sense of each dish’s impact on your wallet. (Happily, this ends up not being too severe).

While the ‘meze-etc’ case’s contents were not as extensive as those of some of the Turkish restaurants further up Agmashenebeli Avenue, there was still a lot to choose from. There are several vegetarian options (including an inordinate amount of eggplant). Our party ordered yoghurt sauce, olive salad, hummus, fried eggplant in yogurt, meat-stuffed eggplant, and stewed green beans. From the meat case we ordered chicken and ground lamb kebabs. We also indulged in a couple of bottles of Turkish Efes beer, and a shot each of raki (anise liquor). All together, our tab came to about 15 GEL apiece.

On our visit the food was hit-or-miss. The green olive salad — comprised of sliced olives, chopped fresh tomatoes, slivers of lightly brined cucumber, and chives—was very good. The hummus hit the spot, as did the yogurt-mint sauce. Some dishes were less successful, though—the grilled eggplant in yogurt sauce was bit bitter for our taste, and the stuffed eggplant’s meat stuffing was kind of nubbly. A very few items were flat-out bad: the beans were very salty and swimming in oil, and the ground lamb kebabs were dry and immediately unpalatable—no one managed more than a small bite. We scored with the grilled chicken kebab, however, which was downright succulent, and more than made up for the odd mediocre item. The chicken meat was moist and tender on the inside, with a crisp exterior, and a grilled aroma and toothsome flavor throughout.

If you are a diner with uncomplicated cravings, Urfa Sofrasis is definitely a worthwhile stop for dinner. You may, however, wish to pass over many of the salads and meze and skip straight to the grilled chicken, which, along with some raki or a bottle of Efes, makes a satisfying simple summer dinner.

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Published in Georgia Today, 18 May 2007

Labels: Eating in Tbilisi, Georgia Today

Grand Cafe CCCP
28 Kiacheli Street. Tel: 877 57 66 67

At 8:30 on a Monday night, Grand Cafe CCCP (USSR) was full of young men and women. The ratio of drinks to dishes at their tables was weighted heavily towards the former. We would have done well to follow their lead—the menu at Grand Cafe CCCP is expensive, and the quality of the food is out-of-step with the prices. A sampling of mid-range dishes (GEL 6-18) got us a transatlantic flight-grade supper.

Grand Cafe CCCP offers a loosely Russian menu with many variations (since when were Potatoes “Idaho” a Soviet standby?). On our visit at least, the restaurant’s food was better on paper than on the plate. The Uzbechka (GEL 12) — chicken fillets with honey and plums served with rice — was disappointing. The meat was dry and mostly flavorless — with only a distantly sweet glaze &mdasgh; and the rice was very bland. The “Blue Medals“ beef (GEL 18) — a minor constellation of thin steak slices in a blue cheese sauce topped with scattered tater-tots — was rich and flavorful, but the portion was very small. The side and appetizer dishes had a better price-to-food ratio, though here the descriptions on the menu were somewhat misleading. (“Stuffed tomatoes” apparently means tomato slices topped with a shredded soft cheese-dill-and-mayo combo.). The pelmeni (meat dumplings – GEL 6.50) were tasty but very modestly apportioned. A blurb on info-tbilisi.com says that the “Brezhnev’s Favorite Salmon” (salmon with sour cream and caviar) and “Mushrooms Proletariat” are good, but I was hesitant to try them, given the mediocrity of the cheaper dishes and their cost (the fish dishes inch into the GEL 30’s).

Throughout the restaurant, objects from the Soviet era — stamps, posters, banners, statuettes, busts of Lenin - are installed on shelves and in glowing recesses in the wall. The cumulative effect is (thankfully) underwhelming. Grand Cafe CCCP’s aesthetic nod to the Soviet era is ameliorated by an international play list and the owner’s decidedly restrained application of kitsch. (If you, for some reason, long to immerse yourself in Soviet-era paraphernalia, the Dry Bridge market is a better bet). In many cases, the decor is less shrine and more send-up of Soviet sensibilities - one poster reads (in English): “Your power core is under attack! Red Leader says: Defend it, fuckface!”

Grand Cafe CCCP is a better destination for drinks than for dinner. Available alcohol includes a Glenmorangie old enough to enlist in the army (from GEL 10), a range of tequilas (GEL 6), flavored vodkas (from GEL 4), imported beers, local wines, and a long list of cocktails. With cafe-style seating in the front and a lounge-style area in the back, Grand Cafe CCCP is a comfortablec — if smoky — hang-out. The lounge’s black leather couches are deep and commodious, and a tent of thin fabric overhead casts pleasantly diffused light throughout the dining room. Diners seeking good Russian fare would be advised to eat elsewhere, and then retire here for the alcohol and old shkola ambiance.
* * *
Published in Georgia Today, 11 May 2007

Labels: Eating in Tbilisi, Georgia Today

I am copy-editing the paper, as it my wont on Saturday mornings. There's always something surprising in there—an illuminating jewel amongst the wholesale plagarizing from Wikipedia, conflicted sentance structure, and page-long quotations—that makes my day.

Today's gem: an open letter to the Georgian President from one Otar Dolidze, an aggreived businessman. Dolidze describes how he was robbed of his intellectual property rights and 30 million USD worth of slag-processing machinary. He asks the government to more strenuously protect private property rights and to revise the Georgian Tax Code, which, he says, was plagarized from Germany's.

It was a big misfortune for Georgia when a new tax code was enforced in 1997. The drafter of the code was economist Temur Kopaleishvili, who noted in a personal talk with me that he "copied the law from Germany.” When I asked him whether he copied the law of Germany of 1945 year or modern Germany, he replied with pride: “certainly, from developed Germany.”

I wonder whether this is true. If it is true, how unusual or outrageous would it be for a (then) third-world economy to be modeled after a first-world one? Confessions of an Economic Hit Man is on my reading list. Perhaps I'll have more light in my head after reading it.

TSU librarians’ search for funding battles the clock as 67,000 rare and foreign books sit rotting in the library basement

When Mzia Razmadze was appointed Acting Director of the Grigol Tsereteli Scientific Library at Tbilisi State University, she discovered that the first two floors of the library were occupied by a robust forest of paper-eating fungus. In and of itself, this might not be such a tragedy, however the fungus happened to be feasting upon TSU’s 67,000-volume collection of rare and foreign books. As the library’s Acting Director, Razmadze has inherited a number of problems that are symptomatic of the higher education system overall – ailing infrastructure, chronic under-funding, obsolete methodologies—as well as problems that might be more in-line with those of a museum curator such as the restoration and preservation of objects of cultural and historical value. “We have a unique collection from the 15th and 16th centuries,” Razmadze says. “There are no other collections like this, either in Georgia or in other libraries.”



In 1987, the Grigol Tsereteli Scientific library was moved from its cramped quarters in Vake out to the “new campus” and into a 32,000 square meter concrete building.

Unfortunately the ceiling of the new building leaked from day one, and the bottom floors especially suffered from perpetual dampness which emanated from the floors, walls, and ceilings.

This was an excellent climate for fungus, but a terrible one for books. It was into these floors that the singularly fragile rare book collection was moved in 1987, and for the past 20 years water continued to seep in from all sides. Razmadze says that when she took on the position of Acting Director and went down to inspect the collection, she discovered that none of the books had ever been unpacked from their move to the library in 1987.

Shhhhhh! No Breathing!

On a recent visit, Razmadze offers a tour of the book collection. The floor of the basement level of the library is under several centimeters of dust and grit. The ceiling is low, and to get to the rare and foreign books we cross a room that is bisected by a sequence of massive vents that run the length of the building. The air is damp and clammy.

A doorway opens into a room where one is immediately flattened by an overpowering smell of mildew: book funk -the smell of decaying literature. The room is wide, deep, and filled with closely spaced metal shelves. The shelves are packed with books, many of which are bound together with twine. The entire collection is covered in a sickly yellow-white carpet of fungus.

The spectacle is quite literally breathtaking. The air burns my throat. Razmadze pulls the collar of her sweater over her nose and warns me not to get any of the book-eating fungus on my jacket. In many cases, it’s impossible to tell what the books even are under the fungal growth, and beyond that, much of the fragile leather bindings and their attendant markings have been digested.

Surveying the rather depressing spectacle of composting manuscripts, Razmadze says that she thinks that since the moisture was ambient, not direct, the hearts of the books are likely to be in better shape than their bindings. “I am an optimist by nature,” she says. “I cannot be passive about this.”

The Spoils of War Have Spoiled

Since discovering the fungus farm, Razmadze has been trying to eradicate it. After determining that the fungus was non-pathological - for people, anyway - Razmadze set about divining whether the collection would be worth the time and money it would take to repair. She sent lists of the foreign French and German titles – which she suspects were taken from German libraries during the occupation of Germany after World War II, as many were acquired through the USSR in the early 1950s - to the French and German embassies, requesting expertise and assistance in identifying their worth. The German Embassy replied to her overtures, and Razmadze was joined in the TSU basement by Olaf Hamann, a specialist from the Berlin State Library. Using the electronic catalogue of the German library system, Hamann was able to confirm that the volumes in question were missing from those libraries’ collections. Moreover, Hamann and Razmadze were able to confirm that the damaged books were worth recovering. “Each of them was quite expensive,” says Razmadze. “Each one was quite rare.”

Since then, Razmadze and other library workers have been gradually bringing the books from the basement level up to drier floors. They have been wiping the fungus off with alcohol and water, and drying them by hand. Many of the books are extremely delicate, and cannot be exposed to sunlight. Though they have managed to bring up many books, the scale of the project is sufficiently daunting so as to render their efforts meaningless if substantial financial assistance is not brought to bear on the problem. What is not clear is where that assistance might come from.

Funding: The Never Ending Quest

Razmadze has appealed to university, state, private, and foreign sources for funds to take on the problems of the library. While solutions to many of the library’s problems are well-represented in the Ministry of Education’s agenda for education reform (such as infrastructure renovation, new title acquisition, and modernization of the catalogue system and methodologies), the problems unique to the older items now in critical need of restoration have not yet been addressed.

The Ministry of Education provides financial support to university libraries for the restoration of basic infrastructure - heating and sewer systems - as well as for library modernization - new computers, books, and methodologies. “We are investing tens of millions of laris annually to help them to refurbish their facilities,” says Education Minister Kakha (Alexandre) Lomaia. Libraries can also seek direct investment from the state by applying to the Georgian National Science Foundation’s (NSF) University Library Program.

As soon as she heard about the NSF grants last November, Razmadze applied for one (“If a grant exists, I will apply for it,” she jokes), and the TSU Library received an NSF grant of 100,000 GEL. But, Razmadze says, the fund is for much-needed new titles and for the development of electronic resources – it cannot be used to work on the damaged books. And while education reform has been good to the library in many respects, it poses some challenges as well. In the last year of administrative reforms, the number of professors at TSU was reduced from 5,000 to roughly 800, and staff cuts have affected the library as well. At one time, 500 workers managed the library. Over the years this dwindled to 132, and library workers have recently been informed that the target “reformed” staff size is 30.

The Ministry of Education and Science is responsible for libraries at higher education institutions. It is not clear whether a situation such as that at the rare and foreign book collection—where the imperiled works are of both educational and cultural value - whether the Ministry of Education or the Ministry of Culture, Monuments and Sports might be the proper body to appeal to for assistance.

There are precedents for cooperation between the Ministry of Culture (whose mission more precisely would seem to jibe with this problem) and the Ministry of Education. The two are cooperating, for example, in developing the National Museum as a modern ‘teaching museum,’ and the Ministry of Culture co-finances higher education institutions such as the Academy of Fine Arts. Potential cooperation on restoring cultural artifacts in university collections has not yet been explored, says Education Minister Lomaia. “Frankly, no one has applied to us with such an issue.”

In addition to seeking more support from TSU and from the Georgian government, Razmadze continues to seek funding from other sources. She has submitted an application for the United States Ambassador’s Fund for Cultural Preservation in order to repair, scan and properly archive a portion of the collection. U.S. Embassy Public Affairs Officer Rowena Cross-Najafi refrained from commenting on the pending application, but noted that the Ambassador’s Fund often acts as a stopgap, and that given the severe infrastructural woes at the library the collection likely requires a more massive and final intervention. “Ultimately, this needs to be a government job,” says Cross-Najafi. Definitive intervention will take time, she adds, “but those books don’t have time. They need to be focused on today.”

First published in Georgia Today, 4 May 2007.

Labels: Georgia, Georgia Today