Gorey in Gori, or: How I "qvit Stalin" and tried to go to South Ossetia with almost zero success

Looking back and retrospectively writing about how interesting and worldly my life was in 2010 only makes me depressed by how uninteresting and unworldly it is in 2012.  If only I could have warned myself to continue living in Tbilisi and accept that job at the hostel making $5/day, then just imagine where I could be today.  Probably a minister in the Saakhashvili cabinet.

There are a lot of things I regret about my time in Georgia and the Caucasus as a whole.  When I look back on all the photos I took I realise that I did not cover nearly as much ground as I could have.  But let's, for a second, think about exactly what I was up against: I had been on the move, for the most part alone, for the past 8 months; I was down to a sickly 60 kilos (which Google is telling me is 132 lbs but I don't think that is physically possible because I am 6' and that would make me an emaciated bone-rack so let's say that I was skinny); and the temperature was in the mid-40s but the warm embrace of humidity escalated that astronomically.  So you know what?  I'm not sorry I sat around in shaded terraces in the downtown of Tbilisi drinking glass after glass of cold coffee with a scoop of vanilla ice cream—café glacée—in it.

I'm not sure if you have ever had this nectar of the gods, but it's quite possibly the best-tasting thing ever conceived and you're only holding yourself back from maximising your potential by not enjoying one of these every day.  Or six.  Six every day, not one every six days.  Because sometimes you're in Tbilisi, wrapped in a blanket of your own sweat, and you think to yourself, "Yes, I can do this.  I can get up early tomorrow, catch the marshrutka to Gori to see Stalin's hometown and then try for a ride to the South Ossetian border to bribe a Russian soldier to let me take a picture of the area, and then ask a family to let me sleep in their barn for the night" but then when you try to stand up you're so embarrassed by just how much sweat has accumulated on your backside that you sit back down and order another coffee with ice cream and settle into the next chapter of War and Peace.  And there is always a next chapter of War and Peace so this could go on ad infinitum.

Oh?  You're not excited about this enormous statue of Stalin in downtown Gori?

In case you're wondering then, I did not have a South Ossetian holiday.  It's really hard to get to and one can't even get passed the Georgians to bribe the Russians.  So I just had to accept that this was one breakway republic I wasn't getting into and I vowed that no other unrecognized state would ever slip through my fingers.  And they never did, with disastrous results.

How about now?

However in case you're wondering if I went to Gori, then you'll be pleasantly surprised to learn that I did.  What I didn't do, however, is pay 6 Lari (~$4) for the tour of the Stalin museum.  Instead I ate a plate of khinkali, tried to find the abandoned factory which used to produce all the water pumps for the entire Soviet Union, and then got seriously over-alcoholed after drinking a café glacee in the proximity of some unscrupulous but outrageously friendly and hospitable Georgian twentysomethings who insisted I join them for not one, but 5 Natakhtari beers and wait to see whose bladder (and liver) gave in first.  I am proud to say I lost and bowed out. 

Apparently I only took, like, four photos of Gori.  And this was one of them.

After crawling into a marshrutka to take me to the train station and apologising for the 15th time for the tragic death of that Georgian luger at Whistler, I was squished onto a $2 train with the rest of the entire population of Georgia in one car, sank onto the filthy floor despite the protests of the grandmothers near me, and allowed myself but one Western comfort by plugging in my iPod and falling asleep.  Gori success!