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.