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| August 20th - September 3rd 2011 |
"That's right my friend. The mother-fuckin' boll.wee.vil," Kim said while supplementing her words with a nod that punctuated every syllable.
"So what you are telling me," I prodded, "is that you were taught that the American Civil War, a war popularly known to be about the Northern states quest to abolish slavery in the South and to emancipate African slaves from plantation owners and to decide if states were allowed to secede from the union was actually fought in response to an infestation of insects in Virginia with a craving for cotton?" I asked, making sure I heard her correctly.
"So what you are telling me," I prodded, "is that you were taught that the American Civil War, a war popularly known to be about the Northern states quest to abolish slavery in the South and to emancipate African slaves from plantation owners and to decide if states were allowed to secede from the union was actually fought in response to an infestation of insects in Virginia with a craving for cotton?" I asked, making sure I heard her correctly.
"There may be hope for you yet my Yankee friend," she replied with a smile, putting her arms back on the couch, resting in a comfortable position. She was obviously not explaining this to someone like me for the first time.
We were currently sitting in Kim's living room in a nicer part of Tbilisi, Georgia on the first day of my trip to the country. No more than 90 minutes earlier, Kim was just one of the countless, nameless faces I had seen in an airport throughout my life. Someone you wait patiently for as they get their bags from the overhead compartment in front of you or someone you wait behind, beside or in front of as they collect their visa and entrance stamp. Someone you stand next to as you wait for the carousel to bring around your checked bag and possibly help if you see them struggle to lift the bag that is obviously too heavy for them. We do lots of waiting in airports it would appear. If it had not been for Kim's and my common need of a taxi cab, she would have remained a stranger to me and my life would have been less enriched because of it.
As we stood outside the airport together, I figured her for exactly what I was: someone traveling through the country and headed into the capital city.. Maybe she would be interested in sharing a cab to the center of Tbilisi? We made small talk on the curb: “Where ya headed? Where ya from?”-- the standard meet and greet parlance of the traveler.
“So you gonna ask me or what?” she finally asked.
"Er-"
“Don't get me wrong, I LOVE the shindig that you are doing here. The whole 'crazy weather today ain't it' number is a difficult one, but you seem like you got it down cold. The only problem is, I got to get going so if you are gonna go ahead and ask me to share a cab well then darling, lets do this!”
Meet Kim. A fast talking, phrase-turning, witty and hilarious southern girl from Atlanta who spoke her mind with a succinctness that most could appreciate as long as they were not easily offended.
I entered that cab thinking that this was the perfect inception to my 2 week holiday in Georgia and Armenia. I would share a taxi, get out at some recognizable city center and then aimlessly walk around an unfamiliar Tbilisi in search of my hostel. I had made a tentative reservation at some hostel but really I was flying blind, willing and able to let Tbilisi sway me as it would. To let it tell me what I should be doing and where I should be going. Well, apparently I was going with Kim.
Our taxi ride was wrought with introduction pleasantries. Name. Nationality. Interest in Georgia. Prods and pokes to find commonalities and mutual interests. I'm not sure if it was the prods regarding our shared affinity for Jon Stewart or the pokes about how we had both tasted and strangely enjoyed pigeon in Cairo but our 20 minute cab ride was concluded at the foot of her front door where an invitation to sleep on her couch indefinitely was extended. Kim was not a traveler like me but an teacher working at an International Baccalaureate school in Tbilisi. So there I was, smack dab in a nice, wooded, and well-lit neighborhood, somewhere in Tbilisi, Georgia where I would be staying on her couch, drinking chocolate milk and bantering about perceptions, education and apparently, the American Civil War.
"Is it so ridiculous of a notion that a home country schoolhouse outside the city limits of Atlanta, Georgia might have a different spin on things? Might assign blame or accountability on something, someone else besides themselves? That they might have written textbooks illustrating another scenario? That we might have been charged with shedding new light on the subject? The other side of the coin? How the south had perceived things? How much did your books talk about individual states rights as oppose to Federal rights? People, after all, do not do things because they like doing evil shit - they do things because they think they are in the right."
"I'm mean, I cried while watching Glory as much as the next gal but shit son...” she seemed to trail off at the end denoting that I was meant to extrapolate for myself and fill in the second half of this idea.
“Now don't get me wrong, slavery was and is inhumane, immoral and in the off chance that there is a higher and revealed deity, I think that whomever condones such practices should be thrown down to a deep, dark place with no chocolate milk.”
“Ok, so what is the problem with how 'us Yanks' perceive this? If we are on the same page here why blame it on the boll weevil?” I chimed in.
“Why not? Sure, it may not be important to your educational curriculum where you came from but it's a different perception, ain't it? A different take on important events? Events that shaped the fate of our country? It begs a lot of questions doesn't it? You start thinking. You start thinking about what sort of people would get behind a claim like this. You start to wonder if something as crazy as a cotton-eating bug might be crazy enough to carry credence. Maybe you start to even wonder how the fuck you actually spell boll weevil?”
I laughed.
“Think about what you would do. For generations, your family owns slaves on your plantation. They house them, feed them, treat them in accordance to the tides of the time but hey, that's how shit got done. They do all of this because if you don't, you don't eat. The Yanks don't get their cotton and you don't feed your family. This was more than just labor practices, this was tradition and culture.”
“Now, all of a sudden and with what you understand to be little rhyme or reason, you are being told not to do what had been an intricate part of your family practices for hundreds of years. They say 'no more slaves.' Well, you're gonna tell them to go fuck themselves.”
Kim had my attention. These were things that I just never empathized with but at the same time, as I am sure was the desired intent, I found myself rationalizing this alternative. She went on.
“I come from a very simple area. Simple people having passed down simplicities throughout their simple generations. We are, in fact, simpletons. There were probably 20 different ways to get to the nearest Walmart from the neighborhood I grew up in; routes that were undoubtedly quicker, shorter, and which had more fried food venues along the way, but we went the way that we had always been told to go. The way that had been illuminated to us from people older and supposedly wiser than us. The simplest way. The easiest way.”
Anticipating my interjection, and also noticing the combination of my open mouth and pointed finger signalling I had something to say she added, “Yeah yeah, I know, just because it is simple does not make it right. The fact that the south more often than not rides its simplicity bicycle sans efficacy helmet attests to this. But at the same time, why should it not be looked upon and learned? Understanding a different point of view, perspective, or an alternate take on transpired events? I mean, why is it that you buy a ticket and come to all the way to Tbilisi anyways?”
Kim was a very worldly person. She had lived abroad as a teacher for the better part of a decade. She worked at several different Baccalaureate schools, spoke Arabic, was currently learning Georgian and during the 10 year issuing of her passport, her extensive travels necessitated 3 separate trips to the “Extra Pages” line at the US Embassy. She listened to Tim McGraw, Toby Keith, Tupac, and Kid Rock; she carried good conversations and posed better questions. And at the moment, she was posing a very good question to me.
I had read Dave Eggers' book “You Shall Know our Velocity” just before I took this trip and talking with Kim reminded me of a passage that I had written down from the book:
“There is so much we don't know. So much of what we learn that must be condensed. We knew nothing and the gaps in our knowledge were random and annoying. They were potholes – they could be patched but they multiplied without pattern or remorse. And even if we knew something, had read something, were almost sure of something, we wouldn't ever know the truth or come anywhere close to it. The truth had to be seen. Anything else was a story; entertaining, but more embroidered fib than crude, shapeless fact.”
I guess that this often times does a good job summing up my personal reasons for traveling and reflections on travel. Seeing truth. Trying to unravel that which seems to be random and annoying. Adding entertainment and texture to the crude, shapeless fact of which I have previously read about or seen a picture of. Perceiving what I had before never perceived and begging questions that I had previously never cared to beg.
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| Tbilisi's city center |
This conversation was the best way to start my travels through Georgia and Armenia. After a few days hanging out in the city with Kim, I hopped on an overnight sleeper train and headed West. I was bunked with 3 older Georgian women who, although they spoke no English and I no Georgian, took me in their charge by making sure I was fed, my thirst quenched and my bed arranged to their collective satisfaction. This was an ongoing theme I found while visiting this country. Much like I experienced traveling around Turkey, the guest was very important to their culture. I constantly found myself welcome wherever I meandered throughout this wonderful country. Even though they were as much of a guest as I in this cramped and dank sleeping birth, they saw me as their guest. And they, in turn, saw universal nonverbal signs of gratitude and thanks that I could only suspect from their smiles, were received warmly.
As the train creaked in at the ass crack of dawn, I hooked up with a few Israelis who were also catching a Martshuka (Georgian minibus) to the top of the mountain. The Martshukas operate much like Turkish dolmus and minibuses do. They wait and wait and wait until they are filled to the brim with people and gear before they depart. So much so, that sometimes extremities were asked to relinquish their seats and be moved to dangle outside the windows.
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| Hiking above Mestia |
I spent the next few days with a pair of identical twins. They were orthodox Jews who grew up in New York and later moved back to Israel to finish up their military duty. Like so many other Israelis in Georgia (seriously, that was pretty much everyone traveling through Georgia) they were tramping around the Caucuses. They were very interesting people. I enjoyed picking their brains about Israel mentality, military responsibilities, religion and the Flotilla incident. I guess that was the first (and only) time that I had ever spoken to anyone who had agreed with the aggressive measures that were taken on the Turkish vessels and although very different to the opinions that I had on the matter, no less justified I suppose. Boll weevils.
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| View of the Caucus mountains from Mestia |
I spent the better part of that day on a bus. I thought that I would arrive at some sort of divine idea, some mystical enlightenment on what city I should go to, where I should jump up and get off the bus but in the end the answer was as divine as a toothless Georgian man conveying to me that the bus had reach the end of the line by an oscillation of 2 hand signals. The first, ingeniously depicted, was of him holding an imaginary steering wheel at 10 and 2 and the second of him giving the universal sign for finished: hands out in front of him waving back and forth across his body. Got it.
As it turned out, I ended up in a town called Borjormi which was on the outskirts of one of the old cities that had been carved into the rocks. While I was there I figured I should see what it was all about. I met up with a Polish couple and decided to take a bus out to Vardzia to see the caves. It was absolutely beautiful. A lot like Cappedochia in Turkey, there was an ancient civilization that had carved its city into a rock face. In the center of the city was a main church that was dug deep into the rock bed. While digging, they found a spring that came up through the rocks that was still accessible. It was truly an amazing site and a beautifully preserved city. I spent the day walking around it, exploring it's crevices and marveling at it’s accomplishment. It truly was spectacular.
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| Climbing around the ancient city of Vardzia |
The next day was Armenia. I met back up with Kim, Melissa and Austin who were also interested in going to Armenia and we worked out that a cab would be more efficient for our group than a bus would be. So we piled in a taxi cab with a guy who spoke no English (and us no Armenian) and headed for Yerevan. Although the trip was long, it was fully entertaining the whole way through. The scenery was beautiful, the company entertaining and the fare inexpensive. I think for an 8 hour taxi cab we all walked away 15 dollars lighter.
We made it to the capital just in time to make it to the genocide museum. This was something that I had especially wanted to go to and since we were arriving on a Saturday afternoon and the museum was closing until the following Wednesday, I definitely wanted to try and make it. Again the whole perspective thing. The whole time I have been living in Turkey, I have been told at every available avenue that there was no such genocide. That, on that fateful march, they had all contracted some horrible disease and succumbed to that illness. That Turkey, and its immaculately clean hands, had absolutely nothing to do with the deaths of thousands of Armenians after their removal from Istanbul and its surrounding areas. But here I was, walking through the museum, reading and looking at first- hand testaments about the atrocities committed against Armenians by the Turks. A side of a coin that has been internationally shunned and silenced for decades and probably decades to come. An Armenian boll weevil.
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| Austin, Kim, Melissa, and me in Yerevan |
After we returned to Georgia, I realized that I really needed to move if I wanted to go to the other cities that I had heard were worth going to. I once again left Kim and caught a bus to one of Georgia's eastern cities: Sighnaghi. This was a beautiful town overlooking an immense valley known for its vineyards. I had originally gone to this town to visit these vineyards but who was I kidding? I knew nothing about wine, could not differentiate between a 2 dollar bottle and a 200 dollar bottle and would have felt uncomfortable around people who could. I would rather just walk around and take things in on my own. So that is exactly what I did. In the process, I met a taxi driver who had spent some years in the Georgian military in Azerbaijan and could therefore speak a few words of Turkish. Our L2 banters then turned into a plan for the next day. He told me about something that I should not miss and convinced me that before I got a ride with him back to Tbilisi the next day I should see it. Davit Garaji here I come.
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| The view of the vineyards from Sighnaghi |
The ride out to this secluded monastery was worth it by itself. 50 kilometers from anything distinguishably man-made, it was as close as I could have got to Azerbaijan without buying a $90 visa. This monastery’s location was obviously picked for its seclusion and lack of noise. Its serenity and beauty was remarkable and how the monastery itself was carved largely from the rock was physical evidence to the motivation, devotion and diligence of the monks that lived there. I had extra time so I climbed to the top of the mountain that overlooked neighboring Azerbaijan. The hilltop was dotted with old frescoes and caves, carved by monks that frequented the hillside hundreds of years before me. People that braved things I could not imagine and persevered through things I could never even fathom. Whatever trials, tribulations and persecutions that these people endured, I only saw a sun bleached and crumbling reflection of it basted upon a cave's stone wall. Whatever perspective I could possibly derive from these must be done through the filter of time and dust.
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| Frescoes at Davit Gareji |
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| View of the monastery |
I made it back to Tbilisi, my hub, with no time to spare. I was off once again to the Caucuses. This time to Kazbegi. I had not originally planned to go to Kazbegi. I had already spent time in the Caucuses in Metzia, but I had met so many people along the way that had spoken so highly of it, I decided to fit it in the trip. I found myself back in a martshuka, making my way up a steep switchback on a road which I found impossible to read my book on. I made more conversation with a few Israelis (lots of Israelis on this trip) to bide the time. 4 hours later we rolled into Kazbegi. A beautiful little village in the mountains north of Tbilisi near the Russian border. A town surrounded on all sides by formidable mountains and looming clouds.
I met a guy as I was walking around the village who had a room available in his home so I went back to his place with him. He rented out several rooms and I was the last to find a vacant bed there that evening. I met an Arabic speaking Italian who was traveling around with a Arabic speaking Dane. I paled around with them for the next few days. We went hiking into the mountains and found ourselves at the dinner table have really good discussions about all sorts of interesting topics. They were the type of guys that made it easy to talk to. They were good at perpetuating conversational inertia. One topic led to another, and that one to the next. They all bled into each other seamlessly and without any sort of verbal duress.
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| The Caucus mountains and Kazbegi |
In the book I mentioned earlier, Eggers goes on to say:
It doesn't make sense to leave one's country if all you are looking for is scenery and poor people, just like it doesn't make sense, really, to cheat on someone you are cheating with.
Whatever reasons you have for embarking on whatever journey you may be on, understanding that there is more out there than what we perceive and misperceive should be a integral part the whole trip. Georgia is a country that I will always think highly of and hopefully return to someday. A country where I saw first hand the awesomeness of hospitality, the graciousness of hosts, and the beauty of shared conviviality.
As highly as I think of Georgia, I have equal if not surpassing feelings towards my funny and witty host. At the time of writing this, I found out that Kim had just gotten engaged. I am incredibly happy for her and wish her all the best in her marriage and life. Truly wonderful people deserve the utmost happiness and that southern girl definitely falls into that category. My time in Georgia and Armenia would never have been as fun, thought-provoking, or enjoyable if I had not searched out someone to share a taxi with from the airport. Thanks again for the amazing hospitality and I hope you know that I never look at an incredibly ordinary municipal building without thinking of you! :) I often think back on our conversations and trip to Armenia fondly and thank you for the education on perception and the Southern school systems. You have a place on my couch wherever I may go in this world, friend. So, in true Georgian style, please raise your cha cha glasses and lets have 3 cheers to Georgia, Armenia, and of course, the boll weevils.
Here's another thing that continues to remind me ya, Kim!
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