My first, crazy hours in Tbilisi

Although I originally intended this blog to be a source of straight news and a space to promote my journalistic endeavors, I have been recently writing more of my personal thoughts and side comments on Georgia that don’t make it into print.

And so, in keeping with that I began looking through some of the old emails I sent back home to the folks narrating my initial exposure to Georgian craziness, and figured if all of you out there are interested enough in what I think about Freedom House, then you might find my first, crazy hours in Tbilisi humorous and entertaining as well.

So, without further ado, I present to you my first letter home:

By the time I arrived in Tbilisi it was about 8 or 9 a.m. in Kansas and having only slept for occasional 45-minute periods over the previous 30 hours I was basically a zombie. I nearly fell asleep several times while sitting waiting for my luggage to appear at the (slowest) baggage claim (in Europe). But once it did appear and I was able to fight through a tight crowd of Georgians welcoming their kin, I was finally shaken to consciousness by a strange – but very Eastern European — turn of events.

I first sat down to send out my “hey everybody, I’m alive” email as there was free wi-fi in the airport but I only had a couple of minutes of battery power left on my laptop. Almost as soon as I sat down a friendly-looking guy came up and said to me in Russian “hey man, you need a taxi?” I said I did, but there were a few things I needed to take care of before leaving the airport – namely trying to get my old Russian phone charged and working or at least skyping some of the people I knew in the city to figure out where I would be sleeping. While I prepared to do all that Yura, the cab driver, told me about himself. He was ethnically Armenian, but had lived in Georgia his whole life and had been driving a cab since he was a teenager. He was more or less a one-man cab company, what we in Russia called a “chasnik” (how Dad, Debra and I made it to Tsarskoe Selo in St. Petersburg). He seemed to be in a bit of a hurry and I told him I still needed to get my phone working and at least exchange some money if I was going to be able to pay him. “No problem, we’ll take care of all that along the way.”

And so we were off, he led me to a beat up 1970’s Fiat that was his pride and joy next to a beggar woman that had been camped out there, and who jumped up and went to work as we approached. “I already gave you money twice today! Enough! Leave my client alone!” he yelled as he loaded my bags. And when that didn’t work, “he doesn’t even speak Russian!” But the woman responded, “I heard you guys talking earlier, I know he understands.” Finally we got everything loaded, including ourselves and we lurched off with the woman pounding on my passenger-side window and Yura cursing back all manner of derogatory Roma slurs.

As we drove down the airport highway, officially christened “George W. Bush Highway” by Georgian President Mikhail Saakashvili, Yura explained to me that apparently as part of Saakashvili’s attempts to make Georgia look like a Western nation he was trying to get rid of all the chasniki around the airports and only allowed a single Turkish taxi firm operate there. Highway patrol constantly drove up and down the highway pulling over anything looking like an independent cab, fining the driver and calling a licensed taxi for the passenger. Although we saw patrol pull over a couple of cars, we made it through just fine. Meanwhile he told me about how last year during the war he was constantly driving Western journalists around, crossing the battle lines where normal taxis wouldn’t go, making good money, but getting shot at by both sides.

On the Russians he said, “for years we lived with the Russians, we love the Russians, but their politics are awful. Just look at Eastern Europe versus Western Europe – and Cuba. It sucks there. For centuries Georgians and Russians lived, drank and made love together and now the Americans come with money and a new political system and the Russians, like an angry ex aren’t happy about it. But America is a country far, far away. We know nothing about its people, and maybe never will, but we’re still better off. We love the Russians, but we can’t live with them anymore.”

Eventually we made it to a currency exchange. Yura said the exchange in the airport was too expensive and they charged a bunch of fees. In my experience, this was indeed the case. But this exchange basically consisted of a guy on a couch with a moneybox and a glock behind bulletproof glass. Nonetheless, everything went smoothly. Yura stood outside on the sidewalk within view to have a smoke, give encouragement and show that he wasn’t going to drive off with all of my worldly possessions. The next problem was the phone. I still had a cheap Russian phone from St. Petersburg, but it hadn’t been charged or turned on for over a year and hadn’t responded to being plugged in – meaning either the battery was dead or the phone was dead. Even with a working phone, I probably no longer had any credit on my old SIM card, and the Russian phone service, Beeline, had very limited coverage in the city.

“No problem.” Apparently Yura had multiple SIM cards for Mag T, one of the main Georgian cell phone companies, and he was willing to sell me one for about three bucks (which is what I had been told they cost in the store). I didn’t ask why he had more than one, but it wasn’t totally unusual. With each SIM card comes a unique phone number. My friend, Misha, from back in St. Petersburg had several, but he seemed to use them mostly to avoid and confuse the various girls he was dating.

Either way, I had taken care of the most important tasks before going to meet with my potentially future roommate and take a look at the apartment. Apparently because of recent building renovations (for us St. Petersburg residents, the dreaded word – remont), the addresses got a little screwy right around where this apartment was and we passed it on the first run-through. Georgian traffic is quite interesting. On most streets there are no lane indicators or crosswalks – pedestrians and drivers alike just try to force their way through to wherever they want to go.

Finally we arrived. For the whole trip and the SIM card, Yura charged about $15. The apartment was a bit more third world than advertised, but none of it was particularly shocking. The one interesting thing was that the bathroom, while it was reserved for only tenants of this apartment, was actually a separate room not connected to the apartment near the stairwell. There was a toilet in what was once a kitchen pantry it seems, but all other bathroom needs including showering required a trip down the hall. Nonetheless, this place was still the best deal for its price and location. The roomie, Amila, seemed remarkably sane. She’s about my age, Canadian, and moved here because her boyfriend, a U.S. Marine, is now stationed at the garrison of the U.S. embassy here. Meanwhile she has been trying to get work as a freelance photographer and has been shooting for Georgia Today, one of the English-language dailies here. On the day I arrived she had just shot a bunch of portraits of Ja Rule, an American rapper, who had just arrived to perform in the Georgian capital.

We talked out the specifics of rent, chores and groceries, and it turned out we were both hoping this was going to work out from the get-go. And so I dragged my bags from the doorway to my new bedroom and had officially moved in. Then, to introduce myself, and inquire about why the internet wasn’t working we went to see the de facto land lady. She didn’t speak any English, but so far Amila had worked everything out through her daughter who spoke some English and could interpret – and was about 10-years-old. And so after the introduction and a few minutes into the awkward technical conversation about why the internet wasn’t working and when it would be back up again, I asked the land lady if she spoke Russian (in Russian) because so far everyone I had encountered in the country did, and the response was a resounding “Yes! Oh thank god you speak Russian.” We then talked over the internet problem, and the issue of paying for utilities, as there were a few points on that subject that had been lost in translation with Amila over the previous few weeks. Then just as we were about to get up and go, her husband camein, his belly sticking out of his unbuttoned shirt and a huge golden cross around his neck. His wife introduced me as the new tenant who speaks Russian! And after a quick introduction he immediately asked me “so what are you drinking?” As I stammered that now probably wasn’t the time, that I was really tired, he interrupted – “cognac?”

I looked over to Amila, who was incredibly confused at this point after three to four minutes of conversation in the room exclusively in Russian, and asked “well, would you like a cognac?” She also seemed to not be in the mood to drink her lights out, and to boot didn’t really like cognac. So I tried to politely explain to him that we both had things we needed to take care of that evening and that I had just been traveling for two days with very little sleep. “Okay, okay,” he said, “you can just come over sometime later and we’ll get to know each other better.”

With that taken care of I really wanted to get my phone working and/or find a place to connect to wi-fi so I could give everyone extended news on my arrival and possibly call an old friend of mine who was expecting me to check in with him at some point and let him know I was alive and in the city. Amila gave me directions to the cell phone place she knew of that was closest, which happened to be near the MacDonald’s which had wi-fi near the metro stop. And so off I went, not realizing what time it was. Apparently it was sometime after 9 p.m. in Tbilisi (noon in Kansas), so when I got to the cell phone place it was closed, and soon after I began back-tracking it started pouring down rain.

And so I have several good excuses for the sacrilege I then committed. I was starving, needed an internet connection and was in the process of being soaked a dozen blocks away from the apartment. So, sigh, the first meal I ate in Georgia was at McDonald’s. There, the menu was entirely in Georgian, so I just guessed certain items were universal and ordered a Big Mac, medium fries and medium coke in Russian. The teenage girl behind the counter responded in English “would you like ketchup or mayonnaise with that?” “Ketchup.”

I was very disappointed to find that the wi-fi in MacDonald’s was also down. I nonetheless begrudgingly chomped down my globalized processed American salty lipids and was at least happy my computer bag and I weren’t getting drenched in the street. Once the rain died down some I came back to the apartment wet and empty handed and met Gary, the marine boyfriend. After exchanging some small talk in which I discovered I probably at some point met his friend Jerome while he was working garrison duty at the St. Petersburg U.S. consulate, the power went out and a voice said in the dark “oh, and this happens sometimes.” I took it as my cue to get some much-needed sleep.

More to come!

Nick