Visiting Old Tbilisi and “Home Depot in Tents”

8:00 AM Tbilisi time, Friday, November 12, 2004. I bed after midnight, up around 7:00 AM. I may not be sleeping long (though that is arguable) but I am sleeping more or less on schedule. The day once again seems to be a hazy one though bright sunshine also is present. We’ve been promised by someone who owns a car, by way of someone lese (it is difficult to follow these chains of interactions since much is not expressed in English) that we will be driving somewhere today (outside of Tbilisi) to see something, I’m not sure what. I think we’re talking something old. In the mean time, I still don’t have an adaptor that will allow me to plug in my computer and therefore can’t download the images off of my camera. Fortunately, with 512 Mbyte of memory, I still have well over 100 images left at maximum resolution, which covers from Minneapolis to this moment. I also still have batteries, though the battery chargers are in my backpack, which may or may not be in Tbilisi as I write this.

As was suggested to me, I have vaguely suggested that Talia and I could get on a train and go somewhere. I do have some fear of the “Georgian” alphabet, though, since I therefore might have little potential to figure out when I’ve reached the correct place to stop plus don’t know what constitutes an “Inn” and what dose not. If we head west and go too far then we end up in disputed territory. To say the least, that would not be good. If we head north and travel too far then the same fate awaits us.  Unfortunately, Tbilisi sits in the southeastern corner of a country that is dominated in the middle by mountains, so approximately west and approximately north could very well be our only choices, at least so long as we choose to stay in the country (visiting Russia, on the other hand, sure is tempting, if only just a brief visit, though I need to look at a guaranteed recent map so that I can have some assurance of exactly where Russia begins—wouldn’t want to inadvertently end up in Chechnya, right?).

At any rate, I’m reminded of the reason that I came here in the first place, and that is to get some sense of how phage are “made,” distributed, and employed to fight bacterial infections. I know that there exists a point of distribution, a “store” of sorts, but I haven’t seen anything else. At an absolute minimum I would like to take numerous photographs of facilities, though I’m concerned that I wouldn’t be able to take enough as my memory card slowly runs out of capacity—gotta get ahold of an adaptor so that I can plug in my computer. And let’s not forget just how long this story is becoming in terms of pages that need to be typed. Egad!

“The more intense the selection, the more the whole genome tends to hold together as a unit.” p. 89, Dawkins, 1999.

8:30 AM Tbilisi time, Friday, November 12, 2004. Far below this sixth floor window what appears to be an old woman sweeps leaves off the street around an SUV. The leaves are below a tree, not quite as tall as I’m standing, which is locust-like, and still full of green leaves. One could imagine that as many leaves as have just been swept could fall from this tree on a daily basis. The leaves were swept into a pile and I can’t see that the pile is being removed. Very odd. However, it does speak to the cleanliness of the street, and other streets that I have been down, at least those upon which people live: The infrastructure is run down, but well used. Things are dusty/dirt/corroded/disintegrating but there isn’t much litter (again, at least close to where people live). It makes me imagine a kind of third-world continuum. Nogales, Mexico, which I’ve visited a number of times, is at one end of the spectrum where there is well used if run down infrastructure, at best only a few stories tall. There is a density of people, but apparently not that great a density as one sees in Tbilisi. In Israel, say Tel Aviv, there is a similarity in terms of the chaos, though the infrastructure appears to be more sound. It is a place with money but not a great deal of planning. These are all places which have either achieved a burgeoning equilibrium or which are still very much growing. They may not be elegant, but they work. Amsterdam then introduces planning and elegance. Clearly Amsterdam was built upon both significant forethought and wealth.

By contrast, there appears to be little of seemingly post-apocalypse abandonment of infrastructure that one often sees in American cities. What is it about the U.S. that allows us to abandon infrastructure? Is it great wealth that allows us to constantly build anew? Or is it great poverty that forces us to abandon rather than repair? I think instead that it is a great passivity on our parts. This is perhaps symptomatic of what is missing in our own lives, which is a willingness to struggle. If something needs to be fixed, we often simply abandon it. This is the root of what has been termed a “throw away” society. At the same time, we are all willing to invest great wealth in machines whose purpose is to do our work for us. Thus, we often prefer the very unsubtle route of employing huge machines to destroy relatively defenseless green space so that we can avoid the struggle, the subtlety required to preserve that which more often than not we abandon.

Again by contrast, there is great subtlety all around me here in Tbilisi. Much of it, to my eye, is an insane jumble of jerry-rigged repairs—gas pipes going every which way, electricity entering buildings tens or hundreds of times rather than just once. But that insanity really is just an outward manifestation of subtlety and struggle that gives the place a richness that contrasts enormously with the American dichotomy of poverty and the avoidance of struggle, both seemingly direct manifestations of American wealth. Clearly what is valuable is people who care, who are willing to make an effort, whether that is to plant then preserve trees or to repair infrastructure rather than abandon it. This is true wherever one goes, though often the observer is conflicted between desires to avoid struggles and desires to partake of the richness of life that comes only with struggle. What luxury there is to experience both—the struggle and, when one desires, the avoidance of struggle—and how sad that so few who could are willing to thus partake.

“An active replicator is a chunk of genome that, when compared to its alleles, exerts phenotypic power over its world, such that its frequency increases or decreases relative to that of its alleles.” p. 91, Dawkins, 1999.

8:35 AM, Tbilisi time, Saturday November 13, 2004. Yesterday Naomi and I compared estimates of how much longer we had left in Georgia. I declared 10 days! She countered with eight! Wait a minute, how could there be a discrepancy? One answer is that I had come up with my estimate that morning, so therefore included that Friday whereas, now that it was the afternoon, Friday arguably could be dropped. The other discrepancy was found at the other end, and that was essentially a question of whether the last day of a trip truly counted as a day on the trip. I apparently favor the idea that yes it does, particularly if one doesn’t actually do any traveling on that day. So, being hard headed, I’m going with my longer estimate, since that feels better. I’m clearly not looking forward to leaving this place. It is amazing what can loom with great importance while traveling. Ah to time all of one’s life caring about little more than whether the last day of one’s itinerary does or does not count as your last day in a foreign land!

Still, try as I do to vacation, yesterday (still Friday) became what is beginning to be a surprisingly common reaction coming from people, more or less in my field. As they are introduced to me they nod politely, but then when given my name, sometimes in and sometimes not in association with my web site, eyes get wider and they say something to the effect of, “Oh, you mean you are the Steve Abedon, I should have realized immediately!” (it doesn’t help, of course, that I’m constantly changing my appearance by modifying of head and facial hair). Five minutes later there is a proposal for collaboration. Whatever did we do (scratch that), whatever did I do prior to the invention of the World Wide Web?

Fortunately, many of the people here I already know so they are simply surprised to see me (once they recognize me) rather than surprised at who I am. This is the difference between taking an unofficial excursion into an institution rather than the typical invited tour of a place (I actually was invited, though we showed up when it was convenient for me rather than when it was convenient to/planned by my hosts). I’ve been doing this kind of thing for years—showing up in a town for whatever reason and dropping in on potential colleagues who, in fact, I have not previously met, nor even necessarily was previously aware of. Often it can make for interesting experiences, though it is only very lately that people I’ve never met have heard of me before I’ve made my introduction. Be all of that as it may, I’ve so far IDed three people with whom I have some potential for collaboration, and I hadn’t even come here looking for collaborations! Serendipity doo, as my mother in law likes to put it.

We still don’t have our bags. Perhaps they showed up yesterday (Friday) at the Institute. Perhaps they did not. We shall see. I have a small fear that they did show up and somehow did not make it to a place where we will be able to find them. We probably should have been more aggressive tracking them down at KLM earlier on Friday, but I still haven’t attempted to get around in the city unescorted. Somewhere quite close to where we are staying is the Sheraton, where the KLM office is located (scratch that last statement; it turns out that the Sheraton actually is well across town, nearby old Tbilisi). Without the bags Talia and I have been wearing the same clothing for nearly a week now (fortunately we both brought along two shirts in our carry ons). I also can’t recharge my camera batteries (fortunately I brought three fully charged sets on the plane) and I’ve had to ration my digestive enzymes (e.g., my lactaid). Talia has even been sleeping in her clothes (and as is typical for a nine year old, not bothering to bathe). Thus she has been wearing nearly the same outfit, without break, from Monday morning through Saturday morning with in all likelihood this continuing through Sunday morning.

Fortunately, the weather is mild and mostly dry, and the people are somewhat used to the idea of people not being able to bathe regularly (though, frankly, nobody smells all that bad, or perhaps at this point this merely is our perspective). Talia seems to be more concerned about losing her specific shirts (her most special ones) that she packed rather than continuing to wear the same outfit. We could buy new stuff, but really haven’t given ourselves any time to (ultimately Naomi would pick up a few shirts for her—thank, yet again, Naomi). Ultimately the important point is that it really does pay to travel very light and simply buy whatever you need along the way. The other point is that delays such as these are what one should expect when traveling to a place that is so remote that the airline only shows up only once every two days (which, if you think about it, would have been a pretty impressive pace 100 years ago). A running, extremely low-level gag is that perhaps next time we should fly Georgian airlines rather than KLM, though this brings the downside that Georgian airlines is not listed on Orbitz.com, thereby greatly complicating obtaining reservations via the internet. Thus one has to consider the tradeoff: $800/ticket vs. having access to one’s bags upon arrival. As noted, I think that the answer to that question ultimately is to always travel light. In particular, if the place turns out to be warmer or colder (or wetter or drier) than expected, there likely is appropriate clothing available for sale at one’s destination, so why worry?

As it happens, there is a colleague of mine who is also visiting the Institute, who also flew in from the U.S. We (Talia and I) attended his seminar yesterday so had an opportunity to see more of the Institute. As it turns out, there are parts of the Institute that are in quite good repair with fresh paint on the walls and all that, while other parts are quite run down. The well-kept places are typical for a 70-year-old building that has been properly maintained. The rest is, well, the rest could use some refurbishing. Perhaps what we need is to set up some sort of infrastructure fund, payable via Paypal, whereby fans of phage therapy could send a few dollars to contribute to much-needed spiffing up of the place. I wonder if I could set up donations like that through my up coming Paypal store through which I hope to sell t-shirts (with phage images on them, of course). Heck, perhaps we could sell spiff-up-the-Institute t-shirts, the proceeds from which could be donated from us to them. I’ll have to ponder that more when I get back to the states. For now, I think I’m going to try to take a bath. J

“A nest, like a bird, is a gene’s way of making another gene.” p. 98, Dawkins.

Friday Afternoon, November 12, 2004. Friday afternoon was spent visiting old Tbilisi, which, as the name implies, is the old (very old) section of town. We walked down 1000-year old streets and visited a still-working stone church overlooking the old town. We crossed the Mtkvaré river, which winds through the center of Tbilisi and from which many phages have been isolated. I dubbed it the “River of Phage.” To the uninitiated the phrase “River of Sewage” is perhaps a tad more appropriate. Talia was fascinated by a plume, presumably of sewage from a pipe letting out underwater, that was coming out of one of the walls containing the river near the bridge crossing it. Imagine all the phage!

Below the ancient church (called Metekhi and featuring a larger statue of king Vakhtang!)  is a smaller, shrine-like church that is in the process of being built. It is fascinating that the same building materials, particularly honed stone, is used in both. All over town there seem to be new churches being erected, many or all made using traditional materials resulting, at the same time, in instant classics that fit right into their ancient surroundings and modern examples of what the ancient buildings must have looked like in their youth. Still, these new buildings, though built at least in part from traditional materials, are also build using modern machines and thus construction durations are greatly reduced to only what I image is on the order of a few years rather than decades.

Remarkably, Tbilisi, in the old section, even has a synagogue, which has been around for 100 years and remains active. Georgia apparently has been a Christian nation for over 1500 years, and also a nation that has has been repeatedly attacked mostly (or so I infer) by neighboring Islamic nations, but nevertheless has retained a tradition of religious tolerance within in its borders. Thus, not only is there a synagogue, but the synagogue remained intact (even through the Soviet years) and continues to be an active part of the community even to this day.

Included among the buildings in old Tbilisi are shells of what until very recently were intact buildings. The shells, walls without roofs or, in same cases, even without floors, are testament to the civil war that was fought in Georgia following and as a consequence of their succession from the Soviet Union. Thus, parts of Tbilisi do have that familiar “bombed-out” appearance of some of America’s inner cities, though in the case of Tbilisi these actual represent the consequences of war rather than a consequence of shamefully bad (not to forget to mention repressive and racist) urban “planning.”

“…one of the early arguments made against Darwin was that there wasn’t enough time for the proposed amount of evolution to have happened. It seemed hard to imagine that selection pressures were strong enough to achieve all that evolutionary change in the short time then thought to be available. The argument of Eldridge and Gould… is almost the exact opposite: it is hard to imagine a selection pressure weak enough to sustain such a slow rate of unidirectional evolution over such a long period! Perhaps we should take warning from this historical twist. Both arguments resort to the ‘hard to imagine’ style of reasoning that Darwin so wisely cautioned us against.” p. 103, Dawkins, 1999.

Saturday morning, November 13, 2004. Last night I spent putting together the record of our journey from Ohio to Tbilisi (and with luck today I’ll put a dent in putting together the story of our first few days in Tbilisi). As a result, I never got around to writing down the story of our first excursion outside of Tbilisi. This was accomplished by car and we can thank Zemphira Alavidze and family for supplying the car and their time (not to forget to mention the wonderful company and food). The following, then, is the story of Saturday, our first excursion out of Tbilisi.

Once again I awoke early, around 7:00 am, or at least it seems as though this was once again. Perhaps it was only the first day I did this. The days are starting to run together. Good thing I’ve been keeping notes. I had gotten to bed around 0:20 (12:20 AM) the night before, having stayed up reading and writing. The first order of business was to read some more and then write some more. That was followed by bath/shower (what a wonderful luxury, what wonderful luxury we are living in here in a luxury apartment in a better part of Tbilisi). Nevertheless, we still have not obtained our luggage. This is not overly bothering me because we haven’t even attempted to contact our airline, and had left a number (and address) with them that only indirectly reaches us (today, Sunday morning as I write, the number one priority is to figure out what is going on with the luggage, though the KLM office in town doesn’t open until 9:00 am and, of course, it is still well before then). The big problem is simply that I haven’t yet changed my clothing (except for switching back and fourth between two shirts). As Saturday began, however, an even bigger priority was that I still couldn’t plug my laptop into the wall (besides, the KLM office was, for some reason, closed on Saturday).

To obtain that long-sought plug adaptor (something that could handle three-prong on one side and European two-prong on the other), we visited what I can only describe as Home Depot, Tbilisi style or, as Naomi puts it, Home Depot in tents. This is essentially what we might describe as a flea market, except that the most of the material (let’s say 80%) is new, plus people can bring their cars into the “aisles” to pick things up. Each of the tents appears to be individually owned and generally are neatly and cleanly kept, though the same cannot be said for the muddy ground upon which the whole operation sits. The place was noisy, busy, and often brightly colored. The more valuable things, such as power tools, are sold from more secure enclosures (something more than tents). Much of the material, though, would appear familiar to anybody who has visited Home Depot. The one major exception were bags of brightly colored powder which I assumed were powered glazes (for glazing ceramic tile), but I just don’t know. We found my converter, though I had a very poor recollection of what the dimensions of the three-prong inlet needed to be. Consequently, I’m now the proud owner of a universal including U.S. (female) to European (male) adaptor. Fortunately, as my writing this on my computer attests, the thing works fine. We also looked into coaxial cable connections plus bought an approximation (used) of what might be “drifter” which I am hopeful will allow me to change the front brake pads on my motorcycle.

Unfortunately I didn’t have my camera with me since I had run out of room on its memory card (having not yet had access to the computer) but it probably was just as well given how busy the place was. The image to the left, however, shows the place, which basically takes up the center of the photo. It is relatively narrow going top to bottom, but about half the width of the image, consisting of the jumbled, low-lying area found in front of the high-rise apparent buildings. This photo was originally taken jus to show what Tbilisi looks like across the Mtkvaré river from the Institute and the row of parallel bars found at the bottom the image are part of the iron fence surrounding the institute. The Mtkvaré river actually has a footnote’s worth of relevance to phagology having, in the first place, presumably having infused life into a historical Tbilisi, thus resulting in a city within which the G. Eliava Institute of Bacteriophage, Microbiology, and Virology could be founded, but also serving as a sewage-infested river of phages just waiting to be isolated. Thus, much of the phage-based medicine associated with the former Soviet Union presumably was isolated from this river, which runs through the center of town, as well as from Mtskheta, the historical capital of Georgia, and our destination for Saturday afternoon (shown, in part, to the right).

“…if a vehicle is destroyed, all the replicators inside it will be destroyed. Natural selection will therefore, at least to some extent, favor replicators that cause their vehicles to resist being destroyed… Replicators that work for the ‘reproduction’ of vehicles at various levels might tend to do better than rival replicators that work merely for vehicle survival.” p. 114, Dawkins, 1999.