Caucasian Invasion!*

Tbilisi was a pretty unexpected sight.  I suppose it’s actually pretty hard for me to explain what I was expecting from Tbilisi, because surprisingly I hadn’t thought much about it in the past.  This I find strange because not only do I have a brother who lives in neighbouring Azerbaijan, but it’s also part of the former Soviet Union and quite possibly the only thing I can truthfully list as one of my “interests” on Facebook is reading about the former Soviet republics on Wikipedia.  Georgia should also have held a higher place in my imagination as well, seeing as it was the central to Russia’s 2008 Caucasian War and because I have a cookbook on Caucasian cooking that has a recipe for sour cherry soup.  So I really don’t have an excuse for the range of shock and awe I was feeling when I stood on one of the bridges at 9pm on my way to find the hostel and looked out over a well-lit and vibrant city.  No amount of Google-imaging could have prepared me for this.

As it turned out, getting from the Vale border crossing to Tbilisi proved no real problem.   But only as it turned out.  At the time things seemed a bit more dire.  After crossing from Turkey to Georgia and putting my bags through a fairly intense x-ray scanner, I realised there was not a bustling metropolis full of marshrutkas ready to take me to Tbilisi.  Apparently that metropolis, Akhaltsikhe, was 15-20km away from the border.  What there was, however, were sketchy gingers in all-tinted Mercedes who slowly crept up beside me, rolled down the windows and asked if I needed a taxi.  And fat men emerging from behind abandoned gas stations and starting totheir slow rumble of, “Taxi!?  Change money!?”  Everything was a bit unsettling, so I decided to continue walking and assume everything would work out for the best.

It was hot.  So hot, in fact, that I realised almost immediately that the people working in the fields had discarded most of their clothing and were pitching hay outside their brick Doukhobor homes in the nude (or rather near-nude, but certainly nude enough for my Victorian sensibilities).  As juxtaposed with eastern Turkey where the men were wearing long black pants and long-sleeved shirts with black leather shoes, these overweight Georgian peasants in my mind were decidedly European.

After rejecting several would-be taxis, I decided to accept the offer of a driver of a BP truck, because I figured after the whole Gulf oil spill fiasco they kind of owed me.  We drove through a couple of villages that looked remarkably like my own hometown in Canada.  This is perfectly logical, because 2/3s of my hometown is descended from Russian immigrants who were originally settled in this exact area.  So crossing the border to Georgia was a pleasant and cozy experience for me, and Tbilisi was a welcome, if imposing and unexpected site. 

*Caucasian as in from the Caucasus, not outdated racial theory