Prometheus Slept Here; Kazbegi and Farewell

“Hear the sum of the whole matter in the compass of one brief word — every art possessed by man comes from Prometheus.”

Day the Last. It was the portion of the trip where final decisions have been made, and all that's required is to act them out. You also make peace with the things you can't or didn't do. Like that Kutaisi animal fountain.

Or... the half-hour train ride to the Georgian city of Gori, birthplace of Stalin. Russian history has dominated my reading over the last year or so, and the aftermath of Soviet occupation has dominated my travels for the last five years, so at some point it felt like seeing the Stalin Museum seemed like a kind of punctuation.

But he was, you know, without any doubt or discussion, one of history's greatest murderers, a genocidal maniac without parallel who did much to prove how thin the line is between civilization and slaughter. Famous "conquerors" from history, like Tamerlane who trashed this region back in the day, Attila the Hun, Cortez, etc. were at least honest. Like, they just rode in and killed everyone. There was no gaslighting. It was like, "We have better weapons and give no fucks, so you will be either dead or enslaved now, and it's our choice which one."

The WWII dudes used the tools of civilization to get their own people to kill one another. It was much more...psychological. Work will set you free. This group of your neighbors with slightly different qualities is the bad group keeping us down, let's work together to drive them out, this arbitrary substance is illegal and anyone who touches it is now a criminal, let's imprison them. These are the rules now and you've chosen them; I'm just enforcing your will.

I mean, they learned it all from the US, which pulled all that shit with the First Nations people and beyond. The WWII crowd just did a better job of institutionalizing it. They got better at scaling. In any case, there's a Stalin museum in Gori, and it's about his schoolbooks and his desk and his clothes and not about his crimes, which is a testament to how having a good painter on the payroll can make a ton of people think you're a funny grandpa and not a psychopath.

They've tried to close it a few times, but these fierce old ladies have kept it open. They're like the Brides of Dracula haunting his mansion. And at some point it felt like seeing it would be a good lesson in how history forgets or can be twisted. But... I think most of life provides that lesson.

So, I chose to go instead to Kazbegi, a mountain town where Prometheus is chained up!

This was the second of the Big Greek Myths set here. Medea and Prometheus. It's kind of like hunting down Game of Thrones filming locations but many centuries older.

This one goes like this: That old Prom King made man out of clay, and the other gods thought man was annoying, so landlord Zeus cut the power. But Prometheus sneaked around the back and brought fire back. So, he made man and gave him fire. Cool story, Pro!

But the gods were haters, so they chained him up and made an eagle eat his liver every night. The liver grows back, and the eagle stays hungry. Prometheus suffered for our sins!

In any case, I always remember the "brought fire to man" part and forget the "made man," part, but those things are why Mary Shelley subtitled Frankenstein "The Modern Prometheus" (he made a man - out of parts) and Immanuel Kant called Ben Franklin the "Prometheus of recent times," (he gave us fire - in the form of electricity)

So, you know, though he isn't real, it's cool to see the mountain everyone has decided he isn't chained up in. It's also in the Ossetia region, which was one of the flashpoints in the war Russia waged on Georgia in 2008, so it blended in with my reading.

Sara, sensibly, decided to use the last day to relax and enjoy her coffee. To shop a little and to do some stretches to prepare for the very long series of flights we had in the morning. So it was just me on this one. Played Two-Stick Magician with Max Called Mocks, pocketed some hard boiled eggs, and headed out on that very familiar walk.

There was some stress. I had lost the ticket, since I had been using it as a bookmark and kept pulling the book in and out of my back pocket, but when I got to the bus place, the bus lady was like, "Kazbegi!" She remembered me and I never even had to bring it up.

Stopped by the Dunkin' Donuts, since they had iced coffee without iced cream in it (a serious hazard here in The Caucasus), and we were off. Pretty crowded bus and a loud guide of the "this corner has this much rainfall," variety, but I was able to tune him out and finish Bread and Ashes. Really loved it. Dumped it in a box at a rest stop and switched to A Hero of Our Time by Lermontov. Fucking hilarious and full of pithy quotes; I loved that one too. The good reading on this trip was all at the end.

At this point, I was as hard boiled as the lunch in my pocket. I wasn't interested in making any new friends or waiting for the English translation of the annual grain yield from whichever field we were passing. It was all about reading and seeing that mountain, son. Quick photo op at a very clear little lake but not at a gorgeous, decrepit Soviet bus stop. I was dying, trying to figure out a way to get the tour to stop so we could go back. A charging horse made of half-fallen tiles. Real tears. It will live on in my heart. My heart's bus will stop there.

Trudging on up switchbacks and up into rough patches, we made our slow way there. The hours melted away into the pages of Lermontov's randy, racy crowd of soldiers. Eventually, we got to a low little valley town where it became necessary to transfer to a hardy mini-van. The town was full of them with a gulag-guard-type dude running the show. He hollered at all the drivers and collected all the money. I've seen his type all over Europe, the Bullying Expediter.

A few Americans wouldn't take the van they were assigned because a woman with them insisted on having the front seat. She wanted that window view. So, there was a lot of reshuffling and waiting while she got what she desired. Why was she accommodated, catered to? Were they afraid she would leave a bad Yelp review?

Most of the cars were a hardy Mitsubishi model called a Delica. While I waited for Veruca Salt to get her window seat, I was amused to see a line of three of them next to a non-Mitsubishi with a rude bumper sticker. When viewed in a row, it looked like "Delica, Delica, Delica, Fuck Your Delica." Some local salt.

Insanely bumpy ride over some truly wild terrain, though still smoother than the highways of Northern Azerbaijan. Mudrunning and rockcrushing, spinning out and swerving over. Not a ride for anyone with osteoporosis. Made it to the little church that affords the best view of that spectacular mountain with its shy, foggy peak.

I found it very peaceful up there and felt not unlike Julie Andrews. I appreciated the views and the air and hunted a little dog around while he begged for scraps from a Scando couple who wanted to adopt him. The small church building had a stout charm. A fussy priest in one of those square Orthodox hats flapped around in seeming disapproval that the souls he was supposed to be saving were actually there and not abstract.

It was a nice group of people at their leisure, posing and sunning, making the most of their moment in the mountain's shadow. Somewhere, between sessions of being fed upon, Prometheus smiled.

On the un-Delica-te ride back, a couple of Belgians revealed to me they'd been stalking the same dog I had followed. We exchanged pictures. It was nice. Then a long lunch back in valleytown through which I ate my eggs and read. Then a quick stop over to something called The Russian Georgian Friendship Monument. A pretty cool picnic spot with a large, curving mosaic with colorful scenes from Caucasian and Russian history. It was built in the '80s for some reason.

Very fun spot with para-gliders rising suddenly up from unexpected corners on unexpected breezes. A woman on the bus got the Veruca virus and asked if we could wait for her to go para-gliding. For some reason, the driver said yes, and the entire bus had to wait 90 minutes so one person could take this selfish ride. I'm over it now, but my blood turned to a kind of venom at the time.

Would they have pulled over for three minutes for me to photograph the bus stop from earlier? I doubted it, but I didn't ask. In any case, hating the driver for saying yes kept me warm through the mountain passes and propelled me to the completion of the Lermontov novel. So... I gave them a positive Yelp review after all.

And then... view achieved. mountain climbed, I was back in Tbilisi to meet back up with Sara. She had had a marvelous time, luxuriating in a city she now knew fairly well. Catching khachapuri and slow-sipping her coffee. She bought a fabulous dress that made her look like two million lari and 1.75 manat at current exchange rates.

I went ahead and bought that little painting of the stacked-up town. The artist and I gave one another deep and genuine smiles of true appreciation for one another. Thank you for buying this, thank you for making it. No, thank you. No, thank you. Stocked up on magnets and it was home to Mari for the last time.

I went berserk on some salami and cheese leftover from... somewhere, took a final shower in Mari's closet, and packed up for the epic three-flight journey in our future. This was it. It was all over but the customs.

Nice little sleep and we made our dark escape. Mari and Max made one last little meddle. He barked while we were sneaking out, and she insisted on arranging the cab ride to the airport for us. We had just mastered the taxi app!, but she was forceful, and soon a men's underwear model arrived to take us away. Sara decided the driver was a young man Mari had trained in the arts of love as a teenager and that he's repaid her over the years by driving her boarders to the airport. Perhaps it was true.

Then we were in the Middle Realms. Half alive with half citizenship. Everywhere and nowhere in those strange zones airports represent. It was like, in a way, the quasi-Europe, quasi-Asia designation the Caucasus represent. We were dragged heavily through the skies, watched awful comedies, ate bread with seeds, and somehow wound up back home. Forever changed.

It was a very beautiful trip to an amazing part of the world, full of history and full of future. Much will happen here in the coming years, and when it does, we will have what I prize most in the world... a frame of reference.

Thank you for following along, reader. Should your own travels take you to this fertile place of wine and mountains and bread and ashes and oil and sturgeon, I wish you the same peace and knowledge I found.

And down in Tbilisi, just look up a cat named Joe.

Mtskheta, Golden Brandy, and the Hottest Ticket in Town

“What of it? If I die, I die. It will be no great loss to the world, and I am thoroughly bored with life. I am like a man yawning at a ball; the only reason he does not go home to bed is that his carriage has not arrived yet.”

 

Our host was Mari, and she lived in Vake (pronounced "Vocka"), which was a tony Tbilisi neighborhood north of the action. The apartment was just off of a charming circular park surrounded by bakeries and boutiques. Charming as all hell. 

Mari had a long silver braid, a friendly fat retriever named Max (pronounced "Mocks") and a little tabby cat with no name. "Why name him," she said, "He just eats here and sleeps here." We were also just eating and sleeping there, but we took no offense. Tabby had a little cardboard box to curl up in on the porch.

Our equivalent was a sweet little combination of rooms with a perfect compact kitchen and a comfortable bed. We dumped our stuff off, washed our faces and went right back out. The trip was winding down, and this was an opportunity to max (pronounced mocks) out the last few days. Plan was to take a long walk from Vake to the column of St. George and see whether or not we could book a tour to Mtskheta (unpronounceable) for the following day

It also felt like one of the last opportunities to pick up magnets. And, so back down that oyster-shell-paved hill we went. 

Some nice cafes and coffee "to take away." Sara popped into a little clothing store where the shopkeep asked where she was from. When she answered, he said, "There is a fifty percent discount for Seattle residents today." What luck! Finally, some respect!

Further down, we were charmed by a few "basement bakeries," which were store windows at knee level, that you had to bend over to order bread from. A woman in a white apron would get on her tip-toes to take your money, then stretch to raise some lavash up for you to grab by the heel. We loved this innovative, great-smelling street.

The front areas of several homes were covered with grapes and vines. I called these "porchards" and thought myself most clever. I loved my innovative great-smelling self. Fading spiral staircases threatened and beckoned in equal measure. The distinct, thrusting balconies were well represented.

At the base of the hill was familiarbynow Rustaveli Square with its metro and its fountain. We got coffee near where they sell the tiny hats. I fell in love with a little painting that showed the whole city stacked on top of itself. It was tall and skinny and would be annoying to frame, but the heart wants the paintings it wants. I did not buy it....yet.

A nice walk on a street we had both been down separately and together, past the women selling plums and the men selling walnuts. Past the Georgiafied Wendy's and the booksellers and the bookstores, the museums with their wilting bronze eagles, the pomegranates and the underground passages full of music, the toy dogs that yap and leap, the ray guns and salt shakers.

We located the place that would take us to Mtskheta.

And though it would be incredibly fun to say we were taking a marshrutka to Mtskheta, we chose a comfortable bus. But that was for the morning! Tonight's activity was to take the subway to the wrong station on purpose to see if we could find our way back to Vake. That is what we like to do. Judge tenderly, reader.

And thus, we went down into the Liberty Square station and purposefully overshot the station closest to where we lived and got out to behold... an entirely new part of the city. An epic walk, sometimes backtracing past universities and down long arcades and past commerce of all kinds. This was a more "contemporary" part of Tbilisi with large chain stores and markets. Wide avenues. Traffic and families.

The shops ended and the road opened up to an enormous cloverleaf highway, we made our way along the edges of it. It grew dark, but the lanterns from a Chinese restaurant bobbed on wires nearby, and from a park with children's rides laughter rose up like a lavash from a basement bakery.  Then we were under the cloverleaf, pausing only to marvel at a large abstract monument and a glittery real-estate billboard. Further on we pressed into a dark little neighborhood.

It was time to consult the phone-map which swore up and down that a little black ribbon of an alley was definitely where we needed to go, no question. We weren't sure, but the phone said! So, we rolled our shoulders and took the plunge.

It led to a quiet street with a choppy sidewalk. A grocery store promised eggs, so we went to see if it would keep that promise. It did. As well, it sold strange bootleg legos which let you build riot police in a moon lander.

We bought eggs and laughed in the dairy aisle remembering the time in Kyiv when we had eaten a container of sour cream thinking it yogurt. Smetana is the word. We knew it this time and shall forever. Go away, Smetana.

Back home, we put the food in the fridge and crashed the crash of those who overshoot their stations on purpose.

And then it was a Mtskheta morning. Amusingly, though Mtskheta was the name of the village we were going to, it was also the name of the street we were staying on. Fate!

It's pronounced a little like "bruschetta" and a lot like eating a bony piece of fish. People mostly knew what we meant when we said "Mush-Ketta" but I'm sure inwardly it was like hearing someone call Pittsburgh "Pitesbork." There is a fifty-percent discount for Pitesbork residents today.

Max wanted to play fetch, but he didn't want to let go of the stick. I found a second stick, and it was game on. He was like, "But... how can you have the stick in your hand if the stick is in my mouth?!!"

We took the long walk down the hill again, because it was a nice day and we like our legs. Got coffee at an ice cream place that opens at 8am for some reason. Then down down past all the taxi-men and the government buildings and the casino drunks and the closed H + M and the movie theater to the bus place. 

They had two seats, and I went ahead and bought a ticket for a trip to the mountains for the next day. Gotta mocks it out. We sat on a wall to wait for the bus, but a bookseller shooed us away. This public space is my storefront, guys. Then the big red bus hauled us off. There were about thirty people on board. One of them called out to us in English as we boarded. "Hey, Tulane! Hey, Pan-Am!" 

He was reading our t-shirts, you see. I waved to be polite, and he was like, "Hey hey!" I noticed he was sitting alone. 

Just at the Tbilisi outskirts, we saw a Brutalist building Sara had been looking out for. She was very excited to have found it. The locals call it the "Domino Building," but it looked to me like an angry game of Soviet Jenga. 

Mush Kettle isn't really very far out of town, so they lard the trip with a visit to a sack of churches and an "opportunity to learn about Georgian wines." Exit through the gift shop. But the mush was first, so about twenty magical mountain minutes later, there we stood. Very peaceful church set high above a distinctive horseshoeish confluence of rivers and a tender village. It was an easy climb from the parking lot to the holy place, and we greatly enjoyed the view and the cool breeze. It's the easiest of all day trips from Tbilisi and very rewarding. 

I heard the cries of "Tulane! Tulane!" again, but this time it was an elderly couple who were retired professors from that university. You never know who you're going to meet when you travel to the Caucasus in a t-shirt from a school you didn't go to.

Fooled around at a little ring-stand looking for treasure and got back on the bus. Next stop... Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. A really glorious place surrounded by those hilarious droopy crosses they have here, the Georgian cross. Legend has it, St. Nino crawled to Georgia to bring them the miracle of Christianity, and she fashioned a cross out of grape branches and her own hair. That sort of construction doesn't hold its shape very well. It kind of looks like the devil done grabbed it mid-exorcism.

The building was marvelous with a truly wonderful peeling fresco with a Byzantine Jesus straight out of central casting. Outside I met up the bus guy. He was from LA, and I entertained for a few moments that he might be a famous producer! And I could pitch him my idea to make a movie about Munch's Muse! The one who died in Tbilisi! But, he wasn't a producer. He was just a guy who was annoying Sara by continuing to call her "Pan-Am." So we left him to get some merlot-flavored soft-serve ice cream. 

Then it was off to Samtavro Monastery, a place of worship chosen chiefly for its proximity to The Chamber of Wine, which was a clip-joint for thirsty tourists. There were some very cool icons there, long-limbed saints in harlequin outfits. I was charmed, but the ones I liked weren't on any postcards. So, we had no choice but to attend the "wine tasting." 

At the Chamber of Wine (that really is its name), a wineista told us that Georgian wine is made by shoving everything fermentable into a clay jar and burying that jar as deep as The Big Bopper. Then, they dig it up, and it's sip sip, sell sell. 

She repeated this in English and Russian, and if you didn't speak the language she was currently using, you pushed past her to get a free glass of wine. The Not Producer was very engaged with her speech, and when she said, "You can tell the quality of wine from the way it clings to the glass when you swirl it. In Georgia, we call this Angel's Tears. In America, they call it legs," he yelled out, "What do they call it in Germany?! How about Korea!?"

I thought this was exceptionally funny, but I had already had a glass and my judgment was suspect. It was then further impaired when I asked to try the Georgian Brandy. 

This was a fulfillment of a promise to my father, who told me before I left of this trip that every spy in every spy novel he'd ever read went on and on about Georgian Brandy and how heavenly it was. I was afraid it might be like chacha, but... 

I held my nose, I closed my eyes... I took a drink.  

It was, as they say, fucking delicious, and I bought a bottle of it. In my mind, four complete stage plays and the script to Munch's Muse lay at the bottom. O' t' g'ld'n dreams I had as we floated back to the bus. I napped a little, and then we were back in Mr. Tibbs. 

We walked over to a nearby little Russian restaurant called Keep Calm and Tbilisi On, which was a soooper dumb name, but they had something called "pelmeni in a pot" that was a lot like a chicken pot pie filled with dumplings and was one of the best dumb comfort foods I ever et. Pan Am reminds me that I fell asleep at the table while we waited for it to be served. Twas that golden cordial from an hour before. 

Georgian Brandy was a fine girl, what a good wife she would be. But my life, my love, and my lady was pelmeni. 

Then home to sleep it off and score tickets to the adult puppet show. They have a pretty famous, thriving theater in the Old Town that puts on serious plays with marionettes. I was a little skeptical, but the plots of that evening's shows convinced me it would be interesting. 

But first, more frustrating taxi nonsense. A driver tried to take us back to Mtskheta (!) because the goddamn street we lived on in Vake was called Mtskheta Street (!!). That means when I mentioned it before, it was foreshadowing (!!!)  It's like when I used to live off of Manhattan Ave in Brooklyn, and drivers tried to take me to the Empire State Building instead of my own home!  

By the time we figured it out, we were halfway out of town. We made him pull over and we got another cab. But the new guy was even worse, so we just asked him to drop us off at the Rustaveli statue and we walked. Walked! I had sweated the brandy out by now. 

Max wanted to play one-sided fetch again, and I obliged. The puppet theater wanted you to email for tickets, so we did, and we asked for three because we invited Joe, and he said he would join us! A quick shower, some hard boiled eggs, a quick nap, and it was back down.

That walk again! The basement bakeries were more fragrant than ever at this hour. We saw children with their mothers buying many strange loaves. 

Walking walking walking, past the plums, past the pomegranates, past the political headquarters, past the jewelers, and the vintners, and the cobblers, and the cardigan crows. Back to the old town, through the sidewalk fisheries and over to the theater. Where, we discovered, it had been sold out for weeks. We had been naive to think tickets were available. Fools, almost. The email we sent meant nothing. 

"Hello, I hear you are showing a new musical by name of Hamilton. Two tickets, please. In the loge, if you will. Please respond to this email within the hour." 

Joe rolled up, his beard glistening with oil, his clothes magnificent as he strode across the stone streets he owned. When we told him the show was sold out, he tossed back his head, his obsidian curls dancing merrily, and he roared out a mighty laugh. 

"It was too good to be true," he smiled. "These tickets are impossible, and when you offered me one, I though perhaps a miracle had occurred, and I," and here he paused majestically, "have made my foremost occupation the pursuit of miracles." 

We went to shop for rugs instead, and he made fun of us, (this saddle bag would look beautiful in the home of someone's grandmother) so we went to a tea place instead and had some tremendous tea. 

We shared many tales, for he holds many tales inside him. I had suggested earlier he convert them to Ghost Stories and run a Tbilisi After Midnight Haunted Tour. He considered it, and to encourage him I added "and some say you can still hear the howling on a clear night," to the end of every story he told. He bore it patiently.

He had no sympathy for our taxi troubles. We had offered them up as our own haunted tales, but he was disgusted that we weren't using the app he had suggested over a week ago. Ashamedly, Sara downloaded it right there and then.

We paid and made our final farewell to Joe outside an all-glass police station. Tight hugs. He was a good man, and a wonderful raconteur, and I wish him all the best.

And then we used the app to get home (Joe had to come back and help, but still, we used it).
It worked! There was no trouble at all. The driver was like, "I'll take you right there, fam."

And then I played unfetch with Max, and then I got right in the goddamn bed to make sure I had energy for the mountains tomorrow. Sara took a shower.

And some say you can still hear the howling on a clear night.

Enemies Embrace on the Return to Tbilisi

"We became companions. I am incapable of friendship. Between two friends, one is always the slave of the other, though neither will admit it."

We liked the little coffee kiosk shaped like a coffee cup so much, we were willing to carry all our bags for several blocks just for the chance to have a final latte on the way to the train station. Packed up, sprung ourselves from Sing-Sing, floated in the early-morning cobalt down to The Mug to get our cup.

Very quiet. The bodegas sealed up, and even some the bakeries were closed. There are some unusual homes here with large vines tied to them with long ropes. We never discovered their purpose, but my guess is if we came back in three years, the home will be riotous with ivy and blossoms. Now, at dawntime, they made the houses look like bound stacks of newspapers.

Extra, extra! I had some meat left over from The New Ship and was hyper-vigilant for strays. Fed a friendly mutt and a suspicious cat.  The latter left sweet little paw prints in the dew of the park. Warm paper cups in hand, we summoned a cab by drawing signals in our latte foam.

Rode in relative speed and quiet to the vagsal. It's an old, pleasant building with a nice view of the sea and the larger newer buildings of Batumi in the distance. I liked thinking about generations of families being as familiar with it as Alabama families are with the Disney World parking lot.

We didn't think getting a ticket was going to be difficult at that hour, and it wasn't. But it looked like we got the last ones, because the seats were where the train employees usually sit. We had gotten the equivalent of the "jump seats." Packed train. We reckoned vacation was over for everyone else and it was back to work. We only had two days left ourselves.

There was a giant chunk of compressed folded paper on my arm rest, so I handed it to Sara when she got up to find the restroom. She hucked it in the huckerbin. We didn't take for granted that this train had a restroom. After the Midnight Train from Ganja, we never will again. With a double-decker car of tired, happy families, we moved closer to Tbilisi.

One thing we both noticed on the trip, intensified in the close quarters of the train, was men's reaction to children. Throughout Georgia, otherwise hard-faced men melted at the sight of a child. We saw them kneeling to address kids and do any small thing in their power to assist them, and they always smiled and spoke gently. 

Surviving years of occupation and the threat of war will do that, I think. Every child seems like a miracle and proof of survival and advancement. The train was swarming with kids and the beaming faces of their parents and the train staff. One little girl had apparently been on this route a number of times. She showed everyone how to operate a tricky restroom door. It slides, you see. Pushing it does nothing. 

I had hoped to recapture that writing zone on this ride back, but these jump seats didn't have tables. So, I finished Bread and Ashes instead. A really marvelous book, rambling and sentimental. Thoughtful, literate, observational, funny -- the perfect book to read in that part of the world. Out of the corner of my reading, I saw The Bathroom Door Girl hand one of the train workers a giant stack of papers that had been next to her seat. 

They were, Sara noticed, almost exactly the same kind of thing I had asked her to throw in the trash. It was probably receipts and tickets and... valuable records of this trip. And we had hucked half of them in the huckerbin. We hoped they had a digital backup copy. 

We roared past a city called Kutaisi. It had been on my list as a possible day trip, chiefly on account of a super-nutty fountain with brass animals crawling all over it, but.. you can't do everything. We can't be accused of not trying to, though. Next time, fountain. There's always something. 

I have a list for a trip I call the "Lips and Assholes Tour" where I go back chiefly to see all the little places and things I was close to but didn't quite make it to on previous trips. The trip is named after what someone once told me was the recipe for lunch meat bologna. Kutaisi Fountain, you made the list! 

Train drifted along pleasantly. There was no meal service, but we had loaded up with water and nuts and snacks, and the first four of the six hours was all comfortable reading and idle snacking. At some point, a man sitting across from us asked if he could plug his phone into an outlet behind us. It involved putting his cell phone on my headrest. It was, of course, no problem at all, and I moved aside to let him plug it in. 

He asked where we were from, and when I said "California in the United States," he said "Ah! Enemy territory!" And though he didn't say it in a mean way, it always gives you pause when someone "pretends" they don't like you for a moment. There's a lot of legitimate tension in the world, because it's in the interest of the oligarchs to keep us afraid of one another. 

No industry in the world exists in the form in which it exists because it must exist that way. The forms industries take is based on who is making money from them and the power they wield to keep them as they are. We don't have enemies, but it's hard to sell weapons if you don't. We don't need oil, but it's hard for the people who make money from it to stop. We don't need high fructose corn syrup, but the corn people fight to keep sugar expensive. 

Everything is advertising. Everything is narrative. Nothing is real but love (and even that is often slave to narrative). Nothing is necessary but communal feeling. And that single, crucial necessity is under constant assault and manipulation. For profit.  

I am a great fan of this bit of Rousseau's: 

"The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought himself of saying This is mine, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows, "Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."

His name was Muhammad, and he was from Iran. He was very interested in how people from the US view Iranians. I told him people who read think of Iran as a beautiful place with good people who are struggling under a restrictive government, but that people who watch TV think Iranians are angry, religious people who wake up and go to sleep saying "Death to America." 

I was taking a small risk saying these things, I guess, but from his presentation and from our surroundings, it felt like saying it that way was fair and mostly true. It also just, kind of.. came out that way. 

He looked pained at the second part. Like, that is what he thought most Americans think. I asked him the same question, of course. How is the US viewed in Iran? He said they think we are either ignorant or full of hate. 

And then we had the scripted conversation I have overheard and taken part in a hundred times on my travels: 

It's not the people, of course. It's the governments. 
Yes, the governments! They only care about money. 
Every time I meet a person from (insert country), they are kind and good. 
But the governments make money from keeping us in fear. 
It is how they control us. 
It is good to meet you. 
We are all brothers. 
Can I have my phone back?
Of course. 

When we arrived in Tbilisi, Muhammad helped us orient ourselves "This is it. I am not joking. This is Tbilisi." We actually weren't sure, so it was very helpful. We said goodbye, and he came back to say he would like to help us find a hotel if we needed one or anything we needed. 

He was very nice, and it was hard to tell him we had arranged lodging long ago, but people need something to make themselves feel helpful, so I asked him if he knew where the train station restaurant was, and he said "YES!" and pointed us to where we had gotten hard boiled eggs a few days ago. We smiled and thanked him, and this was the perfect way for everyone to feel like the other was kind and that it was only the accident of our birthplaces that would suggest any enmity between us.  

We WERE legitimately hungry, though, (but not for eggs), so after a quick taxi from the vagsul, we got dumped off back in familiar old Rustaveli Square and hauled our bags into a funny old "fancy" Khinkali house. It had these hilarious remote controls on the table so you could summon the server. We were like rats pushing a lever to trigger more pellets out of the feed-chute. 

Had the usual struggles with a cab. A week earlier, Noble Joe's obsidian beard had parted in an enormous smile to laugh and say we needed a special Taxi app on our phones in order to to have any experience but torment. But I had not done it.

And so we were treated in the usual way, like a couple of anteaters who had climbed in the backseat of a van trying to catch a ride back to the zoo. Where the ants are. The driver we found called over a couple more drivers to crowd-source the best way to our destination. Addresses, screenshots of the apartment, maps, a note from the US embassy, a compass, Sauron's palantir, and a trail of breadcrumbs were all useless. It was either, they know it or they don't. And they never knew it. 

Take me over there.
Where? 
Right there, we're all looking at it. That corner right there. 
I've never been there. 
It's ok. It's just straight ahead.
I'm going to have to consult with my friends.      
It's on the cover of the guide book. It's the most famous place in Tbilisi. 
I'll be right back. I need a coffee and four other drivers. 
We are all brothers. 

                                     

His buddies sat in their own cabs and ate bread wrapped in yellow paper and chewed and sprayed and nodded and eventually one did the hand dance that mapped our route out in the air. The driver got it, and we were off down a narrow alley paved with barnacles.

The sides of the car almost scraped the walls on either side, but a guy in a fishing hat found room to reach through the window and hand our driver a Dixie cup full of clear liquid. I was sure it was chacha.

He paused to drink it, which gave Fishing Hat time to reach through the back window and offer a cup to Sara. She tried to turn it down, but he was willing to have his arm torn off before allowing her to refuse his hospitality.

She accepted it, took a cautious sip, and spat it out. So, you know, I had to try it.

By this time, we had taken off again over the mussel-and-oyster-shell-pavement and the cab was jouncing like an Azerbaijani mashrutka on the road to Yevlak.

The driver hadn't offered us the trunk for our suitcases, so they were piled in the back with us, and I was in the absurd situation of trying not to spill the gift-liquid on my camera or over our clothes.

It eventually smoothed out, and I drank. It was mineral water with an exceptionally high level of carbonation. I understood why she had spit it out, there was an unexpectedly harsh bite. But it wasn't chacha, which meant the driver wasn't drunk...probably.

Having survived all of this put me in a suddenly light mood, and when the radio started playing "Nothin's Gonna Change My Love For You" I started singing along at the top of my voice.

The driver turned it up to an exceptional volume, and I wasn't sure if it was because he knew I was enjoying it or if he was trying to drown me out.

It was still, at this point, unclear if he was taking us to the right place.