Pasta and Pizza / Pizza and Pasta Fantastico

Pasta and Pizza
32, Barnov Str.
Tel: (995 32) 98 29 82
11:00 a.m - 10:00 p.m

Pizza and Pasta Fantastico
3a, Napareuli Str.
Tel:(995 32) 29 46 75
10:30 a.m. - 10:30 p.m.

Tucked away in an easy-to-miss courtyard in Vera, Pasta and Pizza is a supremely pleasant, unpretentious place to eat. The restaurant is set back from the street, and has a long, narrow courtyard — lined with tables with Viking-capacity benches under broad umbrellas — leading up to the entrance.

The menu here is surprising in its scope and playfulness, with a good selection of entrees running the gamut from Italian and Alsatian pizzas, pasta, quiches, Turkish dishes, and a list of meat platters and vegan items.

Italian Bread Balls (available with or without garlic) — piping hot boules of baked dough, with a dab of olive oil and seasoned minced garlic inside — make a good appetizer. The Italian–style pizzas are delicious, with a good crust and a very flavorful marinara sauce under–girding their generously applied toppings. The Capri pizza (GEL 12.80) — with field mushrooms, tomatoes, pepperoni, peppers (listed as ‘paprika’), and olives — was especially good. The Alsatian (white) pizzas are a bit under–dressed. We tried one with sour cream, onion, garlic, and bacon (GEL 6.80), and while it was good — the topping was thick with bacon, and the onions had a gentle caramel aroma —l it didn’t compare to the Italian-style pizza vying for space on the table.

The restaurant has serves pasta straight up and al forno (baked). We tried the gnocchi with pesto (GEL 5.80) and the ‘lasagna legumi’ (vegetable lasagna, GEL 12.80). The gnocchi were freshly made — so much so that they didn’t hold their form. The resulting boiled dough balls were surprisingly edible (the dough was light and airy), but the pesto was made from dried basil, and on the whole the dish would have been very disappointing as a main course. The lasagna legumi, on the other hand, was fantastic, with layers of pasta and cheese thickly interspersed with a decadent cream and vegetable filling. Mushroom lovers especially will enjoy this dish.

Pasta and Pizza’s menu also features so-called “international khachapuri” (for GEL 6.80 a piece), which include French (spinach, onion, garlic, and Roquefort cheese), Turkish (minced lamb, paprika, pepperoni, garlic, onion, sheep cheese), and Dutch (pickled pork loin, onion, edamer cheese). Turkish dishes — including moussaka (GEL 12.80) — comprise a major section of the menu, and there is a respectable selection of unusual meat entrees (roasted chicken breast with spicy walnut sauce and fries) as well as vegan dishes (there are many vegetarian options throughout the menu). It’s easy to miss, but at the back of the menu fondues (cheese or chocolate) are available either as single (GEL 14-18) or double (GEL 25-35) servings.

Wine, beer (draught and bottled), spirits all available. There is usually an “open” village wine available in half liter and liter carafes — on the evening we visited, this was a honey-colored tsinandali with a moment of intense dryness on the tongue, and a mellow, creamy mouth-feel.

Our decadent dinner left us no room for dessert, unfortunately, but we will be back to try the “whipped wine foam’ and the Tiramisu. The waiters were prompt and attentive — and English-speaking — and we continued to enjoy the smells from the dishes wafting by to other tables even as we exhausted our appetites.

Menus are available in English.

Very decent pizza can also be had at Pizza and Pasta Fantastico. True to its name, this small pizzeria makes oven-fired pizza and pasta, as well as a handful of other entrees such as eggplant parmesan. The pizza here is a bit pricier than that at Pasta and Pizza, with small Pizzas for GEL 7-10, mediums for around 15-18, larges 18-22. Lots of possible toppings are available, including ham and pineapple. The small pies are quite substantial for one person, while a medium makes a good meal to share between two people. We tried one pizza with paper thin-slices of ham and layers of rich musky mushrooms, and one pizza with bell and pickled jalapeño peppers, olives, tomatoes. Both were excellent, with crisp and chewy crusts.

The eggplant parmesan is heavy on the marinara sauce and melted cheese, with thin slices of breaded baked eggplant swimming in there. Gnocchi with pesto was not a very generous serving, and the gnocchi were gummy and a little tough. The pesto was quite good, with a bright emerald color. (Perhaps pesto on another pasta would be better than on gnocchi.) At other tables plates with ravioli drenched in cream sauces seemed popular.

Lots of cocktails are available, and from the looks of it there is a serious espresso machine behind the counter. A narrow selection of Georgian wines cost around GEL 18 per bottle, no house wine is available. More extensive are the Italian and European wines can be ordered by the glass for around (GEL 7 per 200 ml). The restaurant is small, and fills up quickly. Menus are available in Italian, Georgian, English.

* * *
Published in Georgia Today, 22 June 2007

Job Wanted?

"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.

You stole my kidney. Prepare to die.

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.

The Smell of Decaying Literature

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.

Flatigue

I work from my flat, so it is no wonder that I am sick of it.

But I am also sick of working for no pay, of my increasingly strident craving for appointment, convenience and privacy, and of reproachful stares from Georgian friends who ask how my Georgian is coming along and I would speak so much better if I just moved to my mom's house in the country and made more Georgian friends and how come I don't visit ever? I am weary — arg! arg! — of delicious twists of savory khinkali, of buying cheap and flavorful fruit from old women with solid racks of gold teeth, of emerald-green Tarragon soda, of the evocative deteriorating terraces and winding quiet cobblestone alleys in Old Tbilisi, and of feeling the city get a little warmer and more golden as Spring takes hold.

Are there birds flitting past our balcony at dusk? Bleuuugh! Lofty stone churches resonant with antique chanting? Bah! Friends gathered at supra to toast and sing and drink one another under the table? Humbug! A trip to Armenia tomorrow to stay at an off-season luxury hotel with sauna, pool and billiards in the middle of a gorgeous alpine landscape? Piffle! Pish tosh!

How convenient — no. How absolutely soul-and-sanity-saving-ly, sourpuss-smotheringly necessary — that in less than a week I fly to the US to spend almost three weeks in New Jersey with my Dad. Ah! Cafés within bookstores within shopping malls, glossy New Yorker magazines stashed in the bathroom, productive eavesdropping, men with backpacks, women in sweatpants and sneakers, front lawns, fast-food, Ben & Jerry's, dark beer, dinner dates, rude strangers, estranged neighbors, hippies, preppies, goths, yuppies, nerds, geeks, punks, freaks, ethnic and cultural hodge-podge m'godge HERE I COME!

There's 24 hours in that visit home when I will be vying for a fellowship. That 24 hours will will be difficult and sweaty-palmed and interesting - I will probably have a very looong entry about my humiliation and defeat — or triumph and glory — once it's over.

I sent in my graduate school decisions. Anyone wait-listed for IU, New School, or Syracuse will be happy to know that I'm bound for NYU's Cultural Reporting and Criticism Journalism program come September. It's by far the hardest, brainiest, most toughen-you-up-and-get-you-published-est program of the lot I was admitted to, and really I wanted to go to graduate school to shape my wet soggy brain into something steely and lethal and my tentative prose into a marketable and professional portfolio, so I'm going to go for it. Soaring student loans and the infamous NYC real estate market are in my future, so help me god. I can't wait.

Mtsvadi en plein air

In February, C and I went to Gori, Imereti and Kakheti with Imedi TV to participate in a segment on Georgian hospitality for their Droeba program. The gist of our participation was this: we would, one by one, knock on the doors of strangers and ask for water. We would gage their hospitality by

1. Whether they gave us water;
2. Whether they invited us to stay for wine or a supra;
3. How persistent they were about item 2.

C wrote a very funny essay for Lost Writers about our trip; read that if you want to know more about it. I want to write about the MEAT.

After we'd gone through the "Knock Knock" routine in Kakheti, our mark, a 70-year old kind-faced man named Gurami, made a fire in his yard from dry grapevines. The flames licked the air in six-foot flames, then dwindled to a bed of coals. Just as the fire subsided, seven skewers of meat were set on an iron rack that held the pork a few inches above the shimmering coals. When the meat was pronounced "done," it was put in a bowl, sprinkled with coarse salt, and tossed with rings of raw red onion. We sat at a table in the yard, filled our glasses, drank a toast to hospitality, and dug in.

There may have been silverware on the table, but we ate the mtsvadi with our hands. The grilled meat, fresh off the fire, was warm and slick in my fingers. The thick ropes of fat striating the flesh had turned buttery over the fire. I reached for a piece and a very organic smear of something white and soft from somewhere between bone and tendon—a shmear of hot marrow?—glazed my knuckles. I considered a moment, then licked my fingers.

I've eaten mtsvadi in many restaurants in Tbilisi—they've been best at the Marjanishvili Shemoikhede Genatsvale, and Championebi on Tamarashvili street reportedly has good grilled meat—but nothing so far has come close to equaling melting hot meat fresh off the fire, piled in a huge heaping bowl, eaten en plein air.

Man cannot live off of mtsvadi alone. I realized this in an, er, visceral sense when, in 2003, I went on a camping trip where our guides fed us mtsvadi all weekend. The meat traveled in a vinegar marinade (making it technically basturma, not mtsvadi) and when it came off the fire, our friend Sergo would impress us all by manfully crushing pomegranate seeds over the steaming meat with his bare hands. By the end of our trip, one young woman was sick from eating so much pork (she's a vegetarian now, thanks to that experience) and the rest of us were constipated for a week.

But after Gurami's supra, more grape vines were added to the purple-orange-white bed of coals to freshen the fire for another round of mtsvadi. This round was for Gurami's family, some of whom had missed the first supra. As the camera crew packed away their equipment, my head full of raw white wine, I extended my cold hands towards the quick, dry column of fire, wishing we could stay.

* * * * *
A recipe for mtsvadi, which seems to have been cribbed rather shamelessly from Darra Goldstein's book The Georgian Feast, is available at About Georgia.

Perambulation therapy

After too many days of feeling a little blue, a little homesick, a little tired of the apartment and each other, C and I went for a four-hour walk around Tbilisi.

I put on my Dad's old Levi's jacket, my army-green carpenter pants, and my black-rimmed geek glasses and left the apartment looking maybe a *little* like a squat Asian freak among the statuesque (or somehow statuesque-seeming) Caucasians of Tbilisi, but comfortable and determined to cover some ground.

The walk took us up Rustaveli Avenue, up through Vake, and eventually into Saburtalo. On our way, we went through Vake Park (a 558 acre public park), 40% of which seems to be taken up by a huge fountain/memorial that includes a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, a 1976, 92-foot tall "Statue of Victory," and a dramatically tiered (though currently scuzzy and still) fountain. On the way down, C counted 335 steps from top to bottom.

A young man was playing with his Pitbull in Vake Park. There was a branch about 5 feet off the ground, with a short length of rope dangling down. The dog kept jumping up and chomping down on the rope. When it did this, it was suspended in the air, and would sometimes swing back and forth like the pendulum of a clock, or would describe rapid acrobatic parabolas (think chopper blade) in the air. There was a small amusement park with some very old, and some very new rides. We saw a cat napping in the sun by one of the older, closed kiddie-rides.

A busy but pedestrian-accommodating street connects Vake with Saburtalo. On the way there, we passed "Championebi's," reportedly a very good place to come for mtsvadi. There was also a hand-written sign, advertising "khashi dilas 7-saatistan" (Khashi mornings from 7 AM). Khashi is a Georgian hangover remedy that, according to one source, consists of "a thick bouillon made from cow’s hooves and offal that have been rubbed in corn flour and boiled for 12 hours over low heat. The dish is served steaming hot with lavash bread and a carafe of vodka." (Needless to say, C and I will be checking in for khashi early one of these mornings.)

Got lost trying to find an Indian restaurant that may or may not still exist. Our friend Shane gave us good directions, but that was way back in September, and the avenues are wider in Saburtalo & the buildings taller and more generic than in our end of town, plus the street names are unfamiliar. After an hour of fruitless wandering, C and I split a candy-bar (misleadingly labled "nuts" -- it was basically a snickers bar with NO nuts inside - Boo!) and hopped a metro home.

Now my feet hurt, but I don't have depression any more.

a-smile-ation

I never embraced the idea of American exceptionalism. And many ways I still don’t. But living in Georgia, and thinking and writing about what's going on here as best as I can, I’ve noticed that there are, actually, some major ways in which the New World is different from the Old.

Time and again, I find myself explaining how, in spite of the fact that my father was born in Japan, I myself (born and raised in the States) am American, not Japanese. And that actually my father naturalized a few years ago, and is now American, too. (I'm not so naive as to think that no one in America would contest my American-ness, but I don't take them very seriously, and America's most optimistic view of itself is still as melting-pot/tossed salad. And so.)

But then, in spite of my painstaking and painful Georgian elucidation of this simple construct, my conversation partner, who is perhaps selling cabbages, turns to his friend and says. "See, she's Japanese. I told you so!"

For my part, I struggle to understand how people of Georgian descent who have been living in Iran for 400 years can still consider themselves Georgians. (They've been petitioning for assistance in returning to Georgia for quite some time now). The seeming aversion to—or impossibility of—cultural assimilation here is jarring. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around it. Is it even so?

That is all.

Tbilisi Laundry Ban

I'm copy-editing The Georgian Times. It's Sunday morning. I'm still in my pajamas, but I would like to bring the following article to your attention:

Tbilisi residents prohibited from hanging laundry on balconies
Tbilisi residents who hang laundry out on balconies overlooking central streets will now face a $285 fine, the Tbilisi city hall told the Novosti Georgia agency on Friday.

A law to that effect came into force February 15.

Fines must be paid within 20 days, and will be tripled for repeat violations. Tbilisi's city hall said it will distribute drying boards to poor families whose balconies overlook central streets. All others will have to pay for their own.

Guys, I make $250 a month, and that is decent chunk of change here. It lets us pay our electricity, gas, and water bills, with a lot left over for bottles of wine and dinners out.

People who dry their laundry on their balconies don't have driers. (Heck, we don't have one either). Clothes take a long time to dry indoors away from the light and the stir of air outdoors. I've been kind of happy about the downtown beautification project -- many of the old buildings are having their rotting facades re-plastered, and it's nice to see this pretty city get off its knees and apply some fresh makeup or whatever. But barring people from using what's theirs to do something as necessary as drying their laundry - purely in the interest of what? making passers-by forget that there are people without driers in the world? - seems petty and ridiculous.

And just what the heck is a drying board, anyway?

No Starbucks in Tbilisi?

It’s true that, for better and for worse, there are no Starbucks in Tbilisi. Yet. But those who long for a coffee-and-pastry pick-me-up on the way to work, or for a comfortable cafe in which to mega-dose espresso and type their novel, need not despair. At Coffee and Donut and the Donut Stop your pre-caffeinated self will swear – if you only squint a little – that you’re at a South Caucasian Starbucks/Krispy Kreme joint venture.

A variety of fresh pastries are available at both donut depots for GEL 0.20, 1.10 and 1.20. Plump sugar-dusted jelly-filled confections and crispy chocolate-glazed cream-filled morsels jostle for primacy at the counter. It doesn’t really seem possible to be able to go wrong with any of these – deep-fried dough and sugar can’t help but nail a hole-in-one – but I will say that the chocolate-icing crust is tooth-achingly familiar, and the fruit-jelly-filled pastries are especially worth a try; the fruit filling has a tart kick to it that makes these a much more toothsome treat than their overwhelmingly saccharine state-side jelly-bellied counterparts.

The GEL 2.50-and-under coffee menu at both donut shops includes various members of the -ccino family (cappuccino, mochaccino) as well as regular coffees. Authentic Starbucks blends (Yukon Blend, Breakfast Blend, etc) of questionable provenance (which country have they been smuggled in from?) while not on-tap at the time of writing, are intermittently available as well.

The Donut Stop on Kekelidze Street is best suited for those who prefer their coffee and pastry to go. A few years ago, when trademark anarchy reigned supreme, patrons of the Donut Stop might have been lured into the shop by a Starbucks logo painted on the wall outside the café. No longer. Whether due to the need for a new splash of paint, or in provident response to the proliferation of trademark lawsuits against blatant knock-offs in countries where Starbucks is expanding (which now include India, Egypt, Brazil and Russia), the mermaid has been covered up, somewhat diminishing the Donut Stop’s genuine faux-Starbucks aspirations.

Which is not to say it doesn’t try to evoke some atmosphere. The shelves behind the counter boast a number of namdvili (if purely decorative) Starbucks coffee bags, while Starbucks stickers adorn the front counter. The walls of the café display a waist-high band of that distinct ‘Starbucks Green’ paint, and are festooned with green-painted pictures – some of which include the word “Starbucks” swirling around in the pigment. There are a handful of tables should you choose to eat-in, but the atmosphere is a little on the silent-and-deadly side.

On Abashidze Street, Donut and Coffee provides all the ambiance of a neighborhood Starbucks without the “wannabe” vibe of its first location (although its sign – a green circle around the Donut and Coffee logo – does distantly resemble the insignia of its Seattle-based spiritual mentor). Inside, the cafe is spacious and bright. Large windows look out onto the street. Tables for four are set discretely apart from one another, evoking the ambiance of a street café and a feeling of privacy. Patrons have the rare luxury of being able to choose between discrete smoking and non-smoking sections, and one room has a stack of periodicals for your perusal. Come early however if you want to enjoy peace, quiet and fresh air as the dining room fills up with cigarette smoking students in the afternoon.

If nursing a -ccino and nibbling a donut for hours isn’t satisfactory, Donut and Coffee also offers more substantial fare, including salads (GEL 4-8), pasta (GEL 7-9), sandwiches (GEL 3-5), and the strange and misguided “flat burger,” – a hole-less donut with odd fillings such as crab salad (GEL 3).

Donut and Coffee: 10/12 Abashidze Street, Tel: (32) 25 14 66
The Donut Stop: 16 Kekelidze Street, Tel: (32) 25 39 85
Menus in Georgian and English.

Published in Georgia Today, 9 Feb 2007.

We could be assholes...

...just for one day, though.

Tuesday, C received a sudden flurry of email and phone-call from the US Embassy in Tbilisi.

My heart soared. Were our passports, which we'd submitted for visa processing WAY back before Christmas ("real" Christmas), finally ready? Might we finally take our long-anticipated holiday to Istanbul or Yerevan to catch some quick respite from Tbilisi? Were we, at long last, going to be able to flaunt our citizenship and multiple-entry-capabilities to underpaid border-guards at each cardinal crossing?

Alas, no.

Instead, we'd been offered up to a TV Station seeking Americans willing to participate in a short segment of Imedi TV's weekly "Droebea" ('the times'), one of the country's most popular TV programs. Okay! We thought. Cool. Critical to the pitch, though, was the notion that this was a "One Day Event." And where would we be heading? Where else? Gori - best known for it's apples, and Stalin!

We arranged to meet the journalist and his crew at 12, which ended up being 12:45. No problem. We crammed into a Niva and rocketed across town to the TV station. We made some small-talk.

• Had we brought a map?
• Of Gori?
• Yes, of course!
• Um, no.

And so on.

We changed cars at the TV station, then burned rubber to Gori, where the programmers were anticipating a bristly, less-than hospitable from the locals -- apparently not renowned for their big-heartedness. (This impression might be partly due to the hyper-proliferation of Stalin memorabilia -- towering statues, streets, temples, museums -- that dominate the otherwise modest city.)

C was miced, and after getting out of the car, and getting out of the car again, and again, and one more time please get out of the car, but this time don't look at the camera please, we set to work hassling the unsuspecting pedestrians of Gori for directions to museums, churches, and cheap eateries.

Everyone was disappointingly (for the purposes of the program) friendly. One older lady patted my cheek and called me "dearie" when she heard we were visiting Gori from the United States. Virtually everyone we approached offered to walk us to the museum/church/eatery we so desperately sought, which was awkward for us, because we weren't actually supposed to go anywhere.

When we shifted gears and started haranguing people in their own homes, the reception was likewise warm. We approached a cluster of men overseeing some illegal rewiring of TV cable-wires in the street, and the promising crowd all-but-vanished by the time we got there. One man in his 70's or 80's walking with a severe limp and a cane was still there, though, and when we asked where we might find water to drink he immediately waved us inside his home. He made his slow, shuffling way to a small kitchen, produced a clean glass, filled it with water, and gave it to us. We drank it as he beamed at us.

We left his home thanking him profusely over our shoulders, and practically ran into the TV car, which had driven right up the the front door. We got in the car and drove away. As he watched us leave, his face clouded over with a perplexed and suspicious expression. I felt dirty and kind of ashamed, as did C. We were both relieved when the next people we approached waved us towards a watering hole near the old church, and all we had left to do for the day was to be fed. (In the interest of further research for my food column, I'd been dropping leaden hints that I wanted to try some good Kartlian food).

The TV guys took us out to dinner at a restaurant with a modest canal-and-willow garden and etchings of Venice on the walls. The dining area was a high-ceilinged ski-lodgey wood-beamed hall. The restaurant served traditional Kartlian fare (which it turns out we were familiar with -- good old meat-on-a-stick and local red wine), and was called "Venetsia" ("Venice") ((of course)).

Somewhere along the way, the TV crew made it clear that they were expecting us to make a repeat performance the following day -- only this time, we were heading to Telavi, 2 hours east of Tbilisi. Now, it's not like C and I have a great many commitments that we absolutely have to meet day-to-day. But we are -- how shall I say? -- extremely jealous of our time, clutching our unstructured days to our collective bosom with clammy, fretful hands.

The trip to Gori, 45 minutes from Tbilisi, had taken about 8 hours. Telavi, with the two-hour-each-way commute, plus the expectation of more elaborate hospitality, promised to gobble up another fair day that might otherwise be spent more fruitfully (translating poems, writing about donuts, blogging, yada yada). This morning we both woke up grumpy and reluctant to participate any further in the inadequately prenegotiated TV thingy.

Thankfully, I received in my email a reminder about an Idealist.org meeting that I'd signed up for. I legitimately don't want to miss it -- it's part of a larger world-wide initiative that I think I will want to write about here -- and there's no way that we'd be back from Telavi in time for me to attend. So C called the TV people, and while they made "O dear" noises, we promised to be available tomorrow if they need us, and that will have to be good enough for everyone.

And now, I must go investigate the quality of donuts at a local pastry shop. (It's easy to pooh-pooh "where's the water?" programming, but I'm unkindly blowing that off in order to write about fried dough and international grassroots social organizing. Wait... that's kind of cool, though -- isn't it?).

Chinese Commodities

Our friend Shane H, a Peace Corps Volunteer based in Gurjaani, Georgia, knows where to find the good food and the cool things. He's a former chef. He has shot many hoofed creatures, and once had much of the skin on his face replaced after an accident with an explosive toy rocket. He shares a love of burning Christmas trees, fast internets, and good cheap food.

Last he was in Tbilisi, he mentioned a new indoor shopping mall—one entirely comprised of stores selling stuff Made in China. One afternoon, in Shane's hardy company, we struck out to find said China Mall.

It was, in the end, hard to miss. Directly across from the big central food bazaar, there is a brand-new, cinder-block-and-cement behemoth building with a used-car-lot's worth of flags gracing its grim elephant-gray exterior.

Tbilisi has many "China Shops" throughout its variously winding and cobbled streets. They are places where one can buy the kind of affordable and sometimes poorly-made miscellany that has "Made in China" stamped on it -- everything from knock-off Adidas sneakers and women's scarfs to alarm clocks and steak knives. These shops seem to be staffed by multilingual Chinese and Georgians, and the shops are pretty popular. Many of the things for sale are of poor quality, but they're priced accordingly.

Anyway, some unknown power had this very substantial, hastily assembled (and still being finished) building erected opposite the food bazaar near Vagzlis Moedani. And they had it filled with "China Shops," where you can now get *all* of your Made In China-ware for (so Shane says) less than the street-side China shops are selling (the exact same stuff) for.

And so: direct from the sweatshops of China -- mops! flatware! forks! aprons! women's underwear! clock radios! irons! minor household appliances! and many more things!

There's also a casino (if you want to give your money to management directly without burdening yourself with material goods), and a very cheap Georgian & Chinese buffet-style fast-food joint, where, as in the rest of the mall, you get what you pay for.

Anchiskhati meets khinkhali

Wow,

Just had an unexpectedly fabulous evening.

C and I took our friend Pam out to our favorite restaurant near City Hall in Tbilisi. We were coming from a Fulbright hob-nob session in Saburtalo. It had been fun, and we'd left pretty happy, looking forward to visiting an Armenian restaurant near the Isani Metro station that I was planning on writing about for GT this week.

Our bus was a long time coming. By the time we were in the neighborhood of Old Tbilisi, the further journey to Isani Metro seemed less appealing, so we opted for our (name as yet unknown!) khinkhali place up the hill from Tabisuplebis Moedani.

We were greeted by this very friendly man, Temo, who is invariably seating people at this restaurant. He waved us into one spacious room dotted with rectangular tables. We sat, checked out the menu, ordered some delicious kebabs, melty khbos shashapuli (?), badrijani nigvsit, pomidoris salati, and kartolpili pri (shemsvari).

A few minutes after we'd ordered, the room filled with music -- Georgian folk songs, sung by an expert choir. I looked around to see if anyone was seeing, and the source of the sound seemed to be a speaker mounted on the wall above a curtained window. I figured that the restaurant must have put on a CD of an old recording of a professional folk choir. Cool, I thought -- nice and atmospheric.

C, however, was pretty sure that beyond the curtained window there was a room of people singing. After a little while, it was clear that he was right -- the curtains stirred, and parted briefly, and I could see the besweatered torsos of presumably Georgian men at supra.

As the night went on, they kept singing. I thought about asking Nana, our waitress, who the "jgoopee" behind the curtain was, but then decided that she probably wouldn't know. C speculated, "Could it be Anchiskhati?"

The Anchiskhati choir kicks ass. They're a group of a dozen or so virtuoso vocalists, all of whom have marvelously warm hearts and lovely senses of humor. They are friends with my mother, who helped host them on a tour they did of the US, and who has sung with them in other contexts as well. This fall, when my mom was in Georgia, C and I accompanied her to a "thank you" supra that the choir and their friend, L, hosted It was a really good supra, with incredible music, food, expressions of friendship. C and I sat opposite Dato, who beamed his extroverted, sunny, and extraordinarily kind smile at us all night.

Anchiskhati has visited my house in Vermont, and played drums with my brother, Kei, who did Beatles jam sessions with some of their bass singers. C and I saw them in Bloomington when they toured the US with our friend, John Graham. We'd just been speaking of their director, Malhaz. This weekend I copy-edited an article about Anchiskhati's collaboration with a French composer, who iss making new compositions based on Georgian traditional folk and sacred music styles and techniques. I'd just added their new songbook to the Village Harmony online store.

So no, it couldn't be Anchiskhati, could it? That would be too much of a coincidence.

And then Dato stuck his head through the curtains, spotted us, and came over with his 1000-watt smile and warm bear hugs. We were invited to join their supra.

Weee! I still have a bit of a warm buzz going from the two (or so) glasses of wine I had, and so will maybe write about this in more detail tomorrow, but basically, it was a great evening.

Anchiskhati was hosting a French composer and a French chef, who were in Tbilisi to study Georgian music and food, respectively. There were two Georgian women, translating between Georgian and French. And there was music to down in.

We joined the table, nibbled on some khinkhali, and basically basked in the music and company until the supra wound down. It was nice. It was very nice.

And Malkhaz picked up our bill -- even though we'd eaten before we even sat down with them--
and I tottered home full of much better feeling than I had for a little while.

Dato made a toast to the effect of, "This was not a chance meeting -- this was not God's mistake." I certainly hope not. It pulled tight quite a few threads of the last several months, and I think I am going to approach Malhaz to see whether I can finagle an interview with him about his work.

Anyway,

Aba he!

You shall have bear!

Though I'm a little miffed to still be receiving articles 12 hours after my so-called deadline, I was quite happy to come across the following exchange in an interview with the "Minister of Direction of the Legitimate Abkhaz Government in Exile."

Q: You must have bear meat as well!

A: Not yet. Bears are only just starting to come out of the forests. They are quite fat.

Made in Japan

Major breakthrough yesterday: figured out how to use the first washing machine I've encountered that is older than I am.

It's a little tiny thing - smaller than the suitcase that I brought with me to Tbilisi. It has two grocery-bag-sized compartments. One you fill with water, soap, and clothes (you have to to monitor the water - no automatic shut off or anything), and then turn a switch, which causes the compartment to jiggle and swirl the clothes. The switch is basically just a timer, and when the time is up, and your clothes seem sufficiently agitated, you have to manually drain the gray, dirty water our of the jiggle compartment.

There's a skinny duct-tape-patched hose from the bottom of the machine that leads to... nowhere. There's a drain in the floor that we opened and stuck the hose in to drain off the laundry drizzle, but we can as easily put the hose in the toilet, bathtub, or the Dread Open Sewer Pipe (the smells coming from the DOSP aren't worth it, though).

After all the gray water is gone, you repeat the process, only without soap, as many times as is necessary to make you feel as though your clothing has been rinsed.

The second, small compartment contains the spinner. Barely larger than a salad spinner, this little dooder spins at such a high velocity that clothes are practically dry when you take them out. I mean, if you didn't mind momentary claminess, you could put them on right away, and skip the balcony-based air-drying portion of the laundry cycle.

The efficacy of the machine was a nice surprise, given that most things from the Soviet era (with the possible exception for the Lada Niva) work poorly, when they work at all. Of course, when I finally read the fine print on the face of this tiny but powerful gadget, I could retreat back to my original opinion of Soviet goods. My little laundromatic was made in Japan.

*

Yesterday, the VH brochure gobbled up most of my day. At around three, tired and grumpy from sitting all day at my computer, I stepped out onto to buy some street food (oily fried bread with fillin' - "hotdogi" for C, "soqo" (mushroom) for me) and a tomato for lunch.

Every time I've gone out and bought single vegetables, storekeepers have laughed (kindly, I think) at me. I assumed they were responding to my over-punctuated requests ("HELLO! ONE TOMATOES! IF IT IS POSSIBLE!") but Revi, a new Georgian friend, explained that *no one* buys food this way. You are supposed to ask for things by weight - half kilo, whole kilo, etc.

Other things I know now, after a few hours drinking at "Didi" (Big) John's birthday party across the table from Revi:

• The funicular is broken. Has been since a crowd of Japanese tourists tried to ride it up Mtatsminda a few years ago.
• At the bazroba, never accept the first asking price that people quote you. Say 'tsvili a... gaukeli! (or was it gaukedi?).' ("It's expensive... make it less!"). It's not necessary to quote an alternate price, though - and C and my way of halving the price and proposing that as our preferred payment is, apparently, ludicrous.

Here at Last!

This morning sucked. Woke up with the alarm at 7 which had been set with the full, hot-headed intent to get up early and do laundry.

Did neither. Slept another half hour, and when laundry was attempted at closer to 8 AM it was discovered that the Christian Science ladies had beat us to the basket.

Chris left our laundry on the second floor. I stripped the beds, began making experimental piles of black T-shirts and grey underthings for the trip to Sighnaghi, then gave up. Too early/grumpy. Tromped downstairs for a cup of (finally ineffective) Nescafé. Boiled eggs. Ate matzone with Kellog's (German) DayVita! mixed in, egg with mayo applied with a knife.

Don and Dana quietly sparred by the kitchen sink. They and the CS Ladies had a muted (political?) discussion in the far room. Chris, Emily and I sat at the kitchen table, Chris and Emily conversing, I chiming in with occasional (apparent) non-sequiteurs.

This did nothing to improve my mood.

Duties for the morning: to meet with Nino, who had spent 12 hours searching for an apartment for us, so we could pay her. We had originally agreed to 4 lari an hour (which is a measly $2.40/hr) which I then, in a fit of (relative) expansiveness/guilt, upgraded to $8/hr - a livable wage in some low-rent cities. And while Nino did not actually find *the apartment* that we will be moving into later this month, she did make it possible for us to commit to that particular place.

The other apartments were variously flawed: sketchy neighborhood, lack of hot water, lack of heat, lack of vertical clearance. This one we will move into will, I think, be very nice. Its only shortcomings (lack of working plumbing) are repairable.

Our other errand for the morning was to fulfill a request from my mother -- singing in Sighnaghi, two hours east, where we were headed -- for an electric stabilizer. Vague feelings of dread around this one. Um, where is the closest Best Buy?

We set out early, still undercaffeinated, thinking we might use the morning to search for the stabilizer. And lo, none of the shops downtown open before 10. Ah. Well then, we can go to Prospero's and bask in the cozy warm glow of their internet connection. And lo, Prospero's, too, is closed to us.

It was drizzling. Grey. The streets thick with busses, taxis, automobiles - 6-to-8 lanes of traffic on the four-lane road, pedestrians from the swollen sidewalks occasionally dashing across the thoroughfare. In Georgia, drivers beep as they pass other vehicles. Apparently people don't depend on their mirrors -- or delineated lanes -- when they drive. The resulting caccaphony - multiplied by a thousand, added to the din of rough engines and the occasional diesel roar - are persistent and, when a person is short of temper, terribly, terribly aggravating.

We stood opposite the locked gate to Prospero's, in the rain. I smoked an angry, vengeful cigarette. As soon as the gate was opened, we scurried inside - much to the bemusement (mild irritation?) of the Prospero's staff. I promptly requested a computer and did some theraputic email-checking. And lo, the single Americano. And a bit better mood.

Nino was to arrive at 11. 11 came. And went. I received a frantic, apologetic call - she would be 10 minutes late. At 11:40, Nino arrived: frazzled, apologizing, nervy. (We like her). Paid her 175 GEL and wooshed off to try and find a stabilizer.

We walked a while, tried one shop, was redirected to another, discovered that the stabilizer (sold by in a store prominently labled "Computer Technology" up Pushkin street from the Phillips Center store) was 185 GEL.

Nothing deepens my bad, mad mood like spending hundreds of dollars in a day.

I called my mother. Do you still want this? Yes, she said. Please.

I stalked uphill to an ATM. No sooner had two crisp, unspendable 100 GEL bills tongued out of the machine than Mom called back. A techie teen said that laptop computers do not need stabilizers -- their little boxes on the power cords mediate the incoming power. But could I pick up some extension cords?

Sorry, no. I said. Bad morning. Okay! she said. I'll make it up to you with some really good wine this evening. Okay! I said. See you soon.

We hopped a bus to 300 Aragveli and fast-walked back to the house. We missed out 1PM marshutka, but had about 45 minutes to pack for the next one.

Grabbed some lunch. Changed. Packed. Left a thank-you note in a crude scrawl on a found envelope and walked out of the house into a fat rain.

The marshutkas leave from the train station at Samguri in Tbilisi. The parking lot where they congregate is very full (of marshutkas). Each has a sign in the (invariably cracked) windshield. It was raining, and we were in the wrong half of the lot to begin with (local marshutkas bunch in one part of the lot - the out-of-towners are in a lot on the other side of a building that looked like a waiting area -- roof, chairs inside), but we found it and climbed in happily.

Sighnaghi? Asked the diver, diplomatically allowing that we might have boarded the wrong bus. "Ho!" I said. Something like, "YEAH!". More polite forms of "Yes:" "'Ki," "Diagh," are less easy to pronounce. So I come off a bit hickish. Oh, well.

Fellow passengers: 2 Georgian women - dyed redhead and peroxide blonde - two Israelis, and about 10 bolts of white linen. Chatted with the Israelis. Apparently, Sighnaghi is one of the stops on a fairly well-worn tourist circuit for Israeli tourists in Georgia. Huh.

Nearing Sighnaghi, noticed that the marshutka was getting a little ripe. Starting to notice the grease on the headrests. The fermenting breath smell of moist humans. And then, here we are - 2 hours later, doors open, we spill out into a square, rain everywhere. We pay the diver, and head up a familiar hill towards the house.

And here is the part that I like. We are walking up hill, but quickly. Happy to be back. Here, in the rain. Cannot see any mountains - can see very little beyond the buildings and yards we are walking by - for the cloudy misty weather.

We finish our climb, begin our descent, down a road more un- than paved. Fractured asphalt and loose cobblestones shift and slide underfoot in the wet. The road narrows and worsens as we near the house. And then, in the alleyway that the road has become, I see Andrea, who I know from a tour with Northern Harmony in England, 2004. Unexpected, but a happy meeting.

Chris and Emily and I enter cautiously. We run into some people who we don't know, who give us an uncurious once-over and go about their business. But this is *great.* Home!

And up comes Shergil - from Svaneti, instrument-maker, painter, musician - who gives us all big hugs and promises to join us for Mexican food (more on that later) later this week. He, and others, are dashing out the door to attend a rehearsal of the local dance troup, led by Zaza, our former dance instructor. (Also formerly of the Georgian national dance troupe. More on this later also). Things are as they were - palm tree in the autumnal cold, persimmons yellow on the tree, the house, spacious and tidy, welcoming. Mom is putting the finishing touches on the room where Chris and I will stay.

Things look great. Lights are on. Shuki! The upstairs has sitting nooks and a table with benches and kilims on the floor. Downstairs, the bare brick singing room has been (curiously) shelacked. A gorgeous, ornately carved bench (more like a throne) occupies one wall of the room. Through this room, into the lower half of the house, where we lived and studied our brains out in partial darkness in the late autumn of '03.

Changes: Chris and my bedroom is now a very comfortable study/eating room. The kitchen walls sprout iron hangers (from Vermont) from which dangle cast-iron pans and well-seasoned woks. Out on the kitchen porch there is a pot-washing sink under a high roof, as well as an area for drying dishes. There is a sheltered area across the yard, by the fig tree, where the compost is discretely composting.

There is a modern electric kettle. The bathroom has been painted egg-yolk yellow. And everywhere, there are lights on. It is indescribably cozy and familiar.

Chris makes Turkish coffee. We are joined by Mom, and we sit and drink coffee and talk about things - the house, the group, the plans for the week. I am invited to join the camp session. (Well, more like, "I told everyone that you were joining the singing camp."). Well, hooray.

At 7, we go to dinner, and it is here -- in the room at Shalva's house where we used to have classes -- as I am taking in a spoonful of aromatic soup that I felt like I'd finally arrived.

And then! Chris, Emily, Mom and I headed up the hill for flan at Shalva's restaurant.


And the restaurant is really pretty good. We have a flan that is unexpectedly dense -- like pound cake -- but delicious. There are "Aztec oranges" - orange slices with home-made citrus liquor, tequila, and sugar. And the menu looks great. The walls of what was once John's painting studio are sunset-on-red-rock pink. Azure curtains and a shrine of poncho, sombrero, and strings of dried peppers (and a few less readily identifiable fruits) occupy one recess in the wall. There's a photograph of Shalva in cowboy hat, striped shirt, and leather vest, posing behind two young Georgian women who are enjoying an encitrussed beverage (possibly the house margarita?), outside of the restaurant in the street.

I don't quite know where Shalva's Southwestern fetish comes from, but I'm going to find out.

The building exterior has a fresh coat of paint, and a jaunty line of flags fluttering from the roof.

The name of the restaurant: Pancho Villa.

Shalva has always felt a close connection with Chris. He joins us at the table and they begin to converse in what looks like it will become an exclusive and probing conversation. I butt in early - "Er, Emily and I are going to join the group rehearsal at eight," and away we go.

Down the narrow cobble scuttle, in the dark, towards the house. I am glad I wore my hiking boots but sorry I forgot to bring a flash light. We passed a lot of dog shit here when there was still daylight. Oh, well!

Into the downstairs half of the house, where the singing/eating room is packed with the 26 singing camp participants, plus two young men from Svaneti who I don't know but who are sitting in the bass section, smiling gamely.

I take a seat in a corner, where I can see most of the room, and grab a handful of music. Most of it I have sung before. This part of the day is for American and Balkan music. We start with one I know, "Walpole," and no sooner do we launch into it than I can feel my body start to melt. Man, I love singing this music. Or maybe I just love singing. What happens here? Deep, regular breathing. Vibration of the larynx, throat, whole body? Anyway, I make a big loud noise in harmony with 30 other people in a small brick room. The walls are practically resonating, and the air certainly is. When we pause between songs I notice that my heart is beating harder and faster than it was when I entered the room, and that I feel very calm, very alert, and extremely, unexpectedly, happy.

Two days in

The last two days have seen Chris and I riding the Tbilisi Metro compulsively. Tokens - teeny tiny plastic checker pieces - cost 20 tetri (about 10 cents). The subways run way, WAY underground. The escalators are vertiginous. (Photos pending).

We've spent a lot of time trying to get C's cell phone to work and waiting for people (like our apartment-broker) to get in touch with us. (This was stymied somewhat by the dysfunctional phone).

It's really, really nice to be here. The weather is hot and dry, and we haven't had any of the highly anticipated muggings or pick-pocketings that the State Department orientations tend to emphasize. The only episodes of foreigner-harrasment that I've noticed have been getting overcharged for a pair of sunglasses, and a little tiny kid running up to me and pawing the mouthpiece of my Fanta soda. I think that he was trying to gross me out so I would give him the Fanta. (He was begging.). Little did he know of my eating habits. I eat food off of the floor. And I live with a boy, full-time. Cooties don't scare me!

And I didn't buy the sunglasses, so that doesn't really count.

Tomorrow we are leaving for a two-day trip (organized by the US Embassy, not specifically for Fulbrighters - more of a US-oriented cultural field trip) into Kakheti, to help harvest grapes, tour a wine factory, do a wine tasting, watch traditional bread-making, and eat a whole lot of good food. The trip is going to set us back about $100, but we'll be getting a hotel room, a bus ride into the countryside, two lunches and a big supra dinner, and all the other fun stuff in there. Plus, it seems we'll be on a bus with a crowd of other ex-pats for 6 hours. (Networking opportunity! Booya!)

No luck so far in locating an apartment. We were able to reach our apartment-broker today, she has indicated that she might have a few leads in the old part of Tbilisi. (This area has a lot of charm, a lot of decrepit buildings (charming decrepit buildings), and relatively few foreigners). The ex-pat-intensive areas are, apparently, crime-ridden (theft, mostly) as well as out of our price range. We are also hiring the friend of a friend to comb the Georgian classifieds for us to look for apartments that might not be on our apt-broker's radar. We also looked into a friend's old apartment. It is entirely charming, but the two toilets are mostly broken, and the shower base of the downstairs bathroom is cracked and leaking into neighboring apartments. It was a gorgeous place otherwise, and pretty cheap -- the current tenants are paying $350 a month!

Tonight we spend our second night at the home of a family affiliated with the US Embassy. The mother works on energy issues with the US Embassy, and the father is working part-time, as well as doing a lot of the legwork of raising their 10-year old daughter. The family is being very generous with their 3-floor, multi-bedroomed house. They have offered full-reign of their kitchen/fridge (whoooo!), and occasional use of their driver. Chris and I have a room with twin beds. Two Peace Corps Volunteers are here this evening - they are sleeping in the living room and in a spare bed. On Monday, some Village Harmony singers will join the mix -- my Mom among them, I think. (Small world).

The whole process of locating and starting rent on an apartment has taken a little longer than we had imagined. I mean, it's only Friday, and sure, we arrived on Thursday at 4 AM, but I was kind of hoping to have something by the end of the weekend. Of course, the reason why we won't have anything before Monday is largely due to my really, really wanting to go on this weekend excursion. (And why not? Our hosts have offered to put us up until we find a good apartment, and when else will we be able to go into the Georgian countryside for 48 hours of harvesting, vinting, wining and dining?).

I think it will be worth putting off the apartment for a little while. We are really, *really* lucky to have a place to stay for free. I am trying not to wear out my welcome, but I can't resist this little tangent into the countryside while our agent looks for places for us to rent.

Viva la Revolution

At 11 o'clock at night on November 22nd of 2003, I was stuck in the back of a Russian jeep - something with a vaguely mercenary name like "Lada," "Niva" or "Uzi"- in the middle of a very cold, very empty desert near the Georgian-Armenian border. The Uzi was sitting still - had been for an hour - because the driver had taken it on a joyous drunken drive through a nature preserve the night before, and no one had remembered to pack extra gasoline.

There were three cars that had been caravaning through the desert. Only one car (belonging to a Peruvian-American) had not participated in the ravaging of the nature preserve, and thus still had gas in its tank.

A driver was dispatched to find a village and, if possible, gasoline. (And if not gasoline, then a vehicle with a full tank and enough seats to retrieve three Uzis of stranded Americans).

After an hour or so of sitting in the dark, waiting for something to happen, the man riding shotgun got a call from his daughter in Tbilisi. A street protest that had been going on for weeks had just turned into a bloodless coup. Protesters had stormed parliament with roses in their hands and routed the sitting government.

For the next couple of weeks, the evening news showed party people dancing and drinking in the streets of Tbilisi. Young men took turns trying to shimmy up the flagpole in front of the capitol building. News vans, trapped in the city-wide party, ended up with speakers on their roofs next to their satellites, and the song that seemed to be on constant rotation was this simultaneously catchy and kitchy pumped-up Georgian folk song, with heroic male voices and a war-like dance track.

I *love* this song. It makes me feel drunk and goofy, and whenever I hear it I whirl around my apartment high-kicking the shit out of the air and pumping my arms like Seiji Ozawa, if Seiji Ozawa was having a seizure.

And now, three years after the Rose Revolution and one hour after some heavy Googling, I finally know what the song's name is: Samaïa. What's more, there's a music video that aired on VHUn or whatever in France. And what's *even* more - and what made me sit down and write this lengthy (for me) and (not atypically) gushy journal post - some geeky French georgiaphile has posted the Samaïa music video on YouTube.

And so this is where Chris and I are bound: the land of flying Tartars. Enjoy.



Yes, awesome beyond words. Yes, Georgians can defy gravity for minutes at a time. Yes, I have posted the soundtrack to the Rose Revolution here for you to download.

Samaïa