First Impression of Tbilisi I

Morning, Wednesday, November 10, 2004. The plane was just as noisy as the waiting area. It seemed like one big, long party the whole way. Even when the pilot bid us good night, with about three hours to go in the flight, nobody bothered to turn off the cabin lights so few bothered to even try to sleep. Fortunately, Talia and I were both wearing eye shades, and me ear plugs. I was awakened at one point to dinner. When Talia seemed to wake later on I was able to get her a dinner as well. Unfortunately that resulted merely in her being awakened rather than being fed since she wasn’t terribly interested in the meal. Too spicy. I went back to sleep and she stayed up, actually spending time, yet again, reading her novel.

Upon arrival we were some of the last to make it off of the plane, but that meant that we were among the first to get off the bus that moved us to the terminal. Upon entering the arrival area, as warned, the first thing you want to do is to immediately turn right. There is the visa application window. The visa applications were passed out on the plane, and were different from those that I had downloaded off the web and then had made sure to print and carefully fill out. Oh well. There is no longer a requirement for a passport photo, and I’m sill unclear as to what is meant by “Number of entries: One, Two, Many.” I offered my letter from my host at the institute (G. Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology), but I have no idea how necessary it was, aside from my not having reservations at a local hotel to prove, what? that I was not a Chechyan (sp?) terrorist. I recall from the fog of attempted sleep, while still on the plane, that one person was claiming that in fact he was a Chechyan terrorist and that he hated f**king Russians, or maybe that was just a bad dream.

We make it past the visa application window. The cost was $10 American, for me, nothing for children. We then went to a second set of desks, where our passports were checked, for a second time. We then went out to the baggage claim area and there was, well, no baggage. Not our bag, anyway. After some struggle I figured out that a queue that had gathered around a lone woman at a tall column of a desk was the lost baggage claims person. We, ultimately, were last on line and described our bag and offered our stub. The next flight in, as I write this on Thursday morning, is Friday morning, I assume again at 2:00 AM. And before we all get too upset at KLM and/or Europe, recall our crazy experience just getting out of the states. It would not surprise us at all if our bag never made it off of the plane to Dulles and onto the Minneapolis flight, especially since we didn’t get that reservation until baggage was already being removed from the Dulles plane. Or perhaps it missed the transfer in Minneapolis. Or maybe it is sitting somewhere in Amsterdam. Worst case, I suppose, is that somewhere along the way it was stolen, though I remain optimistic. Talia, however, is upset over the clothing that may have been lost. “What will I do?” I imagined her asking. Apparently the concern, ultimately, was not an absence of clothing to wear but a loss of the specific clothing. Maybe we’ll receive good news come Friday.

The last people in the terminal, or at least the last civilians (half of the staff were in fatigues), were us. As we were leaving I asked if there were any restrooms. We had been told, after I had asked earlier, that there were restrooms after border control as well as before. Always have to take advantage of bathrooms when you’ve got access to them, even if only to wash one’s hands and face. Alas, no bathroom, or at least that is what I think was answered to what I imagine was a question understood.

So, as the last people, we were ushered out of the building into what on the tarmac had felt like a surprisingly not cold evening. As promised there was absolutely no facilities. The arrivals area simply was being closed down (and presumably locked) as we left. The departures building was still somewhat a buzz of activity, but I’ve no idea if there were any taxis, nor how I would communicate, nor where I would go (presumably to the center of town, I suppose). We had left vague plans with somebody that some person might come to pick us up, though I had no idea who. The people who we would actually be staying with had no car (and no address, at least none that mail can find). We were late exiting he building, however, given our lost-baggage delay, and nobody had come into the building to meet us (not that they necessarily could have). So thoughts of subsequent possible strategies were dancing in my brain as finally we stepped towards the door.

And there was Naomi, always a wonderful sight to see, but especially so given the circumstances. She and her fiancé were there to greet us, having enlisted a friend (an other gentleman) who owned a car to pick us up. The car was an old Fiat, or was that one of those famous Soviet vehicles that were based on the Fiat (Lada, I believe). Very beat up. I didn’t even try to look for a seat belt. The car was noisy, underpowered, and very, very broken in all sorts of ways. But it was a car, and we had a destination, and we had made it to Tbilisi, sans check-on baggage, but very much in Tbilisi!

With elevator temporarily not functional, we hiked up six stories to their flat (a view from which is pictured above) and immediately proceeded to dine on what I think was my fourth meal of the evening (in Amsterdam, then strict vegetarian meal on the plane, then Talia’s not vegetarian meal after she rejected it, and now this). This business of eating and eating and eating and eating and then eating more (though not spread across quite so many meals) would become a theme. A very nice theme, but one leading to far more padding around the midsection that I might otherwise prefer. J

The last meal before bed consisted of a peasant bread that we had purchased in Amsterdam, an older Georgian bread they had, half-sour pickles, pickled peppers, pickled cabbage (yes, pickles, pickles, pickles—a wonderful theme in Georgian cuisine), and a touch of a spicy local intoxicant know as chacha. Good meal. Good company. Very nice way to start our stay in Georgia. By 4:00 AM (or so) we all had re-retired. I considered not sleeping, and then thought otherwise. So far I don’t feel jet-lagged so much as lacking in sleep. That is, I don’t yet feel as though I won’t be able to sleep when I ought to, but instead just plain needing to catch up on my sleep. So upon retiring we speculated whether we should bother, Talia especially. But subsequently I ended up sleeping for the next six hours, and as I write this, eight or so hours later, Talia remains fast asleep.

Breakfast consisted of fresher bread (very wonderful), green tea, and mandarin oranges (all consistent themes for the rest of trip—wonderful).  Mandarin oranges truly are one of life’s great pleasures, and at 50 cents or so per kilo, wow. (By contrast, there are the tangerine equivalents that we have available in the states I mostly find to be barely edible—why must one have to travel half way around the world just to experience by default decent tasting, reasonably priced fresh fruit?) The bread, when fresh, is absolutely scrumptious. It is a thin, white bread that is baked on a curved surface, almost like a ceramic wok. Sort of a flattened semicircle that is mostly crust but with a soft, sweet, white interior. That’s about it for now. I’m going to take a few more photographs, though the foggy haze about the city persists. Perhaps I’ll photograph the bread.

“What is beneficial to one entity in the hierarchy of life is harmful to another, and creationism gives us no grounds for supposing that one entity’s welfare will be preferred to another’s.” p. 51, Dawkins, 1999.

Random notes. Thank goodness I took the time to buy disinfectant for my boots (and then disinfected them) prior to leaving (I used Fabreeze [sic?]). After 30 hours in them my socks still, remarkably, smell pretty good. And that is a good thing given that they currently are the only pair of socks that I own.

I was able to read a Russian word on the milk carton in the refrigerator. It said, essentially, “sterilized” which I take to be the equivalent of “Pasteurized.”

Though new construction, the flat is nothing like the new construction we might be used to. The pipes supplying the natural gas for heating, stove, and water heater are all welded together (i.e., end to end) rather than put together using fitted connectors. There essentially is an absence of modularity. A triumph of cheap labor costs over expensive fitting costs. Naturally the pipes are exposed in the kitchen, presumably simply the way things are done, though by contrast there are wonderful wooden cabinets and floor tiling.

My first impression of the construction, however, is the lack of electrical boxes in wall. The cables literally come right out of the walls, though I haven’t pried off any switch cover plates, for example, to see what is underneath. This, it would appear, is very much a land without building codes. It works, I think, because people probably are not also terribly greedy. Thus, things are not necessarily always done extremely well, but at the same time things are probably not done systematically awful, i.e., which would be (hypothetically, of course) for the sake of defrauding buyers and thereby enriching the seller (at least over the short term). The metaphor is seen in braving some of the traffic, which we are told can be so bad as to make road crossing all but impossible, though individual drivers, we are assured, do strive to avoid killing pedestrians. In the states, by contrast, one often feels that one simply should not be attempting to walk where cars so obviously rule. “Get out of the road” is a refrane I’ve heard all too often, not here but back home. So let’s codify this, shall we. A place that puts people above pure greed typically possesses at least two properties: drivers who hold pedestrians above convenience is the first rule. The second is large trees since, as I’ve noted before, a lot of people have to care for a very long time for a tree (in a city) to survive to a majestic old age. I think of Boston as a U.S. city that satisfies both of my criteria: polite drives (at least to pedestrians) and large trees. The jury is still out on tree size in Tbilisi, however. I can see a number that are as tall as this sixth floor flat, but I will need to see them at street level to appreciate their age.

Across the way there is construction. I used my new digital camera to first zoom in on the construction optically, took the photo, and then zoomed in digitally while otherwise reviewing it. Clearly one can see that the construction consists of bricks, which are then coated in some manner with cement. Throughout town this is a consistent theme, though on buildings which are in an early stage of construction one can see that supporting members consisting of steel-reinforced concrete.

“If the individual manipulator has more to lose by failing to manipulate than the individual victim has to lose by failing to resist manipulation, we should expect to see successful manipulation in nature.” p. 67, Dawkins, 1999.