Sleepless in Subotica

I've been to Subotica, and I have seen the big yellow building in the square, and I have eaten a pizza there (all 2007), so when I rolled in around noon on the 20th I was all hungry for Hungary.  My whole plan was to just start walking towards the border and then hop on a train once I got there.  Ugh.  Not so easy.  

I walked along what I had determined to the bus route and was finally able to catch a bus to the border after a considerable distance.  At the border, the Serbo-babe border guard followed instructions and stamped where she was supposed to, but the unruly Hungarian guard stamped with reckless abandon, upsetting my system.  

The crossing by car is at Tompa, but the train crosses at a village called Kelebia.  I had to walk from Tompa all the way to Kelebia which proved to be longer than I thought and I ended up hitching a ride from a very nice man and his son.  I was deposited in the centre of Kelebia at a bank and then I waited around for the train to take me to Budapest.  Totally an unnecessary trip on my part, because the cost of the ticket to BP was 3088 forints (~$12) and it would ahave been similar with the cost of the ticket between Belgrade and Subotica to have gone BG-BP direct.  Live and learn, I guess.

Budapest was a sight for sore eyes indeed.  I feel like I had closed a loop: After arriving there in November, 2009,  and thinking to myself that I was finally in "the East" I was now coming the other way after 8 and a half months and nothing ever felt more Western in my eyes.  I was greeted with froccs and given a tour de force of the city.  I felt like I had arrived home, and to a degree I had.  

Making the Belgrade

There is something really exciting about taking the night train through Southern Serbia.  There is always so much intrigue and hijinks going on with the conductors, border guards, passengers trying to bribe and evade paying, while the poorly-afixed windows are so rattly that as we race along it feels like we're going too fast and are on some sort of runaway train (see: The Caboose Who Came Loose.  Lots of parallel themes).  It fills me with a sense of excitement and adventure, as though I have no idea where or how we are going to end up.  The laughable part of all this, of course, is the concept of going "too fast" on a Serbian train--unless we're all willing to remove our Western lens (and let's face it--none of us is) and rearticulate in our minds the concept of how a train should run, and that a train in Serbia moving at all is indeed "too fast."*  

Anyway, I wasn't able to enjoy as much of the hijinks as usual because I was so exhausted and trying to avoid the Erasmus students who ended up de-training at Nis.  They had burst into my cabin to give me more Fisherman's Friend liqueur and ask how they would know when we arrived in Nis.  I told them the station would say "Nis."  They asked how it was written.  I wrote, "Nis."  So, Europe's future is in good hands.  

After splaying myself out on the bench seating and passing out, I had a rough and not totally fulfilling sleep and arrived in Belgrade at around 5 or 6am.  It was jam-packed full of backpackers.  Ugh!  Suddenly, and without warning, Serbia was the hot new destination.  This is in direct contradiction to 2007 when I arrived in abandoned, rainy Belgrade and was nearly murdered by taxi drivers outside the station and had to wander the streets looking for a place to sleep.  I would give anything for it to be 2007 again. 

I slept on the bench outside the train station because the Serbs let me do that (take note, station personnel in Bourgas, Bulgaria) after figuring out my plan to get home.  I would take the 11am train to Subotica and then walk across the border.  I refused the 7am Budapest direct train because I assumed it was going to be super expensive--something I learned later was incorrect--but that's a story for another time.  In any case at this point I had gotten really, really good at reading train boards and schedules, and I want someone to finally ask me either how to get between the various Eastern European countries by rail, or to simply tell me I am doing a good job and to keep on truckin'.

*WHAT was that Wellington quote about how it was unsafe to move too fast so trains were actually bad for peoples' health?  Or else that was just the prevailing logic at the beginning of the 19th century, logic that has been firmly embedded in the Serbia transportation authority's mandate ever since?  Can someone look this up for me please?  I am asking, not telling.  As I'm sure you can tell I try to encourage this blog to be a forum for open discussion.

Dmitrovgrad

Apparently I had some sort of plane ticket to the UK from Budapest with an expiry date of the 22nd so I really needed to get up there.  This is why in the wee hours of the 19th I walked down to the train station and waited for a train to Sofia with a couple of Brits and a Peruvian-German for a really long time because it's Bulgarian rail*.  When we finally did roll into Sofia I had no time for coffee or food at Kartofi Kron.  Instead I had to walk at a fairly quickened pace to the Northern Bus depot which was way out in the industrial zone and required me to take a bunch of shortcuts I wasn't comfortable with taking.  I managed to get there to find a line of people waiting for the same minibus, and for 7 lev we set off, stopping in front of the central train station to pick any stragglers up.  Huh. 

As we inched closer and closer to the Serbian border I worked up the courage to coax the driver into turning off the main road and driving me right up to the border so I could get out.  I bought some orange juice and got ready for Serbia.  As usual I was apprehensive because 1) I had three (3) Kosovo stamps in my passport and I wasn't entering Voivodina, but the southern part which may hold some animosity towards the breakaway state; and 2) Serbia.  The Bulgarian guard gave less of a shit about anything than anyone I have ever seen in my life.  The Serbian border guardress looked through my passport, frowned a bit, asked me how much money I had (trust me, not much), and then sent me on my way.  I was back in the Exoslavia.

Not far from the border had I walked before some Mercedes or BMW screeched to a halt right in front of me ("A" or "D" on his licence plate) and some young Turk asked me in whatever language was our current medium which country we just crossed into.  I did not have patience for this.  You're driving a car.  I am walking.  Check your passport.  What the hell?  How are you a functioning adult?

A bit further I made it into Dmitrovgrad where I learned the train to Belgrade (there was two per day) would leave at 7pm because I had just missed the 1pm one.  It was coming from Sofia.  Everything I had attempted by getting up early in Sofia had been thwarted.  No buses were leaving, and I was trapped in Dmitrovgrad for several hours.  

Things could have been a whole lot worse though.  I love small Serbian towns, and in this one I got my hair cut, had an ice cream, coffee, and ate a huge cevapi fry-up which also included liver even though I was adamant that I do not want liver.  In the end I got liver and ate about half of it before giving it to an elderly gentleman who had walked past my booth and asked me if I was going to finish that.  I wasn't.  

At the appointed hour I got to the train station with a couple of cans of beer, found my own cabin to spread out on, and was about to fall asleep when some atrocious foreign students piled into my cabin and insisted I have a shot of some Danish alcohol that tasted like Fisherman's Friend cough drops.  Ugh, Erasmus!


*I don't know why I say such things.  Bulgaria has a perfectly acceptable rail network, and after crouching on the floor of a dirty Georgian train packed to the brim, this Bulgarian train was absolute luxury even if it was 3 hours late.  

Vulgarities in Bulgaria

Hold the phone--if you think you have met a bad American, then think again.  The worst American currently in existence is in Plovdiv, Bulgaria (as of Jul 18, 2010).  Bulgaria tends to be the country in the world where I encounter the most terrible Americans. In 2007 there was some ox from Los Angeles who couldn't properly articulate a sentence and got into a fight with an equally atrocious British woman about whether people around the world were speaking English or American as a language.  American.  The language.  To be fair to him, his linguistic prowess was such that I wouldn't feel comfortable calling it English in its purest form, so maybe he is correct.  

In any case, that was 2007, and now it's 2010 (It's actually January, 2014, but backdating paperwork is my forte).  And in 2010 I rolled into a boiling hot Plovdiv at 11pm and went straight to the only hostel in town.  I don't think I had a reservation, as I rarely do, and they told me that there was one room they could put me in but it may pose a few difficulties.  The "difficulty" they were referring to was a guy from Philadelphia who just could not for the life of him handle any form of uncontrolled externality.  In fact, my entire stay in Plovdiv was full of people who had just had too much excess in their lives and had for some reason ended up in Bulgaria.  It really upsets me that the Bulgars have to put up with all this garbage because they deserve better.  

So in the end I ended up sleeping down in the common room because it was cheaper, cooler, and the American had had a nervous breakdown of sorts and I did not want to be near that.  So instead I sat in the common area and talked to a British girl who was on a crunk tour of Eastern Europe and didn't know a single thing.  About any subject.  She actually did not know a single thing about anything.  Potentially one of the least-informed people I have ever met in my entire life.  Then some van rolled up and a bunch of North Americans spilled out, including someone from Ontario. That was the final straw for me and I resolved to eat a pizza and hit the old dusty trail the next morning.  

Oh, another thing that happened to me in Plovdiv is that I was approached by someone who works for the Ministry of Tourism in Bulgaria and wanted me to answer a questionnaire about tourism in Bulgaria.  She told me that it's still a dangerous country and that I should not be wandering around from town to town but instead staying at resorts.  I told her I didn't want to and she argued with me and told me they are trying to discourage backpackers!  Ah!  Things are not going well for me socially.  While I know all of these people are unreasonable and I feel that way to this day, I know in some way it's not them, it's me. 

Plov-Diving into Plovdiv

Sadly enough there wasn't a single dish of plov in Plovdiv to dive into, and I have been subsequently scathing of my review of the city ever since.  I love Plov, despite what I was told by an old Russian cafe proprietress in Simferopol who told me that it was no good.  I suspect she was a bit racist, though, and just didn't like the Tatars.  Anyway, I actually did like Plovdiv, plov shortage notwithstanding, mainly because I really love Bulgaria and as always I regretted not spending more time in the country.  

Getting to Plovdiv was no treat, however, only made worse by the lack of plov upon arrival.  Walking from the border and trying to catch a ride was particularly difficult because no one had time for me.  Some even gave me a thumbs down, which I think reflects poorly on their upbringing.  Everyone transiting between Turkey and Bulgaria were just a bunch of busy assholes, and I ended up walking for a really long time in considerable heat.  The highlight of this walk was in a sort of abandoned retail strip zone where two men emerged from behind a container and demanded to see my identification.  Guess how I reacted.  Just guess.  

I was pretty set on not giving them my passport, despite the fact that they looked like Olympic weightlifting coaches, but when the badges and guns came out I thought, "Fine.  I will show you my passport, but if you keep it I will do something that will make you have to kill me and then you'll be greatly inconvenienced by having to dispose of my body" which I like to think guided their decisions wisely.  It turns out they were part of the EU's "green border" patrol and had to ensure any suspicious characters weren't in the country illegally.  While I tried to explain that obviously I wasn't in the country illegally, because it was Bulgaria, I just let the whole ordeal happen because getting in fights with police officers is something I've decided is no longer worth my time. 

After this brush with EU internal security I continued on the long and lonely road towards the town of Svilengrad.  After being rejected for several rides, even from a van full of French hippies, I was picked up by a man on his way to the Svilengrad casino.  He could not wait to get there and burn all his cash.  He let me off in the casino parking lot and I was forced with the very uphill task of getting myself out of Svilengrad.  For such a small town, you would expect this to be easy, but sometimes Western geography degrees have zero application in the East.  Because geography is, like, different over there. 

Ugh.  Everything makes so much sense with a bird's eye retrospective view.  The blue line represents where I should have gone and the red line represents some totally needless anabasis on my part that only exhausted me physically and emotionally.  

Outside of Svilengrad I absolutely broke down and bought a Coca-Cola, which to me is an entirely insane gesture.  I think I can count on one finger the number of times I ordered a Coca-Cola in the past year.  In any case, it was starting to get dark, I was starting to panic, and no was was starting to indicate they would like to have me along for a ride.  Suddenly, and without warning, a car U-turned in front of me and a man picked me up.  He was a border guard, and seeing as I had been having such luck with them all day, I eagerly agreed to go along with him to Plovdiv where he lived.  He told me all about guarding Bulgaria's frontier from the wily Turks and said that I looked like one of the least threatening people to cross a border.  I suppose if lined up with human and drug traffickers and other swarthy brigands banging at the gates, that would be true. 

He also told me a number of fantastical stories: a Japanese man who had been walking across Asia to Europe for three years and had budgeted to spend $3/day and had lost a couple of fingers due to the cold and carrying his rickshaw ("it was not rickshaw, but yes, let us call it rickshaw"); a 90 year old Turkish woman found stuffed in the ceiling of a train who was trying to visit her husband in Bulgaria; how his mother's father had been aristocracy and had studied at the Sorbonne but had been sentenced to hard labour once the communists took over, while his father's father came from the peasantry and was a diehard communist.  In fact, this car ride to Plovdiv was incredibly pleasant and I feel like a better person for it.  He dropped me off at the train station and I was free to find my way to the centre of town and the hostel I was to stay at.  

Thrashin' Through Thrace

This video pretty accurately illustrates the Constantinople-Adrianople leg of my trip.

Thrace sounds like such an awful name.  It makes me think about thrush, which is something I have always been terrified of waking up and discovering I have.  Thrace has always been a bit elusive, as it was part of the Hellenistic world and there were some references to it in Civilization II and also in some of the other books I read as a child on Ancient Greece.  But what is most interesting about it is that it is part of Turkey but it is in Europe.  It is the last remaining vestige of Turkey-in-Europe.  I don't know how they did it, but it looks more like Asia Minor than any other part of Europe or the Balkans.  My theory is that the Ottomans cut down all the trees to build their massive triremes and continue their siege against Christendom, much like the Spanish did in Iberia.  Most of what used to cover the Iberian peninsula now forms a ring around Great Britain, I believe.  

Anyway, Thrace.  I took the bus from Constantinople to Edirne, which I had forgotten was actually Adrianople.  As in, the old capital of the Ottoman Empire.  I know, it makes you wonder why they would move the court out of the most cosmopolitan city in the world, but it makes sense when you think about how it smells in the summer.  It must have smelled so bad.  Adrianople was beautiful, had a large mosque/palace, and a sign pointing towards Bulgaristan.  There were also a few soldiers who hassled me and I had NO TIME for that so I just walked away.  I was having a serious problem with authority figures at this point in my trip.

There wasn't much in the way of help in getting to the border.  I walked a good deal of the way and was passed by about a hundred minivans with "D" or "A" with a circle of stars on their license plates.  I was picked up by a city bus, paid out my last Turkish lira to the driver and walked to the front of the line because that's the type of person I am.  Besides, what I gain in time by budging they more than make up for when speeding past me and not picking me up while I'm walking from the border.  I breezed through the border, bid adieu to the Turkish Republic, and was greeted by a wholly indifferent Bulgarian border guard who could not take direction and stamped wherever he wanted to on my passport.  But with little trouble I was reunited with the EU, and it felt so good.  

Murder on the Occident Express

If anyone was going to get murdered on this train it would probably have to be, besides me in order to access all the wealth that people seem to assume I have, the dining cart attendant who insisted I tip him gratuitously.  Like, I mean really gratuitously.  But that was on the train going the other way.  This time around I just hung out in my own berth and then at Kayseri bolted off the train and demanded two kebabs from the nearest stand and was ready to run back and leap onto the train if it were to start departing.*  Luckily trains in Turkey go about 5 km/an hour so if I had the endurance I probably could have run and beaten it back to Constantinople.

Otherwise I spent a lot of time reflecting on the Caucasus, staring at my map of Europe, and carefully planning how many more stamps my poor, tattered passport could take, and cutting out little paper placeholders based on currently existing stamps.  I had a lot of time to kill.  Not enough time to finish War and Peace, however, which was proving to be one of the biggest challenges of my mid-20s.

The train stopped so many times along the way that I wasn’t surprised or alarmed when it stopped in suburban Constantinople on the Asian side and there was a bunch of hollering and a knock at my door.  I was told to pack up and get out.  The power had gone out and they had done all they could to get me to the city.  I tried to explain to them that no, getting me all the way would have meant paying for a taxi for me to the station, but that’s not the way Turkish Rail rolls (it barely rolls at all, actually) and it was a pretty severe blow to my deeply ingrained sense of entitlement.

So while there were a hundred taxis trailing the train waiting like vultures for something like this to happen, I decided to walk all the way, as I had been on a train for 48 hours.  It was a nice day, there was a lot to see, and I was able to plan exactly how I would escape from Turkey.  A couple of hours later I arrived at my old hostel, in the antique furniture district.  There was a team of Australians (surprise!) who called me worldly and gave me free juice.

*In 2007 I rolled into Romania thinking I was such hot shit and then realized that there was nowhere to sleep in Cluj Napoca so I crawled into a hedge in someone’s back yard and slept for a few hours and then went and caught a train to Brasov at 7am but could not for the life of me find track 3a.  I only realized it was some stubby spur line off to the side and just as the train was leaving I started bolting towards it and leapt off the platform and onto the last rug and tackled the conductor who was about to shut the door.  So Turkey wasn’t going to be a thing for me. 

Big Bertha*

Are you, like, really into physical geography?  I’m not.  Not one bit.  In fact, despite giving intro Physical Geography 101 the ol’ college try, it was a try barely worthy of college-level academic rigour.  What I am interested in, however, is the ramifications of human alternations of physical geography, and how humans subsequently interact with their new built environment.  Turkey is like a big project in which the state says, “Hey guys, let’s [give some project the ol’ college try]” and everyone is all, “Umm” but can’t even articulate a coherent thought because the state doesn’t care and goes ahead and does it anyway.  Like build a massive dam and shift an entire city uphill.  Like Artvin.  The Nelson, BC, of eastern Turkey. 

What I liked about arriving in Artvin is that my driver, a kindly tow-truckist, took me right to the bus depot where I was able to purchase a ticket for Erzurum and also have time to sit an eat a kebab, which eastern Turkey had the market cornered on in terms of quality.  Nothing seems to be cheap in Turkey, however, and I clutched my 25 lira ticket and $5 durum kebab greedily.  I think I may have also splurged on either orange juice, or ayran, but not both.

The bus ride to Erzurum was so relaxing and well deserved in my opinion.  I got to plug in my iPod and really appreciate the Turkish road network.  We stopped for a food break around 8pm at some outpost in the desert and a young student started talking to me.  His main question was, “Why did you choose to come to Turkey?” and it was hard to explain that it wasn’t just Turkey I was interested in and that Turkey just happened to be the current overarching state apparatus governing Asia Minor, one of the crossroads of history.  The role Turkey plays in the Western imagination is hard to grasp myself, much less explain to one from Europe’s own Other. 

We arrived in Erzurum in good time and at the train station I discovered that all the second class berths were sold out and that I must purchase a first class ticket if I wanted to continue on.  It was 11pm, and my alternative was finding a place to sleep and waiting all day to get on a train the following evening, and I doubt I would have made up the savings the following day so I splurged on a first class berth for $50 and couldn’t have been happier with my decision to this day. 

I wandered around the city for an hour or so trying to find an open kebab shop—which, let me tell you, is the easiest thing in the world when you’re in any other country in the world with even a marginal Turkish population (which would be every country in the world—but there was not one to be found or open.  Turks don’t drink Turkish coffee or operate round the clock kebab shops.  Huh.  What next, do Chinese people not all eat greasy pork fried rice all the time?  Travelling is the worst when your deeply ingrained cultural stereotypes are rocked.  I went abroad to confirm my prejudices, not challenge them.

Anyway, what I mean to say is that I had a hard time stocking up on provisions for the train ride.  I went into a grocery store and discovered that half of the entire store consisted of candy aisle, followed by an aisle for tea, and then a few canned goods and things that would be of no use to me on a train.  So I bought about 4 kg of plain yogurt and got ready. If I had only known that my first class berth would include a mini fridge (that worked!!!) then I would have bought some juice.  Nothing like a good juice.

The train was late by 1 hour getting into the station and 4 hours getting out of the station so in that time I was able to enjoy a very peaceful sleep.  This is preferable compared with my usual experience on trains where I get all excited about the prospect of an overnight train and how I get to sleep on one and then ultimately can’t sleep at all because of all the jerkiness and then arrive at 5am all tired and bleary-eyed and end up passing out in a park later on in the day because I’m tired and grumpy.  So way to go, Turkey, in being totally incapable of managing your rail network.  

*There was some sort of cannon used by the Byzantines or Ottomans named "Big Bertha" that caused women to give birth it was so powerful and loud.  I don't know if the Turkish name Bertha and the word birth are connected but this title is nothing if not apropos.  

Getting the Eff Out of Georgia

What followed post-Abkhazia was effectively a hasty flight from the Caucasus and a mad dash overland towards the West.  I caught a ride with my Couchsurfing hosts’ father to Batumi where he worked in a bank.  They gave me coffee and put me in a marshrutka heading to the Georgian border.  I hadn’t really stopped to think that there was a lot of Georgia and the rest of the Caucasus I didn’t get to see and might not get to see for a long time, I was just ready for some comfort and rationality in my life.

...so I decided to go to Turkey. 

The Turkish border was atrocious and I highly recommend never crossing at Batumi.  Always Vale.  We were caged up in the hot sun and—one again—my passport did not afford me special privileges while everyone had to line up and have their bags searched.  I suppose in that my bag wasn’t searched I was afforded a special privilege, but I still had to line up and privilege is all relative.

In case there is any ambiguity around how I feel at border crossings towards taxi drivers (or taxi drivers in general) then I will let you know that no, I did not catch a ride with the nearest driver.  Not of a taxi, marshruka, or bus.  I walked.  I walked for a considerable amount of time along the coast and tried hitchhiking.  I also went down to the Black Sea to take a dip and cool off, but it was actually so warm that I just felt like I was bathing in my own sweat.  What this whole exercise did accomplish, however, was me slicing my toe on a piece of coral which burned and affected me for the next week and made walking much more painful.

A cement truck driver stopped to pick me up and drove me to his hub, which was at the junction of the roads to Trabzon along the coast, or to Artvin in the interior.  I hateresolved to make it to Erzurum or Erdican that evening to catch the same train back to Istanbul.  I figured things would be easier if I went from Artvin so I continued along the road after several stops for tea.  So much tea.  It seems to me that the Turkish day can be divided into two phases: drinking tea, and boiling water for more tea. 

I don’t want to give you the impression that the entire Turkish economy revolved around drinking tea, however.  While at least 50% of the population is, at any given time, engaged in consuming tea, the other 50% is occupied by growing and harvesting tea.  Whether the vast tracts of tea cultivation was prompted by the Turkish love of tea, or whether tea consumption was a politically-manufactured cultural trait of the Turks in order to absorb the excess capacity of tea production is anyone’s guess* but the fact of the matter is that tea was there and I had better get used to it. 

On my walk into the interior everywhere I looked there were people harnessed to apparati that ran all the way up the hills and were collecting masses and masses of tea that were dumped onto tarps in village squares.  The entire population appeared to be engaged in tea harvesting, and all the infrastructure built to accommodate its collection and distribution.  Just over the border in Georgia the natural environment was almost identical but there was almost zero tea production, which really went a long way to show how—wait for it—economies transform landscapes.  Looks like that university degree is finally finding an application. 

Anyway, from here I bounced around from car to car until I got to Artvin where a man driving a tow-truck drove me to the bus depot.  He also stopped to get corn from a roadside corn stand where they sell boiled corn.  This corn was so bad.  I’ve had bad corn before--Iing a tow-truck drove me to the bus depot.  He also stopped to get corn from a roadside corn stand where they sell boiled corn.  This corn was so bad.  I’ve had bad corn before—I lived near Chilliwack and the people of Vancouver foolishly believe Chilliwack corn is to die for but I would rather die than eat another cob of mealy, sickly Chilliwack corn.  In any case I ate it, because that’s the type of culturally sensitive martyr I am, but I didn’t enjoy it and to date this has been my only means of externalizing those feelings. 

*Seriously, anyone’s guess.  What are you going to do, look up an agricultural history of Asia Minor?  We both know you’re not. 

Worst Weekend Getaway Ever.

I could tell you about this but if I’m honest it was one of the most miserable and emotionally difficult experiences of my life and I don’t really feel like rehashing it in a blog post so maybe in the future I will be ready to talk about it but for the time being let’s just say that some DARK SHIT happened in Abkhazia and that I could not possibly be happier to be back in Zugdidi.

Abkhazian Weekend Getaway!

My hosts’ mother drove me right up to the Abkhaz border in the morning and wished me luck.  She also told me not to take any pictures because I would probably get shot.  But come on, I’m a scion of one of the most privileged classes in the most privileged generation born into the most privileged society in history.  The world exists purely for my entertainment, and every misadventure along the way ultimately becomes a funny footnote to my life.  So there I was, looking across the Ingur river at the enormous Abkhaz flag waving menacingly on the other side of the 2km bridge above the Russian army encampment and thinking, “Yeah, I got this.”

Dadiani Cool

Zugdidi was a great place to unwind.  The city had one of those large boulevard-style centres which is really just a long park and the cars circle around them.  What are those called?  I wish I had actually studied city planning instead of just constantly talking authoritatively about it. 

I met my host, Regina, who was half Belarusian and half Lithuanian, and who from a citizenship point of view had access to almost everywhere in the first and second world, and who was working for the EU in Georgia.  She was pretty much the most successful person I have ever met. 

The family I stayed with were great and they showed me around the city, the Dadiani Palace and the slightly eerie botanical gardens.  As nice as Zugdidi was, however, I was anxious to get myself into Abkhazia, the real reason I had come to Samegrelo.  Over sweet red wine and a discussion on Canadian diamond futures with Regina’s boyfriend, I plotted my dip into the breakaway state of Abkhazia, for a day of sun, sand, and a $20 floating visa to tuck into my passport. 

In fact, it’s so hard to even write about Zugdidi because I was so excited about Abkhazia, and because I was listening to Teaches of Peaches a lot at this point and the name “Zugdidi” fit perfectly into one of the songs.  Try and guess which one—I doubt you’ll be surprised. 

Potent Poti

Ew, Poti.  The only thing I remember about Poti was the mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds that started to devour me when I tried to sleep on the beach.  I didn’t necessarily plan my time in Poti well.  I went with the initial plan of inquiring about the ferry to Odessa.  Evidently I needed to go to Batumi but when I was in Batumi they told me that Poti was the port of call.  I believe I got the freshest information available on the subject when in Poti, however, as instead of dealing with a surly and disinterested receptionist in Batumi, I was dealing with screaming soldiers at the Port of Poti who pointed their guns at me yelling while I walked towards them smiling and holding out my passport (that’s my trick in any situation).  My key takeaway from this experience was learning that the boat I wanted was not here.  Perhaps it never would be.

As I spent most of the day causing a ruckus at the port authority, I figured I would need to spend the night but you try finding an affordable place to sleep in Poti.  Much less a place to sleep in general.  I wandered around for several hours before it became apparent that I was going to need to sleep outside.  I even asked an old lady sitting on her stoop where a cheap hotel was—which, come on, old lady, everyone knows is code for “let me sleep on your couch and I’ll pay you handsomely—but she shook her head.  Since I couldn’t get into the abandoned mansion in town (I believe it was across from the po-po station), I tried for the abandoned amusement park on the beach, which is just as scary as it sound.

I found a little cluster of trees and some tall grass and decided that this would be the place.  I set to work setting up a campsite and a bed of grass and leaves, and then I put on my jeans, hoodie, jacket, and hood, then wrapped a scarf around my face and lay down.  Not 10 minutes had passed before suddenly ripped the scarf and the hoodie off, sweating and panting and exclaimed (reflexively),  “omfg it’s 35 degrees out and only 8:30pm, the mosquitoes are piercing through three layers of clothing, what the $&#% am I doing?!”  Ugh. UGH!  I was not willing to go through the night like that.

I decided that I needed to use all the tact and delicacy graciously endowed upon me by fate to finagle my way into the one hotel in town.  I suppose it was stupid of me to have not even initially inquired as to the price of the hotel, but I was right when I learned it was 100 lari and almost entirely sold out owing to some Orthodox Priest convention happening in town.  Looking dejected and forlorn (the hot new look for summer 2010), I somehow tacitly conveyed the message to the receptionist that someone needed to solve my problem quickly or there would be a dead foreigner to clean up off the beach the next day.

Success!  The receptionist called the custodian who knew someone next door or owned an apartment and rented it out.  40 lari a night.  Not great, but you know how grateful I am for anything when I am desperate.  As soon as I got inside I started undressing to take a shower and suddenly the door burst open and a bunch of people barged in with sheets and towels and instructions on how to use complex appliances.  I apologized for being only in my underwear (being Canadian, I use apologies as my chief and most dangerous weapon) and the woman was all, “@#%&$, please!  I have a son!”  My modest Victorian sensibilities still didn’t think that made it okay.

So I crawled into bed with some tea and watched Sex and the City in Georgian and then fell asleep.  The real kicker was when I was repeatedly woken during the night by mosquitoes eating me alive.  Is that irony? 

I'm in Batumi, Trick!

Getting into Batumi was partially relieving but mostly exhausting.  I caught a public bus from Khulo for 2 lari which lasted about four hours.  A city bus!  That went from Khulo to Batumi.  I ended up standing most of the way and alternating seats with an old woman because I thought I had bought a ticket and reserved a seat but apparently I didn’t because I was supposed to buy a ticket inside the bus depot.  I refuse to believe that this is my fault because the “bus depot” made little or no effort to announce itself and I had no idea it existed.  I offered my seat to an old woman but she was getting off shortly and everyone made a big fuss and insisted I sit down.  It was kind of pleasant vis-à-vis Azerbaijan where everyone said, “Oh dang, this foreigner is messing up our system” and instead they were all, “Aww, this foreigner is totally incapable of navigating this irrational system we arbitrarily decided to retain from the Russians.”

The ride included a couple of crunk-stops, where I had an ice cream and then caved into peer pressure and drank a draught Natakhtari beer.  I asked another old woman to sit in my seat and watch my stuff. There are so many old ladies out there that you can entrust your life to.  I just don’t understand why old people are so mobile in these countries.  They have easily the least comfortable modes of transportation so why do these old ladies need to be carting around plastic burlap sacks full of cookies and cheap shoes  idea everywhere?  The entire idea behind getting old is that you are finally allowed to sit and watch other people carry around plastic burlap sacks full of cookies and cheap shoes.

Anyway, I made it to Batumi and was unpleasantly surprised to find that all of the streets had been torn up, it had recently rained and the whole city was a sweaty, muddy mess.  It was so humid, and I ended up walking around the city looking for a cheap hostel—fairly difficult—before having the revelation that no matter what the outcome I would be unhappy and grumpy by the end of it so I settled for one that was 25 lari on Pushkin street with no TV and no AC.  No problem.  Baku didn’t kill me, so if you think you can strike me down, Batumi, I will become more powerful than you could ever imagine. 

Obviously when you’re in Batumi you simply must enjoy a Khatchapuri Adjarskii, or Khatchapuri Acharuli, and I did.  You better believe I did.  Batumi really just felt like a swampy mess, like Tunisia, Albania, and Costa Rica rolled into one.  The streets were such a mess, it was rainy and humid and muddy and I had this overwhelming feeling in Batumi that I just needed to GTFO and so I decided to give it the old once over, checked in at the port authority for boats to the Ukraine, and then plotted my journey northwards to Poti, rumoured to be an even bigger hole.*

*This is something an Australian told me in Kiev and I was really upset that he was deliberately trying to taint my image of Poti.  Now I have no idea what my impression would have been of this venerable port town if I had seen it with virgin eyes.  This made me almost as angry as that Cypriot in Constantinople who was so against me going to Armenia.  I really should stop talking to people because I often become so enraged.    

Khulo

I really got the royal treatment in terms of sleeping arrangements because I actually got a bed.  I have no idea where everyone else slept because there were so many people, but what I do know is that I got my own bed.  It was in the hallway, and it was creaky, and I was woken at 5am because the mother was starting the arduous breakfast-making task, but it was a comfortable sleep nevertheless.  Oh wait, I wasn’t woken at 5am by the mother, I was woken at 5am by the CATTLE DRIVE going past the house, and then again at 6 by the mother starting breakfast.  Which was less loud than the cattle drive. 

Breakfast was a cheesy repeat of dinner, and all the better for it.  I was also forced to take two enormous shots of cha-cha for breakfast because it’s a “disinfectant.”  This was one of the hardest things I have ever had to stomach in my life.  It was 7:30am.  I wanted to die.  Embarrassingly enough I actually tried to refuse (which is nothing short of heresy and to be honest, bad manners and I should know better) which did not go over well.  In the end I would take a shot, grab a piece of bread, shove it in my mouth, take a tiny bite and then force the 80% pumice-derived firewater into the bread through my teeth, and then remove the bread from my mouth, so as to give the illusion that I had taken a big bite of bread (I’m really good at this.  I’m also really good at pretending to chug when the “Waterfall” card is pulled in King’s Cup.  I actually end up drinking less in Waterfall than I do during a normal sip).

Anyway, let’s remember I had to get through two 3oz shots of this stuff so nevertheless by the end of breakfast I was thoroughly crunk.  And not loving it.  Lest we forget how much water I had been deprived of in the past 24 hours.  Water was a pretty interesting commodity there too, as there was a hose carrying fresh glacier water from just up the hill into the house and then down a drain at all times.  It was icy and delicious.  

The bathroom was an even better affair, as it was just a hole at the far end of the deck with a scant amount of curtain cordoning it off.  It was also where the deck was highest above the ground, and there was definitely no fencing or wall or anything demarcating a zone of containment for unwitting passersby.  There was also no hole in the ground to aim into.  It was perfect, and terrifying.  Like most things in life.

Anyway, it took about four hours to actually leave the village because part of the road had suddenly washed away, and we had to walk down a muddy bank and across a creek for some inexplicable reason and I completely ruined my shoes(—LOLz, just kidding, my shoes were so effed at this point that any amount of cow manure, mud, and thistles would only do them good).  We went to visit the home of the lady who was in the marshrutka with me coming up. She was staying with her uncle who hounded me with questions about how much I made in Canada.  Thank god I’m an unskilled, unemployable vagrant with less than $1500 to my name.  He wasn’t satisfied with my answers ($1500 is still a king’s ransom, mind you) and demanded to know my parents’ pension amounts, which I was able to fire back a big ol’ $0 but ultimately hit a language barrier.  I can’t even explain roll-back neoliberalism the western demographic crisis to people who are actually living it in English, so how am I to explain to a Georgian villager in a language I only pretend to know?   I then got to ask the questions and learned more about the village and the inhabitants, most of whom lived in nearby Khulo during the cooler months.  I said, “Oh, so these are like your summer homes?” in the (unintentionally) New-Moneyist way possible to which all their jaws dropped.  I guess I’m just not that good at small talk. 

Then Maxim walked me to the marshrutka launching point, I bought a tonne of cell phone cookies (something you only wish you could try) and waited for the 1pm marshrutka that would take me to Khulo.  With an iPod not quite dead, and a sleepiness setting in from the morning shots of breakfast cha-cha, I was ready to board this rickety Mercedes van and descend from the clouds.  

Best of Beshumi

The best thing about arriving at this house is that I had indeed arrived.  I was treated like royalty and introduced to everyone in the extended family. The worst thing about this house was that I had officially resigned all control over my own actions for the rest of the evening and most of the next day.  But this is the way things go when you’re desperate to sleep anywhere after contemplating curling up in a culvert a few hours earlier.Everyone was quick to introduce themselves to me and started to swarm me when suddenly it was as though the seas parted and everyone cleared way for the patriarch of the family, the grandfather, to greet and embrace me, and act as official interpreter.

“Aleksandr!” he exclaimed in perfect Russian.  He was absolutely ecstatic to talk to someone in Russian because it’s nice when all those years in school finally pay off, you know?  I certainly do.  So he had been in the army and actually loved the Russians.  And why wouldn’t you?  They are so cute and cuddly when you ignore any of the political issues that exist between the Russian and Georgian governments. 

So we sat around in the main room of the house watching Georgian Idol while one woman cooked a meal for about twenty people.  I am not even joking, there were twenty people crammed into this one room.  We talked and laughed and toasted and drank and the grandfather translated everything for me. During the toasts, which lasted about 1-5 minutes per toast and consisted of a nonstop stream of Georgian, the old man would turn to me and simply explain, “To our mothers” or “To old friends” and then we would be expected to drink our entire glass from top to bottom.  As the night wore on and he got progressively crunk, he would slap my back, pinch my cheeks, smile widely and say, "Aleksandr!  Sacha!  Sachenka!!!!"

Dinner was greatest thing that has ever happened to me before or since.  It was pure joy.  Perhaps I should explain the nature of the village: they lived there three or four months out of the year because the rest of the time it was snowed out.  They brought their cattle up to graze on the delicious grass that coated the hills above the treeline.  The men were engaged in directing the grazing and driving the cattle, and the women passed the time processing the milk into delicious dairy treats.  I suppose they eventually sell this stuff in the market but I can’t see how after the sheer quantity of food we ate.

Every single item on the table seemed to utilize fresh cheese curds.  Do you have any idea how incredibly fortuitous it is to be served a meal in which this is the leading theme?  There was boiled pasta—with cheese curds stirred in; there were French-fried potatoes—with a cheese curd sauce poured on top so that it was both smooth and creamy but also had chunks of cheese in it.  Poutine 2.0.  There were vegetables with cheese curds.  Bread with curds.  I honestly can’t even remember because it was, to date, the best tasting food I have ever had.  They apologized profusely for not having any meat for me (the cattle slaughter would be the next day) but my Russian was at a loss to explain that less in my belly merely meant room for more fresh cheese curds.

After the women and children were allowed to descend on the table (prompting an overly exuberant twinge of guilt in me as not only was I suddenly made painfully aware of my pre-disposed position in this village, but doubly so because I had done absolutely nothing to contribute to it or anything else) we continued to polish off wine and cha-cha—a grappa of sorts if you don’t have a Georgian friend who brings over a 2L Pepsi bottle full of it every night—before suddenly and without warning several beds materialised and sleep was heavily encouraged by the exhausted woman who was most likely tired of putting up with our shenanigans.

Beshumi

Luckily I had no trouble flagging this marshrutka down.  Everyone inside was delighted to see me and couldn’t wait to hear what sort of nonsensical adventures I had been up to, made all the more nonsensical by the fact that I was speaking in excited and heavily accented Russian.  They broke into peals of laughter when I told them that I was planning on getting to Batumi by nightfall (the sun had almost set at this point) and one of them, Maxim, insisted I come to their village with them as a guest.  Seeing few plausible alternatives and noting the rain outside, I willingly became their captive.

We ascended further into the clouds, where the landscape got more rugged, more populated, and much colder.  We were dropped off at the peak and were instructed to wait for the next marshrutka going to Beshumi, our final destination.  Beshumi, as it turned out, was quite the hub, but at the end of the line and almost right on the Turkish border.  What later surprised and delighted me is that the village I could see across the valley when walking earlier that day.  Naturally my first reaction was, “Holy shit!  I’ve been walking next to Turkey this whole time.  Turkey.  The Nato-Warsaw Pact border was right there.” 

Waiting at the turnoff, I used this opportunity to get to know my new crew.  Maxim worked for the government in Tbilisi.  I think for the army.  He had been in Iraq recently and now worked in intelligence or something.  His nephew/son/someone was also along for the ride.  This kid was the least village I have ever seen.  So Tbilisi.  Then there was a woman and her son.  Our conversation reached nearly fever pitch when Maxim discovered I didn’t have a phone. 

“How on earth do you not have a phone?”
“I…don’t have a phone.”
“That’s impossible. How do you contact people?”
“I have no one to contact.”
“What if there is a problem?”
“I’ll ask you if I can use your phone.”

At which point the woman interjected with her assent, noting that Georgians are very friendly and will   always offer to lend a phone.  Georgians are so friendly.  I just don’t get it.  Most of these people have gone their entire lives without mobile phones, who even knows if regular phones existed up in this village at 3300m in South Georgia.  And only now is it totally inconceivable that a person could exist without one.

Anyway, I changed into jeans and my jacket for the first time in two months and we all piled into the marshrutka.  I was the celebrity attraction, and was fed a few scraps of dried ramen noodles from a bag that a kid was holding.  We trundled along the muddy path all the way to the village, which seemed to exist in a linear fashion along a single topographical line on the side of a mountain.  This means that there was no natural collection or drop off point for the marshrutka and we stopped at every single house along the way.  It took an hour and a half to finally get to my hosts’ place, where I and the rest of the parcels from Tbilisi were handed over to the hostess as some sort of exotic gift.  

That Time I Didn't Go To Zarzma Monastery

This monastery is famous.  Google it. 

Not far out of town I realized that it wasn’t even noon yet and that I was at a pretty peaceful spot by the river.  I decided to go swimming and read in the sun until I was disrupted by wily Georgian youth playing in the water and lighting things on fire.  I got back on the road and went in the direction of a monastery, evidently a famous one, but I never actually went up to it.  I just sort of circumvented it, and kept on my way.

The higher I got, the smaller this creek got from my point of view, because that's how science works!  

As soon as the cathedral was out of sight I was met with a series of switchbacks that just seemed to go straight up the mountain.  And for some reason I decided it would be a good idea to follow them up, as surely a marshrutka or bus or something would come my way and drive me.  The only thing that I encountered was a logging truck coming down and the driver immediately stopped.  I assumed he was going to warn me or give me some clues on how to get to Batumi but all he was interested in was a light.  As I don’t smoke, he was disappointed and opened up no secrets to me.

I really should have taken this whole uphill bit as a sign to not continue.

I walked for like, 4 hours.  FOUR HOURS.  I walked uphill, with a 25kg backpack for FOUR MF-ing HOURS.  I just kept going.  I just kept thinking that yes, the longer I wait, the closer I get to the time when a vehicle going my way will appear.  Only a few cars come and they were all going the wrong way, which should have signaled to me that clearly I was going the wrong way.

My walk was a whole lot of this.

I started to think that maybe I would have to camp up in one of these lovely alpine meadows when suddenly I saw that I had reached the apex and I was going down.  I followed the road down to find two farmhouses by the side of the road and people working in the fields.  I asked, “Is this the way to Batumi?” and they indifferently gestured that it might be.  Let me tell you I was not totally impressed that they didn’t want to know what I was on about. 

So I kept walking and discovered that the incline started again, and then it also dawned on me that I hadn’t eaten, I had no water, I had been walking for hours, and it was boiling hot.  Suddenly I was hungry.  And for some reason I had passed a roadside eatery in the middle of nowhere selling shashlik and I thought to myself, “No, I don’t want to pay 4 lari, or $4 for this shashlik” because the entire day seemed to be one big lapse in judgment for me.

This is that look I give when I'm all, "No, this is a bad idea, and yet we're going with it." You know?  You have one of these too.  

Alright, so hunger and thirst, my two old nemeses, had come home to roost, and I was really stranded in the middle of nowhere.  But I just kept going, because I had too much pride to turn back, too much pride to drink ditch water but evidently not enough pride to stop me from stripping down completely naked and plunging into the first ice-cold glacier-fed creek I saw in four hours and holding my head under water to drink as much of the giardia-laced nectar as I could get.  It was magical.  Not too long after I could be seen descending on a bank of wild strawberries and stuffing my face for 45 minutes on the tiniest but tastiest of delights. I had turned into a wretched and vile animal and I loved every second of it. 

Post-strawberries, pre-rain.  That brief, satisfying but unsettling window.

Anyhow, after that little episode I was recharged and ready to walk all the way to Batumi if need be.  I looked across the ravine (I was really, really high up at this point) and could make out what I thought were houses.  It looked like a tiny village in the clouds, just above the treeline.  All I could think is how nice that village must be, and that it’s tragic I would never get to see it.

My camera can't seem to capture just how steep and long this ravine bank is. 

Then the absolute worst thing happened.  The worst.  I was on a mountain “highway” with no place to sleep and nightfall was approaching, so you can only imagine how it could get worse: rain.  It started raining, and I started freaking out.  It was that kind of rain that is ice cold and pierces through your shirt and even on the hottest day is so uncomfortable.  It started to come down in torrents and I burst out “I can’t do this anymore” and started running to find some sort of a cover. 

Village in the clouds.

I made it to under a large, leafy tree which provided momentary relief when suddenly, in the distance, I could make out a rickety old Mercedes van coming my way. A marshrutka!  At just the right time.  Things were looking up, and I didn’t have to hurl myself over the ravine after all.  

Google Maps is telling me I walked 16.6km but that is absolutely ludicrous when you think about it.  16.6km!  With a 25kg backpack. Uphill. In flip flops (did I mention the blisters I had that forced me to wear flip-flops for the past several weeks?).  In 35 degree heat with no food or water.  Then I realised that I only measured from Zarzma and not from my starting point at Adigeni, so I actually walked 20.8km.  Yes, I do think I'm better than you.  

Adigeni

There’s really not much to recount about Akhaltsikhe.  In fact, the best thing I ever did was leave the place. Not because it’s particularly awful—far from it, it’s quite lovely and I’d like to go back to stay at the old Soviet hotel here in the centre, and tour the old, restored fortress—but because I was in for such a whirlwind of a day that waking up in a clean bed and being served breakfast was merely the low point of my day. (the low point of this low point was actually not being able to shower because there was no hot water.  I suspect this was a slight on behalf of the proprietress who did not want to budge on the price until her husband stepped in and agreed to 20 lari.  Two can play at this game so in honour of Canada Week I passive-aggressively made the bed and left the place spotless)

I'm going to neither of these places so don't even try to tempt me, loud Georgian road sign with a weak grasp on how we pronounce Xs in English.

Do you know what a highway is? I thought I did.  I thought I was very good at reading maps.  I took cartography and everything, so you’d think I’d be pretty good.  So when I’m handed a map and am able to discern what the varying degrees of thickness and colour for roads correspond to in real life, I expect real life to follow suit.  I mean, aren’t all maps really the blueprints for human geography and not the other way around?

Sorry, what I am trying to get at is that the thick yellow line demarcating a secondary road took the word “secondary” to new and comically euphemistic heights.  I’ve seen secondary roads.  Usually they are paved.  Almost always they contain discernible characteristics of an actual road.  I guess this was just one of those times.

Okay, I really need to focus and actually articulate that happened to me on this day.  I left Akhaltsikhe fairly early in the AM and headed due west.  I had covered enough ground to decide that yes, this place did look like that area around Christina Lake where it’s really dry and there are lots of pine trees and beds of needles on the sand and you can actually smell the pine (you know), and that I had had enough and was ready to get picked up. 

I immediately turned around and flashed my goods, which at this point really only consisted of a drawn-out look of forlornness and which, at 9am, was too much forlornness for this young Georgian professional on his way to a spa to bear.  He picked me up immediately and drive me to the turnoff to the spa he was attending, all the while telling me how he just needed to relax for the weekend and this was literally the only place in Georgia one could do that.  Next time, I guess.

So I continued westward along one of the nicest valleys that I can remember seeing on my entire trip.  It was so fertile, so peaceful, and so far from Russian tanks.  So I decided to walk a bit further without asking for a ride, which gave me a chance to buy a couple ice creams, and then get picked up by a cement truck driver who took me to the nearest town where his services were clearly needed: we had reached the end of the road.

If you’ve ever been to Adigeni, you’ll know that the town centre consists of a big open gravel pit and a general store where you can indeed get cold coffee with milk to go.  From here, I set off along the very dusty trail knowing full well this was going to be a terrible, terrible idea.

A Halt in Akhaltsike

On my way out of Tbilisi I actually stopped again in Gori.  I travelled with two Danes—one who had been to Canada and loved it, and one who said that my passport was “low quality” and who I will forever remember as a total asshole—by marshrutka to visit the Stalin museum.  I decided that yes, maybe $6 was actually worth it, because who knows when I would be back in Gori again?  Georgia wasn’t at the crux of international trade as it once was.  So we embarked on the extremely rigid tour, led by a woman who loved Stalin, who had rehearsed exactly the English script for the museum, and who had no time for questions.  We were even allowed to visit Stalin’s personal train carriage. 

From Gori I bid the Danes adieu and hopped on a marshrutka heading west.  I was initially planning on going to Kutaisi but there ended up being one of those middle-of-nowhere switchups between marshrutkas and we all had to get out and into another vehicle.  I was the last person to get in and the only seat available was the one at the very back next to the window.  The furthest possible seat from the door, and in between me and this seat were several billowy babas, luggage, animals and whatever else.  Expecting the populace of the van to recognize that I needed to get in and systematically tetris themselves into position so that I may take the first available seat, I was surprised to find no one budging and everyone waiting impatiently for me to somehow squeeze in.  I gave one of my signature “WTF?” looks at them, apologized to the nearest old woman, and dove in, crowd-surfing my way over the people and seats until I gingerly slipped into my spot. 

It was after this I decided I didn’t feel like talking to my co-travellers and pretended I couldn’t speak Russian.  Even those who fed me plums and cherries didn’t get much of a peep out of me because it was hot and I was going through a grumpy phase. As it turned out, the marshruka was heading south, not towards Kutaisi but back from whence I originally had come, through Borjomi and to Akhaltsike. 

This is the kind of adventure I live for, however, and I was totally prepared to deal with this.  I hadn’t even been given a chance to look around Akhaltsike on my way into Georgia so I used this opportunity to look around the town.  There wasn’t a great deal in it, except a large castle.  I also ate some pelmeni after “bargaining” down some hotel owners from 30 to 20 lari for a room.  Still expensive.  But once in Akhaltsike I was ready to plot my advance on the autonomous Adjara region, by tracing my finger along what us pros in the geography business would refer to as a “highway” on a map.  

Cocky in the Caucasus, or: Third Wave Feminism finds an unlikely hero

Ugh.  Do you ever just want to sit and drink cold coffee with vanilla iced cream and not have to deal with peoples’ baggage?  That’s all I want to do.  Once a girl liked one of my friends and called me to ask what he liked and what I thought he meant when he said “___” and I told her that she needs to never, ever, ever talk to me about something like this again. Well, when you’re blond, alone, and introspective everyone assumes you want to talk.  Isn’t the entire idea of looking introspective to ward off all potential comers?  This is why I loathe my own approachability and why I often get roped into conversations about how women should be proud to serve their husbands because it gives them meaning in life. 

I mean, yeah, I get it: there are other cultures out there and stuff.  I’ve seen a lot of them.  But I just want to sit alone reading War and Peace, I don’t want to engage in any conversation that will ultimately make me really upset.  So when these two guys sat down and insisted on having a conversation with me about how awful the West must be with all these liberated women, I just snapped and blurted, “I’m sorry, I hate to tell you this, but women are human beings!”  They found this laughable and said that if he married my sister then after a year she would be proud to cook and clean for him.

At this I perked up.  I said, ‘Yes. Yes!  Please, here is my sister’s contact information.  Yes, this will be perfect.  Please marry her.  I will pay for everything—the plane ticket, the wedding, everything—I just want to be there to watch how all this unfolds when you tell her “Woman, I’m hungry” and she turns and says, “Oh?  Well why don’t you go eat a *BEEEEEEEEEEP*”’ followed by a few more expletives.  I guess what I’m more interested in is how long it would take before he was proud to be cooking and cleaning for her. 

Anyway, that’s how I spent Canada Day.  Later I headed down to the park by the river with a few others from the British Empire and we sat in a large circle with some really cool hipster Georgians who were playing guitar and doing cool, hipster Georgian stuff.  One girl had learned English from translating Great Expectations from Russian into English.  Who does that?  Georgian hipsters are cooler than you.

I also went to the university district and had a pizza, and I was offered a job at the hostel which I almost took.  I mean, why not, right?  Well, several reasons, not least of which that people—travelers—are actually really awful to deal with.  I would hate to put up with all my drama.  As I had other fish to fry I realized it was to be hitting the old dusty trail, bought my last kefir and signaled for a ride out of Tbilisi.