Tbilisi Meanderings II: Sameba
The Georgian Flag over Sameba
Wedding Party at Sameba
Sameba
Chapel at Sameba
Tbilisi Meanderings I: Old Town
Gorgeous Tbilisi: Fortress, Sunni Mosque, Turkish Baths & Azeri Tbilisi
Little Church Above the Turkish Baths
Another Shot of Old Town from the River Side
Two Old Friends Prop Each Other Up - Old Tbilisi
Old Town Courtyard - Tbilisi, Georgia
Old TownMetekhi Church
Who Needs a TV?
That is, when you don’t have curtains.
Winding down for the evening, I shut the lights at my new apartment. That second, a hundred different screens blinked into life–windows across the way.
Truth is, not much is “on” when your screen is someone else’s life as seen through their windows. People watch TV or have silent conversations. They clean and walk around seemingly aimlessly. Some even read, or are they doing homework? Who knows. And that’s about it. Mostly my reflections focused inward.
On my window frames, on my bare apartment, the expenses, the future. And then on memories. Memories about frames.
Like last winter in Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. When for light and heat I broke down and burned the wooden frames on my art. How I learned to remove heavy duty staplers with a single hard-working tweaser. (It’s all in the wrist.) On deciding to make it festive by having friends over to skewer marshmallows (an overseas gift from a friend) with kebob sticks, toasting them over the picture frame fire. Indoors. The crackling sparks made by hidden staples that foraged so deep into the wooden frames that they’d ended up in the fire. Our headlamps on. Our laughter filling the cold, chasing out the void.
Frames. They don’t have to be what we use to capture an image. They don’t really even limit anything. They just hold an image of an image, and even then, only for a moment.
Then again, our lives are over in a blink, too. In the meantime, it’s fun to think on reshaping frames, on tossing them into fires to make up our own ones. At least then we’d never hold them sacrosanct.
Truth is, frames are part of our lives. I suppose our brains need them. And they do hold paintings up rather well. And as Jesus and the Naked Guy are coming back soon, I’d best find me some new frames. So when folks look into my apartment, they have something worth tuning into. 
Turkish Courtyard Seen through Doorway
Thwarted: A tale of pathos and Georgian swat teams, but no Thai food
Yes, it became common knowledge rather rapidly in Georgia that I would do just about anything for Thai food. If I could swing a meeting in the capital, which boasted exactly one great Thai place, I would be pretty sure to time it such that a meal was in order.
Even when I had dysentery I managed to squeak in a visit to the Thai place. At that time, I could barely even handle the scent of food, and plain rice was all I could stomach. Still, I was there.
When I returned to my site–the name Peace Corps gives the village, town or city in which a volunteer resides–my host mother asked me if I’d really gone for Thai, sick as I was. I sheepishly admitted that I had.
“But what could you eat?” she asked, shaking her head.
“Rice with dry bread,” I thought I said. ”Rice with joy,” I actually said. She collapsed in mirth and I left her for the facilities.
The only problem with my Thai addiction, other than the dearth of Thai food in Georgia, was that half the time I was there, the country managed to be politically unstable.
As a result, volunteers were pretty much told to steer clear of the capital for the most part. Tragic. So beautiful a capital, so ancient, and so beneficent in Thai food.
Finally the day came when we were allowed in Tbilisi (with restrictions.) I stormed the city. By this I mean I climbed into a shattered yet miraculously moving minibus and hurtled down the potholed highway to Tbilisi, where I fell out shaking and breathless about 45 minutes later.
“Come,” I said, and began the march from the river up through Old Town to the Thai place. ”Nothing can keep me from Thai food now! Nothing!”
My companion said nothing as we saw the first signs of a noticeable police presence. I too maintained a prudent silence. He might have cleared his throat as we ran past a barricade. I may have glared back at him, but my memory’s hazy on that.
“Nothing,” I repeated firmly, and stalked forth. We told ourselves everything was normal.
Old Town was pretty desolate. We walked those tiny alleys and gorgeous balconied roads, finally emerging just a few streets down from the restaurant. My internal soundtrack was almost back in happy gear. Thai food was so close, so tantalizingly, deliciously, irresistibly close. And everything had been calm and normal. We’d been overly sensitive to the sight of the police. I relaxed my shoulders.
Then we passed a huge swath of dark buses filled to the brim with soldiers. I frowned, but we sallied onwards.
“I guess you really meant it when you said nothing would stop you,” my companion remarked. I nodded silently, but I was beginning to feel perturbed. I know: late.
We turned the corner. We had arrived. It should have been the most joyous of moments.
But opposite us, across from the Thai place, were two huge groups of swat forces, dressed head to foot in black gear, including such bullet-proof vests as I’d only ever seen on Batman. Huge truncheons, machine guns, glass barricades, the whole shebang.
We looked at them. They looked at us. My companion raised his hand to knock at the door.
“What are you doing?” I hissed.
“It’s locked,” he answered, as if we weren’t gazing at two hundred deaths’ worth of men in black.
“Gah!” I responded reasonably. And grabbed his arm and began pulling us down the street and away.
“But I thought nothing would stop you–!” he protested.
“Nothing but swat teams,” I answered irritably, “Swat teams will stop me.”
We broke into a desperate jog. No Thai food for us. Not for weeks.
Foiled again.
What would you do, opposite a door with this painted on it? (That's what I did, too.) ;)
The Night the Russians Attacked
I was conked out, an overdose of Nyquil.
Yes, this is already old hat to you. You already know, I was serving as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Republic of Georgia, blah blah. But maybe what you didn’t know, is that when I finally got there, all trussed up with enthusiasm and ready for the job, they managed to find the most mosquito-ridden place in the country to place me. (I thought not.) In a land known for majestic mountains and lush greenery, they found a malaria zone for me.
I jest not.
I took this in stride. I find that the only way to take things; it helps avert nasty stumbles.
And from this day forth I became an avid user of all the bug repellents and itch ointments in our trusty Peace Corps medical kits, which resembled the kind of sturdy med kit Chekhov must have lugged through the backwoods in days of yore.
Well, the day came when my ship came in. All of them, actually. Namely, a group of volunteers left the country, and returned their unused medical supplies to the Peace Corps office. To say I leapt on these supplies with the crazed frenzy of an addict would be…well, to ever-so-slightly belabor the point. But you get it.
I scrambled madly among the left-over med kits, wholesale grabbing everything that looked like it ought salvage my poor bitten body from my mortal enemies. What I neglected to check for was—expiration dates.
Yeah. It turns out they’re relevant.
I was stunned, gobsmacked and completely confounded the next day, when my skin broke out in the hugest rash I’d ever seen.
“Gah!” I said profoundly. And applied more anti-itch ointment. Yeah…
I’d never seen the doctor’s eyebrows go up like that before. Well, fine, I had. This is Peace Corps, after all. We had all sorts of everything plaguing us. And the docs are great. Anyway, they easily discovered the source of my rash: my stupidity.
As we all know, the cure for Ruth’s Stupidity is a massive dose of Nyquil. Which brings us back to the beginning of our tale. Namely, my stupor.
I wake up after a night of much thunder and lightning. I stretch. I see I have a text from J in New York. I chuckle. She’s going on about some scuffles at the border with South Ossetia. She thinks it’s getting worse–could it mean…war? I smile. Dear girl, she’s yet to learn that there’s always scuffles at borders. Honestly…
I leave the village I’m temporarily at to attend a Peace Corps meeting in Khashuri, a nearby town. And apparently 30 minutes afterwards, the village was bombed. I was the only one without any questions about the night before; everyone else had seen the lights and heard the artillery. I was the only one who’d attached a weather forecast to my lists of reasons for the noise.
“Thunderstorms without rain?” they asked me, unimpressed.
Hm. And of course within an hour all hell broke loose. But that’s another tale. And maybe not for the blog…
Wintery Bank in Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
Silver Linings, or Winter Evening Conversations in a Small Caucasus Town
We were sitting huddled around the fire in the kitchen.
Every few minutes one of us would kneel down before it to fan the flames, to increase the heat in the frigid room. It was the only source of heat and light at night.
All winter we lived our evenings around that fire. Sometimes we played the panduri, a Georgian national string instrument, and sang. Sometimes we tried to hit each other with the panduri. Most nights we did both. But always, always, as close to the fire as possible.
At first, it was…novel. An adventure. Exploration of a world beyond my previous experience. But after 3 months without water, electricity, gas and regular heat, it became…life. Not easy, no. But–life.
Raising my hand to turn on and off light switches ceased to be automatic. There was never a reason. Not washing, that was the hardest. Or maybe it was the cold nights, when water bottles froze solid next to my bed and I climbed in fully dressed. Then there was the lack of light in my room, which had a blanket hammered into the wall to block the hole in the window.
It was life. And really, not that uncommon for many people around the world. A great Peace Corps lesson.
One night, my adorable host mom turned to me, suddenly curious.
“Ruth,” she asked, “in America, what do you do when you don’t have electricity, gas and water?”
I paused. What would we do, if ever such a thing happened? We’d be in dire straights. We don’t know how to cope, for the most part, pushed up hard against the elements.
“I don’t know,” I answered slowly. ”It never happens.”
She looked into the darkness, pondering my answer. Then she shot me a mischievous grin.
“That’s what’s great about Georgia,” she announced. ”Everything can happen here.”
Bless her soul. :)
Kartulis Deda, Tbilisi, Republic of Georgia
Ministry of Adventures
I was going to be legal about it. I was going to register the art I’d bought in Georgia at the Ministry of Sports and Culture. I was also, however, going to leave it to the last moment. The Thursday before my Monday flight, to be precise.
I found the Ministry easily enough. It was conveniently located across the street from the park under Dry Bridge, which was where I’d bought all of my paintings. I’d tramped past it, plodding through mud and snow, and never walked in until this day.
I cleared my throat, and the sturdy entrance guard deigned to look at me. ”Do you speak English?” I asked, somewhat bleakly.
She frowned. No, then. ”Do you speak Russian?”
“What do you want?” she asked, proving in her directness and diction that indeed, she spoke Russian.
I murmured something about wanting to register my paintings. She didn’t wait for me to finish. She bumbled out the longest string of names and directions I’d ever heard. Eyebrows raised, I managed to grasp that among other things, I had to get me to the 4th floor and find a man named…. I forget. But it was loooooooooooong, his name.
I crossed past the guards, lounging near the elevators, and entered the open lift. The doors shut with a clang. I pressed the button. And waited.
Now, in my time, I’ve managed to get myself both into a falling elevator and into a stuck one, so I’m pretty aware when things are looking grim, and I’m not quite willing to wait for another plunge.
And the thing wasn’t moving. Just standing. And then the lights went out.
I reacted immediately. I lunged for the closed doors and gripped them, pried them open, and pushed myself through. Shaken, I stared back at the guards, who’d stopped talking when the elevator had splurted me out.
I pointed shakily behind me. ”The elevator doesn’t work,” I said. (I might have said, “The elevator doesn’t play.” I was speaking Georgian now, and ’tis not my strongest language.)
“Take the other one,” a guard answered.
“No,” I answered, aghast. ”I will walk on the stairs and I will walk on the fourth floor.”
And I ran up on shaky legs. By the time I arrived on the fourth floor, the man’s name was a whisp in my leaking memories. A woman asked me what I was doing there, and it was all I could do not to shrug and shake my head helplessly. I whispered the first few syllables of his marathon name.
She nodded me down the hall, and I chose a door at random and stood outside it, trying to recall the first few syllables again. It opened roughly, and a man asked me my business there. ”I have to register paintings,” I answered in Russian.
Now I was led to a woman, strict and proper. ”Give them to me,” she ordered in Georgian. Oy.
“I don’t have them.” Now I did feel quite the fool.
“How can I measure them if you don’t have them? Come back tomorrow.”
“But I will be in hospital tomorrow. I am leaving the country on Monday.”
She looked at me funny. Could I really predict an illness in my future, or was I just a crazy foreigner? ”Well, how can I measure them if you don’t have them?”
A valid point. I hadn’t thought this through, apparently. I shrugged hopelessly. Maybe doing things the legal way was a foolish idea. Or maybe procrastination was. I leant in favor of the former.
“Fine,” she barked, “do you remember their dimensions?” (Thankfully, she’d switched to Russian, for I promise you there is no way I would unravel that sentence in Georgian.)
“Err,” I answered helpfully.
She stared at me.
“Well,” I said, “the first one is sort of–this shape.” I gestured vaguely in the air, drawing a ghost of an outline of a painting. Idiocy, thy name is Ruth. But–
“Wait, hold still,” she answered, and rummaged in her desk, emerging with a measuring tape. I blinked a few times and gaped as she stood up, holding it toward me. ”Put your hands out again.”
I did as she asked, and watched mesmerized as she measured from one finger to another, held at hypothetical ends of my absent painting. First width, then length. Painting by painting, I held my hands at varying distances from one another, approximating size and shape. She measured these spaces of air between my fingers, and wrote down the measurements on a slip of paper.
Thus was all legal and straight and narrow and good. I love Georgia. :)
wild-colored painting
There’s No Such Thing as a Muse. (Did ya know?)
Established writers tell newbies that all talk of “muses” must cease and desist, for by relying on “our muse” we handicap ourselves. We risk forgetting the muse is really our own subconscious, our very own selves. Likewise we must take care not to form rituals, for these may cripple our agility as writers.
And so I am here to tell you today that my muse:
* does not need coffee
* certainly does not need more coffee
* does not need air conditioning
* does not need music
* does not need solitude
* most certainly is not sparked powerfully in the lovely, rumbling, rollicking subways of New York City
HOWEVER, full disclaimer alert:
My muse subconscious does greedily appreciate attempts to bribe her. She is truly unprincipled that way, much in contrast with her conscious self. *cough*
Subway Strike (of inspiration)
This afternoon, after leaving work, feet aching from hours standing and being “on” since 11:30, I got on the A train only to find no seats were available. I was drained, and felt like there wasn’t a word ready to be wrung out of me in my tiny writing window this afternoon/evening. Of course, I still planned on writing, regardless.
I leaned against the pole and turned on my iPod. The train began to move, shaking to and fro, and the pole between my shoulder blades banged painfully against me. I adjusted my position, relaxing into the bar, hooking one foot around it for stability, and then closed my eyes and got into my song. I’ve lived here long enough. I know how to hold my bag so I know it’s safe. I can sense when my stop’s far from close, and when I ought reawaken. I let myself move with the train’s jostle and stretched into it, enjoying my music.
And I thought, why the hell am I setting my book in Somewhereistan, USA (not the real location name), when New York is what I know and love? When New York is the city I feel like a character in my life? Where I know what it’s like at 2am and 2 pm and at 5am and 5pm, and exactly what’s true and not true about the mythos that the city never sleeps?
But that’s not all. Remember how I’ve been complaining about how I can’t grasp my heroes properly yet? How I’m all over my antagonists, how I love them and feel them viscerally, but my accursed heroes are just. not. there?
No longer. S is here. I found him in the subway. Rumble, brumble, tumble, said the train, and I suddenly got it. I understood S. I’d given him the wrong family. The wrong financial situation. The wrong reasons to be who he is. No wonder I couldn’t grab him later in the book.
Now it all works. Inner tension, character relationships, the stakes. Yay!
Who needs a muse, when I’ve got the NYC subway system? :)
*she hurriedly fed her muse adoring eyes and promises of iced coffee, not that it mattered in the least*
Random Courtyard, Old Tbilisi
There’s something I love about Old Town, Tbilisi…
Yowza! Learning from great books what makes them tick…
A fellow member of Absolute Write made a great recommendation about a week ago, and I’ve found it so helpful. She suggested choosing five books from my shelf, and opening them at random, reading one single page from them, and without context or continuation, really absorbing what made them strong.
Of course, among the books I picked out was Prisoner of Azkaban, and as a favourite of mine, it captured me solidly. I’ve been reduced to reading single pages from it at random–many single pages. *bashful blush*
What this exercise does is, particularly as I’m concurrently reading a great book on writing strong fiction (The Fire in Fiction by Donald Maass)–is highlight the techniques used by the author which work so powerfully in pulling the reader in, creating a compelling world, raising stakes, revealing character through actions, etc–on each and every page.
It sure is a reminder to up one’s game. And how strategically and masterfully this has been done in my fave books. I admire good authors even more now.
Boom-Boom-Pow!
Tbilisi Old Town -- My Fave Corner
Tbilisi Doorway
Random Tbilisi Doorway
A million doorways in Old Tbilisi… A million secret moments behind them.
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