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!

SimCity 2000

Something that you perhaps do not know or have not heard in passing is that Stalin was a fan of relocation programs.  He simply lived for them.   Give him fifty or so ethnic clusters and 1/6th of the globe and he would spend hours--decades, even--mixing and matching and having a great time.  Easy to please.  The Ottoman Turks, on the other hand, loved setting up bazaars in other countries and leaving them as a lasting legacy.

Of course, Google Maps has not taken this into account.  Google Maps and I have been playing quite the chess match of wits, these past few years, and we're always trying to foil one and other.  My thoughts were that preparations for Simferopol need only a quick Google Mapping to determine the distance from the train station to the centre.  So when I saw the swirling streets on Google Maps that anyone who has spent at least three weeks in Tunisia and is therefore an expert on Ottoman-Arabesque urban planning would know is a bazaar/souk and that it would be bustling with activity, I figured I knew exactly where to go and would not entertain any other possibilities.

Crimea was, afterall, the centre of the Crimean Tatars and Simferopol its capital.  Some postcards I bought in Yalta showed Simferopol in the 17th and 18th century as a bustling centre of commerce done in rich Oriental styles.  I assumed absolutely nothing had changed.  And who doesn't love Turkish bazaars outside of Turkey?  I was excited to see how the Russians had incorporated this into their retailing geography.  Sarajevo had capitalised on it as the focal point for tourists, offering decendent and exotic experience to self-proclaimed Orientalists;  Skopje used its bazaar for everyday purpose, presumably the same cottage industries operating out of each shop as for the past several hundred years.  So what, I was curious to know, would it be like when you fill a Turkish bazaar with Russians?  The answer was surprisingly simple and immensely disappointing.

Simferopol's bazaar was, as noted, a Turkish bazaar filled with Russians.  Russians who did not care about the Tatar legacy, and Russians who were relocated there during the era of centrally-planned economies.  As such, the winding streets were not lined with shops and merchants and cafes.  They were barren, desolate, and closed off.  The entire area was residental now, and there was only one or two Soviet-era kiosks selling just the barest of essentials like bread, chocolate, cigarettes and vodka.  Stalin had won.

Sim City Trans seemed well-
financed, but the historic quarter
could have used some
porntipsguzzardo (plus
a few additional 'ardo' entries).

Most of where Simferopol is bumpin' is on the gridded and ordered Pushkin Street, just outside the bazaar. (It's a good chance that anywhere in the FSU will have the centre of its activity around something called "Pushkin Street" which adjoins to some sort of park named after Taras Shevchenko)  And nothing makes a town in the Ukraine bump harder than dark and sketchy-looking "Internet Clubs" which exist for the sole purpose of online gambling.  These, of course, lined the main street.  In addition there was a statue of Lenin, the administrative building for the Crimean Autonomous Republic, and hospital that had absolutely nothing to do with Florence Nightingale. 

I found one Tatar restaurant where I enjoyed a dish of Plov (a pilaf of sorts) with a Turkish coffee and then I looked around for acceptable pizza.  Determining that it was not to be had, I opted, finally, to get a haircut.  I selected from a large poster on the wall the least 80s  haircut available and had to wait for the barber to stop making out with his girlfriend in front of me before he began cutting my hair.  I used this opportunity to figure out how to explain to him that I did not want a rattail, even if it looked apropos on him.

Night fell and I became increasingly unsure about my plans.  Was I to head to Kerch?  Evpatoria?  Was I to leave the Crimea for good?  Mulling this over a beer and some perogies at a Ukrainian beer parlour next to the station, I was quickly swayed by one of the old women outside offering rooms.  I shrewdly negotiated a room with an old Tatar and she even threw in some free tea.  This bought me some time and I was able to plan my next move, getting out of Crimea.