Reviews: the Tbilisi Metro

If there is one thing I was too afraid to take a picture of, it was was the Tbilisi metro.  In retrospect I am sure this would not have been a problem but after getting surrounded by large Ukrainians in camo-gear and physically forced to delete the picture I took of my dad and sister in the Kiev metro from my camera I was in a natural state of caution with regards to taking pictures of the stations.  What each country defines as "militarily sensitive" is up to them, as long as I don't get fined or arrested.

Payment method: big 10!  The Tbilisi metro is very advanced in terms of payment and ranks much higher than Vancouver in terms of almost everything.  In fact, you can't just randomly wander onto the Tbilisi metro with no intention of paying and almost always evade any consequences.  What a concept that seems to foreign to the SkyTrain's sieve-like control system.  In Tbilisi you have the option of buying small plastic coins, much like anywhere else in the Po-So, or buying a card that you can top up for repeated use.  The only thing I would appreciate is if it would tell me how much I had left instead of hurriedly flashing my card and then clotheslining myself into the closed gate because I was out of money.

Decor: 7.  Every metro station in the former Soviet Union is perfect and looks like they were designed by grade 6 art classes.  They are like living dioramas.  It's really too bad I've never been allowed to take pictures in the (except for, *spoiler alert*, Minsk of all places) because they are really beautiful and thoughtful and you can see all the raw materials used to build them (like paper mache and hand-painted everything).  The reason I am giving Tbilisi a lower ranking is because they are trying to drop all this by painting roses everywhere and putting TVs with advertisements everywhere to make it look more Western.

Cars: 6.  The older ones were exactly the same as the ones in Budapest, though they had painted them up to look more Georgian and modern.  This repainting of history doesn't always go over well with me because it's not nice to bite the hand that feeds.  This is why I am happy that Budapest has not made a single effort to update or repaint or even clean the cars that they got from the Leningrad Metro Manufaktura in 1960.  Tbilisi also seems to have new ones with flashy lights which I can only assume were built by Bombardier.  So they get some points in trying to be more like Bucharest but then they also get fewer points because they are trying to be like Bucharest.

User-Friendly Interface: 2. Tbilisi metro ranks pretty low in terms of user-friendly interface.  When you get dropped off at the Dudide station at the end of the line at dusk and you know no idea where the centre is on the metro map and therefore where to get off, it can be a bit frustrating.  Trying to the decipher the map was a disaster.  There was a map, so they get the two points for that.  But the only language on it was Georgian so instead of looking like actual place names it looked like a collage of someone's curly hair trimmings superimposed onto a electrical grid schematic.  You may think that the one point of interchange is probably in the centre but I would recommend not taking that chance and getting off here.  Unless you need to get your shoes shined immediately outside.  Or wait in line for 6 hours to find out if a train actually leaves for Azerbaijan at the nearby train station.  The station now has a mall attached to it and there is a nice market nearby, but by no means is this the centre.  In any case, all you need to do is get off at every station and then beg hopelessly from the attendants to tell you where the centre is.  Since they will all have their own opinions, trust no one.

Station placement: 5.  Freedom Square and Avlarbari are really far apart so don't think you can just get off at Freedom Square and then walk to Avlabari, especially if you arrive at 10pm.  You won't get there until midnight because you'll probably get lost.

In all, a great metro and I would love to see it again.

DP World

One of the biggest problems facing me in the Ukraine is that I gave my jacket to my dad to take back with him to Canada. I assumed that by the end of March it would be warm enough for me to only need my spring jacket, and that summer would be upon us soon enough. This wasn’t such a naïve thought, too, because only months later structurally-sound young Muscovites were taking to the streets in bikinis and high-heeled shoes to beat the heat. With this in mind, and in spite of the icy winds through the streets of Kiev, I had pushed on to Kharkov, but decided to take a sharp right-hand turn to the south and the Crimean resorts on the balmy Black Sea. Not, however, before making a pit stop in Dnipropetrovs’k, partly because I wanted to break up a 20+ hour train ride, and partly because I had a hard time pronouncing the name and that intrigued me.

DP, as I like to call it, is a place that certainly almost never comes to mind when people think about the Ukraine, and probably wouldn’t even come to mind when one gets together with friends to play a rousing game of listing the most populous cities in the Ukraine. This is a mistake, because evidently it’s number 3. So why is this place so shrouded in mystery and anonymity? Partly the name is so confusing that no one attempts to pronounce or remember it. Part of it is because, believe it or not, many people don’t actually care about the Ukraine and spend hours poring over maps of it. But the real reason is because during the Soviet era it was a “secret city.” DP is famous throughout Ukraine and the former Soviet Union as the main production centre for nuclear weapons and spaceship components, but it was purposely left off the maps as though it did not exist. Until recently, on the highways leading up the city there were no indicators that a city of 2 million people was there until lo and behold a massive industrial giant materialised out of nowhere.

But for all its industrial and warfare-oriented pretensions, it’s actually quite a beautiful city. There Because of the large dam on the Dniepr to the south at Zaporizhe, the city is surrounded by [oily, chemical-laden] water and there are lush parks and a river walk all along the water front. Karl Marx Avenue runs straight through the town, flanking a large promenade and boulevard where a craft market has set up shop. In fact, say what you will about the Ukrainian oligarchy and their scheming and corruption, but they have made considerable efforts to up the game of their respective cities vis-à-vis the historical and European appeal of Western Ukraine and the political cachet of Kiev. There is nothing I like more than boorish coal and steel barons flexing their economic muscle and building opera houses in factory towns.

Evidently, however, DP’s success and rejuvenation hasn’t been purely due to the recent success of its industrial elites. As is well-known to any economic historian who has studied the collapse of the Soviet Union intimately, the concentration of military and industrial capital in Dnipropetrovs’k sired an elite who ruled the Soviet Union for much of its later years. The most famous scion, Leonid Brezhnev[‘s eyebrows], was groomed by the Dnipropetrovs’k Chateau Clique for an iron-fisted and in the end bumbling and almost incoherent 18-year rule of the Soviet Union. To my delight, my CouchSurfing hosts took me to a bar which featured celebrity shots of Brezhnev himself. You’ll also remember the Ukrainian Princess Leia, political super-babe Yulia Timoshenko is also from DP, and despite her Ukrainian name and her allegedly-pro-Western-lesser-of-two-evils approach to politics, she only learned the Ukrainian language in her later years and has intimate ties to the Russian state. She is a living example that with the right ties and hair style, anyone from DP can go from managing and later privatising a student-run video rental store to owning a massive steel and chemical conglomerate, and inevitably end up in jail on corruption charges. What fertile grounds for success and ultimately devastating failure! I wouldn’t have it any other way.

You may well ask what I actually did while in DP. Well, not a great deal. I was impressed by some of the architecture—evidently it had been a very small, old town and the centre preserved some of the shells of buildings that sustained heavy enough tank damage to render them useless, but not be torn down or replaced. I also enjoyed the parks, the $2 “Biznez Lanch” specials, a night of bowling (I had no idea 10-pin bowling existed—what a cultural shock! Ukraine taught me so much about myself), and the 6-stop metro that runs from the train station out to the factory districts in the outskirts, and I was fortunate enough to have my host, an American English teacher, take me on a metro station pub crawl, one that thankfully didn’t result in my getting beaten and left for dead in the suburbs. Owing almost entirely to this, I can count my time in DP as a success and recommend it to all.*

*One thing to note is that I am currently engaged in a minor impasse with the Ukrainian Postal Service. I sent three or four large packages of post cards from the central post office in Dnipropetrovs’k and I dropped them off in the post box outside, as directed. They have never arrived and I am starting to suspect that the box I dropped them into was merely a decorative feature. So if you’re going to DP, can you please ask at the post office to look in that box and see if my parcels are still in there? I would really, really appreciate it. I’m also considering writing a strongly-worded letter to their public relations department and that’s bound to go straight to the top, so it’s not a problem if you aren’t in the neighbourhood.