First Impression of Tbilisi II

13:15, Tbilisi time, Wednesday, November 10, 2004. Talia continues to sleep. (Note to self: all photos up to those taken a few minutes in the vicinity of this entry are off by two hours since they remain on Amsterdam time.) In the interim, while I wait for her to wake, I decided to take a bath. I hit the light switch to the bathroom, a room that contains a bathtub but no toilet (though it is plumbed for a toilet). Anyway, no light goes on. I check the hall light which had seemed to be on since at least our arrival, and that wasn’t on. I went to the other bathroom, this one consisting of toilet and all-room shower (in the European tradition—though I’m not sure it actually gets used much as a shower since there also is a very not-waterproof throw rug on the floor). I know the light had worked in there, but it too did not turn on. Ahh, I finally realized, this must be one of the daily black outs that I had been warned to expect. Well, perhaps I should just wait on that bath. 13:30 and Talia continues to sleep. Conservatively she must be up to 9 hours. Amazing!

“…many arms races reach a stable state in which animals on one side permanently work for the benefit of animals on the other side, and to their own detriment; work hard, energetically, wantonly against their own genetic interests.” p. 80, Dawkins, 1999.

13:42, Tbilisi time, Wednesday, November 10, 2004. I take Talia still sleeping as an opportunity to take a bath, lights in the bathroom or no lights. Unlike last night, the water now flows freely (and I do mean literally cost free as well as amply from the tap). Last night (well, this morning at 4:00 AM) the water was still free, but not ample. Indeed, it did not flow at all. Apparently whatever keeps the water going, throughout the whole city, does not keep up through the night so each evening the water, from the tap, literally stops flowing. Electricity, however, clearly is not involved since last night we had electricity but no water while this afternoon we have water but no electricity away (the alternative explanation that I heard for why there is no water late at night was that the water is turned off at night in the interest of economizing—that is use less of and paying less for a finite commodity).

So why do I continue to write rather than partake of a bath? The answer is quite simple. While the water heater is gas fired, it has an electronic ignition (or so I presumed) and, at least of equal importance, it is one of those water heaters that heats the water on the fly. That has the upside of economy (no water tank to keep heated) and an effectively infinite water tank size. However, it also means that temporary interruptions in heating translate into immediate interruptions in hot water. Without electricity, the whole system apparently breaks down at the point of gas ignition and/or gas flow (again, or so I assumed): water will flow, the heater goes click, but no hot water comes out. Quick inspection reveals that that the water heater is indeed plugged into an outlet, so clearly electricity must be responsible for at least some aspect of its operation. Boy, the things we take for granted. (that’s the bath tub to the right/above)

Meanwhile, I’m getting tired again (perhaps my green tea from earlier in the day has now worn off). The time in Ohio is eight hours earlier, or about 6:00 AM, so clearly I am no longer on EST. I suspect, however, that now is the time to not give in to my fatigue on the assumption that I need to still be tired eight hours from now when it really is time to get to bed. Perhaps I should go for another cup of green tea.

I wonder if the stove employs an electronic ignition. Apparently not, since if nothing else it does not appear to be plugged into an outlet. But it also does not actually ignite. A quick glance around the kitchen reveals a box of matches. That does the trick, only just barely. The gas pressure is remarkably weak. I wonder if gas somehow requires electricity (i.e., to keep the delivery pressure up). It would pay, for example, to have gas mains turn off automatically, given a loss of electricity, since that could signal a natural disaster, and the last thing one needs is broken gas pipes that are still carrying gas.  Somehow I doubt this explanation. Instead, it would appear simply that at his particular moment we have no electricity, only moderate gas pressure, and ample water (and ultimately it turns out that the problem was with the one burner that I chose to use—otherwise the gas pressure was just fine—and I guess I was basing my conclusions more on expectation than on robust data). At approximately 14:00, Talia sleeps on.

“Replicator selection is the process by which some replicators survive at the expense of other replicators. Vehicle selection is the process by which some vehicles are more successful than other vehicles in ensuring the survival of their replicators. The controversy about group selection versus individual selection is a controversy about the rival claims of two suggested kinds of vehicles. The controversy about gene selection versus individual (or group) selection is a controversy about whether, when we talk about a unit of selection, we ought to mean a vehicle at all, or [instead] a replicator.” p. 82, Dawkins, 1999.

14:15, Tbilisi time, Wednesday, November 10, 2004. (that’s the water heater to the left) Disregard previous hypotheses, on the next try the water heater actually turned on, and with ample heating in contrast to the stove. But then it turned itself off again, along with its warmth. Cool water at that… Oh forget it. I’m not going to be able to figure this out without first taking a bath (it has been 48 hours after all—OK, not too long but the 48 hours at least represents a very great distance), and I’m not taking a cold bath if I can help it. Meanwhile, I hear a door opening and its Talia, aksing me whether I want to play a game of cards. Almost immediately, while we’re standing there next to the front door, in comes Naomi.

So, here are some explanations. The water heater automatically turns itself off when there is no electricity because electricity is required to run its exhaust fan. Without the fan the burning gas might give us all carbon monoxide poisoning (or perhaps it simply will get too hot, though why it could with the water cooling it I don’t understand—maybe it just wasn’t designed to be water cooled). How the heater knows to turn itself on and off without electricity (i.e., electricity to run some of electrical brain) is beyond me. Maybe there is a mechanical thermostat that is coupled to the gas inlet. (But what then powers the clicking noise without electricity?)

Meanwhile, the poor performance of the stove appears to be limited to the front burner. This after Naomi’s frantically went into the other room trying to deal with the gas, which I just could’t understand since all of the gas stuff seems to be in the kitchen (it turns out that the gas heater for the house is found in the living room). “At least we still have water!” but she doesn’t expect that to last. Instead she says, “Do you know what’s wrong? It’s the middle of the day!” Oh yes, of course, that explains everything.

Then I start coughing because of the off-gassing of food as Naomi makes Tali breakfast (that you!). I note that, speaking of exhaust fans, the kitchen really needs an exhaust fan. Apparently Naomi asked for one as they were building the place, but they refused to make her a hole in the buildings outer wall for it. Still, there is an exhaust fan in the kitchen, it’s just not over the stove (instead it is so high up on the wall that Naomi probably can’t reach its pull cord; wait a minute, scratch that, it runs off of a wall switch). That exhaust fan probably would do a great job, except that currently there is no electricity.

I mention that I’ve now written so much in my notebook/diary that I’m starting to fear how much time it’s going to type it all in. Naomi says that no matter, a laptop can be brought home. No problem, I’ve got a laptop! I exclaim. But I can’t plug it in. No problem, we’ve got outlets that work for both European and American! That’s great, except that I’ve got a three-prong plug. No problem, we’ve got adapters! That’s great! Well, except that there’s not electricity (and they didn’t have adaptors, after all). And, points out Naomi, our stay in Georgia is thus far so brief we haven’t even been out of the house yet! (Aside: it wasn’t for another week that I would finally finish typing in the impressions that I had recorded in my notebook.)

[Another aside: a few days later I see Naomi cooking over a small electric range. Apparently the gas was out but the electricity was not so she was cooking using electricity rather than gas. Meanwhile, the shower in the second bathroom uses an electric water heater (also a tank-less heater) so that one can take a shower even if there isn’t any gas. However, in that shower the wiring that powers the electric water heater is right next to the shower itself (as is the water heater) and is fully exposed (though the insulation appears, at leas, to be intact), complete with not-boxed wire-nutted splices. Georgia is the land that building codes apparently forgot.]

I’ve thought of two more things that help define whether a place is or is not civilized, i.e., in addition to drivers that are courteous to pedestrians—acts of kindness mightly more empathetic than shouting, “Get out of the road, a**hole”—and the presence of larger trees. Civilization, however, really doesn’t have anything to with the consistency of electrical power, water supplies, or gas. Frankly, an inability to live without functional utilities 24/7 is a sign of being spoiled, not of being civilized (yes folks, civilization predates the existence of all three of these conveniences). But beyond that, here are my additional indicators of a fully civilized society. First (or third if you’re counting), if you can’t buy a decent loaf of bread, then you just aren’t living in a part of the civilized world (those civilizations that never had a bread tradition excepted). And I don’t mean that you have to go to a specialty shop way across town to buy it. If where most people shop (or live) you can’t buy a decent loaf of bread then clearly people are not eating decent bread and, it follows quite naturally, theb those people are failing to take advantage of what clearly is central especially to Western civilization: good bread.

The fourth item on my list is even more central to what civilization is all about, and that has to do with alcohol. Fly out of the U.S. and suddenly wine and beer are free on planes, and very few abuse the privilege (or fly first class domestically and the same holds true). I mean, come on, if alcohol is not simultaneously ubiquitous and not abused, then clearly that “civilization” is not properly taking advantage of that ubiquitous feature of civilized society (even more so than bread) which is ubiquitous but civilized consumption of booze. (In Georgia, apparently the oldest Christian nation on Earth, the churches feature simultaneous depictions of both grapes and the cross, the bread tastes great—though I would still like to find a good whole-grain peasant bread—the Tbilisi trees are a lot bigger than they have any right to be in this semi-arid climate and, arguably, the most of the drivers do seem to go out of their way to avoid hitting pedestrians. As evidence for the latter, I’ll note that we haven’t been hit yet.)

“…the active germ-line replicator… the unit for whose benefit adaptations exist. The reason active germ-line replicators are important units is that wherever in the universe they may be found, they are likely to become the basis for natural selection and hence evolution.” p. 84, Dawkins, 1999.

2:28 AM, Tbilisi time, Thursday, November 11, 2004. And so, now we’re both up. I think that I woke Tali by moving about our room a bit, but she clearly was ready to awaken. By way of temporal orientation, we’ve been in Tbilisi a little more than 24 hours at this point. Talia was as shocked as I was to see that the time was only a bit after two in the morning. That would be a little after six in the afternoon (18:00) EST. How does one explain that? It was about this time last night that we had started our deplaning. It can’t be the wine from the night before (a very fresh white), since that would only explain why I’m wide awake, not Talia (who typically can sleep through anything). It can’t be that we weren’t really sleepy when we got to bed, because clearly at least I was (though that could have been the wine and Talia didn’t fall asleep quite as fast as I did). It could be that I’ve just woken up for a relatively short time, and that makes sense since I don’t feel all that with it. Of course, those are all ultimate-cause explanations. The proximal cause was a squeaky bathroom door as my hosts apparently returned from their party at 2:00 or so AM. That thus raises the question: From a sleeping perspective should we too have stayed up until 2:00 AM, thereby better assuring that we would be sufficiently tired to have slept through the night? We, of course, may never know.

After Talia woke up, around 2:30 AM (about 12 hours ago as I write this), she at breakfast/lunch as Naomi and I talked through the intricacies  of the schedule of service of public utilities—no electricity midday (and dusk) but plenty at night. No water at night but plenty at noon. It is remarkable how little, beyond convenience, any of that matters. It is a lot like camping, except with a lot more luxury and greater access to electricity and showers. Indeed, Naomi, who apparently can’t stand camping due to the lack of access to such things as daily showers, has no problem at all in her “coping” with the daily losses of services. What in the U.S. would be considered a national outrage (except from perspective of certain sitting presidents—I’m thinking Enron-induced rolling blackouts in California) is just a part of life here. The bigger problem is what it does to productivity at work. But, really, people, what is productivity except capitalistic propaganda to the effect that it is more important to make money, as quickly as possible (and mostly for other people), than it is to enjoy one’s life and/or to have public access to large trees, conscientious drivers, good bread, and civil consumption of alcoholic beverages. Can’t mine the Earth of her resources fast enough. Gotta cut down those old-growth forests. Gotta drill for oil in the artic (and everywhere else). Can’t dawdle. Don’t take time to smell the roses. There’s money to be made!

Meanwhile, the lights blinked on and off twice just now. Though not on schedule. I guess that we could lose our electricity at any moment, so now I’m writing faster. Gotta get out my thoughts while I can (especially since I don’t know where the candles are kept). Talia just keeps working on her homework, one sheet at a time. Right now she’s working on her multiples of twos. Outside the traffic continues, as it had with a vengeance all day, though now it’s an occasional car rather than a rare absence of cars. It also continues to rain, as it had started to do sometime between 18:00 and 20:00 last night. This prompted us to take a cab home from our party last night.

The party was great. I ate and ate, and of course drank wine. In hindsight I wish that I could have taken a picture of each dish, and each person, and later prompted Naomi for names, and then me for descriptions. (I’m only learning how to do the camera thing—as I type this into the computer, about nine days into the vacation, I’ve taken nearly 700 shots that I’ve kept, and I wish that I had taken twice as many.) Oh well, I didn’t have enough juice left in the camera’s batteries to have taken all of these photos anyway. Still, I’m clearly becoming more and more obsessed with taking pictures. The freedom, and freeness (lack of ongoing processing expense) of digital is just too seductive to resist—I will get more systematic, too. Meanwhile, speaking of multiples, that is what Talia continues to work on next to me, her multiples of two, four, three, and six, looking for commonalities.

But back to the party. The party was put on by Liana (sp?) Gichechiladze of the Institute (and also Naomi’s boss and grandmother in law to be, plus somebody who I know from meetins), who apparently had spent the entire day pulling it all together. The food was great. There was this huge pile of appetizers: pork rolled into bread, corn-coated and sautéed cauliflower, pickles, pickled peppers, bread, corn cakes, a spicy bean and pomegranate dish, and the list goes on. That was followed by a breaded beef dish and French fries. I think as a mistake in translation we started talking about veal and how inexpensive veal was in Tbilisi. I speculated that that must mean that calves are routinely culled form herds, perhaps from dairy herds, but I don’t really know. I’m not even sure where these cattle are raised since at this point (less than 24 hours in town) I’ve barely been out of Naomi’s flat much less out of Tbilisi.

Our first adventure out of the apartment, a few blocks over to the party, was pretty wild. The big crazy is the traffic, as we had been warned (repeatedly). The problems are many: The traffic lights had just been installed so aren’t universally followed. People consistently try to drive the wrong way down one-way streets, then attempt to recover by driving backward rather than by turning around. The sidewalks are used for parking so any time there is no obstacle between the street and the sidewalk there is a possibility that a car might come barging in. It is a lot like Amsterdam, except that the bicycles are completely replaced by cars, and the orderly lanes have been replaced by chaos (not that people in Amsterdam don’t also drive fast, just not quite so close to the edge as they do in Tbilisi). Also unlike Amsterdam, the pretty trolleys have been replaced by vans and beat up busses. As I remark to Naomi, it is particularly difficult for me to avoid all of these vehicles (or keep them avoiding me) since I am a car junky (so constantly distracted by interesting cars), and that says nothing about the pretty women, who are far more ubiquitous than the interesting cars. We soldier on, as I remain hyper alert trying to protect both myself and Talia from the cars. It doesn’t help that it already after dark, though only about 6:00 in the afternoon. It does help that I can kill two birds with one stone by keeping an eye on Naomi, who qualifies as both an experienced guide and as eye candy, in these parts an exotic one at that. J

Fortunately, there are no motorcycles in sight, yet another potential distraction, in Amsterdam and elsewhere. I really should be spending more time photographing these various delights (if only they would stay still without my asking). Well, at least I can photograph trees.

“The world tends automatically to become populated by germ-line replicators whose active phenotypic effects are such as to ensure their successful replication.” p. 84, Dawkins, 1999.

17:21 Tbilisi time, Thursday, November 11, 2004. Tbilisi is not cold. There are palm trees here! I know this for a fact. I have photographs! Working from knowledge of Tucson, Arizona, I can infer that rarely does it get down to 25°F in Tbilisi. This is confirmed by Naomi, who indicates that rarely do the temperatures drop below freezing. Now beware, as I continue to fail to learn, those who claim that a climate/weather is “bad.” First, there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad/inappropriate clothing. Second, everyone’s perspective on climate/weather is a relative one. Third, only those who are used to only relatively mild weather speak of non-mild weather in negative terms. Fourth, those who are used to not-mild weather simply accept the weather as what it is; this may be a macho thing, or it may be a “why fight what you can’t change” kind of thing.

Thus, beware when asking people to describe their climates in relative terms. Chances are very good that if it is typically mild and otherwise wonderful they will be so used to the goodness of their climate that they will be overwhelmingly fixated on rare slightly bad weather (e.g., weather that reaches down to nearly freezing!!!). However, beware in the other direction should you ask a native whether you could, say, survive a winter in Minnesota. The natives may not consider below zero (Fahrenheit!) to be any big deal, relatively warm even. A statement such as “Georgia can be cold and wet in November” therefore can be interpreted as barely above freezing and raining all the time, or instead it can mean rarely above 60°F with occasional rain. There is just no way, without probing for absolute numbers, that one can distinguish these possibilities and I always misinterpret. I really have no excuse for this since for me a cold autumn is just not compatible with a rainy one. So take this from an honorary Swede: Tbilisi is mild and occasionally it rains! The same, by the way, cannot be said for Amsterdam.

I later was told, by a native, that the springs are worse than the autumns, both colder and windier (and, as I’ve experienced, a strong wind in Tbilisi can be something). Also, I did manage to eventually use the The North Face expedition/waterproof shell that I picked up for the trip (after being told about the coldness/wetness of Tbilisi autumns), while taking a midnight walk in the hills in Western Georgia—though where it really shines is during a Thanksgiving rain when I’m too lazy to wear layers and too stupid to keep out of the rain. Finally, if it is any indication of just how the natives feel about the Tbilisi autumns: They all are wearing jackets/sweaters and long pants out of doors, all the time, and are downright shocked (if facial expressions mean anything) to see somebody stroll around in shorts on a sunny day that’s in the low 60s (°F). This is either a modesty thing or it’s a “this is cold for my climate” thing. I strongly suspect the latter, though can’t rule out the former.

So, into the dry warmth of Tbilisi we went, leaving around eleven since we didn’t wake up until 10:30 (both AM). We took the trip into the Institute by taxi, yet another harrowing experience on the road, one which ended with the driver stopping the car seemingly at random just past the traffic (and just after cutting off a car to make a left across traffic, which somehow resulting in the cut-off car no pausing in the slightest). Our driver raised a finger as to say “wait” and then started inspecting the car from the outside, eventually settling at the right, rear quarter. There the tire was flat. Bummer for him! We, fortunately, were only a few hundred yards from the Institute. Indeed, we were adjacent to the grounds, though not to the buildings.

The most obvious things to say about the G. Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology and Virology is that it is old, something like 75 years old. The infrastructure is literally falling apart at least at a superficial level. The equipment is a mixture of very old and only a little bit old to brand spankin’ new, and among the older stuff there is a mixture of Russian and the more typical not Russian equipment found, say, in any American research institution. This scrounging for equipment is typical in most laboratories, except for the extremely well financed who can’t be bothered to pause long enough to pursue bargains. My own lab is very much the same, consisting of materials inherited from the microbiology class I teach, stuff that was otherwise discarded from the OSU Columbus main campus, stuff purchased off of ebay, and other materials obtained from the discards of previous positions. So Eliava may be crumbling, at least in parts, but it still works and works well enough to allow proper aseptic technique. Save for the cigarette smoke and the absurdly slow internet connections, I feel right at home.

By contrast, what the institute has but I to a large degree lack is personnel. There are people all over the places all quietly going about their work manipulating bacteriophage as well as other microorganisms. On ubiquitous petri dishes there are big “phage” (i.e., large plaques) and small “phage” (i.e., small plaques—plaques are the virus equivalent of colonies) and various people buzzing over them. The work being done is very much basic science in the first lab I visit, at least in the sense that unlike what makes the institute famous, worldwide—phage therapy—here what is being studied are phage genotypes and phenotypes (i.e., DNA and everything else) that may or may not have anything to do with the ability of phages to cure bacterial infections. Much of my time hanging out at this lab, however, was spent downloading materials off of my website for people there to use and also helping Talia to put together an accounting of the trip so far, which she then e-mailed back to her class in Ohio.

At some point Naomi shows up and we make our way back to her apartment by some combination of foot and bus, both very interesting experiences. The bus has us packed in like sardines, though as I pointed out the total number of people who could be packed into this van-like compartment was limited mostly by two-dimensional thinking, i.e., poor use of ample vertical space. J I suppose, though, that optimal packing would be limited as much by our own physiological and anatomical needs as by the need for people to get on and off of the bus a few at a time at different stops. Bottom line: crowded but not awful, but limited mostly to those who can read Georgian and/or otherwise understand which but goes where, which I do not.

The walking was through various neighborhoods, one of which Naomi pointed out that aside from ubiquitous cars\ was quite safe owing to an unusually low likelihood that children will be kidnapped. Oh, that makes me feel very good. Reminds me of the warning from a Russian woman who was waiting with us in Cleveland: “Child, always hold your father’s hand. You are going to a very dangerous place. Hmmm.

We returned by 16:00 or so and to varying degrees slept or read. For dinner we returned to the previous night’s home for a similar and just as wonderful meal. Flush with wine I came back and napped for perhaps two hours, then woke to return to reading. As I remarked earlier in the day, in the sense of simply relaxing this is turning into quite a real vacation, as opposed to an adventure (thought that may still be to come). I can thank Naomi for that. Perhaps tomorrow we may even get our lost bags back from the airline.

“The basic beneficiary of any adapatation is the active germ-line replicator.” p. 85, Dawkins, 1999.