Into Georgia (and Back Out Again)

Apologies for the absence; I’ve been traveling in Georgia, that mysterious little post-Soviet Eden on the Black Sea. And as post-Soviet things tend to do, the republic is slowly crumbling, from pockmarked, torn-up stretches of sidewalk on Rustaveli Avenue, the main street of Tbilisi and the most important street in the country, to the Tbilisi metro, which in form looks like a rundown mimicry of the St. Petersburg metro and in size resembles a model train set. But the food is delicious, even the alcohol, which ranges from red wine to the stiff Georgian white wine, a de facto hard liquor, to the grape-based vodka “cha cha.”

And the people are the friendliest I’ve met so far in the former Soviet Union, priding themselves on their maxim, “Guests are a gift from God,” and inviting this traveler into their homes on more than one occasion.

In short, a charming place, which is why it’s hard to watch as its already scarce territory is sliced away by Russia, which has played on Abkhazia’s half-baked dreams of independence and poured its settlers and then its troops into South Ossetia in August 2008. These troops have yet to withdraw from the new swaths of territory they conquered.

The August war is never far from mind. On Rustaveli, there’s still folks living in tent-like “cells” to protest the rule of Misha Saakashvili, who is either loved or hated by each citizen of Georgia in his turn. An American government employee I met in Tbilisi blamed Saakashvili for the August 2008 war, saying he had misinterpreted signals from Washington and gotten overexcited to win back his country’s territory, but also noted that the Georgians don’t have anyone better to lead them at the moment.

When I went to Georgia in the second week of July, word was that a new war was soon to break out …

First sun of the season

I wrote this at the beginning of April but never published it due to Internet problems.  Today we finally had the first hot weather of the season, with a daytime temperature around 20 degrees Celsius.

Yesterday at about 7:30 p.m. the sun emerged from behind the clouds in the tentative glory of early spring.

Under Liteyniy Bridge was the breaking point, the place where the ice of winter held an ultimately untenable front against the waters of the Neva, which were rippling out from beneath the flaking ice floe like swarming wraiths.  Huge  chunks sprouted outward like a mangled overbite where the face of the ice mass had been driven into the pylons of the bridge.

A toy water pistol floated by.  I ripped up a chunk as big as a chestplate and threw it into the lazy current, which swept it away toward the Gulf of Finland.  The sun was low to the west, aligned to the left of the spire of Peter-and-Paul Fortress in a perfect astrological hieroglyphic.  Divined was the coming of spring …

The sun disappeared behind a cloud in a moment analogous to that which Tsoi described 20 years ago: “Clouds swim over the city / closing off a celestial light / And over the city a yellow smoke / City of two thousand years …”

I realized I have to stay in St. Petersburg for the summer, to fulfill the promise that shimmered for a brief moment above Peter-and-Paul, then broke and rolled back.

Anapa on the Black Sea

I’ve returned from my trip to Anapa on the coast of the Black Sea, a beach resort vacation-meets-that Twilight Zone episode where all the town inhabitants have disappeared.  It’s not tourist season for another month or so, and we were the only guests in the lovely Hotel de la Mapa.

Russians often speak of ideas like “the Russian soul” in quasi-mystical terms, but as with stereotypes, there’s often a grain of truth to all the mythologizing.  In the south of Russia, I found that the ideal of “Southern hospitality” (a more common variant: “Eastern hospitality,” but the Caucasus and Black Sea region has always been considered Oriental by Russians) is indeed grounded in real life.

We were lounging in the dunes along the beach one fine day during our visit, drinking local half-sweet red wine and eating adjika with lavash (hot pepper sauce and flatbread) when two dudes rode up on a moped. The exact details of the encounter were lost in the sudden chaotic meeting of people, emotional gesticulating, persistent soft crash of the waves and a bottle of vodka produced from the seat compartment, but Yura and Slava soon offered to photograph us on the moped.

At this time, I’d already been searching for a moped to rent (in vain, they’re “not in-season” yet), so I asked if we could take it for a spin.  They agreed and with a friend a careened up the beach, through the cresting and crumbling dunes and out onto the highway.

By the time we got back, the conversation had moved to shashlik — the Russian barbecue of skewered meat — and why we weren’t cooking some on our beach holiday.  We had no good reason, so Yura and Slava invited us back to Yura’s “tourism base.”

What followed in the next few hours was a mostly happy, sometimes tragic trainwreck of barbecued meat and too much Putinka vodka.  Highlights include a high-speed ride through Anapa in a sports car, vomit, a late-night search for a friend who had wandered off and fallen asleep under a willow tree as if in some vodka-drenched, atavistic fairy tale, and more vomit.

Just some Southern hospitality for you.

Yura took me out shooting on the coast the morning of our last day, and we pinged away at cans and bottles along the cliffs with his 20-gauge.

“Sorry we can’t use my machine gun (‘avtomat’),” he told me. “I lent it to a friend.”

Hospitality.