Steve Diamond: Observations, Thoughts, and Reflections

Ukraine

2012-01-07T08:28:00.001-08:00

Lviv

Arriving in Ukraine screamed you have entered a former Soviet land, Georgia on steroids. The railway station was made with a lot of steel, one dim light going in and out like in movies. A clock hardly visible as it was located in one of the two rounded arches on the inside between crossbar vantage points. Putting a clock dead center escaped these minds of engineering. Honestly, Western Europe transit stations have too many clocks and poorer countries don't have enough.

Right away a guy asked me if I wanted a taxi while I was exiting the train carriage. The station had no currency exchange, no tourist information center, nothing in English, and when you walked out the door, there were illegal taxi drivers bombarding you, which I like. I was in Georgia again, my home, just on a larger scale.

The weather turned to cold, windy, and rainy right away, it's six in the morning. I eventually found a currency exchange place outside the station hidden away in the corner of a bus stop, bought a train ticket to Kiev, and took a taxi to the only place that's always located in the heart of the city, is warm, and has wi-fi, Mc Donald's. If you ever need a safe haven, that is your place. They also serve breakfast in this region of the world. Two sausage and cheese Mc Muffins please. Farting and mildly rancid diarhea to ensue.

The weather got worse. I walked a bit and then jumped on a bus tour for a few hours. It was so boring. The kind of boring where you can't imagine how it is possible something could be so boring. Forget water boarding, put a terrorist on this bus tour three times in a row and they will give you their first born to make it stop. It was that bad.

That was the first time I did a bus tour and possibly my last. The voice on the headphones put me to sleep a few times. The roads are mostly cobblestone and bumpy just to male it more unpleasant. Transport crawls, the streets are narrow, and people line up six deep to get on trams and buses, a common thing in Kiev as well. The clothes are darker and the people obviously poorer, ahead of Georgia, but behind the rest of Europe sans Moldova. I consider this part two of my trip, from developed middle income to developing middle income, from eradicating Soviet influence to still surrounded and behaving like it still exists. The rust is back even if there is a western style fast food chain and boutique shops on every third corner. They don't have box stores, mega malls, nice movie theaters, and all the other modern "conveniences" yet, but it's getting there, in the biggest cities at least.

Lviv is a lovely little city that looks like Krakow but in need of a facelift. Time has not been particularly good to Lviv, a former Polish city, the combination of communism and corruption has a way of destroying urban landscapes in a way you can see. In the countryside people just starved to death.

Kiev

Arrived in Kiev around six in the morning. I passed out last night on the train after running on fumes for three days around eight. The train shockingly left the Lviv train station on time. I upgraded for seven dollars to first class and thank God I did. Second class would have been a three by three affair, all six in one room. This way I got four in a room. Even though my place was on the top bunk it had plenty of clearance and a ladder wasn't required to get on it. In the cabin was a mother and five year old daughter and a Danish guy living in Kiev running a very small information technology company.

I woke around four in the morning, read, and waited it out. Upon arrival, it was more of the same thing, just on a larger scale. The train station was huge with two major entrances. No signs of any use, so I asked and was sent the wrong way. I asked where the ticket hall was through a variety of Russian words, gestures, and even holding up a ticket and making the universal sign for money. She sent me to the back exit. I turned around and found the main entrance, which is the old entrance where there are twenty ticket counters and no one working them. Apparently the back of the building is where the functional ticket booths are which when I was there meant two open windows. Ass backwards is a common theme in my Ukraine post.

So you have literally fifty seven windows, I counted, and four people working and lines twenty or more deep. There are two information windows and they don't speak English, French, Spanish, German, or Chinese. I asked in each language just to be obnoxious. I am starting to think information people get these jobs because of connections. They have the most cush jobs in the cesspool that are bus and train stations. It's a money job.

Just as a side note, this country is cohosting the Euro Cup next year. It is basically the Olympics of European football. The kind of thing that brings in millions of tourists. If a seasoned traveler struggled, people are going to be in trouble if they come here without a tour package, tour company, or someone else holding their hands. I hate to sound like a broken record, but corruption just kills development so much. The Congo today could have been one of the richest most successful countries in the world if not for it.

Downtown Kiev

Mc Donald's again is my feeding ground until the sun rises and I can meet my couch surfing host in the furthest part of town. I get the feeling they are loaded. We will see. There was no wi-fi and it just made the experience that much more unfullfilling. I will say this though, sausage Mc Muffins are just as good the second time around. People love this place in Poland and Ukraine. It is usually the cleanest most comfortable place to spend an hour or three in most cities for free, use free Internet and have a dfree which is usually the case when living on buses and trains. Registers are eight across, four deep, and moving briskly. It is really amazing the machine that is Mc Donald's. I bet the golden arches work ethic and efficiency are responsible for training young people for better success in developing countries notorious for piss poor customer service.

I still have a few hours to kill so I took a subway to the city center. Upon entering the train station the police stopped me and asked for documentation. Then they asked me if I had drugs. "Drugs" and "documents" were the only two words they knew. There were six police officers sitting in a back office in total which contained a cage. I was asked to empty my pockets, they looked at my passport but couldn't read it or find the visa because of all the stamps, and then did a half ass search of my bag. The parting words were, "sorry." It is funny how we don't stop for many people, but the police triggers something that says to us, authority, listen to them. The irony of the whole thing is they are usually the most corrupt and dangerous.

The city center metro stop is gigantic above ground. It is some kind of square dedicated to freedom, revolution, independence, memorial or combination. It is so played out and tiresome already. I am totally addicted to putting labels on things and into boxes, but I truly long for a mind that doesn't see things this way. Language tells you a lot about how people think. In Georgian there aren't words for "boyfriend" or "girlfriend." I once read somewhere some tribe somewhere doesn't have a word for "to tell a lie." Imagine!

Check this out. When John Lennon was talking about "Imagine there are no countries" in his song "Imagine," I take that as no nation states, just one land of people living and working together. I know it sounds very hippy and John Lennon lived in a gazillion dollar apartment with a view of Central Park in New York City, not very One Love, We've Got To Live Together. Regardless, the end product of communism is just that, a place with no borders and no government. Self sufficiency and harmony. So were hippies communists? It really brings to light just why capitalist were so staunchly against it. With communism there is no consolidation of wealth in the hands of few. I wonder if people travel in this theoretical world and earn frequent flyer miles or would you have to share them with others?

You enter an open area with a U shape of Soviet era buildings that were most likely government offices or banks or both. It is a huge open space and I thought that Kiev may be more than a city, a metropolis as it stands today and likely during the Cold War. The streets at least at this spot are paved and clean. Banners advertise the coming Euro Cup, Big Macs, and the latest in beauty care and financial planning are plastered everywhere. by early afternoon until late in the night, Santa Claus, princesses, and Homer Simpson characters walked around asking if you wanted a photo with them.

Lots of cuties. Slavic girls got it going on. I am not sure how they turn into large round old ladies, but that seems to be the progression, luckily it is well past forty. Aging well just isn't in the cards for most females anywhere. Too bad really as men grow more handsome, gain status and wealth which ultimately a women is drawn to regardless of what you hear or they say, ladies you know it is true, their eyes start to look at all the youthful possibilities and their aging annoying wives.

That being said I can say that all over the world I have been, when men and women are not together, that is, in the same room with me and my twenty questions, they both agree that extramarital affairs are healthy and monogamy is not necessarily so. Men want to have sex with other women, but don't want their women engaging with other men. Women want to have sex with other men and don't mind so much if their men do. As long as there is no lying or falling in love with the other people, couples I have met all over the world want to be polygamist.

Colors of clothes goes to black as countries get poorer, Baltics States to Poland to Ukraine to Georgia. The metro station is the biggest sign of it all when you have a stationary working class group of folks who don't drive to observe. Shoes are also a big tell. Just look at all hard plastic leather sneakers and shoes. There are varying levels of product quality throughout this region ending in Georgia with the Chinese leftovers.

The subways are the same as in Georgia with walls of grey, concrete, and some tiling. There is nothing written in English and there is a strong case for having some since the transfer stations are a bit of a zoo. In fact, all the subway stations are a bit of a zoo. Kiev is a sizable city with a lot of human traffic. There is rarely a time when it is not standing room only until the last two stops when people get off enmass before the train heads out to the perimeter of the city and what is a relatively remote location filled with rivers and lakes, quite pictaresque.

The high speed escalators are needed as in Tbilisi since the metro runs deep beneath the ground. You can clock a solid minute or more on an escalator that is running at five, yes, five times the speed of anything you might find in any other country. At one station there was a double escalator which implies about a twenty story drop beneath the above ground world. If you have a fear of heights or are claustrophobic forget about it, it is daunting even to a regularly balanced person.

Couch Surfing Hosts

My couch surfing hosts live outside the city in what is effectively a village of modern homes. Getting to and from there place is an adventure in and of itself. First off, you ride the metro to the end, then take a bus a solid eight kilometers, which is where the main highway to where other cities lay and what I presume eventually leads to the Russian and Belarus border.

Traffic is flying by at top speed and then some. This is where you exit the rickety old bus, walk along the highway, down a dirt path, five minutes later you enter a patch of houses thirty deep and ten across. Of course my hosts live at the end of the thirty deep part and it takes another solid ten minutes to get there walking. The whole journey is an aerobic exercise and one of patience especially considering the wind, lite rain, and temperature.

It is kind of worth it though as are most things that require effort. The house is located on about an acre of land and is a quaint little thing with an attic, two bedrooms upstairs, a small staircase that connects to the bottom of the house consisting of a small living room, large entrance way, smaller kitchen, and oddly enough, a larger bathroom next to the kitchen. The house is out of proportion no doubt. The lawns are big enough for multiple apples trees, a small path, and what could be used as a space for a swimming pool if it was that kind of country. Considering a huge city is twenty minutes away this is a lot of land and house for under one hundred thousand dollars.

My host greets me by the highway. She is slender, slightly above average height, piercing blue eyes, straight black hair, and has blemish free pale skin. She is smoking hot and knows it. Toss out what you think of blond haired blue eyed Russian and Ukrainian bombshells, there are a lot of blue eyed black haired girls in this part of the world. The contrast is striking. I like the blue eyes, green eyes, and steel eyes, but they are a bit off-putting, less warm and welcoming.

The conversation is easy going. We go to the house and get ready to go out to the city for a little tourism and Christmas shopping. In Orthodox Christian countries, December 25th means nothing, it is all about January 7th. The Orthodox use a different religious calendar. I go out for a smoke and when I come in my host is wearing what is affectively a long red skin tight sweater that covers her bottom like a skirt, black leggings, and a small tight jacket.

I almost said, "Jeeeesus Christ" when I walked back in the door, but managed "You look good!" In winter it is hard to see bodies, but once girls get dolled up, for a bit of Christmas shopping apparently, you get an idea. It was ridiculous, not model ridiculous, just really nice. We go shopping and meet some Russian couch surfers on the streets. The Russians are interesting right away. I greet the man with a smart ass comment about America being number one and Russian being number two. He has a sense of humor about it.

Conversation turns to tourist sights. This guy knows his geography and history. Turns out he is a card carrying member of the Russian Communist Party. Gorbackav sold out and Yeltsin was a nightmare. Both let the Imperials takeover. Interestingly enough he was talking about Russians not Americans. The politicians and powerful friends became what is now labelled so repetitively as the Russian Oligarchs. He really leaned into his own people, a common theme all over the world from my experience. Ask an angry Egyptian who's to blame and you here Mubarak, not America or Israel. Perhaps that has changed now with the revolution. Don't go there, let the statement lie dead without us getting into a long story about revolutionary history and its' backtracking leaders.

Turns out the Red Army liked Jews. Trotsky was a Jew and a good man. Wasn't Marx, you know the guy who literally wrote the book on Communism, a Jew? Also turns out that only the Ukrainian Army and police killed Jews. If you didn't get the memo, everything you think you know, someone else thinks differently. I think we can all agree that America invented democracy, political theory, and the foundations of a modern society. The Greeks might disagree and the Chinese started everything. Speaking of which, there are more Chinese tourists in Kiev than in China, loads, taking over, spreading their pink kittens and boy band looks.

At the mall, yes, the American style shopping mall, we get to talking about everything. She tells me the Ukraine equivalent to, "For every hot chix there is a guy who is tired of fucking her." It goes, "If you eat Chinese food everyday, eventually is gets boring." I thought the Chinese food reference was weird considering how limited Ukrainian food is and diverse Chinese food is. I take food personally. I spot two black guys in the mall buying a keyboard, Chinese girls in groups of two all over the place going into and buying clothes and shoes from whatever is right below the highest end stores. They try to walk in high heels, but can't pull it off even in Europe. They try so hard, it cracks me up.

Pavel, a name I think is kind of cool for some reason is Olga's, a name that sounds disastrous, husband. He is what I call "Living the dream." I have only met a handful of these guys in my travels and believe it or not, when it comes to meeting people and playing the getting to know you game, I am an expert. This guy however is in my top three. It breaks down like this.

In school he was not particularly good in sports, but he was really good in math and science. He is on the small size, skinny, balding, with a kind face. Got married, had a child, first wife dies, not sure how. OK, that isn't living the dream, but he is now. After graduating from the best university in the country, he got a job as a computer guy. A few years later turned that into his own small company successful enough to buy a house and drive a new SUV.

Six years ago he meets the twenty year old beauty who is Olga. She is also really smart, having gone to the best technical school in the country. They date for five years and eventually marry, a year ago. Every year they travel to two or three countries, have amazing photos of amazing places to show for it, many of which include his wife in bikinis posing. She is basically a very smart model and he is basically a really nice nerd. They live in a nice little house on the outskirts of town, they both remain fit, and live the dream.

When I meet him that night, he was wearing a robe like a pimp and she is wearing some oversized Asian robes that asentuates her firm breasts and she pulls her hair down in that Asian fashion with it tied back except for a few strands on each side, just like the fashion magazines showed her to in the section, "Drive him crazy with that Asian school girl look to reignite your sex life."

We drink some hot wine, watch a nature video since some guests are over and they have a three year old girl, chat a bit, and call it a night. The next morning she is wearing a flowing morning dress low cut on the neck with no plans for the day. For his Christmas gift she got him a bell that reads, "Ring for sex!" like something you would find in Spencer's in the mall next to the psychedelic posters. When we grow up we all want to be Pavel. It's "good to be the king" but it is also good to be a solid student and make some money. It is true, nerds get the girls, that is once they get the money.

Later on, I passed by this sign which in Russians said "Chachepuri." This is a traditional Georgian dish that is essentially Georgian pizza without the sauce. I put my head in the window and announce in Georgian, "Gamarjobat!" That is the greeting and they respond in kind. One, the forty year old woman is working in Kiev having her own little Georgian pizza business, the other is a male, a bit older and speaks really good English.

The woman moved to Kiev in the early nineties during the civil war in Georgia, the man to America in the same time frame. He is visiting her and afterwards going to Georgia for the first time since the Rose Revolutin of 2003. He speaks like someone who hasn't been home in years. I know more about his country modern day than he does. He loves America and democracy and thinks it doesn't apply to Georgia because of this current adminstration which, I am going to say it, is a million miles away from bad, but can always do better, but he doesn't see it that way. Perhaps he will change his mind when he sees things nowadays. People can never be satisfied.

Segway into why I decided to end trip early.

I sort of knew what I am about to say but I had to come to Poland and Ukraine to see it for myself and that is the following. We, the Jewish people, being both an ethnic group and a religion won't look like people from anywhere specific like the Asians, Africans, or Hispanics. Following my ancestors footprints from city to city and across great distances in eastern Europe hasn't had any profound effect on me, nor did Israel. I had thought that the people here would somehow be a reflection of me, us, grandpa, but Poles and Ukranians are just that, Poles and Ukranians, a totally different ethnic group.

That being said, my grandparents could have been from China as far as I am concerned. I don't see us in the Chinese nor eastern Europeans except for the occasional brown eyed girl from Hungary. The food has some similarities and sure there is the historical significance of what remains and what was destroyed, but I don't see any of us in any of them, more so in Israel, but most often in New York and Florida. I suppose I am a little disappointed. I was hoping to find some connection to the people, but they are not our people, but good people are still good and such is the way of the world.

I'm glad I saw it here. I get why people come here looking for the past, perhaps answers, perhaps a connection, but there are none. Jews are people of the earth where home is a concept not a place. The Georgian I met, his home will always be Georgia, but he is American now. He does however have that connection whether he agrees with the political climate or not. My home is simply where my family is, not my people.

People are nicer when they have less

That night I returned home around eight and had dinner with my hosts and their guests. At dinner no one was talking so I started in slowly. I found a willing participant in the friend. His name was Alex, 50, and he was with Olga's friend Marci, 25. The details of the conversation are lengthy so here are the highlights.

People were, during communist times, about at the same level socially and financially. They also had about the same opportunities for promotion. Therefore people spent very little time worrying about money, things, and status and spent more time on hobbies, interests, bettering themselves, and with friends and families.

During Communist times people were nicer to each other. They took time to talk. Neighborhoods were important. There was a sense of community.

Having contraband like a Pink Floyd album wasn't an offense. People had access to Marlboro, Salem, and Parliament cigarettes. The main problem was cost. You would have to spend a month's salary to buy a pair of jeans. If you had jeans you weren't arrested, but no one could really afford them.

Keep in mind, Soviet times were many decades long, it isn't as simple as we speak, but like most political and economic systems, difficult times are followed by prosperity and followed again by challenges, adversity, and inevitably decline. Him being fifty, grew up in the sixties, seventies, and the part of the eighties when things were really good. Perhaps that is why he is sentimental about those times.

Last full day in Kiev

Today started like any other except there was a half dressed women in my presence. My couch surfing host basically walks around the house in something provocative all the time regardless of who is there. It is kind of torturous. Anyway, we spent a few hours lying on her bed looking at pictures of their trips together. Every ten pictures or so was a set of three picture of her in some sexy pose. At one point we got to nude photos, full frontal, and teasing shots. I made a comment that Pavel really likes taking sexy shots of her and she told me that she wants the shots, not Pavel, so she can have something to remind her of what she once looked like when she is fifty. It was a really honest forward seeing response from such a young person. As far as I can tell, Croatia is the nicest of the places in this part of the world they have been to.

I spent the day chilling as I was planning on meeting Doug, now Peace Corps Country Director for Ukraine, at a bar and spending my last night in Kiev at his place. I met Doug in 2004 in Rwanda when he was helping the government rebuild a constitution after a decade of stability after the Rwanda Genocide. He is the uncle of a Peace Corps volunteer I served with in Kenya.

He called me a few hours before we were suppose to get together to cancel as he became ill. I could hear the relief in his voice when I brushed it off as no big deal. How often does something like this comes along, meeting in Rwanda, me being close with his nephew, and both of us being in some random place in the world at the same time? It reminds me of my brother's friend who was in Europe around the same time I was. That too didn't happen. People are strange. When I say to people you are welcome I actually mean it and expect the same from others. I am the fool. Don't say something if you don't mean it.

Went to the buffet again today because that is how I do. I ate the rest of the selection I couldn't get the first time around. In line I asked a girl if she spoke English because I didn't know what I was ordering. She spoke very little, but enough. Her name was Tatiana and was from Samara, Russia, about a thousand kilometers from Moscow to the east. There were limited table space so we share and chatted.

She mentioned her interest in living in East Asia. Her interest was South Korea and she had learned a little bit. We played with some Korean letters going back and forth between Russian and English. It was fun. We went for a little walk and then parted. I sure have an ability to meet people pretty well on this trip. I talk to just about anyone. It has been good.

My last night in Kiev was uneventful for the most part until I took the metro to the end to pick up a taxi to get to the outskirts of town where my hosts live. When I got there, it was a ghost town. There were a few people here and there, but no buses, no open businesses, and one taxi. December 6th is the first night of Orthodox Christmas. This being Kiev, kind of a major world city, I expected some traffic.

Three taxis didn't want to take me the ten minutes to the suburb, but they were working. They didn't want to take my phone to get exact instructions from my host either. The trip is quite easy when you take three seconds to relax and listen, I just didn't get it. Honestly, it is the little things that make this otherwise really cool city with beautiful sights, more beautiful girls, lots of art and culture, and a good transportation system annoying.

When you change Ukranian money back to dollars at the airport they want your transaction receipts. No one mentioned this at the million places I changed money. There you are standing at the exchange place haggling with customers like an ass needing the catch a flight.

The security check point is state of the art with the body scanner, but you still have to strip down. The security guys make you grab a bin and it is inconveniently located behind said security checker.

The bus drivers take your money but don't give you a ticket so they can pocket the money and you get screwed if the police jump on the bus.

Everyone points you in a vague direction of something, but it is always, and I mean always more complicated.

People aren't partcularly nice over the age of forty and under the age of twenty are loud and obnoxious. As with big cities, people are colder, but still, it is a nice enough place if you avoid certain things, especially the police, and have money to do it. It might be cheap here, but people are always looking to squeeze you for a few more cents. Greed is almost here, almost.

The End is Near

I decided to pack it up and go back to Georgia. Moldova cound wait, Romania is really cold and the cities are grim I hear, and Bulgaria like the other two are places best seen in better weather.

Three weeks, five capital cities, four secondary cities, two Christmases, one New Year, lots of good food, amazing people, interesting stories, fantastic couch surfing experiences, painful feet, miles of walking, a couple of night trains, a broken down bus, and a strong desire to go to Latin America, get a camera, and find someone to go with.

Poland

2012-01-03T06:04:00.000-08:00

Warsaw, Poland

In the Broadway musical The Producer one of the characters is named Bialystok. We just arrived in Bialystok, Poland. The bus station screams we have entered a new country of less means. The doors are old, there is rusted metal in places of the structure just like in Tbilisi and you have to pay to use the toilet which seems to be a common theme in Europe these days. It is 8.8C but feels much colder with the wind. Welcome to Poland!

Our bus broke down somewhere outside Bialystok around 9pm. For three hours we sat in the parking lot of a Shell gas station waiting for a replacement bus from Warsaw. At 12:15 in the morning a replacement bus arrived and in twenty mile per hour winds the crew moved all the luggage and we boarded again bound for Warsaw. Forget about an eleven o'clock arrival, this was going to be a dead of the night arrival.

At 2:45am we arrived in Warsaw at a closed bus station. There was one lobby open with twelve seats and some heat. An elevator led to a sixth floor hostel which was actually a hotel at $40 a night. Just like I remember Budapest twelve years earlier, there was a room behind reception which looked like the living quarters of the two young female receptionists which could also double as a home or prostitution. In Budapest it was simply where then workers lived, I wasn't sure about the bus station, it felt shady.

The girl at reception didn't know how much a taxi was from the bus station to Old Town. I was the first tourist in Warsaw. I asked some locals at the taxi stand the cost and distance, only the ten year old had a clue. I had a fifty note and thirty seven in coins and smaller notes. A taxi drove me to Old Town for the thirty seven where I expected tons of hostels all over the place. There wasn't one or even many hotels.

I asked the security guys in a car for help, clueless. I asked the police, clueless. Out of four of them, only one spoke English, but was not from Warsaw, he was on loan for Christmas holiday security, in fact they were all over the main street protecting the stores and monuments. Outside tthe high volume tourist spots no police were to be found. Believe me, I walked down enough dark roads beyond my better judgement looking for a place to rest my head.

I walked for about thirty minutes on the main avenue and saw nothing. Then I got to the end and was ready to sleep in the street and a beacon of light was in the distance with the blue and white sign of a tree and wooden bench that I know as Hosteling International. I walked the five minutes to get there and posted on the door was a sign saying they were closed for renovations. It is now four in the morning, around nine degrees Celsius, slight breeze, and lite rain.

I figure where there is one hostel there must be more. I walk a little more and saw nothing. I stop this guy in the street and ask for help. He knows nothing, but has wireless so he invited me into the stairwell to get out of the cold and do some Internet research. Turns out there is a hostel one street over, he takes me there, and we part.

When I go up the elevator and enter the hostel I end up waking the receptionist who proceeds to tell me that they are booked. I ask for help in finding another hostel, he tells me the one he knows is booked, but there is another that is open. He tells me to leave the building and turn left and it is right there. I turn left, then the road ends, turn left again, the road ends, walk down some stairs, and twenty minutes down a dark street at close to five in the morning to find out that is costs $35 for the room because when you travel alone you sleep alone. I have entered the Twilight Zone.

Now, every hostel in the world I know of has this thing called dormitories, a variety of rooms with two, four, six, eight, and sometimes ten or more beds that people basically pay a flat fee for a bed in and share. Not in Warsaw! The girl at the counter tells me is costs one hundred Zloty of which I only have fifty in my pocket. There aren't any banks open and I can't exchange money at this hour. She can't help me. I get frustrated and decide to sleep on the street, she shows no reaction, just a sheep doing her holiday job before going back to the village. I get it, I try unsuccessful to hide my contempt for her bosses, the city, the banks.

In parting I ask where the metro is. She says go up the hill. I go up the hill and again, it is more like a forty five minute walk from Old Town to the central business district to get to the metro. It seems Polish people have spatial reasoning problems. It hits six in the morning and I spot the only thing open, a Subway sandwich shop. There are no twenty four hour convenient stores and taxis are infrequent. The most developed creature I met so far was probably the semi retarded shit housed drunk "security" guard at the bus station who said to me in his best stroke victim impersonation, "There is a hostel for 110 zloty on the sixth floor." The hostel that was a hotel.

As some point you have to throw in the towel and around five in the morning I did just that. I readjusted my clothes from the eternal bus ride from Lithuania and hit the streets. First stop was the ghetto wall, but before I got there I endulged in a foot long tuna sub because I could. Next stop Prozna Street where a building from pre World War II in what was once the Jewish Ghetto remains. One side is intact and the other is a gutted shell. It's important to note that where one building ends and another begins shows the stark contrast between 1920's and 1990's architecture. It was quite a vision in the dead of night with no activity in the street in what is the busiest part of town come rush hour.

The ghetto walls surround part of an apartment complex that you can't see clearly from the street. You enter the apartment complex where people live and go about their days and right there are three large walls mostly twelve feet high and fifty across of what was once a reminder to Jewish people that they were imprisoned in their own city. One wall is not as wide as the others, but at least twenty feet high and what I interpreted as some sort of guard post atop the wall making sure Jews don't get out and regular citizens don't get in.

As day broke masses of humanity started pouring out of apartment complexes and public transport, traffic started to build, and people had that mad rush on of getting to work while the elderly went for a stroll.

A big part of my day was focused on getting to Treblinka outside Warsaw. It was not to be. First of all, no one knew how to get there at the tourist information center, train station, and bus station. On the advice of the practically useless twenty five year old girl at the tourist information center I went to the bus station which required navigating buses and trams to find out that Treblinka didn't ring a bell with the information officer so I hit a dead end. If I wasn't an experienced traveler, this would be the moment where I would have a breakdown, similar to the painful feet predicament in The Baltic States.

When I exhausted all information options including the Internet I tend to seek out the highest end commercial hotels and ask the concierge who one hundred percent of the time to this day knows more than anyone in the business. It broke down like this, take a train to a town close to two hours outside Warsaw, get a taxi to drive you to Treblinka where he will wait for you and then drive you back to the train station where you return to Warsaw via another train. It would come out to a hundred dollars or something and on the advice of the Marriott concierge I decided to go to the mother of all concentration camps, Auschwitz, instead of all the others. That would prove to be a wise decision as once you go to Auschwitz, the rest must pale n comparision. I can't help but imagine concentration camps are like churches, you can only see so many.

There is clearly a huge divide among English speakers in Poland. Over the age of twenty five and forget it. Over that age it is more miss than hit and when you hit we are talking a word here or there, not complete sentences and nothing more complicated than useful words like, numbers, left, right, go, stop, yes, no, and other level two vocabulary.

People at the train station asked me for money in really poor English. There seem to be a variety of characters with busted up faces lingering around asking for money. In what I would normally say is a junkie looking for his next fix, it appears to be more like an alcoholic looking for another drink or pack of smokes. Meanwhile on the metro I immediately noticed that the train cars are cleaner, more modern but still a decade or two old, people are cleaner looking, have more varied clothing and apparel, and there isn't the smell of body odor or alcohol on people that is common in Georgia. Considering how easy it is to navigate and how much better it is to take public transport, all classes of people take it. That also tells you right away that Warsaw is a big city, one that needs and more importantly has the public infrastructure to accommodate the masses of people living and working here. Warsaw is more sophisticated than other developing countries but they are still a ways off from The Baltics and Western Europe. It's a grey area really, one that takes into account subtle differences. Yes, I am brushing off my shoulder here. Without the experience of traveling to a variety of places, you wouldn't notice.

I did a solid twelve hours of walking on my own today, from three in the morning to five in the afternoon. By the end of the day my feet were worse for wear, bruised, and blistering on the sole. I went to the Wilanow Palaces which got me thinking about Mel Brooks and how he said in his character as the King of France, "It's good to be the king!" I went to a park with this sick bronze statue of Chopin looking to his left while this beautiful lady starts to come out of the bronze by his side only to transform into a crow and appear to be getting ready to attack his head. The grounds of the park went on forever and followed down a hill into a park and lakes area right near the city center with an amphitheater, lots of ducks and birds, the calls of nature, and benches in just the right amount of places.

The city has a nice buzz with the right amount of calm. It never seems to get to noisy, there are plenty of places to find refuge, and it is hard to knock this amount of parks easily accessible from most points in the city. It isn't overpriced, but it isn't cheap. The metro costs a dollar, the bus a dollar, the trick being to buy in bulk for transport and pay something like four dollars for an all day pass or even less for a monthly or residential pass. The food is cheaper than the Baltics, but like everywhere it adds up. Just to be clear though, potato salad and some sort of pork product like sausages is all pervasive in homes throughout this region all the way down to Georgia with Turkey being an exception from what I can tell. Perhaps a hold over from the Soviet Union but more likely a reflection of agriculture and weather, the Soviets?

Lodging is expensive as there isn't a lot of it. That goes for tourism as well as living. A decent place will run you a third to half your salary in the five hundred dollar range to keep it simple, but more for family homes. Regardless, properties work well with good infrastructure, windows, heating, electricity, water, and fresh paint and less rusted out metal bits. The streets are safe and with some travelers common sense you can avoid trouble if it exists.

Today there has been a constant lite drizzle and the temperature has been hovering around nine degrees which is nice as long as the wind doesn't blow for too long. Younger people seem nice, people in the forty range seem really pissed of at the world and old peope go about there business with the occasional push and shove old people are wont to do at a certain age.

I met my couch surfing host at the train station. Her name is Joanna pronounced with a "y" like Yoanna. She has this great accent which I like to use when doing my best Russian imitation. She ends a lot of sentences with "yes" and "no" which keeps me on my toes when conversing because your response depends on the context. I kept messing up my yes's and no's in response. She really likes to talk and has a great bubbly personality. Her roommate is a mute for the most part. I think given the right environment she would be able to tap into her elementary level English but she is really selfconscious about it.

Joanna busted put some smoked sausage, potato, salad, and bread for us and a few cold beers. We talked about this and that and after a few hours busting out the shisha pipe to smoke apple tobacco. Smoking shisha seems to have taken off in this part of the world. I saw it a bunch in The Baltic States and now in Poland. It was the first time I experienced smoking indoors on this trip. People couldn't imagine how we still smoke indoors in Georgia it had been so long since anyone did it in their countries.

The view from the balcony shows striking contrasts between the old and new. Even though most of the old is a refabrication of the old considering Warsaw was levelled after World War II, it still looks interesting from the balcony seeing church spires in the distance next to multinational corporation signs posted on modern buildings. While there are definately those cookie cutter Soviet buildings everywhere, they have more sophistication than in poorer post-Soviet nations with better windows, fresh paint, nicer entrance ways, and other little things. It important however to keep in mind that while Poland might have been levelled after the war, it does have a long rich history and a time under the sun as a major power so there are elements of that which remains in urban planning and design.

I was so tired I started passing out around eight, but managed to make it to 9:30. I sure as shit can't pull these all nighters as easily as I use to do, but I can hold my own. I only need three minute power naps around two in the afternoon, kind of like a Medicare patient. Once I take my shoes off and know I can crash, it is lights out no matter how many times I pumped myself up which means clapping my hands and exhaling quickly.

Woke this morning with damaged feet, with a two inch bruise on my right foot near the Achilles hell and a blister on the sole. It is going to be a long day of walking and sucking up the pain. Tomorrow, I can sit on the train, chill, and recover. Today though it is go time.

Started out by walking around old town which I only saw at three in the morning when I arrived. Hit the river and the uneventful Praga District which felt like a rundown suburb under construction and lacking public transportation. Met a Georgian guy selling wine retail. I went into my twenty questions routine and left with a Georgian phrase being exchanged. Went to Warsaw University library, it was a library, just in a big old building. I thought libraries, Aren't libraries dead yet?" Most students were using computers not the card catalog. Tried going to the Copernicus Science Museum, but it was packed, with a line out the door and close to wrapping around the building. Went to Chopin Museum, detailed for a composer's life, and then ixnayed the National Museum when I saw the size of the building, it would take days. Warsaw has a lot to offer.

The Jewish cemetery was briefly interesting. The cemetery was overgrown and unkept. I was informed but haven't verified that Jewish cemeteries are not to be manicured and Jews cannot work there. Lots of last names I recognized and Polish ones I haven't heard before. It is a nondescript place except for a long twelve foot high wall made of red clay bricks, identical to the ones composing the remains of the Warsaw Ghetto Wall. Many headstones are inscribed in Hebrew and the only noticeable pattern was the year 1942.

Lets be clear about the size of the ghetto. It was huge! There were something like three hundred thousand Jews living in Warsaw before the war and it shows considering the demarcation line of the ghetto and rest of Warsaw. Jews came here most likely because it was a safe place to live and work. Why do Jews pick certain cities? I can only assume that Jews are attracted to places that will accept them. It also doesn't hurt if the place is comfortable and pleasant like Warsaw.

There don't seem to be a lot of Polish restaurants in town. They must be here, but I have a pretty keen eye and a huge endless gut and it took me a solid two days to find an authentic place and it was called Corso's. As soon as I walked into the place I fell in love.

The smoky interior hits you right away and considering the last time I smoked was in a basement blowing out the smoke through the flue of a fireplace in Kaunas, Lithuania with my couch surfing host, I was pretty happy to be warm and smoking. The interior hasn't changed in forty years with awful red, pink, and dark green walls and tapestries with wooden tables and chairs with pink table clothes barely covering the table. People are drinking heavily and the place is feeding no one under forty except me. like everywhere else in Poland so far it is pleasantly quiet and calm. ER and Friends is softly playing in the background as it is dubbed in Polish.

Round one included three different kinds of Polish sausages served with slightly stall white bread, ketchup, and the mildest mustard known to man. Delicious! Round two were meat perogies, like a dumpling. There were tasty and more meat than dough, a welcome surprise. I should of stopped there but I wanted to see if they could pull off apple pie a la mode. They couldn't.

That night I went to the couch surfing weekly meeting in Warsaw which surprisingly had a big turnout. There were easily one hundred people filtering in and out of the bar. At eight it was standing room only. People were really friendly and there was a large amount of girls there. The couch surfing crew is an open bunch of peope. You have to be a certain kind of person to take a stranger into your home.

I managed a lot considering. I didn't hit a couple of museums, but got a real feel for the place. I kind of like this city. It has the right amount of busy and calm and everything inbetween. There aren't many pretty girls though. They sometimes have nice blue eyes or fill out a pair of jeans, but for the most part The Baltic States ruined me. Warsaw is basically a modern city with bits and pieces of history here and there. The Old Town is brand-new even if done in the old style, you wouldn't really know it and they did a good job. There are lots of open spaces, green, and places to have a sit.

Train to Wroclaw

The night came and went and Joanna and I went to the train station together. We said our goodbyes and I was on my way. It was the first time she ever met a Jewish person. When we parted I gave her a hug and initiated her into my faith. She will forever be labelled as a sympathizer for allowing a Jew to couch surf in her home.

The train ride was uneventful. Met an interesting fellow traveler from a northern Polish city, Bialoystok in fact, ate a few sandwiches, listened to music, wrote some letters, and stared out the window. She was quite interesting and would be one of two athletes I would meet in two days. She was taking a trip to Scotland for the new year. She spent eleven months a year working and one month a year climbing mountains. She was built quite well with strong shoulders and lean features. I was sure she could kick my ass. The other person I met was a female working in a shoe store who was a professional judo competitor who had two instances of using it to fight off would be attackers. She could definately kick my ass. In truth an easy task.

Upon arrival, you notice right away the construction. Train stations all over the country after twenty years are being redone to make Poland look nice for the Euro Cup 2012 which looks to bring in millions of visitors and billions of dollars in taxable revenue. I don't mean to sound like a mean spirited individual, but tourists would much rather prefer more comfortable trains than nicer hallways and timetable boards and it might help to get some English speaking information desk employees. Just saying.

After breaking down the urban landscape and transport system I went out into the suburbs where I would meet my host Agata. She was a thirty five year old spinster in the making. I have limited experiences with cat people, but the few I have met in travels all seem to have a great love of cats, dirty floors, lots of clutter, and horde just a little more than normal if there is such a thing.

Her apartment was really nice, new, and located on the fringe of the city near the airport. It was basically a one room flat with all the new fixtures, well heated and insulated, copious amounts of hot water and even a dishwasher, something I haven't seen in years. Upon arrival she made us a dinner of stuffed cabbage with meat and barley, marinated cabbage, and a small side salad. Everything was tasty and my bowels were exploding within five minutes. That evening I went for a walk around the city center and returned home. We chatted for a bit, she made me a beer, honey, clove, and four star concoction. I slept terribly I think because of the food and drink, but those are sometimes the consequences of putting rocket fuel of cabbage into your gullet. Don't even get me started on legumes.

Her hospitality was really amazing. Besides the arrival dinner, she made a proper bed for me, drive me around the city in a small tour of buildings and architecture as that is her professional, took me to a good pirogie or dumpling joint by the train station where apparently all the good street food is, let me do laundry, and was a good conversalist who knew a ton about Poland, especially her city of Wroclaw. She reminded me of what a mayor would be like.

Old town at night is the same as elsewhere, nice, lit up, old buildings no more than five stories high, tourist traps, overpriced low quality food, and nice places to walk around. They were setting up a stage in the main market area and doing a horrible rendition of No Woman, No Cry sound check. Everyone can't be a singer in the real world, only on YouTube.

I immediately wasn't immpressed by Wroclaw. I felt right away that my couch surfing experience would be the real reason for this visit. After Warsaw and other places, it just lacked luster for me, I am spoiled. So I took the day off for the most part. It was interesting to take a laundry inventory. After thirteen days I got by without stinking up the place on five socks, five underwear, three shirts, and one pair of pants. I am experimenting with lite travel and I have done well so far, but it would of been better to add a few more socks and underwear and leave a few more shirts at home.

I ate like a champ this day. At one place I had mushroom pirogies, borscht soup, and the most oil drenched crispy potato pancakes on earth covered in a stewed meat with the softest chunks if beef on earth, they call it goulash, but it isn't the Hungarian kind people think of. It was so good, but so heavy, I, Steve Diamond, the bottomless pit only ate two of five potato pancakes. Later that evening Agata and I had sour wheat soup with some unidentifable pork pieces in it and homemade meat pirogies.

Shopping this time of year is unavoidable. Luckily Agata wanted wine and it was only sold in this one place which was the megamall. The supermarket in this place was incredibly huge. They make Super Walmart look sizable, but nonthreatening. Not only that, they don't sport much of a clothing section and other wares of our American mega stores, it was just endless food. The pork section alone took up the equivalent of a produce section in Ralph's, Publix, or Albertson's. I went to town on smoked salmon, cream cheese, cured pork, Swiss cheese, Camenbert, salad, and a loaf of bread. After returning home I made a boat load of sandwiches for the five hour train ride from Wroclaw to Krakow.

The girls in Warsaw were fair, but in Wroclaw I started to see a different Poland, a Poland of spandex, legs, ass, fair skin blue eyed cuties, but not hotties. There is something homely about the faces here, a sadness at times, a childish look. It is hard to explain, they aren't striking looking, more kind and caring in the face, but yes, they do have the blue eyes or steely eyes, nice skin, usually straight blondish hair, and wear a fair amount of spandex bottoms. The men are average looking. They don't seem to be balding early, getting too fat, and aging poorly. They aren't particularly handsome perse, but they are reasonably good looking enough to fit with their Polish female counterparts.

The Conversations in Wroclaw

The first of many conversations started with Malta. What do you know about Malta? I certainly knew nothing, except where it is. Turns out they have a long history of being invaded because of it's strategic location in the Mediterranean Sea, has a lot of people at four hundred thousand, tourism is the biggest source of revenue, and they speak Maltese.

The Warsaw Pact comprised Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany or DDR, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugosloavia, and Albania in a cooperative agreement to support one another in the event that one should be invaded by another or potential outsider. Apparently these countries while not in the Soviet Union, were indeed Communist countries who basically reported to Mother Russia, had their own borders, passports, social and political climates depending on the time and the leader. Unlike the Soviets, you were allowed to travel and many defected. It was however not a cakewalk to get a passport because of government control so people had to really be sure about how committed they were to walking away from everything in their lives during this period. Just like the Soviet Union, there were good times and bad. Some of the highlights include the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 by five members of the Warsaw Pact and the tyranny of Nicolae Ceaușescu in Romania.

Apparently illegal goods were alive and well during the Cold War in this region as well as in the Soviet Union. Favorite imports included western music, movies, chocolate, cigarettes, and anything of the pop culture variety really. Apparently Bulgaria and Italy were big players in the game. It would be fascinating to see where these smugglers are now and what they did after the fall of the Soviet Union. Did they move onto drug, human, and weapon trafficking, open restaurants, retire, buy farms, or something totally unexpected like work for corporate America and Europe. Become oligarches?

Borders changed a bunch of times over the last two hundred years or so. It breaks down like this to keep it simple. You had the Polish Empire and Hapsburg Empire, and a few more here and there over the centuries which drew up more lines. What we call nation states today in this part of the world is the result of the Allied Forces carving up Europe after World War II. Russian, US, UK, and even German negotiations on what to do with pat war Europe was questionable at best. Look it up.

So without getting into the details, if you look at borders and areas within a hundred miles or so of these borders whether east/west or north/south, there is some mixing. That was once our land or they took our land is a common thread of conversation all over the world. The spoils go to the victors and the victors here were the Russians. Lviv in Western Ukraine is a Polish city that has been Sovietized.

Affectively the Russians were fighting because they had there own agenda. In many ways they were worse than the Germans because they tended to rape and destroy more whereas the Germans came in, evaluated, and took goods, shipped them off to Switzerland. They were superior to everyone else. The Russians were and remain drunken animals and the Germans were the superior Aryan race that wouldn't waste time and energy raping and pillaging a lower class.

I don't think it is that simple, the Germans after all started the war by invading Poland, but on the other hand Stalin did like killing people and ruling with an iron hand and in modern day Russia Putin puts detractors in jail and storm cities and village killing everything in the path in order to restore peace and order. There is so much nuclear tension build up it seems inevitable that one day some nutjob will get into the Kremilin, White House, or some other nuclear country head of state position and say, "Fuck it, let's see what you do now bitches. We are ready to die for our beliefs. Heaven sure as shit is better than this standardized cattle farm of human life." He or she probably wouldn't talk like that, but it would be an honest appraisal of the general sentiment. Except the Hindus would like a cow's life. See how complicated it all is. Poor play on words?

The influence of American television apparently played a big part in the downfall of the Soviet Union according to some people you meet. People saw images of decadence, wealth, and freedom, and wanted it. Who wouldn't? The televison show Dallas is credited with influencing the region by way of showing excess, greed, alcohol abuse, and sex. People wanted all the material things and that somehow lead to the downfall of communism.

I don't quite see how wanting something translates into bringing down an empire, but let people dream. I don't think we will be hearing stories of contraband bringing down North Korea. That will happen when the leaders decide to open up, kill everyone, or get invaded by a foreign power which guarantees democracy, freedom, and an equal economic spread of the natural resources of the country. It's true, the oligarchs can attest to equality.

Poland apparently has a divide between the east which is considered poor and the west which is rich and supports all the freeloaders in the east. Poland is quite a big country with at least five major cities, a sea port, and bordered in the middle of successful and fringe nation states, Germany/Czech Republic and Belarus/Ukraine, respectively. According to my hosts it is a nation where the favorite past time is complaining and they don't produce much in the way of athletes or anything else much one would know.

I thought that blacks or more appropriately Africans would be an interesting site in Poland. Most disagreed. If there is going to be any anomisty towards anyone it is likely going to be directed at the Gypsies. Romanians get the worst of it because when people think Gypsies they think Romania, but they are all over this part of the world. Many can be found in The Balkans and surrounding countries. They have darker skin, dress differently in what I perceive as the majority of clothing styles the people at Grateful Dead or Phish shows would wear, and are credited with one thing and one thing only, thievery. I kind of look like a Gypsie, too bad I get caught when I steal things.

To Krakow

Young love is everywhere this holiday season. The train station is packed with young couples traveling near and far. Most are in their early twenties, but some older folks in their early thirties show up time and again. It is very cute to see, I use to be happy like that.

When I entered to cabin there was a skin head sitting alone in the compartment. He was pretty drunk and shaky as if on speed or other racing heart inducing drug. We shook hands like long lost friends. Perhaps I misread the shaved head, black leather boots, metal weapon, and overall drug addict menace look for something that it wasn't.

The rest of the train ride was uneventful. We had a bunch of delays and eventually got to Krakow. It was quieter than I expected. The train station was kind of ass backwards with the main hall being detached from the platforms. The train station main square was empty. There weren't many signs of activity when exiting.

Walking around what was at one time the Old City wall was easy enough. Starting to dissect the streets, map, and distances I quickly discovered that this was a small city. I walked from the top to bottom in twenty minutes and the main tourist section was very compact. It is a university town with Jagellion University being the most respected in the country in the center of town.

I met my couch surfing hosts at their home. It was a couple, an American guy and a Polish girl, both approaching thirty. They met in America when she was working in a bar and he was drinking in it. She over stayed her visa by four years and somehow managed to stay on the books and be an illegal. Basically no one came looking for her and she stayed off the radar and paid taxes. America doesn't frown on that.

He was finishing his second tour in the army. He originally dropped out of school at the University of Tennessee at nineteen after one year, enlisted in the Army to have the government pay for school, went through basic training, was sent to language school for Arabic in California, then sent to Kuwait to defend the borders there as America has been doing for years since Iraq's invasion, then September Eleven happened and he found himself in the Iraq War.

After finishing his tour and four years, the government used a clause in the original contract that allows the military to own you for an additional four years if there are extraordinary circumstances like invading a sovereign nation on false pretenses. They owned him. Work here and there, deployment now and again and meeting a girl from Poland turns into finishing his tour, getting married, and moving to Krakow to get a master's degree.

They are a nice couple and they are both very American even though she only lived there for six years. Their apartment is nice and cozy for a couple, a loft. The couch is comfortable enough and they are very nice people. Little Man and Monkey are the cats and that is home. My hosts are really interesting, I have been lucky so far. They are both native speakers and highly educated. I didn't get out of the house until close to one in the afternoon today because of conversation.

New Year's Eve was uneventful. We walked around for a few minutes and went to the Jewish District which took all of three minutes. People were mostly inside and the bars were not crowded at all. It appears that most people left Krakow for New Year's. At midnight I went outside and was unimpressed by the fireworks thing and it was below zero, so it was time to pack it in and go to sleep.

I walked around the city and immediately though how lovely a city it is with the quiet streets, nice buildings, peacefully meandering river outside the old town, and casual atmosphere of the place. My only beef with the place is the constant reminder of tourists.

Returning home to another lengthy interesting conversation and an impending decision I must make, where to go next? Trains are a hundred dollars here or two there, buses are twenty to fifty. It is a no brainer, but a lot of buses travel through the night and arrive at midnight or the next morning. I like to see the countryside, but arriving at night blows. I don't know what to do, but I do know that this is a good problem to have and complaining is comical.

Auschwitz / Birkenau

Getting to major tourist attraction early is a must. The town of Florence, Italy turns into a crowded mess of camera toting, hiking apparel wearing, group tour herds by ten o'clock. My suggestion for these places is to start your day at four in the morning and witness a sleeping city as it was in many ways hundreds of years ago wake up. You can nap in the middle of the day.

When it comes to tourist attractions that have an open and close time, be there first. I arrived at Auschwitz thirty minutes after it opened and only five other people had the same idea. It was basically all to ourselves. I went in winter on purpose to get a feel for those conditions in this horrible place of starvation, torture, and death. The prisoners had a thin cloth as clothes and must have suffered terribly. It was oddly warm in the low forties, but still eerie.

When I entered the exhibits alone, it was pretty sweet until I saw the displays. There are photos of prisoners lining the walls with shaven heads and in the pin stripe outfit, pictures of starving children, women weighing around thirty kilograms or seventy pounds, mounds of human hair which was accumulated and sold for stuffing, glasses, loads of brushes for shaving, brushing hair, and toothbrushes all made of wood, and of course the shoes, pots and pans, and photos of the ghettos, trains, and lines where people went either to work or the gas chambers. The whole thing is mind blowing if you really dissect it all.

Personally I found the barracks at Birkenau the most startling after the hair. The barracks are cold, the bunks are three levels and was used as a horse stable in some of them previously and it feels like a stable, that chill. The prisoners were less than animals. The platforms where the arrivals came and never left were surrounded by guard towers, and on both sides were bobbedwired electrified fences and in the far distance what I can only imagine was a plumb of smoke coming from the gas chamber crematoriums. Birkenau is an open field and everything is in clear view. The chances of escape had to be minimal with all the security and its' location was isolated far from any civilization, as if the civilians would of been in a position to help or want to. People have built a community around the site and ride their bikes along the outside to and from work, the market, and school. My how things have changed and continue to.

Conclusion

That night Gosia prepared pirogies made with farmers cheese, potatoes, and fried onions from scratch. I got my things together and headed to the train station for the overnight to Lviv, Ukraine. I got excited when the cashier told me there were only three beds in the compartment, that is, three beds means first class to me. I was disappointed to find that modern train cars now cram three beds one on top of another in a compartment and call it second class instead of the four or six beds, two or three on each side as in the past. At least they were wider if not higher. Being late in buying my ticket, I ended up on the top bunk with a clearance of a foot and a half between my head and the ceiling. It was not comfortable and I had to use the ladder to get up and down. What can you do?

Poland started in Warsaw, continued in Wroclaw, and finished in Krakow. I take from it that Warsaw is a big city with a pulse and vibe, a place I could live. Wroclaw was nice, but to stuffy feeling for some reason that is hard to explain. Krakow of course is a gem city if it wasn't for all the tourists including myself. A great university party town with a long history, beatutiful architecture, easy to get around, and chill.

Poland wasn't what I thought it would be. I thought it would be poorer, less developed, and people wouldn't be able to speak much English. I found a country that is quite wealthy, functional, loaded with stores and shops for the better part of a decade, and quite friendly even if a little standoffish. If you are under twenty five you speak English.

The presence of foreigners creates its' own feel, similar in some ways to Korea but more student orientated, in short it is saturated with Americans and Europeans, but that can be a good thing. I guess at this stage of the game, I prefer places that are poorer, a bit more raw, and cheaper than what Poland is. I am not saying I am a huge fan of calling Chad home, but something in-between before they open up all their markets and become a cookie cutter place like the rest of Europe and the developed world has become. A place with character.

The Baltic States

2012-01-02T23:35:00.000-08:00

Brief Rant About Europe

Going to The Baltics was a "why not" afterthought to the main reason for my most recent trip to what is generally known as Eastern Europe. Everyone wants to be special and what I recently learned since the last time traveling around Europe extensively in 1998-1999 is that certain countries are clearly Central Europe, Eastern Europe, and The Baltic States.

Some of them consider themselves to be part of Western Europe since being part of the European Union and other European govering institutions grants them some sort of exclusive entrance into a good old boys club, but let's be clear, the big brother countries of France, Germany, and combinations of Northern Western European countries run the show. You can have your titles, but we all know who the real players are. You could argue that to a certain degree when a country has the Euro currency they have come of age.

If your country is unfortunate enough to get the Euro you enter a world where your salary remain constant while the cost of living triples. It does however allow you to have a stronger economic position in the event that you can save something, depending on your debt to savings ratio which is generally quite low the world over, except Asian, not that is changing as consumer credit card nations build. If Europe didn't have a discount or budget airline in practically ever primary and secondary city I wonder if Europeans could still afford to take those four to six week holidays all over the world.

In the lates 1990's when I visited southern European countries, they were relatively poor and while the roads are better, it is still heavily reliant on agriculture and tourism for much of its' economic revenue. What use to be a bargain is now a ripoff. The big post college trip or study abroad semester in Europe has become more difficult as the Euro spreads, the US dollar tanks, and the cost of living increases briskly.

Estonia

I return to Europe a decade later starting in Estonia, a country I know little about. In fact, I know little about anywhere I go anymore. My travels have gotten to a point where I go in with little expectation, cities are cities for the most part, easy to navigate. In Europe, Old Towns are the highlights plus a few other architectural points of interest, museums, and cafes. After a while they are affectively all the same just like the thousands of churches. I even feel the same way about genocide sites, monuments, and memorials. Same shit different place. Nature, however, still captures the imagination.

Arrived in Tallinn after a stop in Riga airport. It was pissing down rain and windy in Riga and I was on the tarmac unclear of the direction I was suppose to go. It was my first time being left alone on the tarmac. It would of been fun to purposely get lost if it wasn't for the icy cold wind blowing in my face. I was unprepared for a tarmac exit as we had pulled up to a gate and had a big enough plane for using the covered exits. The next plane to Tallinn was a twin engine propellor puddle jumper which in recent years has become less nerve racking.

Flying down a mountain slope in a ten seater straight out towards a mountain face before breaking hard left in The Himalayans of Nepal will give you steel balls when it comes to prop planes. The airport was good and small and looked like it got a fair amount of traffic considering its size, mostly from Air Baltic, what I can only assume is the state carrier for all the Baltic States as there isn't much to say about Estonian Air.

Laura and Eve, my couch surfing hosts met me at the airport and we got into Laura's SUV where another couch surfer from Norway was and a friend of theirs. We stopped at a gas station where I got a few beers and some supplies for the night we would be spending with twenty other people in a cabin in the forest of Lahemaa National Park.

In a convoy of about six cars we went to a fifteenth century church for a quick look. It was snowing and the wind was pushing it horizontally. I entered a snowy, rainy, windy, and darken place with about five hours of actual day time light and two hours of not quite a shiny morning and not quite a lit up dusk. I failed to take into account the latitude and sunlight totally escaped my mind.

By three in the afternoon, the day was ending or at least the light of day. The last two days I woke up at eight to discover darkness. I love traveling, but I know at the end of the day, I prefer spending my days in a warm place with plenty of sunlight, beaches, and girls in summer dresses and bikinis. I am also convinced that people who live in hot places are more hot blooded and engage in intercourse more often. Supposedly really cold places have the same mentality, but who wants to fuck under a blanket and have to be careful with air vents? Trust me, it kind of takes some of the passion and spontaneity out of it. I even asked my couch surfing host in Kaunas, Lithuania about this and it was confirmed that getting drunk and having endless sex in the dead of winter isn't the norm and she is beautiful and in a relationship so it can't be him or her, perhaps it is the clothes, weather, and lack of sun. I digress. Sorry about the language mom.

After a few more miles down the countryside roads we stopped at a meadow to look at bogs and then went to a forest. The forest was the highlight of Estonia for me. It looked like a winter wonderland with fresh coats of snow on pine trees, the air fresh and brisk. It then opened up onto a bog which had a trail of wooden planks running on top of it so you could walk through a bog in the wind, snow, and ice. Falling or slipping would of totally blown as your leg or legs go a foot or two straight into freezing water.

Estonia - The Cabin / The Sauna

As the sun was setting around four in the afternoon we arrived at a small track of land in Lahemaa National Park in which lies a log cabin with a big open space downstairs and an attic for sleeping on the floor. There are about twenty five of us in total all from couch surfing and representing a variety of countries, including Hong Kong, Columbia, Norway, and of course me, the lone American which has been a common theme throughout The Baltic States.

The majority of the couch surfers are Estonian and they introduced me to Estonia's favorite past time, going to a sauna. I can only describe it by how I still see it in my mind. Just for the record, this isn't my first time putting a towel around my waist and walking around with a bunch of other naked people and going swimming or sitting in a hot as balls place while you steam together. I think why it messed with my head so much is because it was a Saturday night and we were all drinking in a log cabin in a forest whereas six hours before I was sitting in Tbilisi, Georgia, a rather conservative country.

I can only described it as sitting knee deep in naked bodies in a sauna and steaming together, taking a quick shower, and going out into the freezing cold to cool off and repeating the process. The girls were covered, but the guys were just free balling it like it was no thing. I had to cover my junk, I am just not comfortable in my own body with a dozen other people, buck naked, free balling and hairy, an inch away from me. For the remainder of the night, people in the cabin are walking around in towels, playing cards, opening beer bottles, laughing, and chatting like it ain't no thing to be practically naked. It felt like at anytime this should turn into a giant orgy, but it seems to be pretty standard behavior in this part of the world. Want to go out for a beer and a steam, you can leave your towel there?!

I learned about competitive sauna competitions and how most recently the competitor from Finland died. Other ineresting side bites include how Finland and Estonia are more than just neighbors, sharing some cultural similarities, how Russians make up a big chunk of tourists, just how white haired blondes can be, how pretty cobblestone streets are to look at and terribly uncomfortable to walk on, and confirmation that the further north you live the more you live in a different world, Alaska was the same. That's a nice way of saying people are a bit strange up there.

Estonia - Conclusion

I am on my fourth day and on my way to Riga, the capital of Latvia. My host Laura was really gracious and I got to briefly meet her eighty six year old grandfather who looked like something out of a movie with the long beard, kind face, and rail thin body. Wish I spoke Russian, imagine the stories.

I cursed myself over and over again for being in such bad shape and going to a freezing place for my winter holidays. On the third day after spending a miserable morning in the rain and wind, my boots are killing me because I have become such a wuss wearing dress shoes for so many years and trading in my sandals for countries with four seasons. the boots also blow, but my feet are soft as well.

I am thankful that I get to sit on a bus for five hours today as my feet are bruised and killing me from just one day of walking around Tallinn's Old Town for four hours. I actually was so miserable from the weather and my feet were hurting so much that I watched two movies in the theaters just to kill the time. When I got out of the movies at 7pm it was still pissing down rain. This is what I refer to as "the first week" where you break from the normal sequence of daily life and embark on something completely different and your mind and body get tested especially the harder the journey. It isn't dangerous, but it is freggin cold.

I had two defining moments where I felt real shitty and had all those dark thoughts like, "How much does it cost to go... Should I just... Seriously Eastern Europe in December. What were you thinking?". Hopefully things will get better as the sky clears, my head clears, and my feet stop acted like whining brats.

To Riga, Latvia

The bus is clean, it even has a bathroom. There isn't annoying loud music playing on the speakers, the girls are pretty, the countryside is as expected, flat, the temperature just right, my clothes not too stinky yet, the rain has stopped, and while it will be getting dark in an hour, about three in the afternoon, I have time to explore Riga before meeting my next couch surfing host after eight tonight. Please God, don't rain!

My feet enjoyed the break! The sky opened up on the four and a half hour drive from Tallinn to Riga. Oddly enough when the sun blazed through the bus windows no one used their curtains to diminsh the rays. The sun didn't really rise as much as it coasted along the horizon.

Arriving in Riga was instantly likable. The central bus station is located across the street from Old Town and what is affectively the central business district as well. It was less windy today and not raining, a blessing. The tourist information center was perfect, bus tickets easy, and money exchange a breeze. Riga is built for tourism and rapid transit. It felt like a real European city with a buzz right away, not on a huge scale, just right, small in reality. Right away I noticed Old Town had practically no car traffic and lots of expensive shops.

After two hours of walking around my dogs started barking. I sat outside the opera house freezing my ass off just so I could get off my feet. They were killing me! I need to kill three hours before meeting my couch surfing host so I did what seems to be a common theme this trip, I looked for a warm place to sit down and that took me to the cinema. Sometimes I am so pathetic it even shocks me. I went to see some cheesy chic flick and while the whole thing was predictable, it was entertaining. The token black guy was a police chief kind of movie.

I met my couch surfing host after getting a bit lost and asking for help on a dark street from a Russian living in Riga. The house is on the fringe of Old Town and a stones throw from the central station in what is a hundred year old brick house that has been converted into multiple apartments. The interior is quite new and very cozy. It makes me think of, "Home is where the heart is." There are photos of previous couch surfers on the walls in addition to the usual family photos. Couch surfing in this part of the world has a lot of participants and they are very hospitable.

I will be sleeping tonight on a futon in the same room as the boys who are in their bunk beds in what is basically the living room. I have been here for less than an hour and learned about the ratio of men to women, how EU membership has it's benefits for work abroad in member states, ate Latvian pancakes, and listened to a mother read a Latvian story to put her children to sleep, seven and four.

Today I did something I have never done before, I drank an overpriced tea. Costa Coffee is some kind of rival to Starbucks where you pay too much for a warm beverage. To me it was worth the comfortable seats, warm air, and wi-fi for $3. I think I stayed there for two hours. I tried to find the Jewish ghetto along the river and didn't so I went to the open air and covered market and was blown away by the selection, the cleanliness, and the prices. The latter was surprisingly high considering this is suppose to be a lower income developed nation. The prices were like any developed country, five dollars here, ten there, three for this and four for that. It would easily add up if you shopped for a family of four for a day or two. Sure, Riga has the fancy dress shops for the rich, but food is a basic necessity, even the vendors selling fruits and vegetables were in the two dollars a kilo range, a steal by US prices, but not cheap. The produce, meat, dairy, sweets, and breads looked amazing though, high quality products.

It became clear to me after talking to Liga, my host, that people live paycheck to paycheck. If a person loses their job they have no savings to get through the unemployment period and end up struggling or losing what little livelihood they have. Rent and food come to about $200 and $100 respectively which leaves no money for extras considering the average paycheck is around $300. In the event that you live in a dual income household, the extra money would have to go towards clothes, toys, books, curtains, and other unnecessary necessities if that makes sense.

Gas hovers around six dollars a US gallon. The bus isn't cheap at a dollar and change. EU membership might have it's benefits, but I haven't seen it in the last nine years I've been observing it. The only thing I see are higher prices, inflation, economic disparity, higher unemployment after the boom years of housing growth, and overall disappointment in its' people's faces. I suppose some positive things include more goods, mega stores, more competitive currency in international markets, higher purchasing power allowing governments and private investors to build up the infrastructure, and open borders for international trade and tourism just to add to the first paragraph rant.

Lithuania - Kaunas

We just crossed over into Lithuania through the fog. This morning was overcast, foggy, and cold. After two lovely days in Riga the weather turned mean, luckily for me it is a warm December so far with no snow. Latvians are unhappy about not having a meter of snow on the ground. It would be very pretty and romantic, but I don't have a snuggle bunny on my arm, just extra padding and a constant look of, "Christ it's cold. How are those people not wearing gloves?"

We crossed the border by driving through an old border checkpoint which was boarded up and mildly overgrown with weeds. The sky cleared such that there is no fog and a three thousand or so foot ceiling between the bus and what appears to be snow clouds, we will see. I am on my way to Kaunas, Lithuania, the last of the three Baltic States where I will spend two days before heading to Vilnius, Lithuania for Christmas.

For some backwards reason we went to Vilnius first before Kaunas. What I thought would take five hours took about seven with holiday traffic and delays. No problem, the ride was good. There was a brief, ever so slight break in the flat landscape when a few, very few hills appeared for maybe four seconds. As for the rest, it was flat and just a bit poorer than Estonia and Latvia in the countryside, a few more rundown farmhouses and few more old things in the grass, but still nice by Caucasias standards. Arriving in Vilnius even if only to stop at the bus station it felt like urban sprawl gone wild. The city center didn't jump out at me at any point, but I know it is there along with the tourist traps and Old Town.

We arrived in Kaunas two hours later to rush hour holiday traffic. Right away I got the same urban sprawl feel and this is the second city. Reaching the main bus station was uneventful, no bums, no traffic, very low key. I couldn't exchange money right there and had to walk to a mall to do it in a bank in order to get one of the remaining seats on the Boxing Day bus to Warsaw in which there is only one a day and it is almost sold out four days early. I made it to the Ecolines sales desk at exactly 17:59:58, no joke. The ladies spoke English fairly well there.

At the main bus station the ladies did not speak English and right away I got flashbacks to those countries where they have old people who don't speak English working in toursit sales offices, drivers who look at you with great confusion when you ask them if this transport goes to their equivalent of Times Square, and while tourists come, the country and its' people could do without them. In short, I was expecting the big change to come in Poland and it still might, but Lithuania in just the two hours and change I have been here is the redheaded stepchild of The Baltic States. Will my opinion change in the next four days?

Hotties Change My Mood

People in their twenties and teens speak English, but not clean English. It is like they learned it, but didn't cement it into their brains like in Riga and Tallinn. They were thinking when I asked simple questions and while they could communicate effectively, there was a hesitation to the speech, an insecurity. A boy of probably sixteen years helped me arrange a meet with my couch surfing hosts and just like in China, the conversation went on for a solid two minutes before the kid said, "Can you wait here for an hour?" Classic 'Lost in Translation' moment for me, and another sign.

To be honest, I expected it in the Ukraine and definately in Moldova. I guess the three people at the bus station trying to figure how to get the foreigner from the central bus station to Old Town was enough to get a glimpse into the mind. Arrogant much! And just for the record, the most popular beer I am drinking now while waiting for the meet isn't really that good. All ready hating on Lithuania, gotta stop it.

What a difference an hour can make! The kid drops me off at the bar. I have a beer and type out some mean spirited thoughts. Then I go outside for a cigarette and when I come back, three hot girls are looking for a booth to sit in, I offer mine, we get to chatting. They are graduate students returning home from Copenhagen University, this and that, it is pleasant. I get to thinking Lithuania is great. The super hottie sitting next to me reminded me of my Netherlands days where all the women were smart, hot, and easy going. Thirty minutes pass and my couch surfing host arrives. She is hotter than all of them, real classy elegance. I am besides myself. Lithuania is my new favorite country.

She has a car which for some reason surprises me, a VW maybe two years old. I think she lives in a small flat with her boyfriend. No. She is renovating a hundred year old European style house with four stories, multiple staircases, a huge front facade, high ceilings, new interior, a lawn with a fountain in front, some terraced lawn, on a hill overlooking the city next to a centuries old set of stairs leading down to the park, surrounded by equally impressive houses. It is basically an early ninteenth century mansion.

She tells me this is where I will be staying while she goes to her temporary residence while the house is being renovated. I'm floored. She speaks perfect English, pours us a Courvosier, and made tea as soon as we arrived. Ridiculous! Her boyfriend is as nice as can be, hooking up the wi-fi and putting on the water heater in addition to giving me a phone so I have a way to communicate with them. I kind of put one and one together and get something like hard working girl from a well to do family meets idealist stand up guy and fall in love and build a life together. Really great hosts.

Balls Cold in Kaunas, Lithuania

It is basically a meet and greet since it is late when I arrive. They leave and I had the bright idea that I would smoke a cigarette before heading to bed, you know, to get the lungs all clean for sleeping. It was midnight and the temperature dropped to -5C which I didn't know. I stepped outside through the door to my room, into the hallway, then through the main entrance door, then through the corridor separating the hall to the entrance, stepped through that door, and finally the main front door. Bam! In your face cold.

If you aren't aware of this, +2C is cold but manageable, 0C is cold, annoying, and forces you to adjust your layers. When it is zero degrees you can take off your gloves and do things like smoke, adjust your clothes, go through your bag, whatever, but when it is negative five, shit starts to freeze. Your smoking hand gets that pins and needle feel that isn't pleasant and the humidity makes your bones frozen. I didn't finish my cigarette, but sure did curse a lot.

Kaunas has graffiti, some decrepit buildings, and less expensive cars than Estonia and Latvia. Kaunas appears to be a place where young people are raised and then leave to Vilnius or elsewhere. The butterscotch apple filled croissant was amazing so Kaunas is the greatest.

Spent the day walking around. The city is really small and it took me only a few hours walking slowly to go from one end to the other. The temperature started dropping early in the day and I was forced to go to the mall I ridiculed to buy Long John's. It hit 15F (-8F) by late afternoon and I busted out the scarf and hat. I counted thirteen articles of clothing at its height.

For dinner Milda picked me up and we met her boyfriend Ruslanus at a pizza place on the edge of town. Stories exchanged included mass production, urbanization, greed, corruption, the police, anarchy, family stuff, and sex. Ruslanus really enjoyed my stories about sex in Asia and the crying looks of pain in the throughs of it all. He is struggling with the way the world is, that determination to be part of a more fair solution, but how and is it worth it?

Christmas Eve dinner - Kaunas

Today I am helping prepare Christmas Eve dinner with Milda and have been invited into their home for dinner. There will be no meat besides fish and no dairy. There has to be twelve dishes in total. Main dishes consist of vegetables and herring. Side dishes included beet and white bean salad, wheat, peas, some kind of grey porridge, and a salad I overprepared not realizing there were only going to be five of us. I couldn't help myself, the Maxima grocery store was so huge and overstocked I got brocolli, spinach leaves, red, orange, and yellow bell peppers, red onion, walnuts, and raisins. Everything was so juicy, but lacked flavor. It was shocking, I bought with my eyes and my hosts acknowledged they already knew about this. Lithuanian policy makers gave up quality for convenience around the turn of the millenium. Consequence of progress, you could argue points for and against until the organic cows come home.

Before eating we all stood and took the body of Christ into our bodies. Why does Christ have to taste like a dry piece of thin cardboard? Dessert was a poppy seed milk with poppy seed nuggets of bread. You make a wish, grab a handful, and if the number is even, luck may come your way. I grabbed ten, Milda grabbed ten, Adam, her brother, grabbed odd, and the great aunt grabbed three, odd.

Considering we weren't suppose to eat meat, there was one more thing Milda and Adam, wanted me to try, lard. Adam reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a slab of what can only be described as super fatty bacon, like a ten to one ratio of fat to meat. It was cut into thin slices and served with a bit of onion, some brown Lithuanian bread, and a pickle. We took a shot of vodka and ate, then took a shot of this alcoholic herbal drink made of twenty seven herbs that tasted like ass and took another bite. The bread basically absorbed the alcohol and fatty texture of the lard, but the onion and pickle flavors were everlasting including that herb alcohol. It was a very informal affair and they were very gracious and hospitable hosts.

I was invited to join Milda, her brother Adam, their great aunt, and their mother who was stricken with multiple sclerosis fifteen years ago. She is a beautiful looking women in her mid-fifties who worked as a doctor until the disease made it too difficult to work. The kids affectively take care of their mother and I could see how Milda at age thirty was already under considerable pressure to work, tend to the house, her mother, and regular life including relationships, desires, and reality of circumstances. It reminded me of something my mother said to me when I asked her about growing up with a sister with cerebral palsy. She said, "I did the best I could as long as I could." Sometimes people get dealt a shitty hand. It's heartbreaking to see, I can't imagine what it is like to live through it for the caretakers and the individual who for all intents and purposes is just broken in body but not in mind an hopefully not in spirit.

The Great Aunt & Jews in the Old Days

So it is Chirstmas Eve dinner and I am sitting there in a Lithuanian household because of couch surfing and kindness. The great aunt got curious of my religious beliefs. I tell her I am Jewish. We get to talking. I ask her questions about her childhood and the Jewish people of Lithuanian. Twice her mother comes up in the form of sweet memories. The first story was about how in the summer in the countryside the fields would have thousands of pink flowers in the grass and they would lie in the field as if floating on a magic carpet.

The other was about how when she was young Jewish merchants would come to their village as traders selling a type of Lithuanian donut and collecting clothes. I asked if it would have been frowned upon to marry a Jew back then and she said no, but her facial expression and body language said yes. It also appeared to be the first time Milda and her family spent any considerable amount of time in the company of a Jewish person. In the end it doesn't mean a thing or does it? I clearly remember my friends of color more vividly than the friends who were just like me in color, class, and beliefs.

Ryan Rogers was in the Peace Corps with us for training only. He left when it became clear his exgirlfirend was keeping their baby and he did the righteous thing and returned to be a father and husband or at least give it a shot. Ryan was a big black guy who grew up in both the ghetto and pearly gates of the rich, had a BA, MBA, and JD, and didn't hold back when you asked him a question or two. I remember the one hour we talked over a beer more clearly then the countless hours among the rest of the volunteers who were basically kids of privelidge from white middle and upper class environs.

Lithuania - Conclusion

Having traveled a bit these last few years, I can say that having come back to Europe after so many years away just reminds me time and time again and only in the eight days I have been back so far that it may not be the most exciting place in the world, but it is the place that makes the most sense to me. Two things shoot right into my mind. Two dogs in the park in Riga, Latvia running around without a leash chasing a stick and running in and out of people. No one minds the dogs, there are no laws restricting it, and two guys, one on accordion and one on a trumpet are mashing up Christmas songs. The other is the women. It has something to do with the walk, an aire of confidence.

It's hard to explain but here is goes. In America guys love it when they find a girl who is cool, easy going, and as the saying goes, "just like one of the guys." In Europe, they are cool, easy going, and not "just like one of the guys," they are women who might happen to like watching sports or getting dirty from time to time. They may very well wear tight jeans and high heels to a game, but not the kind of outfit that says I am trying really hard to be noticed like in Asia or dress down to a slovenly look like Americans.

Men for all the bad things said about them are nicer in Europe and the Middle East. They have personality and are interested in things. You might have to drink more than you want or drink a lot of tea as is the case in the Middle East. Regardless, they make sense to me more here, seems to be less castration as well.

Vilnius, Lithuania

Arrived in Vilnius today. It is a nice city with a large Old Town, lots of cobblestone streets, and signs for tourists. I met Ginta my couch surfing host around 11am and she showed me my new home for the night, a one room, what they call Stalin Building, near the central station. It is maybe seven feet wide by fifteen feet in length with a three by three bathroom. It is something a college student would live in if they had no money and was studying in New York City. Ginta seems nice, married. Today is her husband's birthday, Tomas, around thirty years old, and willing to host me on this holiest of holies because, "it isn't my couch, if it was I wouldn't host you on Christmas," and really helpful about getting around.

The church was packed this Christmas morning and the streets are quite lively around midday. It is must be above freezing because the icy streets and sidewalks are getting easier to walk. I stopped in for lunch to try zeppelins, a Lithuanian traditional food. Basically take a bunch of potatoes grind them down and fry the shit out of them, put a piece of ground meat inside and serve with sour cream. Heart attack central, I ate there twice in two days.

Tonight was Tomas' birthday, Ginte's husband of twelve years which she kept reminding us all from time to time, they are high school sweethearts. There was a small gathering of thirty or so colleaugues mostly from his office and some friends. It was definately the most fun I have had so far in The Baltic States. Everyone was in a festival Christmas mood. One girl was standoffish when I introduced myself to three people in the area of where Ginte was when I arrived there, that would change.

The man sitting next to her introduced himself in poor English and made it clear the hottie in the seat next to him was his wife. Fast forward three hours and the women is pretty smashed. She explains to me that they are divorced and share the same bed still. He is not jealous of her behavior as he hovers around five meters away keeping an eye on her. Under different circumstances I suppose I might go home with her, but who wants to get caught in the middle of this dysfunctional functional relationship involving a twelve year old son, one who works in Egypt six months a year, and one who has a huge personality shift when they drink. Of course when all is said and done he takes her home and no doubt holds her hair back when she throws up. He loves her and she is torn about something. I'm telling you, short days make people a bit nuts.

The usual characters came in and out of the picture during the night. Some guy had an American wife, some guy was a human beat box, more than one girl threw glances in the safety of their mostly male companions, beer was the drink of choice, shisha was past around outside, and by midnight a big chunk of people were checking out.

I went to Ginte's house for an hour from around two to three in the morning and got into a conversation with a very drunk Tomas and Ginte about economics, free will, and the differences between conservative and liberal thinking. You have to cut people slack when they are talking about advanced concepts in a language that isn't their native tongue. That being said, sometimes you have to rip down people's illusions and play the holier than thou card. Sometimes you are just right and they are just wrong. It was his birthday and he was shit faced so I let it slide, but his wife didn't. It was kind of like being an observer of a domestic disagreement without the animosity. A few more drinks later they were both talking about two different things like an elder couple and I took that as my cue to depart.

In the end my host in Vilnius was really interesting especially when it came to the topic of music. As a classically trained violin player I learned the following things. Drummers in an orchestra are people who hangout with a bunch of musicians like in a rock and roll band. Viola players are pussies. Conductors get all the women no matter the age. Good conductors are practically geniuses. There isn't much difference between a professional in a smaller city orchestra and a big city orchestra, but there is a huge difference between the first chair and second chair of a small city orchestra and a big city orchestra. Beethoven's ninth symphony isn't all that but it can be. It's a job just like any other job except like in a restaurant there are moments when everything clicks and there is harmony, balance, and everythng is right with the world. Before the financial crash of 2008 people were hiring violin players for all kinds of events and throwing money around. Those days are over and it is a struggle to get by.

Common themes in The Baltic States

Girls hot. Men not. Consistently higher ratios of men to women.
Leaving The Baltics for a better places means EU, not USA.
Costs high. Salaries low. Savings rate miniscuile.
English language of youth. Russian language of elders.
Big box stores everywhere. Drive. Shop. Leave.
American style shopping malls all the rave.
Estonia is the rich country with a small population and strange traditions like Finland.
Riga is the big city, but a cold place by nature and expensive.
Kaunas is a town, but I liked it in terms of making a comfortable life. Small town USA.
Vilnius is a city with a slower pace than Riga and less pretentious.
All agreed they loved their countries, but recognize other places would be better to live.

Onward Bound

We just crossed the border into Poland. It has been dark since four and luckily the temperature is in the high thirties around five degrees Celsius but the wind is fierce, negating all that warmth. Suppose to reach Warsaw around eleven tonight. All my couch surfing hosts seem to have lost their Internet connections so I will find a way to Old Town and get a hostel somewhere along the line.

The Baltic States were well worth the visit if even for a short time in the worse time of year. I wouldn't be interested in a life in Estonia. I see the real appeal of living in a city like Riga with a pulse, amazing looking women and relatively low rents, but it is expensive for everything else. Lithuania is definitely poorer than the other two, but it has a more cozy feel and the people seem somehow more down to earth and warm.

Armenia Nov 2011 - Jazz Fest - House Party

2011-11-23T02:56:00.000-08:00

Jazz Fest

November has been an eventful month. I started the month with going to my second Jazz Festival since arriving in Georgia. Last year it was The Poogie Bell Band. This year it was The Charles Lloyd Quartet, Larry Crowell Trio, and the Tamar Gurashvili Quartet. Last year it was front row seats, this time around it was a bit more formal. The shows were held in the main concert hall this year. Everyone had a seat and the shows were bigger, but not better. Last year the layout was something from the 1920s. There was the stage and in front were tables where eight to ten people could sit, order table side service, and take in the music. I have always been a big fan of Jazz and it is good to see that Tbilisi takes its' music seriously for a dying genre in modern music. There is no shortage of talented musician in Tbilisi and you can find a jazz lounge act most nights of the week and people playing in subways and on the streets.

Armenia

A dozen volunteers got together in early November and went to Armenia. Armenia is a small landlocked country south of Georgia which borders Iran, Turkey, and Azerbaijan. The country is mostly mountainous and its' capital city, Yerevan, is home to 1.2 million of Armenia's 3.2 million people. There are approximately seven million Armenians living overseas and the country was part of the Soviet Union. Armenia is an ancient country and prides itself on being the first country to adopt Christianity in 301.

Doing an organized tour is usually hit or miss in developing countries. You are never quite sure what you are going to get. Luckily, the hostel we arranged our two overnight stays with and tours with was legit. A van pick the dozen or so of us up in Tbilisi and drove us down to Yerevan making stops along the way.

After crossing the border from Georgia you instantly enter the wilderness. The whole drive to Yerevan was up and down mountains, through valleys, along plateaus and rivers, and in and out of forest. Our guide was an attractive Armenian women who spoke practically fluent English and knew her history inside and out.

Our first three stops before making the last push to Yerevan was at churches and monasteries. What else? Unlike Western Europe with the stained glass, pristine floors and walls, and cavernous halls, Caucasian churches are designed like "+" signs. They are usually small and at most you can get a hundred odd people inside standing up. Only the newest churches are sizable for modern weddings and ceremonies. In the old days, churches were small but plentiful. They are everywhere in this part of the world. In the middle ages, things were good here, it was a prosperous time however short lived it may have been when centuries of being conquered by passing kingdoms and empires swept through their lands, the Mongolians, the Romans, and the Ottomans to name a few.

Churches are cold inside. Which churches aren't? The frescoes are fifty percent faded in most and what remains is the usual depiction of Jesus, Mary, the apostles, and all the other characters from the Bible doing their thing. The only thing I found impressive besides building such a structure so long ago was the locations of most of them. They all had the best piece of real estate in the village or town. Churches were located on the flattest piece of land at the highest point, the real central point in the area with plenty of space for walking with your hands intertwined behind your head contemplating life and God's words as he told some guys back in the day who then wrote it down for all to read, but hasn't spoken to anyone since, only those guys had God's 1-800 number.

Me being me, I asked a lot of questions. I wanted to know about the difference between Georgians and Armenians? Georgian men are lazy. Armenians food is better. Armenians men are shorter, but have more hair. I asked her about the Jewish people in Armenia? She said they mostly left, but some remained. I asked her about Armenian work ethic and she told us a joke.

How can you tell when an Armenia is doing business?
How?
When two Jews are looking for work!

So, apparently Armenians are hardworking types who like making money. I thought it was kind of funny, but not really. It was one of those times where you smirk and go, "Uh huh." Another thing I learned that Georgians would strongly disagree with is that Armenia invented wine making and the Georgian language. In case you didn't get the memo, everyone invented everything depending on the country you're in, except Americans who know 200+ years is hardly enough time to take credit for much. China was the worst so far, they invented everything during my time there.

There are some considerable differences in the countryside. The most obvious at first were the roads. The roads were much better than I expected. Of course they were still narrow, but the traffic was thin. A good way to get a feel for the economic happenings in a country is to take a look at truck traffic. The less trucks, usually the less import/export and economic activity, especially in a landlocked country.

The other thing that struck me right away was the decrepitude of the country homes. They were the same design as in Georgia, but they were more rundown, more rusted out, and more likely to be lopsided and cracked. Cause and effect of that in my opinion is one of two things or a combination of both. One, there isn't enough income in Armenia for people to fix up there country homes so they do the best they can. The other is that so many people have left Armenia, many of the homes have been abandoned for years, whereas in Georgia, people tended to stay after the fall of the Soviet Union.

It is really quite spectacular outside of Yerevan. Only thirty minutes or so outside the capital city are snowcapped mountains sitting right next to the highway on both sides. There was just one plateau after another after another where you drive along. Georgia is all about valleys, but this place was plateaus of open fields of grass, hay, and natural beauty.

Yerevan

Right away you could feel the differences between Yerevan and Tbilisi. First of all, Yerevan was much smaller, the roads were smoother, the streets wider, cleaner, more organized, and practically all the cars were newer and cleaner. I have to chalk it up to political stability. Georgia is just now getting its' act together after years of civil unrest and political corruption whereas Armenia has been working pretty well for more than a decade. Don't get me wrong, both countries are littered with abandoned factories sitting like rusty reminders of an industrial time, but the capitals have stark contrast.

People are a bit colder in Yerevan. In the city center you can feel the entitlement of the young who have family abroad sending money, lived abroad, or were just born into the right family. Twenty-five year old professionals in Tbilisi might drive a ten year old Opel or fifteen year old BMW, they don't drive two year old Mercedes S and C class cars like every fifth person in Yerevan seems to be doing in the center. They also seem a bit less miserable. In my first impression, I got the feeling that life was a bit easier here for most, slower, more relaxed, more country-like.

Things of interest included the cognac factory which was closed that weekend. There are a dozen museums and art work dots the parks. I went to three in one afternoon, contemporary, modern, and Russian. You can walk the whole city center in one hour from north to south. I went to the Genocide Museum which had the usual pictures, morbid music, and fact sheets. The only thing I found interesting about the genocide, where the Turks killed an estimated 600,000 - 1,500,000 people, depending on who your source is, is that in some places they literally wiped people out to the hundreds. There was one town with something like 150,000 people in it and then a year later there were 200 people left. I had never seen numbers so precise before. This is going to sound like a terrible thing to say, but once you have seen one genocide museum, church, mosque, synagogue, mansion, or most other man-made things, you have seen them all. It doesn't stop you from checking out more of them for the subtle differences though and once in awhile a spectacular one comes along. I suspect when I go to Auschwitz this winter I will be floored, not because I am Jewish, but because of the scale, just like Hagia Sophia, St. Peter's Basilica, and Old Jerusalem were pretty awesome.

I would be as bold as to say that while there are differences between Georgia and Armenia, many things felt and looked the same. The food was similar, the way people looked was similar even though women were shorter and rounder, the infrastructure was basically the same, the history not too far off, and the overall feel similar. Armenia is definitely worth a visit especially if you like mountains.

Dinner / House Party

I have been having people over for Sunday brunch on and off for months now. I cook up an American style brunch as best I can, friends bring the ingredients to make mimosas, and we have a pleasant afternoon in my flat. My friends and colleagues know I can cook pretty well and it is easy to please volunteers who eat bread and cheese most days. After talking about it for close to a year, I decided to finally have a dinner / house party fully catered by me except for drinks.

I invited my advanced English class of five women from the police department, my Georgian colleagues from the police academy, my volunteer friends, and some random Georgian friends I have met over the last year. There were about twenty-five in total and I think all had a good time. Unlike most parties, the ratio of girls to guys was high and outside of one person, the husband of a dear colleague, everyone spoke English, and many spoke Georgian and Russian, even the volunteers.

I opened the party with cold appetizers of tomato salsa, cucumber salsa, and apple / walnut salsa and chips, and cold veggies with a homemade sour cream dip. The first course was fusilli pasta in a spicy tomato sauce and rigatoni with an Alfredo sauce. The second course was my take on the Georgian kebab, mincing meat, seasonings, onions, garlic, and blue cheese together and calling it, "Blue Cheese Kebabs." The third and final course was Asian fare including sesame chicken, beef and vegetables in soy sauce, and a Szechuan chicken dish with loads of chillies.

People loved the food and as it common in Georgia, the Georgians started trickling out around eleven at night and the foreigners got pretty sauced and cleared out by two in the morning with three crashing on my couches around five. It was a huge success and I think one of the better parties in town. People brought loads of alcohol and there was no shortage of good food, drink, music, and conversation.

Racha - October 2011

2011-11-22T01:34:00.000-08:00

In October, a group of volunteers got together and went to Racha, a mountainous region in north central Georgia between the occupied territory of South Ossetia and the high mountains of the Svaneti Region. It was the weekend of Yom Kippur and the beginning of Autumn.

On Friday morning we all met in front of the Radisson Hotel in downtown Tbilisi. There were about ten volunteers and two Georgians in addition to the driver. The two Georgians were our colleagues from the police academy. Marina is a sixty year old English teacher from Utsera, a small village in Racha. We would be visiting her hometown, seeing where she grew up, and exploring the mountains along the way.

Marina is a very extroverted person with a gracious smile and kind heart. She wanted to show us a part of Georgia unexplored by most tourists and Georgians alike. As the president of an NGO focused on rural tourism, showing us her hometown was something of a personal mission for her. Racha is one of Georgians most beautiful regions with forests, rivers, and mountains in all directions and was well worth the drive.

Oni was our first stop. Oni was home to the largest Jewish population in Georgia for hundreds of years. It has the largest not working synagogue in the country. We met the caretaker of the synagogue who upon arrival explained to me that in the 1970s and 1990s most of the Jewish people left this area for Israel and a better life. The only Jewish people remaining were elderly folks who feel that Georgia is there home and don't want to leave. In Tbilisi it isn't much different, but you will find some younger Jews living and working in the capital.

I asked him if there were going to be Yom Kippur services and he explained that they haven't had a Rabbi in many years and that there were hardly enough people left to hold services. In affect, the synagogue was a museum. It was strange for me, being a Jew, standing inside a synagogue on Yom Kippur, and not being able to be part of the high holiday services.

Twenty minutes outside Oni is the village of Utsera. Utsera is a small farming village sitting on the hillside with a population of a few dozen families. There are practically no young people living there anymore and most folks are elderly. The houses are of the farmhouse variety, made mostly of wood, large rooms, and a small kitchen were the only heat in the house came from.

We would later learn that in Utsera, everyone was a Metreveli. That is, everyone had the same last name and came from the same lineage. If someone has the last name Metreveli then you knew they came from Utsera. It was something Marina was very proud of.

Marina grew up in a small country house on these hillsides for the first fifteen or so years of her life before moving to a small city to pursue her education. Her house was built by her grandfather in the mid-1800s and with a few remodeling jobs here and there still remains. The entire lower housing section is close to two hundred years old and reflects a time where people and animals lived closer together. Animal stalls where in one corner of the house to keep animals warm during frigid winters and the kitchen was in another where families spent a great deal of time around the fire trying to stay warm.

The upper section of the house was built during Soviet times from wood, has high ceilings, and multiple rooms usually connected through a series of doors that make farmhouse in Georgia effectively a maze of rooms all connecting to each other. The exterior has a balcony that wraps around almost the whole house. When you look at the house from the road you can see where the rock built house of the 1800s meets the wooden house of the 1900s. It is quite remarkable really to see the contrast between old and new.

On Saturday we took a trip high up into the mountains along a dirt road that crept higher and higher towards the Russian and South Ossetian borders. We had a police escort as we were employees of the Ministry of Internal Affairs. Being foreign employees has its benefits. They squished a dozen of us in the back of a pickup truck and we were off on a two hour off road bouncing-a-thon into the Racha forests and mountains.

South Ossetia is a breakaway region in Central Georgia that become occupied by the Russians after the fall of the Soviet Union. It is effectively off limits to everyone and remains a sensitive topic when talking to Georgians. South Ossetia is also the place were the 2008 five day war with Russia got started when Georgia started a full scale military offensive in respond to claims that villages and town in South Ossetia were under attack. The Russians responded swiftly by occupying parts of western Georgia and defending Ossetia with military force the Georgians could not match. The war ended five days later.

After stopping along the way to sample to stinky mineral water we arrived at a military checkpoint with spectacular mountain views and then proceeded up to the high mountains where all three borders meet on the snow covered peaks of the High Caucasian Mountains. On one side you could see the Russian outposts a little higher up the mountain and on the other side it dropped down into a valley that was the demarcation line separating Georgia from South Ossetia. Some of the volunteers rode horses and posed with AK-47 rifles with no safeties on. After thirty minutes of picture taking we went back down to sample more stinky mineral water and have lunch in an abandoned park that was a tourist destination during Soviet times.

On Sunday we visited the old tourist spot where Soviets of means would go to escape the summer heat. The hotel had been abandoned for more than three decades and all that remains on the grounds besides the old hotel is the stone and wood house that Stalin use to visit. It was sad really. What was once a prosperous beautiful location for tourist to visit was now a forgotten village of twenty or so remaining families living out their golden years while all their children moved to the cities or abroad. The grass was still mowed regularly and I suppose on some level the government hopes that one day someone will come along and bring back the glory days of a forgotten town.

Racha reminded me a lot of Oregon. Mist covered mountains, streams and rivers, and that damp air commonly found in forests in temperate climates. Racha is a beautiful place that is practically untouched. It won't have the ski resorts that Mestia is building. It won't have the historical appeal that you find in more ancient parts of Georgia. It is just the kind of place where one goes to find peace and comfort, to get away from it all.

One Year Anniversary - Georgia

2011-11-22T00:29:00.000-08:00

September 1, 2011 marked my one year anniversary in Georgia. After a solid five years in East Asia I wanted a change from the land of "same-same." Footsprints Recruiting, the original recruiter who got me my first job in Ulsan, South Korea with CDI Language Academy, in September of 2006, recently signed an agreement with the Ministry of Education and Science in Tbilisi, Georgia. The program was simple, free plane ticket, small stipend, live with a host family somewhere in the country, and teach at a public school. My original plan was to give it three months and move on. Now, it is November 2011 and I am fifteen months in with seven months to go. The following are some thoughts on the last year.

When I arrived in Georgia I knew right away I went from the developed world to the developing world. The airport was new, but small. Incheon Airport in Seoul, South Korea is a giant place where 747's are two out of three airplanes in the international terminals and considering Korea is a small country, most departure destinations are outside this country. Tbilisi, Georgia has one domestic departure a day and the rest go to Europe, Dubai, and Istanbul. It is from these locations that one goes around the world. I am not even sure if the airport has enough runway for a jumbo jet. That isn't to say it was like landing in a remote location, but it certainly wasn't the big leagues anymore. I had arrived.

We waited around a hotel for three days while other volunteers and lost luggage arrived and then went to the third largest city in the country for seven days of training. After Tbilisi, with a population around 1.7 million, the populations fall off dramatically. The biggest cities after the capital hover around 250,000 people, less than 100,000 people being the average.

After training I was approached by the director of the TLG program and asked if I would be interested in teaching police officers at the police academy in the capital city. I said yes and that is where I remain today. Originally another volunteer and I would both teach at the police academy and live in a farmhouse in the suburbs of Tbilisi until after the winter holidays when he moved onto another job and I moved to the city center.

The farmhouse had a lot of good memories. For example, Mama Tina and her chicken wrangling on a daily basis right outside out porch, the Thanksgiving Day party where twenty were invited and eighty showed up, educating my black friends on just how great Harlem Nights was, sleeping under eight blankets because my bedroom was as cold as it was outside, sleeping in the living room on really cold nights because it had the only heater in the house, walking down Cow Shit Road on the way to work in dress shoes thinking "Really, am I really do this?", learning about the last ten years of television from my roommate as I hadn't watched television since the mid-nineties, learning about this thing called Facebook and how it was how people communicated even if they lived in the same neighborhood and being annoyed by it, blogging, and other things.

After the New Year and a quick trip over to America and Israel, I returned to the farmhouse and within a couple of days found an apartment in the city center, a loft, with easy access to the metro, shops, and grocers. It was like entering the real world again. Living in the suburbs was effectively like living in a village but the water ran, the electricity usually ran, and there was a suburban buzz. Living in Sabartelo was a big change, more hustle and bustle, more traffic, more everything. I live on the ninth floor, have a view of the city, and one of the shopping districts is one minute away. My work also took me away from the police academy to various police agencies in Tbilisi and Rustavi where I would become known as the advanced English learners traveling teacher.

By this time, January 2011, almost all my old friends had left and new volunteers had arrived. I was in group three and by the new year TLG was up to seven groups and today has brought in close to thirty. There are literally a dozen or less of us left from the old days which means your social network is always evolving. My old roommate moved to the city, met a girl, is sharing an apartment with her, and may get married this summer, another friend is making a life here with her girlfriend doing graphic design and teaching private lessons, and another guy I know from way back is still living in a remote village in the snowed-in mountains in Adjara in Western Georgia. The rest returned home or have gone to South Korea as ESL teachers looking for some money are wont to do.

My new friends are a more well rounded group of people with some travel and work experience. My new foreign colleagues at the police academy are disciplined hard working types with travel experience, one recently got promoted and is effectively my new boss as well as travel buddy and friend. Other volunteers have moved to the city, rent their own flats, and continue teaching in public schools. I don't talk to the ones who have left much as is traditional in these programs. Even with Peace Corps being six years in the past, most of us don't talk anymore, but I am more likely to "unfriend" a TLG Volunteer, but never think about "unfriending" a Peace Corps Volunteer. One is a life changing experience and one is a way-station for young Americans and Canadians who have nothing else on their plates upon graduating from university. Peace Corps changes you and your friends for life, it's just how it works.

The TLG has evolved as well. TLG now requires volunteers to be more than an native English speaker and a pulse. The screening process had improved as well as the opportunities. Volunteers only taught in public schools in addition to the only two teachers, me and my roommate, teaching at the police academy. Now volunteers teach at the Ministry of Justice, the Ministry of Finance, and other ministries through the capital city and country. What started with two volunteers at police institutions has more than twenty teachers throughout the country teaching.

Over the summer of 2011, my colleague and I gave small introductions and trainings to all new volunteers for the summer police training program where a hundred volunteers went all over the country to teach English in a trial program to see how the Ministry of Education and Science and the Ministry of Internal Affairs could work together to better educate their staff in the English language. The success of the TLG/Police program and the purge and cleanse of the previously corrupt Ministry of Internal Affairs - Police Division has been national news for a few years now and a reality television program is following a class of Georgian police trainees around the academy.

It has been a good and interesting year. Some of my better memories included trips to Batumi where the Director of the Police Academy showed us a good time. A trip to Mestia, Svaneti, Georgia, in the high Caucasus Mountains where my friend and I hung out in the mountains with a village family for a few days. A trip to the wine region of Georgia with three other friends for Easter, sleeping on a soccer pitch in Telavi, seeing the waterfalls in Lagodkheki, off-roading accidently in Vashlovani, and having an Easter Egg hunt in the soccer stadium. The house parties were fun, it seemed like we had one every weekend until moving from the farmhouse. The International Film Festival was great and seeing The Poogie Bell Band during Jazz Fest was stellar. Tblisoba, a citywide party to celebrate the birth of Tbilisi is always fun and the only time when the streets are closed and you can get a feel for what it must have been like before cars in the Old Town. And finally, during the summer of 2011 before and after giving police trainings to new volunteers, Misha, my direct supervisor at the time, would take Heidi and I on trips around the city, once to Stonehenge, once to the amusement park, once to a few different restaurants for the best of each place. It was one of the few times where he could relax from an overworked job.

There were some bad times too. Freezing my ass off in the farmhouse was not a pleasant experience. Developing the Georgia belly has been kind of annoying. When you live on a diet of bread and cheese, what can you expect? I tend to adapt to the local culture pretty quickly when abroad. In China I was healthier. In Holland I started smoking. In Kenya I was much much slower. It happens. I dated this psychotic American girl briefly and then tried to court this conservative Georgian women. Neither ended well. I torn my shoulder up working out, my Achilles Heel is ripped up, and my ego was bruised when I turned thirty-five and it became clear that I was kind of old in the eyes of friends, date-able women, and some students. I started to feel the pinch of money after years of making it and watching it disappear from currency market and financial institutions screwing me and billions of others. My stepfather went from functional to struggling.

It has been an interesting year, mostly good. I wanted a change from the homogeneousness of East Asia. Ironically, Georgia, as well as everywhere else it seems outside of America, is homogeneous. As an America you tend to forget that most places are ninety-something percent the same ethnically and religiously. I wanted to see a part of the world that had always seemed so remote and unknown. I wanted to live in a place where people thought independently. What I got was more than I expected. I think a great deal of that comes from the interactions working in the capital have brought and how most of my students and Georgian friends are highly educated, in some cases well traveled, and certainly knowledgeable capable English speakers they are.

I learned a great deal about a part of the world with a long history of being conquered over millennium and most recently by The Soviet Union. I learned that The Soviet Union did many good things as well as bad, things you don't learn in American public schools. I learned, again, that substituting one traditional country for another can weigh on your personal life, especially when you grew up in a such an open and diverse place as South Florida. I learned that when a young visionary leader has a young visionary political party they can do amazing things in a country in a short time and that once in awhile they actually do come along. I learned that it is highly unlikely I will be returning to America anytime soon if ever. I may very well become one of those guys who lives in some foreign country and makes a life there. I do love Chicago though and think living in a small town in the American south or Midwest might also be appealing.

While I have to admit living in traditional countries gets on my nerves at time. I can't deny the appeal of the simple way of life. The traditional and sometimes religious norms are humbling for someone who has seen so much and has strong, at times stubborn views and opinions about the world and life. Georgia has in affect brought me back to the western world and while it is changing rapidly here and becoming a more materialistic consumer nation, it still holds onto its identity while it struggles to move from a war torn nation of corruption and violence to a safe prosperous country.

Batumi Trip - August 2011

2011-08-20T02:24:00.000-07:00

In early August the police academy director upon the suggestion of a colleague of mine from America arranged a trip for all the foreign teachers, four in total, and few employees, including one of my two direct supervisors, to go on a trip to Batumi, the coastal beach hot spot of Georgia. We would be driven there, stay in a hotel, and basically swim and eat our way around the city.

We left Tbilisi early Friday morning. Two hours into the trip we would stop in Kashuri to sit in a small forest, drink tea, and have breakfast. While we were eating breakfast a convoy of black SUV's outfitted with bullet proof glass and reinforced steel would cruise on by. It was the closest any of us every got to seeing the president of Georgia or at least seeing his convoy. It got me thinking about all kinds of things like...

Why didn't he stop to say hi? He must have seen our police academy van logo.

Man, it would be really easy to attack his convoy if you were any organized well funded black ops or terrorist team.

Is her wearing a suit or slumming it?

Is he going to be in Batumi?

Will we see him at a lunch or dinner just hanging out like one of us? After all, my boss is kind of a big deal and we are Americans, Canadians, and Australians, perhaps it would be good diplomacy to thank the foreigners for all their hard work.

We arrived in Batumi in the afternoon to find out that the president was in fact in Batumi staying at the Sheraton Hotel, but we would be staying at a different hotel. A hotel a bit off the main strip, in fact a hotel without a paved road, a view, or a decent restaurant, but free is free so who cares. Everything was paid for and Georgian people of means like to eat in nice places.

We would eat a couple of times on the water with a seaside view and one time in a plush restaurant atop a fifteen story building with a revolving upper deck and view of the whole of Batumi. There is a South Beach Miami feel to a lot of the higher end newer restaurants and clubs in Georgia. Most things are white and designed for lounging. Bars not only sell alcohol but you can smoke cigarettes, cigars, and shisha or flavored tobacco from hookahs or water pipes at your table. These places are well outside the price range of regular Georgians, but the upper class and elite frequent these places with great regularity. Not unlike China, the middle class isn't big enough yet to fill these places, but will be in the years to come.

We would go to a dolphin show which reminded me of Florida in many ways. In fact Batumi felt like a combination of Florida meets Mediterranean. It has the beaches but they are stone covered, the water is a perfect temperature, but after three meters drops off steeply and you have to tread or swim, guys are renting wave runners, but they are the turbo charged ones you don't see often in Florida, you can drink on the beach, and the backdrop to the coastline are tree covered hills extending all the way into Turkey which you can see from the shore. Like Florida it is a place that families come and where children will remember going. The one or two times daddy was around and mommy and daddy were happy together. We all have these photos, somewhere around five to nine years old where things were perfect, life was simpler.

The two nights we were in Batumi our director insisted we go to Take Five Club behind the Sheraton. Both nights were Brazilian night. Again, a lounge type atmosphere with music playing. The four performers, two men and two women, performed twice each night, for about forty five minutes each set. The show primarily consisted of two half naked women shaking there asses and well built guys doing Capoeira, a Brazilian art form that combines elements of martial arts, sports, and music.

One girl had a great bottom and shook it a lot. The men really liked it. The rest were surprised at the costumes and sexual nature of the dancing. Most people probably never saw a dark skinned person before with black and white features, what I believe is referred to as really "mixed" up. The majority of Brazilians are mixed, small percentages are black, and a quarter or so consider themselves white. Why do people say Brazilians are smoking hot people? Perhaps it has something to do with the mixing of people over the centuries. Half German half Japanese, half black and half white, half black and half Asian, and so on makes for some good looking people.

Here is how the evolution of a Georgian night club evening goes.

10-11pm: Club starts to fill. People are seated in groups of four to twelve. People order food and drinks. People are mostly seated and beginning to drink.

11pm-12am: Heavy consumption of alcohol begins. Show starts. People start dancing on the fringes. Set one ends and the music gets a little louder and people dance in fits and starts. The DJ basically has attention deficit disorder (ADD) because no song lasts longer than 30-45 seconds so the crowd can't really get a groove going and at the same time within one minutes time has this resurgence of energy because they recognize a new song and scream and yell before repeating process. It is quite tiresome if you like getting a groove on. Everyone is dressed well and the places screams upper class and elite people of means.

12am-1am: People are pretty sauced my now. Cigarette smoking increases, drinks accumulate, drunk people want less drunk people to get happier and drink more, dance more, and smile more. The second set begins as people cool off from dancing. The second set finished on a high note with pictures and a nice lead into the dancing part of the night club scene. By now the families have left and the mostly single or divorced people are remaining.

Girls anywhere else in the world would be ripe for the picking but here they are only the marrying kind letting off some steam. Men are hardly present as the only men with money tend to be older and more interested in watching over their flock of girls, mostly daughters, or relatives. The younger guys are getting their drink on together and occasionally girlfriends of these guys are sitting together chatting it up. The dance floor is packed that is, forty or so people packed, it is more of an outdoor a catering hall probably only open a few months a year, then a dance floor as we know it, the surround areas have some girls on ecstasy or cocaine or high levels of alcohol doing there best interpretation of a stripper before stumbling in their high heel shoes.

1am-2am: The crowd has really thinned out. Rush hour as we know it in America where you have about a one hour window to meet someone and have a one night stand that turns into a meaningful relationship doesn't exist in Georgia. What seems to happen during this one hour is one more round of drinks, one more brief bounce around on the dance floor, and the reduction of sugar in your system, the glazed over look in your eyes, and the emptiness that lies behind them showing throw as you realize you are all alone. Couples are going to their hotel rooms together and you are going to sleep along again tonight. Repeat this the second night and that is a typical weekend at the Take Five Club in Batumi.

It really was a good fun trip though. I enjoyed being with the people I was with. We got the royal treatment except for the hotel rooms and transportation to and from Tbilisi, we didn't pay for any drinks and we could drink and eat as much as we wanted. Most people had a good time. It was nice to see my bosses take a break from working all the time. The food was good, the views were good, and the beaches were really nice. I am going back in two weeks on my own, perhaps I will see things differently. We will see.

Mestia, Georgia July 2011

2011-08-20T01:18:00.000-07:00

July flew by without any incident until the end when my colleague and I spent a long weekend in Mestia, Georgia. We flew on one a propeller plane from Tbilisi through the mountains arriving on a small landing strip 1400 meters high at the base of the high Caucasus Mountains in the Svaneti region of Georgia.

The flight was awesome. The mountains in Georgia have this way of beginning and ending abruptly. At one moment you are flying at 3000 meters and the ground is far below you and the next you are a few hundred meters from the ground looking out the window at 4000 meter snow capped peaks.

Upon arriving we met a colleague from the TLG Program teaching police officers English in Mestia. When we arrived at the station I ran into Amirani who was my student in Tbilisi when he was a trainee at the police academy. Now he is a working police officer in Mestia about a four hour drive from his home in Zugdidi, in the Samegrelo region of Georgia which is home to the Migrelian people, which is not an ethnic group perse, but they do have a different language and a different way of preparing food which is by far superior to the traditional Georgian food you get everywhere else. It is kind of like a New Yorker and a Texan. They are both American, but speak differently and certainly have different tastes in food.

Anyway, it was surprising to randomly meet a former student an hour flight into the mountains just standing outside the police station after his English lessons. His English was still good which made me proud. Our colleague took us to her host family's house where we would be staying for the next three nights. It was difficult to really get a handle on who was who but it went something like this, one mother, four daughters, a son and wife, two or three babies not sure, three children, roaming cousins in groups of three and five. At any one time there was between twelve and sixteen people staying at the house.

The mother cooked everything. She made fifty loaves of bread a week for the family and military camp she sold bread to, milked the cow in the morning to produce cheese in the afternoon, buy some things that she couldn't get from her garden and prepared all this all day everyday we were there for everyone who was there. She lived in the kitchen and her children lived in the kitchen and the babies lived in the mother's arms, and the activity never ended as long as you were in the kitchen.

The rest of the house was a two-story affair with the equivalent of six large rooms that was rather quiet most of the time. It originally started as a one room affair and over a decade or so another room was added and another and another until there were about six in total. I think in a few years there will be a few more rooms as the family grows and this place eventually makes more money from functioning as a guest house than as a baker for the military camp across the way.

Upon arriving at the house you can't help but notice the view. Sitting in a valley your view is spectacular from both direction. Behind you is Ushpa one of the highest peaks in the mountain range that runs along the whole border between Georgia and Russia and Azerbaijan and Russia. It kind of towers over Mestia like a judge towers over the lawyers and other players in a court drama. In front of the house is a million dollar view, literally, the v-shape of the valley is eighty percent filled with snow covered peaks and faces some of the largest mountains in the range.

What would be a million dollar view in Colorado or Switzerland is commonplace in this small town and surrounding villages. It is a place that doesn't know from the tourist trap and overpriced cost of things that it is going to become. It is a place where people milk cows for cheese and bake bread in ovens fired by wood and debris. A place without landfills because everything is consumed or burned for fuel. A place that just broke ground for a hotel because there is only one in town and it is fully booked so why not. A place that only has one flight a day with seventeen passengers and a road going in and out that no one wants to take because it is so bumpy and uncomfortable. A river runs through the middle of the town and just like everywhere else in Georgia you are always amazed at just how much water this country has. It seems never ending.

On the second day of one of the hottest days of the year we went to the "lake" which was little more than two small pools of water concentrating into what was effectively a very large puddle from run off from the little stream of water sliding down from a mountain. To get there you walk through of concrete factory as if it is no big deal to be surrounded by moving cranes and heavy stone crushing equipment and then walk across a small creek of icy cold mountain water. As we were walking through the concrete factory I couldn't help but think about how many laws in America this was breaking.

The next day we went to Ushguli which is the highest inhabited village in Europe. Well not really, but that is how it is advertised and it is sometimes OK to let people think what they want. Georgians strongly believe it is so let's not tell them about the other six places in Europe with higher inhabited places. Anyway, Ushguli is high, some 2100 meters above sea level and at the base of some big ass mountain, Shkhara Mountain to be exact. A six hour hike from Ushguli is a glacier that you can see from a distance in the village.

The old part of the village is sparsely inhabited and basically a cow shit covered ancient place infested with flies and roaming cows who piss and shit at there own accord all over the place. The museum is slightly interesting if you are into old bibles that you can't take pictures and an old bracelet or pot. They coolest thing was the view of course. You can't help but wonder what it was like in the 12th century when some nomads said, "This looks like a nice place to set up camp and start a village. Let's go to the river and collect stones for a four story tower that we will live in year round." Ushguli would not have been an easy sell for anyone especially in the winter time where the village is effectively shut off from the rest of the world due to heavy snows and freezing temperatures.

By the third day the fresh food started to become weary to me as it was essentially the same thing over and over again with a little twist here and there, but then again, city life isn't that much different. The flight home was pretty cool but not as exciting as going into the mountains. If was one of those trips where you go back in time briefly and leave wondering what it would be like to live off the land in a place isolated from the rest of the world in many ways but still functional to be comfortable enough. I thought that it would be a great place to buy land as in twenty years people will be paying stupid amounts of money for these kinds of views and the skiing that goes along with it.

America June 2011

2011-08-20T00:59:00.000-07:00

At the end of June I went to America for two weeks. Since 2003 I have been traveling or living abroad and due to the great expense of airplane tickets half way around the world, I usually only go to America once a year. The Ministry of Education and Science however has been gracious enough to provide its volunteers with a plane ticket home once every six months or so. I have been to America twice this year, once in January 2011 and once in June 2011. That would be considered a lot for me these last few years.

This trip however would be different from all others in that I would not go to Florida at all, my home state, the place where my parents live, the place I grew up. This time around my parents, sister, and nephew would fly to North Carolina and we would all stay at my brother's place in Asheville. Asheville is would appear is the new central place for all of us to meet and spend time together.

In the mid-nineties I went to Asheville on road trips to listen to jam bands play at small bars. Asheville was a small town then with no real suburbs, a quiet mountain town feel full of hippies, want to be hippies, and blue collar workers who want to enjoy life without the stress of making money and making a mark on the world of finance and politics. It was and still is in many ways, one of the great American towns with a small town feel, but not so small as to know all your neighbors. Nowadays it just has more transplants, suburbs, and one stop shopping.

You can go hiking in the summer and skiing in the winter. When I was there in January we went tubing on the snow down a small hill, this summer we went hiking in the Blue Ridge Mountains and tubing down water slides. The place is something of an outdoor lovers paradise. Barbecues on the porch at night and lightening bugs dotting the sky as you sit by the small wood fire since the temperature drops a tiny bit at night in the mountains.

Some of the highlights for me was going to the now out of business Borders Bookstore. I love books and have become something of a bookworm since picking up reading in my mid-twenties. I read mostly nonfiction and ran out of books from my last visit to America. Just like buying music use to be an addiction of mine in my youth, but now easily stolen from the Internet, now I buy books digitally and read five at a time.

There are different schools of thought on the whole digitizing of the written word, but I think it is great. We chop down less trees, I can share the books with different people anywhere in the world, the consumption of oil is reduced from the disappearance of the tangible end product, and it is less expensive for the consumer. Those are pretty good reasons for me. That whole nostalgic thing about having bookshelves and books lining them from floor to ceiling is such aristocratic nonsense. I try not to roll my eyes when I hear it or see it. Some books are worth keeping, but your twenty three book complete collection of John Grisham or Nelson Demille isn't impressive, if anything it looks insecure. Using the excuse that books make good references is weak at best with all the technology at our fingertips. Those rare people who bookmark pages and highlight passages are few and far between.

Of course I consumed as many bacon cheeseburgers as possible, it being my favorite American food. The raw bar and grill near my brother's house had the best one of the four places I had this deliciousness. After five years of talking about it, but not actually getting one, I went to Wendy's for a junior bacon cheeseburger, the best of all the fast food chains. Eating was a big part of my trip to America as it always is. Luckily I don't have to pay for my consumption on most trips because at $270 a month, my salary couldn't sustain my eating habits in The States.

Going food shopping practically everyday with my mom is always a treat. The supermarket and mega stores still shock me. America is truly blessed when it comes to food. We have so much of it and in so many varieties. In many countries you have bread, not twenty different kinds of bread and five different kinds of manufacturing processes related to each kind of bread. It is remarkable really.

I usually go for salad of all things once I have had a bacon cheeseburger or two. America does greens really well and we have a huge selection of fruits and vegetables. Of course many of our fruit doesn't quite taste like it does when naturally grown, but the choices are undeniable. After that, I prefer a magical ride down refrigeration row. Nowhere in the world can you select from fifteen types of meat in tube form, Hebrew National getting it right every time, side salads with or without industrial mayonnaise, cured meats from all over the world, and a selection of cheese that would take up all the refrigerated sections and then some of a grocery store in Tbilisi. Going to a grocery store with your food addicted relatives is kind of a big deal in my family.

The most "normal" experiences was sitting on the porch. Sitting on a porch seems so basic to me, something us urban dwellers know little about. As people have been moving more and more into the urban centers of the world, we are leaving behind millions of years of evolutionary connection to the earth. Only recently have people detached themselves from the land in a mad rush to concrete jungles. I believe it goes against our human nature to live like this, but nevertheless, it is the way of the modern world.

We now spend thousands of dollars to take two week trips back to nature. Some people feel so uncomfortable outside the city that they get anxiety just thinking about a week long trip in the woods. The wealthy buy homes in forests. The poor tend to live in trailer parks, the majority middle class have hanging plants in their apartments and haven't walked on grass in years if ever. For the people who just get it, sitting on the porch just makes sense. What was surreal about sitting on the porch for me was the ice cream man.

I haven't thought about the ice cream man in twenty years. I don't remember seeing the ice cream man or even hearing about him since perhaps the last time The Mets won the World Series in 1986. There we were my stepfather and I sitting in rocking chairs on a beautiful late afternoon summer evening rocking away. In the near distance I heard a jingle and thought that someone had a strange sense of musical taste especially to be blasting it from their car. Then it slowly dawned on me, Eddie Murphy, ice cream, red, white, and blue icy pops, strawberry shortcake, chocolate éclair, that ice cream that finished with a piece of bubble gum, the creamsicle, and the ordering window being to high as children reach up with their tiny hands and one dollar bills to get some icy cold goodness.

I couldn't believe my eyes. I felt like I was in a Norman Rockwell painting or some 1950's All-American town where everyone celebrated Christmas, except the Jews, and had nativity scenes on their from lawns. A time when people had lawns, a time where the kids in Brooklyn wanted ice cream to escape the brutal summer heat in five minutes of ice cream consumption, a time when milk was delivered. If Asheville wasn't awesome enough already it was now.

Of course spending time with family is always great and the only real reason to go home. My sister introduced me to The Daily Show with John Stewart so I now have a different perspective on American news besides cnn.com or the bbc.com, my twelve year old nephew can play a few chords from seventies rock songs, and my niece and nephews are at an age where they are little people who say funny things.

It was a good trip that got extended a couple of days because Asheville airport is small and if a flight is delayed you will most likely miss your connecting flights in North America and Europe when making the schlep all the way to the Republic of Georgia. Luckily my new flights would eliminate sixteen hours of layovers in Chicago and Munich. The only catch was my luggage would go to Warsaw, Poland and I would be going to Tbilisi, Georgia upon the return trip, but hey, no layovers and the luggage would eventually arrive.

Summer English Programs

2011-08-19T23:48:00.000-07:00

On June 15th the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the Ministry of Science and Education started a joint English language training program for police officers throughout the country. Old and new volunteers would be placed in police stations, live with local families, and work through a twelve week curriculum designs to provide a basic introduction of the English language.

It was the responsibility of my colleague and I to provide a quick and dirty on the curriculum and issues in the classroom to about sixty volunteers already present in the country at a resort in Anaklia on Georgia's Black Sea coast. At later dates throughout the summer, newly arrived batches of volunteers would get the same two hour presentation without the luxury of sitting in a beach side resort, but the word resort is loose term for what Anaklia really is.

Anaklia was under construction when we got there. There wasn't a patch of grass in sight and you had to look both ways before crossing the soon to be promenade for heavy equipment vehicles and trucks flying back and forth. Once you walked the short distance to the coastline you had to step over bottles, plastics, netting, and other types of debris as the main river flowing from the high mountains drains into the sea fifty meters from the hotel. Once you get in the water, everything is fine past the first ten feet of oil slick water and debris. The water is actually quite nice and will make for some nice swimming once they replace the grass and trees, and bulldoze the debris away from the coastline. It is also a sandy beach unlike the south coast where river stones both large and small make up the whole coast line, much easier on the feet.

The president of the country is the principle investor in the nicest hotel to eventually dot the coastline once it is finished by Fall 2011. In the meantime, the one existing hotel is doing just fine with a decent kitchen, strong drinks, and a nice swimming pool. The only problem is the guy with a jack hammer ten feet away from the pool hammering away. You get use to it.

A walk along the soon to be promenade takes you along a strip of land that is a fishing village dotted with the occasional coastal property which will soon be leveled in all likelihood for more hotels and shops. It is suppose to be the next big thing, but right now it is one hotel, one under construction, and lots of wiring, bricks, and debris.

During Soviet times the north coast of Georgia is where most people went for sun and fun. Now with the occupied territory of Abkhazia effectively a Russian province, it is off limits to Georgians and remains a sore point of discussion some twenty years later.

Old piers are something of interest to me. Steel reinforced concrete doesn't seem to last long when it is located near a body of water or completely abandoned in an urban environment. It might have to do with the way the concrete was mixed in the nineteen sixties, who knows. Either way, the pier was literally hanging into the sea where it hadn't actually broken off and fallen in. I couldn't help but wonder, A, why was there a pier in a place with no history of tourism or shipping, B, what must it have looked like when it was finished some four or five decades ago, and C, is there a photo of the ribbon cutting ceremony, who were those people, and where are they now. Yes, all this from a ten second gaze at a forgotten pier on an isolated beach thirty minutes down a dirt road practically no one lives on.

On the second day in Anaklia we went to see the hydroelectric dam that separates Georgia from Abkhazia. It was basically a gorge with some rusty old dam and processing center that you could look at from upon high. We couldn't see much else as the fog was thick and the sky opened up and started soaking us in sheets of rain. The kind of downpour where you have trouble keeping your eyes open because it is so heavy. The government officials managed to get one snapshot before we ran to the buses. We all can now say we have seen Abkhazia or at least a cliff face that is technically foreign soil until it is returned to Georgia.

After the disastrous trip to the dam, we went to a restaurant in Zugdidi, the capital of the Samegrelo region and had dinner. This region is home to the Migrelian people. I can't get a straight answer from anyone on what makes the Migrelian people different than Georgians except food and language. They are a proud people, known for being boastful and occasionally loud and arrogant about their heritage.

Migrelians speak a different language in addition to Georgian, have lived in Georgia since the beginning of time and make the same food as Georgians except the cheese is a little less salty and the cooking style is a little bit different. Instead of cheese on the inside of dough, it is on the inside and wait for it, the outside too. They don't look much different either except for perhaps the lighter eyes and hair that is common in the eastern regions of Northern Georgia. Russian genetics may have worked there way into the gene pool a bit more than in the rest of the country.

It is a topic of discussion that can be too sensitive to talk about. Black Americans are no fool and they know that somewhere along the line some white slave owner may have forcibly injected his genes into their genetic makeup, but here, the "We are all Georgian" philosophy is strong and something not to be questioned. I can just see my Georgian friends rolling their eyes at this last statement. Luckily or not so luckily, depending on how you look at it, having a common enemy is a good way to bring people together. Once that external enemy dissolves people usually find ways to hate each other internally. For Georgia, thousands of years of external enemies has created a very unified group of people. Nationalistic like most people, but not arrogant enough to think they invented everything like the Chinese.

Everywhere you go in Georgia the food is basically the same, but for some reason Migrelian food is just a little better. The cheese is a little better, the textures are smoother, the meat a touch tastier. I use to think it was all nonsense, but having eaten basically the same food for a year straight and having the gut of a beer drinking couch potato to prove it, some regions do it just a bit better and in the case of Lagodekhi, Georgia, a town near Azerbaijan at the base of the high Caucasus Mountains, a lot better. Lagodekhi likes its meat tough, it cheese super salty, and its service aggressive.

With that first meeting in Anaklia we had a good glimpse of who the volunteers were and what to expect from most of them. That is, many of the drunks were still in the program, many of the drama queens still existed, and many of the overachievers which is Steve-speak for people who want to change Georgians and instill their American and sometimes Christians values on the Georgian people were still there. But they were a dying a breed of volunteer held over from the first five or so groups coming to end of their one year contracts. Many would leave early, quit, or be fired, and things would prove to run smoothly considering the scale of the countrywide project.

With the newer groups, green as ninety percent of them were, we found a smarter, more responsible group of recruits. Sure there was the occasional hippie leftover, alcoholic in the making, and some people in way over their heads, but most had a clue at least. They seemed to still have limited numbers of trainees with teaching experience, but they seemed to be more aware that this wasn't a cake walk party and that they might be pretty far out there in remote regions.

People have a much better idea of what to expect in this program now and the recruiting process was cleaned up from a free for all to a bit more selective. I will say this though, while they appear more mature and experienced, that is twenty two or much older, the younger people seem to be canvases for ink. From the neck to the calf muscle, a quarter of the people and half the young people have tattoos the kind you really can't hide unless you wear a suit and even still, a sleeve or neck tattoo still shows through the cuff or collar.

Road Trip April 2011 Eastern Georgia - Easter Weekend

2011-05-08T01:44:00.000-07:00

Easter is kind of a big deal in Georgia as in most Christian places in the world. Public school teachers get four full days off in addition to Saturday and Sunday. At the Police Academy we only got two full days, but it was enough to plan and go on a road trip to the Kakheti province in Eastern Georgia. It was a pretty awesome trip even though the weather and the roads didn't work out so well.

I contacted a car rental agency and found to my surprise an American sounding person on the other end of the line. George was the owner of a car rental company along with his father who have been in business since the early days of renting cars, that is to say a good ten years or so since things got stable and less corrupt in Georgia. To his misfortune, the way he sees it, but to my delight, prices are a quarter of what they use to be and now on the cheap end of things you can rent a car for about $50 a day compared with a couple of hundred dollars only a few years ago.

His selection of cars are the discarded remains of America's middle class. On his lot you will find mostly eight to twelve year old American and European (read: German) cars. Six months a year he lives in New York where he was raised after leaving Georgia with part of his family in 1991 during the end of Soviet rule and the beginning of civil war and six months a year he remains in Georgia to run the family business with his father. We rented a 1999 Volkswagen four door family car which for me was like stepping back in time to my college days because the car reminded me of my first car, a 1995 Honda Accord. The dashboard had a fuel gauge, was in miles before kilometers, buttons big enough for the sausage fingers of a cyclops, and the only digital display was the time and mileage which had a little button you could press to go four zeros to keep track of your Trip A and Trip B distances. By today's standards it was an dinosaur but not a classic.

On the other hand being a fairly old car, there were some things that I would have been common on a new car that this car didn't have. The right hand side mirror was missing, something you don't necessarily need in Georgia as most of the roads are only two lanes, but in Tbilisi there are a few multiply lane roads where you actually need a right hand mirror and signal although the signal isn't really needed here. Two windows didn't work and the back tired had no shocks.

People tend to glide into a turn here and there is no real things as lines in the road except at some stoplights where people jockey for position to gun it when the light hints at turning green only to have to spend most of the time riding the brake as the next light up ahead isn't timed for efficient traffic flow, people are making a break for it across four lanes of road, a dog is in the street, a bus is pulling out, someone stopped to make a call, light a cigarette, is drunk and swerving up ahead or next to you, or the road has a pothole or ten up ahead. Riding your blind spot is a Georgian pastime. It might sound bad but all things considered, the roads are pretty good, the drivers aggressive but aware, and the speed relatively slow so things that can and do go wrong are avoided in time. Considering I haven't driven a car since 2006 ever so briefly when I drove to Alaska from Chicago with a good friend, this would be a welcoming home for me as I lived in a car from 1992 until I left for Africa in 2003. It is true that riding a bike and driving a car instantly come back to you I wish all the foreign languages I learned were so easy to remember.

My American colleagues from the Police Academy and I rented a car and while originally planning to drive west of Tbilisi through a mountain range and check things out, decided against freezing temperatures, snow and ice and drove around Eastern Georgia. Kakheti region is Georgia's wine making region. Most of it sits in a fertile valley with the Caucasus mountains sharply rising on the north side of the region. The vineyards were starting to grow leaves but this being April, there was hardly any grapes or lushness to the landscape yet. This would be a trip of National Parks and going with the flow.

On the way we stopped at an old fortress. It was built in the 12C or something and was currently being occupied by eight drunk men. As is the custom in Georgia, when you do something you should be drinking. This being Kakheti that means nearly everyone makes their own wine. My former roommate being something of a connoisseur of alcoholic beverages partook in the drinking festivities while the rest of us took shelter in one of the corners of the fortress. The bow and arrow was a common weapon back in the day and no fortress would be complete without a spy hole, wide inside narrowing down away from the shooter. Here we ate bread and cheese, drank, and tried in the worst form of broken English and Georgia to communicate but not one person spoke English, so you just drink more. The equivalent of a bottle of wine in twenty minutes is standard. We proceeded to get stuck in the mud and went on our way.

The weather wasn't very good, but we made due. We started at Lagodekhi National Park for two nights. It is located at the base of the mountains near the Azerbaijan border to the east about ten miles away. When we first arrived we saw a broken down fence and a sign that read Lagodekhi National Park. We had arrived. Problem was that there was no entrance and no real park to speak of. We could see it from the chain linked fence but there had to be more or at least we hoped.

After backtracking about three times we asked locals where the park might be, one person actually knew, everyone else looked at us like we were nuts. This happens everywhere I go in the developing world. You go to China are in Beijing and you ask in poor but sufficient enough Mandarin, "Where is Tienanmen Square?" and people look at you like you just spoke like the teacher in Charlie Brown cartoons.

Our man was a taxi driver who also seemed to double as the welcoming party of his small town. We followed him up a road and went the rest of the way into the great unknown alone, about one kilometer down a paved road. Upon arrival we again ran into a fence this one was a serious looking affair with a big wooden door, concrete walls, and a layered rock welcoming blockade on either side. It screamed, "By invitation only." Right away I started thinking we would have to schlep all our gear into the park and not have easy access to the car which makes car camping a breeze. After some investigation we met the park director who showed us around the grounds.

There were two main buildings with nice facilities and right away my brain said, "NGO." Nothing in Georgia is new, well engineered, or thoroughly planned out unless it is a government building, a multinational corporations project, or NGO assisted project. I am not suggesting that engineering is a mess, in fact, when it comes to buildings Georgia is well ahead of the curve it is just that a lot of care was put into the formation and maintenance of the Department of Protected Areas and public schools don't have adequate toilet facilities yet.

The former Soviet countries I have visited, five in total, all have one thing in common when it comes to nature, amazing public parks in cities, and completely noncommercial national parks. You will not even find souvenirs in these places, just a popcorn machine and someone selling beverages under a tree or on the curb, it is kind of great. Bishkek the capital of Kyrgyzstan has a public park running right through its center which calms to nerves immediately, Tbilisi has multiple parks in and around the city center and more economically developed cities like Prague and Budapest have lots of urban sprawl and plenty of casual walking and chilling spots.

Look, we all know that London has some of the world's best parks, if not the world's best parks and Central Park in New York City is the real deal, but these are traditionally cities of great wealth. Bishkek, Tashkent, and Tbilisi haven't had the easiest of developmental times since the Soviet Union broke apart yet they find the resources to maintain urban parks. People almost seem to expect it in these countries and governments recognize that nice urban parks are essential to keeping some sort of peace in addition to places where celebrations, revolutions, and debate can take place. So Lagodekhi National park screamed NGO to me. The buildings were new, clean, and in the style of something you would find in Switzerland, fireplaces, stairs of equal distance, community eating spaces, couches, doors and windows with real integrity, and paths between buildings and roads.

We of course would be camping. It hadn't stopped raining in a week, but that wasn't going to stop us from giving it a go. One of the park employees showed us to a spot where we could camp. We would have to use the buildings to go to the bathroom, get water, and cook if inclined. Our camping spot was a patch of grass up a small hill, about a hundred meters from the buildings. By looking at the discoloration of the ground and compression of flora you could tell that only two places where used by tents and they hadn't been used much since winter ended, probably once or twice a week or a month. Why camp when you can lodge, especially when it is cold and rainy? I totally get it. The tent my old roommate and I rented was a Coleman another tell that it was an NGO project. Coleman is as American as apple pie. The girls had a legitimate 3/4 season North Face tent they borrow from our boss. Now as far as weight and compression is concerned Coleman is not what you want, but for practical use I have to give Coleman credit. It had a tarp bottom, went up with ease, and didn't leak too much. If there was a storm I would have been worried though. We setup and went to town for dinner.

In town we learned that there were only two restaurants, the good one which was closed and the other one. For a country that likes to eat out in large groups this was surprising. The only place open was a hotel. The food sucked. The town was empty which would be a common theme throughout the trip. The church however was abuzz with activity. People mostly attended church and went to villages to be with family members and to visit the graves of dead relatives, a traditional thing to do on Easter in Georgia. The next day we hiked to a small waterfall and it didn't rain the whole time, praised be he. Since the snow was melting from up above and the rains hadn't stopped in weeks the waterfall was powerful and impressive albeit short in height, maybe thirty feet. We knew we arrived at the spot because a rock was painted "FINISH."

After Lagodekhi we drove to the south easternmost part of Georgia to go to Vashlovani National Park only to find the road ended ten miles outside the park. I tried as best I could to navigate the road with three foot potholes and just wide enough track to maybe get a tire or two on it, but when we got to a pot hole the width of the road and depth of a small swimming pool, I had to make a call. The National Park Service Agency I called days before failed to mention that you need a 4WD SUV or Jeep to get into the park. We rented a VW Passat which is basically a four door family car with a foot and a half clearance on the bottom, so we turned around and went to Telavi about a two hour drive on the way to Tbilisi. We only went three hundred feet down this road and it took twenty minutes to get back to the main road. Along the way a decision had to be made about the best way to navigate certain section. High speed and luck was decided down a mud patch that would surely stick us if momentum wasn't on our side. It worked well until the end where a well disguised tree stump was lurking under some grass. I managed to swerve around it, but the back side of the car wasn't so luck and having no shocks, I took out a big chunk of the back right hand side of the car almost severing the brake line. Some duck tape later we were on the road again.

On the Telavi Highway my friend went to pee in an abandoned building on the side of the highway, common in Georgia and post-Soviet countries. Georgia is a great place to be a squatter except in winter. When we stopped a police officer came by. Right away my American raised feelings about police came on and said, "We are not allowed to pee in abandoned buildings. There is some stupid law against that as there is for practically ever human action in America." He saw us, put it together, and in surprisingly near fluent English, offered assistance. Turned out that this Easter weekend the number two police officer in Telavi, one of Georgia's biggest cities was doing patrol. Lucky us, he knew everybody.

He made a few phone calls and got us a camp site. Now, there are no camp sites in Georgia outside of the National Parks but he got us a spot at the old abandoned soccer stadium which during Soviet times was probably a glorious place to watch comrades battle it out on the soccer pitch for mother Russia to witness as its people showed their supremacy. Now the stadium is overgrown, home to hundreds of huge snails, a family of dogs, and empty buildings. Officer Anzor got us in, explained to the groundskeeper what the hell we were doing there, brought us two bottles of wine, and managed a few mattresses and blankets, the latter being for Neal who would make the car his bedroom when we weren't driving. We only had one tent for this part of the trip seeing how Vashlovani was a no go and while not impossible four people would have been a tight squeeze, besides he snores.

The toilet was awesome. Imagine a concrete structure with ten rows of squatting toilets on each side. Now imagine the roof caved in, two decades of foliage fallen from trees and blown in by the wind, and darkness. That was our toilet facility. It wasn't gross because it was so run down, that is, it was like going to the bathroom outside with half a concrete covering and walls. These were the old toilets for patrons of the soccer game. Nature was slowly overtaking the concrete again. It was a cool place to see. Good enough to do your business,perhaps not so much in the sweltering heat of summer.

There were a lot of young people hanging out, smoking, and drinking in the stands where only the most prestigious of people once watched games. I can only assume that it is a making out spot for the young and a nice place to walk around for the old and athletic. In the morning some man drove up and walked around the track a few times while we had an Easter Egg hunt. A stadium and surrounding grounds is a pretty cool place for an Easter Egg hunt as long as the dogs don't catch wind of what you are up to.

The view was spectacular. Georgia is mostly mountains and high ones too. The Caucasus Mountains start and end abruptly. In Telavi we sat at around 1800 feet. Across the valley which sat at 500 feet was the base of one of the mountain ranges. Just the first line of mountains we could see from Telavi stretched to at least 6000 feet. Behind this first line you could see what where pieces of 8000 feet mountains or more. 8000 feet is around the height were altitude becomes a challenge to the human body. It isn't so much the height that is impressive as much as it is the abruptness from which this small but high mountain range begins. There is no lead up to it. You are cruising along at a steady elevation in some valley and then go straight up.

The trip ended with a drive through a small mountain range to Tbilisi. It was a terrible drive for me, albeit only two hours. I haven't driven in such horrible conditions since I took a night drive on CHW16 in BC, Canada on the way to Alaska. This road almost killed me and my good friend. She was sleeping like a baby in the passenger seat and I had white knuckles for eight straight hours. The drive was so bad fear kept me awake.

During Easter weekend the fog was terrible, it was raining, and parts of the road were washed out, I'm talking huge slabs of earth abruptly on the road right in front of you around a bend and parts where the road was gone from sliding down the mountain. Someone definitely pocketed some of the engineering money. New roads are not this poorly made especially in the mountains. We got through it, but we would have preferred clear skies, it must be beautiful. Instead we went to some old churches and wandered around in a few cool forests with the their newly sprouted bright green leaves adding color to the fog and white bark trees.

Upon returning we had lunch at our friend's house where they had a stash of American boxed and canned foods from the commissary of the US Embassy. I feasted on Chunky Chicken Soup and one of those dehydrated Pasta Sides that comes in a bag. These are the same Pasta Sides that got me through rough patches in the Peace Corps. My folks would send me these care packages and I would add my own touch with whatever local ingredients I could get (read: tomato and onion) to make Alfredo, Parmesan, and Garlic Cheese masterpieces, or it seemed that way at the time.

A reoccurring feeling comes back to me time and again in Georgia. Georgia is a small country with a lot to offer to outdoor enthusiasts, it is safe, pretty clean, and functional. It is hard to believe that this is a country where the main form of light was candles only ten years ago. Georgia has come a long way and is changed rapidly. Good leadership has a way of doing good by its people just like bad leadership can destroy things.

Spain Revisited

2011-04-26T05:21:00.000-07:00

In March 1998 I had been living in Holland as an International Exchange Student studying at Utrecht University, a half hour outside Amsterdam in a university town. The Euro didn’t exist, no one was bombing subways and buses in Europe and murder from a hang gun was an unheard of event that brought nations in Western Europe to a stand still when it occurred. I was an inexperienced traveler and spent most of those first four months in Europe traveling through Western and Southern Europe. Things were much cheaper than they are now and a student could easily take a thousand dollars, see a lot, do a lot, and grow as a person usually does from walking the globe. I was twenty three years old, in my second semester of the junior year of university, and starting what would become a lifetime of travel.

The following are some excerpts from my Europe Journal written in 1998 from a trip I took to Spain and Morocco when I probably should have been in class more. To follow is what I call Spain Revisited which is a follow up take on Spain thirteen years later when I went to my sister’s wedding in Andalusia for a week and drove along the Galician coastline following the wedding.

March 7, 1998 Bordeaux, France to Madrid, Spain
I was off on an early morning train to Madrid. This meant a whole day on the train for it was already late morning and Madrid is about a half-day trip from Bordeaux. I arrived in Madrid around eight at night. The place I stayed at was a large flat turned hostel. My room was a shoe box with running water and a shared bathroom on the floor. There was a courtyard in the middle.

March 8, 1998 Madrid
Madrid has a large plaza, a lot of cars, grassy parts, expensive shops, museums, and the biggest post office I have ever stepped foot into. Large post offices seem to be normal in Europe. I saw Jackie Brown at five in the afternoon. The movie theater was packed. The film was dubbed in Spanish with no English subtitles.

March 9, 1998 Madrid
The weather was great. It is my perception and has always been that the Spanish are good generous people. They got Jesus Christ, rice and beans, sun, money, and good family values as far as I can tell. The only people I saw as being fucked up were the alcoholics, but that is everywhere, no place more apparent than in Budapest, Hungary so far in my travels.

March 10, 1998 Madrid to Algeciras, Spain to Tangiers, Morocco
The early morning sunrise north of Algeciras had a full moon on the surreal landscape in southern Spain that was awesome, second only to Southwest America. Somewhere in the early part of the afternoon we arrived in Algeciras, completely cashed from a long night of drinking and smoking. I would return to Spain three days later.

March 13, 1998 Valencia, Spain
We (Carlos (student from Denmark I met on the train from Madrid to Morocco) and I) arrived at five in the morning in Valencia. He called his relatives when the sun rose. Carlos’ family had a guesthouse waiting for us. All meals were outside at the communal table. During our stay in Valencia there was a week long holiday going on to celebrate some Catholic holiday. It was a festival that culminated on the last day with a celebration similar to that of Godfather movies. It included big festivals, marching bands, parades, religious ceremonies, the burning of large sculptures made of wax in the city, with the grand finale taking place in the city center where a huge white angel was burned to the ground.

March 16, 1998 Valencia
Tonight was the end of Fallas and the celebration of the holiday in the village where we stayed in Valencia’s suburbs. The whole village got together on the city streets where everybody made paella in open pit fires in the streets, where the drink worked its magic and music filled the air. The little kids were playing with fireworks the whole time and it sounded like a firing range and a party. I remember at one time during the night somebody asked me if I was alright. I said, “Yes, I am just overwhelmed with happiness.” The way I was treated considering I was a stranger and the goodness of the Spanish people made my spirit fly. It was honestly one of the only times in my life where I felt so good about being alive. I also couldn’t believe how much they drank, ate, and enjoyed each others company.

Spain Revisited 2011

March 26, 2011 Madrid
The first thing I noticed when I landed in Madrid was how the old and new airport collided. One terminal was new and modern and the other terminal looked like the forty year old terminal at JFK International Airport in New York, old, outdated, stale, and depressing. This is symbolic to me because while Spain is now an expensive venture for even the hardest of budget travelers when I first went in 1998 it was inexpensive and you got good value for your money.

The roads have improved significantly and Spain is essentially one of the rich Western European nations, but you can still see how it lags behind what is traditionally referred to as Western Europe. The Internet isn’t everywhere, Spain still takes a siesta in the middle of the day, and the overall attitude is much more relaxed than in Western Europe. While infrastructure is amazing on the primary and secondary levels, there is still a throwback to less prosperous days when you go deeper into the countryside. When the kitchen in a restaurant doesn’t open until nine at night that tells you something about how people live. This is a common thing in what can be referred to as Southern Europe. You find the speed slower, the family values more traditional, and open air markets more common in Spain and Italy. TESCO does not rule Southern Europe yet.

I planned to sleep in the car the first night somewhere along the highway and get to Andalusia the next day along the scenic route. What normally takes four hours took me twelve. Finding a place along the highway to sleep wasn’t so easy. I arrived in two small villages before settling in for the night at a third village outside a bar on a dirt and gravel patch of land that doubled as a parking lot, I did some surveillance, reclined, and grabbed my coat as a blanket.

The first time I woke up a guy was using my car to shield him from others while he took a piss. He had no idea I was in the car a mere three feet from his choice of toilet locations. An hour later two girls used my car as a shield while they drunkenly squatted to take a piss. I could see the expression on one girl’s face as she relived herself. I remained still and looked away because the last thing I want is some drama in some po-dunk village of three hundred people at two in the morning on my first night in Spain. I woke the next morning shaking from the cold but that is the price you pay when you don’t drop a hundred dollars on a hotel room.

March 27-30, 2011 Villanueva de Tapia
I arrived in Villaneva de Tapia in the early afternoon, stopped at a local hangout and had what would be the first of many delicious meals in Spain. It was a fish soup with squid and huge chunks of a white fish I could not identify in a mild tomato fish stock. It was so good I order a second one. After getting a bit lost, I arrived at the guest house about five minutes before my sister and her family arrived. El Molino de Conde was the town’s mill and bakery until a British couple bought the property which sits on five acres of land and turned it into a rental property mostly for groups of fifteen or so people and caters to special events like weddings with the large backyard full of grass, trees and views.

The house sits in a valley in the Andalusia countryside surrounded by plantation after plantation of olive trees. Southern Spain is the world’s largest producer of olive oil and there is practically no place that isn’t touched by olive trees. After the olives are harvested for olive oil production once ever two years, the seeds are dried and used to heat the furnaces of home in the winter, nothing is wasted. The scenery is magnificent, the weather near perfect, and the company choice important people in Allison and Angelo’s lives including mostly immediate family, a few close friends, and their partners.

The food would prove to be amazing, the wine and Sangria delicious, and the relaxation epic. Some food included the traditional Spanish comfort food of paella, a dish made with rice, chicken, clams, calamari, mussels, saffron, and chicken stock simmered until tender, garlic and shrimp sautéed in olive oil in a clay pot, croquettes that we think were potato and pork bits, and never ending cured meats, cheeses, breads, and olive oil. Sangria was made from local wine and fruit that never ended and refreshed each afternoon and night.

It was what should be an still is in many parts of the Catholic and Arab parts of the world normal for the most part, spending time with loved ones and enjoying good food and drink. It is something so common in other parts of the world, but lost in the modern fast paced world of the developed economies. With me living abroad, my sister in California, my brother in North Carolina, our friends and family scattered around America and in some cases around the globe, it is so rare that all of us are in one place at one time to enjoy each others company. While many people claim to have a great love of food, so few understand how to make great ingredients come to life. I have seen how Angelo brings not only great love to my sister’s home, but also a great love of food as well, something I assume comes from his upbringing and what remains of the Bolivian culture that his parents and family must have shown in how they ate and celebrated family events. Something my family did not do so much do to geography and circumstances. People who see the world in tastes, textures, and smell, see things differently, more connected perhaps to the earth and its bounty.

March 31, 2011 Granada
We went to see the Alhambra today. It was cool, but the highlight of the day was probably the meal. The view of the Alhambra from the other side of the valley was really nice, it gave you some sense of the scale of wealth and power the Muslims had in this part of the world hundred of years ago.

Granada has incredibly small streets and practically every road was one way. Cars without a resident sticker were not aloud to drive there. At the top of one of the valleys was a park were hipsters smoked, drank, and played drums and guitars. It was interesting to see how my twelve and fifteen year old nephew and niece, respectively, would react to this. Being from California, it didn’t seem to be a big deal for them. They also seemed to recognize the smell of marijuana and what looked liked a rolled cigarette for what it really was. I guess California children see these images a lot in advertising, school, and on television.

April 1, 2011 Cordoba
It was a nice day with everyone. This day would sort of mark the separation of family from events. The trip drew to a close for many people at this point as work and other obligations brings people back to their homes and families.

April 2, 2011 Villanueva de Tapia
Spent the whole day chilling out at the house. Most people left early this morning and now it is just Alli, Angelo, the kids, and me. We would spend the next few days together in Seville where I would get to know my nephew better and spend some time with my niece, something I have never really had the chance to do as I have not really been a part of their lives since they were born. Emily was born in 1995, my second year in college and Jake in 1998, the year I left America. Turns out the twelve year old and I have a lot in common. We are both children. The older one is more cerebral, she isn’t as funny as the twelve year old, but even at her young age shows strong signs of great intelligence. It was great to spend time with them, getting to know them, and perhaps for even a few brief days letting them get to know their uncle a bit better.

April 3-4, 2011 Seville
Wow! What a great town to be a college student in. Beautiful, busy, lots of bars and restaurants, the kind of place where a bar gets busy at midnight, Seville has a lot to offer the young twenty and thirty something’s of this world.

April 5, 2011 Seville to Santiago de Compostela
I originally wanted to drive to Salamanca, but couldn’t find parking there so I just drove from the south of Spain to the northwest of Spain in one day, about twelve hours, slept in the car after a meal of ribs and steak and woke the next day to drive the northwest coast and north coast of Spain.

April 6-7, 2011 Galicia
I spent most of the day driving along the coastline of the northwestern part of Galicia going from one fishing village to another. It reminded me of Maine in the summer or what Scandinavian coastline might look like or what parts of Oregon and Washington State look like. The house dotted the mountainside, the bays filled with fishing boats, little village cafes and bars, the wood painted red, blue, brown, and the smell of salt water.

After leaving this part of Galicia I drove a couple hundred kilometers along the north coast and spent two nights in a hotel with a view of the Bay of Biscay or what is really the Atlantic Ocean. I could hear the waves crashing through the hotel room windows and saw the tide come in and out. The coastline was fifty foot cliffs with some small trails leading down to the many beaches that dot the northern coast of Spain.

April 8, 2011 Galicia to Madrid
The drive was uneventful. I slept in the car at the airport parking garage. My flight was the next morning to Tbilisi. I was thankful that after not driving regularly since 2003, I was able to do it without any problems.

Looking Back
The thing that a few of us spoke of and that sticks out for me the most is what was referred to as A Change of Expectations. Being thirteen years older now then I was when I had my first overseas experience brings attention to how things have changed for me. In the past not only could I not legally rent a car, I never would have thought of it. Normally I would stay in hostels, but now I couch surf, stay in modestly priced lodgings, or sleep in cars. I take a roll of cash with me instead of trying to stretch a hundred dollars as far as possible. I don’t care so much about tourist attractions and usually avoid them whereas I felt compelled to do them before. I now realize that travel for the budget backpacker that I once was is no longer affordable in Europe and how I can no longer live out my dream of living in Europe without a real job. The Euro and economic development have made it impossible to live on three hundred dollars a month.

On the other hand, I am now thirty-five and will still sleep in a car instead of paying stupid money for a hotel room. I still haven’t gotten a real job. I kept my promise to myself that I would travel as much as possible and learn from it. I haven’t become a slave to some corporation and hence have no real life security, perhaps not so good. I continue to seek knowledge and understanding of different cultures.

As I write this now, I sit in an apartment I am renting while doing volunteer work in The Republic of Georgia. Since leaving Spain the first time in 1998, I have been to over forty countries, lived in Africa, Asia, and Europe, gotten a Master’s Degree, seen Mount Everest from 5500 meters up in the Himalayas, done the Peace Corps (number one on my list of things to do at the time), seen my siblings get married and have children, spent time with my parents when I can as they have gotten into their twilight years, and haven’t lost the travel bug. I still love it even though it is really difficult establishing a new life with each new place I live. I guess there is some truth to it not being about the destination, but the journey.

Tbilisi Housing

2011-03-21T01:17:00.000-07:00

I recently moved into a new flat in the city center of Tbilisi. As with most buildings in Georgia, the outside isn't so appealing. Unless it is the Opera House, Concert Hall, stylish government buildings, a fancy hotel, or some piece of architectural work that has made through the last hundred odd years or so, most buildings look terrible, especially housing.

Not unlike its Asian friends most housing in Tbilisi is concrete block apartment buildings. Buildings are usually eight stories high and around ten apartment widths across. In Korea we use to call it Lego Land after the company that makes blocks which kids play with. In Korea, there actually is a Lego Land amusement park. These countries tend to build up. Japan, Georgia, Korea are all small countries with land and resource limitations and large populations. Georgia has about six million, around two million live in the capital city.

In other post Soviet bloc countries you see similarities in the housing due to huge numbers of people living in the capital, a big amount in the countries secondary city, and the aren't relevant as they are small villages when you really get down to it. Sighnali, Georgia is one of its cities, but so is Newark to Manhattan. A city, but not really much.

As with all the housing I have been in in Georgia, the outside is not particularly nice, in fact it is depressing. I live in a group of apartments blocks ten around that surrounds a courtyard of small brick made sheet metal roofed houses, car parks which are big metal boxes, and some abandoned or incomplete structures. To get to my top floor loft which was formally one apartment split into two for university students, I enter the third door on the right of my 9x6 building. Each door means that on each floor is one apartment to the left (A), one apartment to the right (B), and one apartment in the middle (C). Walk up nine flights of stairs and you have 27 apartments in total in this doorway of three.

Stairs are evenly spaced for the most part except for the first step on each staircase. Some of the stairs are missing bits and pieces of concrete and you can see the steel reinforced bars the concrete was laid over. Half of the landings do not have lighting so a flashlight is needed if you want to see the stairs. Dust build up and spiderwebs looking things are common. Some people have nice new doors usually made of thick wood, but most have heavy metal doors that remind me of prison doors. It might have something to do with the war time in Georgia and personal security. Whatever it is, heavy doors, poorly lit stairwells, and rusty railings seem to be common in all the buildings I have been in. A fresh can of paint and some light bulbs would go a long way here, but everyone would have to be on board for it to really have an impact and these things aren't cheap and why should people care about outside aesthetics anyway seems to be the general consensus.

Above your head you will find various piping for water and gas. The piping is exposed, usually rusty, but in its defense, very well installed. It may look ugly on the outside, but Georgian housing is sturdy housing, better than most things the South Floridians every make. Cables commonly run from house to house in what I can only guess is some sort of cable sharing thing. One bill, six people watching television from it. At my old house in Gldani in the Tbilisi suburbs, there was a cable running from our porch to the apartment block 100 meters away and three more lines running from their to other apartments. It wasn't as bad as you see in Africa or India where a technician is something of a genius with figuring out configurations, but it stood out as something unorthodox.

The elevator is an experience and one that is worth mentioning. There are no bells and whistles literally in a Georgian elevator. It is big enough to hold four average Georgian people and three average American people. You are very close together in the elevator and you feel it. The elevator is around two to three should widths long and wide with a six and a half foot clearance. It doesn't feel overly claustrophobic, but you certainly don't want to spend any length of time in it with too many people unless you are making out and even then you might need to have a few beers in you, it is small.

For me to take the elevator I push a push on the second floor as elevators in Georgia do not start on the first floor. The button is hollow as someone broke it, so you essentially push the circular plastic that once had an actually button on it. The elevator arrives. The doors squeak open, you enter. When you enter there are nine buttons on the elevator, 1 through 9. I live on the ninth floor, but my button is seven. The doors close, the power goes out. Now you can begin.

Out of your pocket comes a 5 Tetri coin. You put the coin in the coin box which sends a signal to the electricity box at the top of the building that allows the elevator to begin. You find your button and push it. The elevator lights come back on and the elevator begins. For shits and giggles I once moved my body back and forth to see if the elevator would move. It moved a lot, scared me a little, so now I basically remain dead still in the elevator to not put any more strain on it. My 230 pound body is enough for OTIS. Not really an OTIS, just a box suspending in air by some wires. I figure if the wires can hold the elevator it ca hold at least another 500 pounds or so. Elevators are heavy things.

If you do not have money, the following happens: Elevator arrives. You enter. Doors close. Lights go off. You are fucked. There is no "open door" button. You have to sit in the dark until someone pushes the button somewhere in the building. You can't really open the doors unless you have super human strength or some instrument to pry the doors open. Also, if you don't exit quickly enough, you are in trouble because when the doors close, they close. There is no mechanism for detecting that a human being is wedged between the doors. The subway is the same. When doors close in Georgia, they close, look out!

I live in Sarbartelo, a central part of the city, but not the swankest by any means. I live in an area where people with some middle class money live. People who can afford to go to an urban supermarket and pay 5% more for things and not really worry about it too much. Plus there is the city's biggest market nearby which takes up about a four block by four block area of the city. When Georgia becomes wealthier and starts to standardize everything as is the norm in developed countries, the outdoor and underground markets will be closed by the government, a wealthy businessman will get the lease to the land and build housing and shopping centers for the wealthy. The market which is fundamental to most cities and towns has no place in the modernized urban centers which is really a shame because it is always better than pre-packaged factory farmed foods. Farmers markets in America are usually mobile and more expensive. Urbanization has twisted everything around that now we think organic is a fancy when it was the norm for millions of years or 5700 years if you are religious.

The buildings are usually gray on the outside, different shades of orange and brown from various types of brick work that makes up the back and side walls of some apartments. It looks like on many buildings that at some point people extended the backside of their apartments and brickwork was the way to do it. A rust color is common wherever metalwork has been done, the most common being the metal bars that stick out from every apartment which has string laying across it for hanging laundry, balconies made of rusting metals, and roofing with sheet metal that is, wait for it, rusting, but it rusts quickly everywhere. Some buildings have been painted and in my particular neighborhood there are shades of South Beach, a light blue, light orange, light pink, and light green building to the west of the courtyard. Amazingly, their color remains intact. You will see this occasionally, a painted building next to a gray one. It happens.

The real beauty of housing in Georgia is on the inside. You can usually tell from the outside which housing has been remodeled. The key sign are window panes. If the housing has white modern windows, you can usually bet that the inside has been changed since the 60's, 70's or 80's. The Russians built strong buildings, but they didn't do a good job with the insulation and heating. The old school windows did little more than keep the flies out. Go near any window in any building and you can feel significant cold. See the rotting wood. When the wind blows, your curtains move.

The heater is usually under the window. The kind of heating where if you stand with your back to it, your back gets toasty while your front side gets frostbite, very ineffective. In movies you see people literally gathering around the fireplace, well, in the modern world, people literally gather around the heater because until you are ready to get under the blankets, there is no warm place in the house accept in front of the heater. You still however are fully dressed and wearing a sweater or sweatshirt. As I proofread this, I am sitting on one of my hands to keep it warm. As I told my sister the other day on Skpye as she is sitting in San Diego with the sun shining through her windows, "I have been cold for five months."

The inside of houses are really nice. Even in the old school apartments you will find nice high ceilings, spacious rooms, some molding work, very functional kitchens, sinks that work, floors made of wood, carpets, tables, fine China, cabinets, bedrooms of significant size for a couple or multiple children sharing a room depending on the number of children you have, and plenty of lace work on tables and curtains.

Bathrooms aren't usually much to talk about. They seem to be very small, with low ceilings, small showers, occasionally a smell, but functional. The water pressure however is usually very good and everything works which at the end of the day is all you really care about when it comes to bathroom stuff. Does it have running water, does it stay hot, does it flush, does it have any pressure?

In conclusion, the outside might look depressing, falling apart and stitched together with duct tape, but the inside is nice, spacious, and comfortable. The apartment I live in now cost $350 a month. In Korea it would be $600. In Japan and Chicago $1000. You get good value in Georgia when it comes to housing, but you will be cold in the winter time.

1 Degree of Separation, Sometimes None

2011-03-16T05:30:00.000-07:00

I have been in Georgia for close to seven months now. In that time, I have only spent any considerable time in Kutaisi and that was only for training and only eight or so days. Most of my time has been spent in Tbilisi with a side trip to Sighnali in the Khakheti wine growing region of Georgia about an hour and a half to the east of the capital and work assignments in Rustavi, a satellite city of Tbilisi, only forty minutes outside the city center. To many Rustavi is a suburban or a close enough place that they live in Tbilisi and work in Rustavi. There is however farmland separating the two and while Rustavi is clearly just outside Tbilisi, it is its own place, quiet, cleaner, and poorer than Tbilisi.

During my time here I have meet many different Georgian people, but due to a language barrier, I only get to chat with a few. Of those few, I usually meet people who speak at an advanced level of English and in a country that is practically being reborn over the last few years, a high competency in English is usually a reflection of some elitist background and in some cases, just hard work and lots of studying.

Among the people I meet, it seems like all but a few are famous. When I say famous, I mean the real kind of famous. The equivalent of going to Hollywood and running into Steven Spielberg, going to Washington D.C. and having coffee with Colin Powell, or meeting the Speaker of the House or Ted Turner. Georgia is a small country with a long history, but has a short modern history. The people who ran the country during Soviet times seem to have been replaced or laid off for the most part, but the people who ran the country during the first eighteen difficult years are either still in the mix, albeit behind the scenes, or more often than not people who provided the framework from which the next generation, their offspring, those in their late twenties and thirties from which to dominate Georgian finance, media, government, and society. They are so young and unassuming. The following are some of those people (names have been changed).

Ted Turner
He had this terrible voice, like someone who smoked three packs of cigarettes a day, but refused to speak in low tones. His voice is abrasive to say the least. His manner was loud, but no one seemed to mind. When he made an entrance into a room, you noticed. How could you not?

He came into the room intoxicated as I would later see he often was and talk up a storm. Everything he said got the table rolling with laughter. He was easily the funniest guy I have ever seen in Georgia. He made the most serious of people laugh. People seemed to love him. I don't speak Georgia so I couldn't partake, but laughter is the same everywhere in the world, infectious. There was however one instance where he made a reference, in English, to being Jewish. One of those self hating Jewish references so common to the humor of Jewish people. It awakened my curiosity seeing as there aren't many Jewish people in Georgia. I wanted to know his story. I had only met one other Jewish person since being in Georgia.

My ice breaker was a question I had that needed translation. At one point during time with older Georgian people, I whistled. Half the people, especially the older men, looked at me and told me not to do that. It appears that I offended them. I didn't understand and no one spoke English. I asked what the problem with whistling was? He explained to me that during Soviet times whistling meant you had no money and that someone had your money. It basically meant you're a poor loser. I had no idea of course, but learned quickly not to whistle ever again. The translation wasn't totally clear, but you get the idea, culturally it was rude.

We got to talking over the next hour or so, the usual questions and answers. Well, there was nothing usual about this guy. He was 32 years old. He started his first company when he was 16. This would have been 1996, a time when Georgia was hardly the modernizing state that it is today. He took sometime to study at Penn State in America before returning to Georgia to get involved in the media business his father had been building over the 90's. Go vocal cord cancer along the way, hence the voice. At 25 he took over from his father and over the course of a few years, seven to be exact, built the two largest television companies in the country. At the age of 25 he was essentially the CEO of both ABC and NBC.

Jerry Bruckheimer
Sometimes a conversation that interests a person has to be underway in order for people to feel comfortable enough to get involved. Recently I was talking to a fellow TLG Volunteer about the state of educational reforms in Georgia. At one point I mentioned that my former colleague had been relocated to PS#51 in downtown Tbilisi. PS#1 and PS#51 are commonly acknowledged as the two best public schools in Georgia. The Georgian man sitting at the table mentioned that he attended PS#51 as a child. I mentioned that their are no bathrooms according to my former colleague and that part of the educational reform movement in Georgia is to get all schools outfitted with better wash facilities. This started a lengthy conversation about education in Georgia.

As the conversation started to fade I got to talking about the generational differences between his parents, him, and his children. It is commonly acknowledged here that the older generation are products of a Soviet conditioning that is ingrained in the thinking and way of living life. The modern working class generation had limited Soviet experiences, but grew up in a time of great conflict, turmoil, corruption, and at times war. The youngest generation mostly doesn't know from the difficulties of the past. Their world is mostly happy and without terror, although other social ills and limited reach in the international arena remains. That was my way of saying, Georgians might have computers, cell phones, and the Internet, but they don't have the disposable income to travel, buy any big ticket items, or open a business without significant assistance, except for a select few. I bought a bag of oranges today for less than $2 (in America easily $15), but a car still costs $5,000 at the low end. A huge sum of money in Georgia.

He mentioned to me that even though he is only 31 years old, he remembers the terrible things that took place in Georgia when he was a child and the terrible things he did as part of a collapsed systematically corrupt system. He seems like a nice enough person, but for me, I am more impressed by how his mind works. He seems to think like an American or European educated person. There is a connection between ideas that is usually only acquired through extensive learning in various social and pure sciences. The well rounded generalized education we take for granted is not the norm in many countries. Most people specialize at a young age and never get exposed to other subjects. A well rounded education is something that is sought after, not necessarily a standard in developing countries. It might sound arrogant, but well rounded people are not a dime a dozen.

So I asked him who he was and what he did? He told me he use to work in land development. Right away that tells me he is rich. He told me he sold it a few years back and has been producing since 2003, the same year as the Rose Revolution. I asked him how is father was? He told me that his father was the former number two in Georgia during the reign of the last presidency which lastest well over a decade. His development company owned 35% of the Georgian market. At 23 he was already producing movies, at 27 he sold a gizzilion dollar company, around the same time opened the nicest movie theater in Georgia, and is currently enrolled to study film at UCLA.

Both these guys couldn't be anymore unassuming. They dress in Target T-Shirts. Wear blue jeans. Have no fancy jewelry. Drive regular cars. And come off as normal people. No one treats them differently and they don't treat anyone differently. This would be a common theme throughout my encounters here. I have only seen one nice watch so far on a man who wears relatively plain clothes. The watch however is a time piece of the Swiss variety, no diamonds, but pure gold and super thin.

David Beckham
I was with some Georgian friends not too long again and a man comes into the room to greet a friend of a friend. It is no big deal. The two men greet each other in the customary way which is to shake hands and kiss each other on the right cheek. He greets a few other people and everyone moves onto their conversations, beers, and food. He joins us for a few minutes before leaving. When he leaves someone mentions to me that he was a footballer. I am thinking he played for the Georgia national team when the World Cup of Soccer rolled around every four years. I was clearly mistaken.

Apparently I was in the presence of Georgia's greatest soccer player. Over a decade he played in the English Premier League and is one of the most decorated athletes if not the most in modern Georgia history. To my friends he was just a friend who went away for a few years played some soccer and came home. It would be like having lunch with Michael Jordan at Apple Bees because we knew each other from high school to these guys.

Ministers
When I go to The Ministry of Science and Education for work related matters, I occasionally meet with the deputy minister. Her office is next to the minister's office. At times the minister walks around and sure enough says hi and goes on his way. He is probably going to be president of Georgia in a decade or sooner. He just says hi like it is no big deal because in Georgia it is no big deal. Everyone I meet, especially government officials are in their thirties. Many movers and shakers are young here if not all of them.

If I planned ahead, made the right requests, and the timing was right I could probably meet the President of Georgia. The Minster of Internal Affairs was in my office a few months ago just checking things out, so why not the top dog? A stretch perhaps, but you would be surprised just how small Georgia is. When I was chatting with my media mogul friend the other day, my boss, The Minister of Education and Science called him to schedule a lunch. He takes the call looks up at me and says, "That was your boss on the phone. We are having lunch tomorrow."

Writers
There is a book in the English language bookshop that seems to be something of standard reading for the traveler to Georgia. It is the book Georgians will buy foreign friends as "something you should read." My former roommate even had a copy of it in his room. I personally never thought much of it until one day I met up with some friends and were told that so and so was going to pick us up. Sure enough he picked us up and we went to Georgia's biggest radio station just to check it out and have some cake.

The radio station was a salute to all the good music of the 60's and 70's with bits and pieces of music from other decades thrown in. People might not speak much English here, but they sure know the lyrics to many Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd songs. In fact musicians are all over the place here. You can usually find live jazz somewhere, a live band, or some street performers most nights of the week. Some bad, most good.

After a tour of radio central, we headed over to the bookstore where the news crew was waiting to interview him about his new play that was opening in Batumi. I had to google this guy and ask around. Turns out he is one of Georgia's most famous writers, having written fifteen books, and at times getting into hot water because of his words and his political stance during a time when not falling in line was grounds for incarceration.

Small World
I am basically a nobody in Tbilisi. This is a city of 1.6 million or so people and in the short time I have been here, I have run into taxi drivers I remember, doormen I remember, the guy that checks my coat, people I have meet randomly, and others in the street or elsewhere. For a city so large in numbers, you sure see people you know all the time. I am starting to get why famous people are no big deal here. People are people. The only person I know of that has a special detail is the president of the country.

Israel Journal January 2011

2011-01-26T04:44:00.000-08:00

ISRAEL January 2011

I arrived in Tel Aviv as do all international travelers to Israel by plane. My trip would start and end here going to Jerusalem, Eilat, Petra (Jordan), followed by a quick stop in the Negev Desert to see where Ben Gurion, the first Prime Minister of Israel, is buried, and a race up the coast to Acre (Akko).

I asked the immigration officer not to stamp my passport so I could visit a friend in Lebanon and he proceeded to stamp a clean page in my passport right in the middle of page to add a big, "f you, welcome to Israel bitch." A later immigration officer suggested I get a new passport, “you have no pages.”

I did not have some connection to Israel like I thought I might. I don’t see it occuring over time either. I wasn't moved by anything except this one girl and all her bouncing parts in Eilat, she was spectacular. Many Jewish people, especially American, come here and volunteer for the army for a couple of weeks at a time, sometimes for a couple of years, others pack up and move to Israel, and others choose to support Israel through financial instruments. "The Right of Return" allows Jewish people all over the world to return to Israel as it is their "homeland," acquire residency and citizenship. There is only one requirement, you have to be Jewish and prove.

My former colleague when I worked at the library at my graduate school just spent a few weeks in the military in Israel volunteering, she is probably in her late fifties and I met people easily in their seventies doing the same. I met one boy straight out of the Yeshiva in New York City doing two years in the military as a matter of duty. He thinks the universe is 5700 odd years old. This was a reoccurring thought among the religious people I met. We didn't have much in common.

Even Petra was something of an overpriced, overhyped let down. The challenge is, how do you put a price on something like that? I have found over the years that the landscape is the thing that moves me the most. The people are the most interesting, the things that make us the same and the things that make us different. Major landmarks of the ancient kind rarely interest me. "Look at this old ass rock, it was used by (fill in the blank) to do (fill in the blank)." It is basically the same everywhere, but some people had more materials to choose from. Cultural artifacts got more interesting, in my opinion, when people started using metal, colors, different fabrics, and some advanced techniques in manufacturing.

The most impressive thing for me in Egypt a few years back wasn't The Pyramids at Giza; it was talking to our tour guide as Canadian Catholics (my sister and I) with a distaste of American foreign policy. He really opened up and gave us some insight into how some people really feel not just about Israel and America but about President Mubarak (read: democratic dictator) and how the government has sold out (read: Camp David Accord, 1979) its honor and country for greed and never-ending dictatorship disguised as democracy. He lectured us all while sitting on some stones outside the wall at the Temple at Karnak in Luxor, probably the same place working thousands of years ago sat to take a break from the sweltering desert sun. That is perspective you can’t get from a lecture hall, ancient history and modern geopolitics colliding.

I am spoiled. I seem to have to go farther off the grid to find those spots where you cannot buy anything resembling a trinket or souvenir. In addition to my changing attitude, my funds are starting to take a hit as global travel has become much more expensive partly due to oil prices, price gouging, inflation, the weakening dollar, and the overall hike in prices for the backpacking traveler. There are still $10 a day places, but getting there can be pricy. Even visas are absurdly priced now, $30, $60, and upwards of $100 in some places.

Tel Aviv (incorporating interactions throughout the trip)
Tel Aviv is progressive, easy to navigate and quite a nice place to live. Lots of freedom, dreadlocks, and yuppie meets hippie meets banking meets beach bums meets healthy types meets alternative lifestyles. It reminded me of a less dangerous version of Miami with a real city atmosphere to it, not just a South Beach. Nothing historic stands out, even though the ancient port city of Jaffa lies to the south and is walking distance from the city center.

I couch surfed (couchsurfing.com) the first two nights in Israel with a gay couple. At this point I knew very little about Israel. My plan was to couch surf with different types of people to get different perspectives. This would be the progressive Tel Aviv talking and it was an introduction to the realities of the religious communities influence on policy more than in view into the world of modernization, progress, and acceptance in Israel's second biggest city.

You may have heard of a country being an "Islamic" state before and I believe for many Americans this translates into something not safe and open to the freedoms we take for granted. American is basically a "Christian" state, but it isn't what defines us as a people and certainly not policy. America is a very free place even if it feels like a police state. A handful of other countries, usually rich and usually with small populations are the only other places in the world where you can do just about whatever you want religiously, politically, sexually, and socially.

Israel is a "Jewish" state and not unlike its Islamic state neighbors in all directions they have some pretty archaic laws. Tel Aviv might be secular, but the country is not. People identify with being Jewish first here. In the last fourteen years of travel, I have never been asked what my religion was before what my name is. When I lied and said no, I was treated differently instantly just like in Egypt those few years ago. When I was Jewish, I was instantly appreciated as a member of something that unites us all together. I was part of a family and some united struggle to refrain from becoming extinct. Israel was my home with having ever been there before.

Following Jewish law even if you don't agree with it is seen as a cause for the greater good and the protection of the Jewish people from another holocaust. The spread of Islam, the explosive reproduction rates of Muslims and Hassidim (Jewish Ultra Orthodoxy) infiltrating the land and laws has become problematic for more secular and modernized people in Israel. People are generally not pleased with the state of things, especially the ones who came to Israel in the late 40's to the early 60's. They feel that religious extremism, the collapse of the Kibbutz (collectives in rural areas to settle land) system, and a general disagreement of the way Israel treats Ethiopian Jews, people of color, and Arabs as real disappointments in Israel's evolution. The people in their sixties (mostly women) I met who told me these things all have children and at least one of them is living overseas.

Being a proud Israeli is commonplace as nationalism is instilled at a young age. Everyone has to enlist in the army, girls for two years, boys for three years. The few dozen younger people I met would be just fine leaving Israel behind for a new place to live, not quite with the urgency of Africans and some Asians, but you can see it in the body language and in the words. Israel is a good country, but why not somewhere else, we will probably get kicked out of here anyway is an unspoken undercurrent of some of my conversations here.

"We cannot coexist together. It hasn't worked in the past and it isn't working now. In time there will be a major war and it will be religious in nature, but about water in political circles" said a western educated Armenian Christian I met in Akko. His friend, educated in Israel, but well traveled believes that most people want to live in peaceful coexistence but the religious groups throughout the country and in the region will never allow it to happen. After taking a drag from his hash pipe, he looked up at me and said with glazed eyes, "Never!"

The first Armenian man got animated after a few minutes and asked me if I had heard of the Armenian Holocaust. I hadn't. He went on to explain how after World War One the Ottoman Empire systematically killed between one and one and a half million Armenians. He brought this up to bring to my attnetion not so much the plight of Armenians, but how the Jewish Holocaust is constantly something the government wants the Jewish people to remember. In back to back to back succession Israel has a holiday for the holocaust, Memorial Day, and Independence Day. It is a long few weeks of getting that nationalist spirit reawakened. He wasn't suggesting that this is a bad thing, but this constant reinforcement reminds the people of Israel that everyone wants us elimination or at least gone. Getting more serious again he said, "That is part of why people are so angry and suspicious here. There is this constant reminder that we are wanted dead not alive. Peace is not possible."

As for my couch surfing hosts, they can't get married, they can't adopt children, and they are only welcome in progressive cities like Tel Aviv. In fairness, Islamic States wouldn't tolerate these two at all. A country on red alert at all times has time to discriminate people on race, religion, and sexual orientation. There is always time for discrimination, historically when people aren't fighting outside influences (subjective) they are killing each other. There is always time to discriminate, especially when it comes from the mouth of God. According to a Rabbi I talk to, being darker I skin color was a punishment from God for doing wrong. Is it any different today? Americans would say blacks are animals let them kill themselves. Israelis wouldn’t say this out loud about Arabs, but when I said, people didn’t disagree with my words, just eye contact, a pause, and a shrug.

Jerusalem
Jerusalem is hectic, crowded, and full of tourists. You walk around the Mountain of Olives (Christian sightseeing area) and people are dressed in the traditional garbs of the Greek / Russian Orthodox variety. Men have long beards, rounded bellies shufffling along in long black robes with the cross of their savior around their necks. The head is covered in a combination black doo-rag and baseball cap without the lid, just go with me. It is important to note that men of God all shuffle along, most of the time walking with their hands behind their backs as if contemplating everything and always in deep thought. Asian religious leaders do the same or hands in front interlocked. The women are basically dressed like nuns.

Through the cemetery across the street lies the Wailing Wall and Dome of the Rock, the holy Jewish and Muslim sites, respectively. Islam is a boys club so I do not have a lot of information to provide here. If you aren't Muslim you cannot enter mosques. Police presence is higher at the Dome of the Rock then at The Western Wall.

In Ethiopia during Ramadan many years ago, my friends and I were walking in a more run down part of Addis Ababa. Being the holiest of holies for Muslims, this time of year the mosque gets crowded to the point where people had to pray outside on the mud and sewage infested streets of this particular slum. People humbly grab cardboard boxes, make a makeshift prayer rug out of it, and get busy with the bowing, kneeling, and praying. It was quite a sight and within ten seconds we were angrily told to get a move on by some guy just standing on the corner, "this is not your place" looking at the two girls we were traveling with with disgust. Boys club!

The Hassidim, are easy to spot. In many ways they look like their Orthodox counterparts across the cemetery and street over by the Church of Mary Magdalene. Black hats with a rounded trim, half cowboy hat and half gangster hat, long black coats, long beards, long hair, rounded bellies unless you are young in which case an eating disorder on par with anorexia is the standard look underneath the same clothes. All that contemplation requires fasting. I think they are all on drugs, but who am I to judge. Change the clothes and they look JUST like the drug addicts you see on a Grateful Dead or Phish tour. The women even dress like they live in Northern Cailfornia on a farm exclusiviely devoted to growing organic high grade cannibus sativa. They look like gypsies, long shirt or dress, upper body covered, shmatas (sp: Yiddish for head rag) on their heads. I fit right in except when I go to the airport where in I look like a terrorist. Long black dress slacks complete the look with additional cloth tied around the waist like a small towel covering the private parts and buttocks and black shoes. Black and white seems to be en vogue these last few thousand years. The one thing that really separates the hardcore from the extreme hardcore in fashion is that the latter have two pony tails curling down from just above the ears, think long side burns. They look like floppy ears on a cute big dog like a Labrador Retriever or donkey.

When my siblings and I were kids our mom used to tell us to go bang our heads against a wall when we were bored. It was her way of saying go find something to do on your own. It never made sense to me, I never banged my head against a wall, I just went and played like all kids do. When I saw what takes place at night at the Wailing Wall, especially on Shabbat, Friday night, I think I learned the origins of my mom's advice. The Wall is packed, seventy-five percent sectioned off for men, the rest for women, always separated, as God intended. Lined up along the wall at least twenty deep banging their heads against a wall or what is called Davoning (sp: Hebrew word) are the religious Jews going through prayer. Davoning looks like you are screwing in a stand up position with the ass in front of you only you are enjoying yourself so much, you shake your head up and down as if saying yes yes yes over and over again except you are facing a wall the whole time. The Muslims and Buddists (it varies) get on all fours and the Christians kneel. And they say white men ain't got no rhythm. Religious Jews boogie, albeit in a circle, usually kicking legs, and never individually like modern dance. They started dance unless you ask the Chinese who invented everything in case you didn't know, but that is another cultural distinction and generalization entirely.

I sat for a smoke and engaged these two really cute twenty year old girls in a conversation. The prettier one spoke better English. I have this thing about looking people in the eye. It helps me process the truth from the bullshit. She had a pretty face, but her eyes were amazing. The kind if eyes you can get lost in. Her pupils were so dilated I wasn't sure if she was on acid or if I was. It was night time, but there were a lot of lights on.

Anyway, I went through my usual, simple question to gauge the temperature, followed by some easy conversation, leading questions to gather information, and then bringing my stuff over after getting a sign that you can enter our world for a short time. People want to talk, but they just need the right conditions. My ignorance was a chance for them to teach me about their beautiful world, the daughters of Ultra Orthodox Jews. I didn't notice it at first, but the long skirt was a dead giveaway that they were religious. They didn't wear head coverings because they weren't married. They had traveled from an hour away to pray at the Wall, would spend the night in Jerusalem because driving is forbidden.

As the conversation drew to a close, I was asked if I believed in God. "I don't know." Do you believe in anything? "I don't know." What do you believe? "I don't know, it all seems like a bunch of nonsense to me. We don't know and that is just how it is. Subscribing to a religious belief seems too easy. You get to ask impossible questions and religion gives you an out by saying, "God talked to this guy or it is written" and that seems suspect to me. Her English wasn't that good; I simplified it with a shoulder shrug and an "I don't know." We parted ways, they went to the Wall to pray and I missed my chance to bring home a nice Jewish girl to my parents.

I learned a few other interesting tidbits and saw the tourist attractions but the Shabbat dinner was epic, coming up in a few paragraphs. I learned that girls get Bat-Mitzvah'ed at twelve not thirteen as is tradition in America. "Girls mature faster than boys you know," the pretty girl on the bus told me. The Holocaust Museum was the most comprehensive I have ever seen. The Museum of Israel was surprisingly good, a French collection, historical treasures of Jewish history, and the most surreal, four actual synagogue interiors from India, Germany, and two other places, hundred of years old reassembled inside the museum. The differences were subtle, but for the most part they could have been synagogues from the same places.

The family I couch surfed with in Jerusalem consisted of a married couple who emigrated from France in the sixties. The husband is frail looking, short, all of one hundred twenty pounds. He has the shakes but his mind is rock solid. He is one of the leading historians on Jewish history and works at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Museum's official name. The woman is a social worker and as I would learn through conversations throughout Israel, very open about her opinions and those of her peers when it came to Arab / Israeli relations. They have three children, one of which is living at home for a few months before he starts military service, they kept kosher, observed the Sabbath, but as I would learn in Israel, there is religious and then there are the rest.

This family didn't go to temple often, but considered themselves religious. It was made very clear to me that the American concept of reform and conservative was not socially acceptable. Orthodox or bust baby! This family had lights on timers, so they didn't sit in the dark, they just couldn't push the button. Regardless, they were very nice and accommodating. If anything, they followed the rules, but didn’t necessarily subscribe to the dogma.

My second night there I asked if this middle upper class neighborhood would be welcoming if an Arab of equal or greater educational, social, and / or economic status moved into the area. I asked her to speak for the neighborhood as not to single her out for her own prejudices if any. She said, in short, it didn't matter, the family is Arab and that is the problem, Arab first, everything else second. Switching the conversation around it became clear that a Jewish family living in an Arab neighborhood was not a good situation either, but it was suggested that violence was more likely in an Arab neighborhood. I didn't get the chance to heard an Arabs side of this scenario, but two Arab taxi drivers I met made it clear to me that the Israelies shit on them constantly and that, "the government is a Mafia controlled by the Jews.". Similar themes about Jews controlling the media, banking, Hollywood, and the American government also rained down periodically, even without a leading question or a prompt.

Jerusalem - Shabbat Dinner
This guy approaches me in the street and asks me about my Mets hat. He is 20, but looks older with his long beard, hat, and long black coat. He is a promising future Hassidim in the making, but for now he is a well spoken nice Jewish boy from New York who can talk religion and history very well. Occasionally you meet people like this, the kinds who go to the best school in the world, speak like they are reading from a textbook, and never miss a beat, highly evolved brains for remembering things and formulating complex thoughts, but perhaps not socially comfortable. This kid was one of those kinds of people without the social awkwardness; he would have made an amazing lawyer if he didn't decide on Jewish law as his life's work.

We talk for two hours in the street, kid doesn't miss a beat, and he gave me a tour of the Hassidim ghetto area. These people are basically cut off from the rest of the world or at least in theory. Other stories lead me to believe that men of the cloth like to make sexy sexy with the prostitutes from Ukraine, Russia, and other former Soviet States, but I will save human trafficking for another time. Let’s assume that religious people are all good folks. They get married, have a million kids, get a little money from the government to live, are exempt from military service, study Jewish law, pray, and go about their lives. You might know them as fundamentalist.

I get invited to the Western Wall on Friday night to see the praying, maybe have a prayer myself, wrap a little Tfillen (sp: Hebrew word for long leather straps you wrap around your arm), and enjoy a Friday night Shabbat meal at someone's house. Why not right? It is everything I want, the full on cultural / religious experience.

I show up at the Wall, meet some people, all long bearded black coat wearing religious tough guys. About twenty of us go to this Chabbad Rabbi's house where his wife has prepared a meal for all of us. She has a one and two year old in toe and is six months pregnant on the third. She will probably repeat this process until 8-10 pop out.

The other foreigners at the table are all religious leaders from America, Australia, and New Zealand. They don't look any different from you and I and can speak, read, and write Hebrew fluently. I am the only one there who can't.

After three long hours of prayer, singing, and toasting, I get impatient. Let's get the main course over with so I can respectfully leave is what I am thinking. The Rabbi who founded Chabbad apparently died on this day, so the "party" is longer than normal. He is considered the Messiah by this group and when he returns to earth, we will all return to Israel. Passover also has a Messiah. Jews leave a glass of wine on the table for him and leave the door open for him. Every year he doesn’t come and we usually shut the door because of the air conditioning or mosquitoes. So, I am done. I want to jump out the window. It is just like Church, by the third hour you’ve had it. I am sitting inbetween three American twenty year old men who all went to Yeshiva and think the world began 5700 years ago. I can’t talk sports, girls, or lighter subjects with them.

After the chicken, I make my toast and do the usual thank yous, use words like "nice and interesting" to describe the experience and then drop the bomb by letting them know it has probably been close to two decades since my last Shabbat dinner. Collective shock, a collective exhale, and a collective pause suck the air out of the room. I say “Le Chaim (To Life!)” and get escorted out the door where Rbbi walks me to the stairs with the hands behind the back like a man in deep though. The boy from New York who originally invited me to Shabbat dinner while walking the streets of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City escorts me to the street where I would eventually hitchhike to get to my couch surfing hosts home in the suburbs since public transportation shuts down for Shabbat, wished me well, gave me some more history lessons, and shook my hand. It was very interesting, but so boring, the appetizers salads were tasty as are all salad dishes in Israel, the soup gross, and the chicken dry, but plentiful.

Massada
Massada is a place near the Dead Sea where Jewish rebels setup a fort to live in isolation from the Romans in the early first century. It sits on a plateau in an arid scrub land, has little access to fields and water, and was impossible to invade as it was. The Romans wanted to kill the Jews or take them as slaves, so for three years they built a ramp of earth and a battering ram to eventually get to the Jews. The Jews decided to commit mass suicide in the final hour.

Massada is interesting historically assuming it is true. The historian who wrote about Massada was a Roman soldier with Jewish heritage. Food, water, time, and place leave one to question the validity of the story. The views were spectacular and it is one of those things you should do in Israel.

Dead Sea
Floating in the Dead Sea is kind of neat. You can sit Indian-style and your chest floats out of the water. The water is slimy and the beach small and rocky, but well worth an hour of your time.

Backpacking / Couch surfing
Couch surfing has been great, but you don’t run into backpackers often. To be frank, Israel isn’t really a backpacker kind of country anyway. Group tours are the thing to do here and there are some things you can’t do as a solo traveler like visit the Herzl Museum. As things get more expensive, the backpacker world has shrunk. Europe started it all, but now you have to pick and chose your spots with a limited budget. When I think backpacking I think SE Asia, Central more than South America, and a few places here and there. Sure, Zambia is cheap for the basics where Europe, the Middle East, and other places are not, but it will cost you a few thousand dollars to get there and $50 to enter the National Park a day. I miss the backpacker scene at times, random friends, random hookups, and a chill atmosphere. I need to do that again before hooking up with 23 year olds is creepy.

Brief Descriptions

Eilat
Staying at Aya's place in Eilat is sweet. I have a whole apartment to myself with a view of the downtown and sea. Aya is 62, mother of three grown children, been in Israel forever, loves her country, but is disappointed in the collapse of Kibbutz, the religious extremist going on, and how the economy is fairing for the future kids.

In 1978 with a one and three year old in toe, she bought a camper and did the national park tour in America, took her kids to Mount Everest Base Camp on a thirty-one day hike, and spent ten months in India after they were grown. She is kind of like an Israeli hippy.

Petra – Tour Groups
I went on a tour. Most of the people were dinosaur age. It made me reeally glad I am traveling while I am young. I don't know how some of these people do it, even with the nice hotels and shuttle services. Some of these places are taxing and you can't really see much more than the main sights when you travel at an older age unless you got the legs, heart, coordination, tenacity, and determination, to make it happen and still, there are unexpected things that happen which you have to adjust to. Regardless, I was a young pup, but it was nice, they were nice to me except one man who constantly criticized my look and habits. Petra was stupid expensive, $130 for ticket, $100 for transport, $50 for visas for a one day trip. It wasn't even that spectacular to be honest. It was a real cattle festival.

Petra smelled like piss when we crossed the border and it smelled like piss the rest of the trip at the park. When the horses ran buy with their carriages for the people who can't physically walk up and down the hill, it smelled like shit, horse shit to be exact. Basically I paid $300 to go for three hour hike surrounded by people, camera totting motherfuckeres taking picutres of everything, things of practically no consequence, smelling piss and shit most of the way and inhaling it when walking up hill, not to mention the noise and having to get out the way, and then there is only one cool looking place left and it is all fenced off and barely taking care of. The Jordanians are milking you and didn't even invest $10,000 into fixing the place up just the slightest bit. Seriously, shame on them! The one big carving, half a dozen other carvings, and the caves were cool though. How do you put a price on history like this?

A Bedouin who was born and raised in the caves at Petra told me that business has been suffering since 9-11. He made $10,000 a month before 2001, now he is reduced to selling bullshit trinkets because companies moved into the park to cater to tourists who do package tours so they don't eat or buy much in the park anymore and the government kicked them out and forced them into modern housing estates, so the Bedouin have been systemically isolated here and worse, have a limited source of income mostly related to NGO businesses and herding.

Midreshet Ben Gurion with Lucy and Uri and baby Ruthie
Near Sede Boker in the middle of the Negev Desert are Ben-Gurion University (BGU) and the resting place of his body. It is a beautiful site with cliffs and valleys running through the area. This whole region towards Jordan is the Great Rift Valley leading all the way to southern Africa. It is spectacular depending on the light. The air is clean, the sky is bright.

BGU focuses on graduate work and is one of the main centers in the world for research in alternative energy and climate change. The couple I couch surfed with were both academics, one in a political philosophy, the other in energy and climate, the husband a graduate of Oxford, the wife finishing her PhD . His body of work was about anarchy. He is one of those guys at WTO conferences boycotting something among other things. Really interesting people, but when you have children and responsibilities, you have to put food on the table. You don’t see many people beyond their late twenties fighting the man. Anarchy does however sound interesting in theory, but so did communism, feudalism, and one could argue, capitalism, but what we are really talking about it democracy.

Old City in Acre
Spent three days in Acre in the Old City where everyone is Arab and most are Muslim. It was the most relaxing part of my trip. Here is where I met the Arab Christian and Armenian Arabs. The market in acre as all markets in Israel had fresh beautiful foods. Hash was smoked more openly here and on Friday night I joined the hostel owner and his friend for a jam session.

Tel Aviv - Finish
I finished the trip where I began, in Tel Aviv. I met my first couch surfing hosts for dinner and told them about my experience in Israel. The only thing they asked was if I thought two weeks was enough time to really get a good idea about a country. I said no of course. What I did say in my defense of making my analysis, criticisms, and judgments is that whether traveling for a short or long time somewhere, if you meet the enough people and ask enough questions, you can only learn a lot about a place and its people, but you have to get both sides of the story. In the case of Israel there are more like four sides to the story, Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, and Christians.

Israel was an interesting place. It is one of those places you should visit if you can. What you see on television is practically nothing like the reality. It is a small country with a long history, lots of internal turmoil, and beauty.

The Big 40!

2011-01-18T12:46:00.000-08:00

I hit 40, as in 40 countries. I lived in America, Holland, Kenya, Korea, China, and Georgia (Republic of). I have spent the last 11 of 14 years outside America. It has been my experience that generalizations hold true in many instances when it comes to culture. While not always true for all people, there are very few absolutes, many of the following hold true and are generalizations that I have seen for better or worse.

Women are generally regarded as second class citizens. Women are usually very supportive of continuing the cycles of inequality, in some cases more than men.

Women are the backbone of many societies, do a huge portion of the work, in some cases move into positions of authority and power, but are rarely top dog, getting pregnant and raising a family is the number one reasoning from both sides, but everyone knows it runs deeper than that.

Men will do just about anything to protect their women and children. Day to day stuff is not a concern though, but come to fighting for honor and family, men step up to the plate in the most violent of ways.

Men don't cook at home, in some cases are not allowed, but in the restaurant world, men dominate. Baking too.

Nowhere, and I mean nowhere I have been are there more than a few token female taxi drivers. A few being you see one every couple of months drive by.

Never seen a woman in construction anywhere.

Never seen a man better than a woman in speaking English at random or at work without some serious time overseas and he still might not be able to hold his own with a woman who never went overseas but studied hard.

Never seen a man selling better vegetables in the market.

Just about everywhere you will find dogs and people who love them. Dogs and cats around the world do not say the same things. "Ruff" in America is "Mung! Mung!" in Korea and "Gao" in China. I still hear "ruff."

Everyone eats meat on some level, we do not live in a vegetarian world and that includes India as well.

People have a lot of sex, yet it remains a taboo subject in many cultures.

Corruption is everywhere, in some cases, so absurd that is becomes comical in a very very sad way. What makes no sense is how many people away with it and the extent to which it is done.

The desire to have a material capitalistic lifestyle is everywhere. Everyone wants what America has on some level. The Europeans would strongly disagree with this, but they live practically the same way Americans do, but would say they are "more cultured" as a way to show they are not the same. Indeed they are not, they just buy in less excess and size, but it is basically the same, a generalization of course. Americans do buy in excess no doubt. I'm American, what do I know?

There are always two sides to the stories, sometimes more!

Religious people when loosing a battle of logic when it comes to god, miracles, the supernatural and all that other hookus pokkus will say, "I have faith" and end the conversation dead, full stop, end of story. You can't argue with faith.

What have I learned from these experiences. Many things of course, but the one thing that stands out is that people all over the world are just about the same and want the same things, it is just the way of going about it that makes us different.

When Arabs do business or run a business they are usually yelling at someone.

Fat countries eat fries with that, skinnier countries eat vegetables with that. In addition, if it is fresh, the people are usually skinnier. Especially where less meat is involved.

Eastern Europeans, Russians, East Asians, and some other random countries here and there have serious drinking problems. End result, domestic violence, a very silent problem all over, especially these places.

Collectivism provides a false sense of security outside the main family unit. Feel free to debate this one!?.

People smoke all over the world and know it is unhealthy. It is no great mystery like America wanted us to believe a decade ago. Speaking of which.

Countries with a lot of money have the most obnoxious people telling the rest of us what to do and think and how to live our lives. Poor countries use the threat of bodily harm to get their agenda across. Both are flawed.

I will stand by this one until they put me in a box. Every organization has it's own agenda and the big organizations do not help others because of a sense of moral obligation to help their fellow man, there is ALWAYS an agenda.

If no outsider is busy killing us, we will kill each other.

Black people who live in non-black countries are always doing the shit jobs. It breaks my heart to see it everywhere. Ever-y-wh-ere!

We all recognize that we got shafted with only 75 years on planet earth, most of us will not have the opportunities to do the things we want. Most of us know this. Most of us know our lives have some sort of predestined table of contents. We accept it and move on to the next thing.

Tamuna, a friend, asked me about my travels recently. All I can do is tell my story.
Tamuna is Georgian. I live in Georgia. I am from America. I am writing this in Israel. I was in Jordan yesterday talking to a Bedouin man who grew up in a cave in Petra. A cave!!! What did we talk about? Family, work, politics, and the weather. I grew up in the suburbs, not a cave, and I talk about the same things with my suburban brethren. People are basically the same everywhere and that is my biggest generalization of the blog.