An old paper from MHC
I wrote this as my paper for my sophomore-year J-term course in the Republic of Georgia.
Georgia in the Modern World
Georgia is a borrower country. As we stand on the sidewalk before Tblisi State University, we watch a decrepit trolley creep by on its wires. Archil, our perennially disheveled host, points at it and says, “We bought those from…Czechoslovakia.” When it was still united and not the Czech Republic and Slovakia, it looks like. They are old trolleys. A beautiful yellow bus goes past, its sides covered in what could be dust-covered mud. Those, it turns out, come from the Netherlands. Their cast-offs still look pretty nice. The Netherlands must upgrade at least every five years. It’s not that Georgia has no culture. It is that most of the visual things in Georgia are not its own. Take for instance the buildings. The city hall and theater as well as all the government building as beautiful, done in a Roman-type style seen in many European countries. Even in Washington the towering buildings recall a history that is barely our own, and here it is no different. Georgia is, as a Georgian student in American told me before we left, just like any other European city. Maybe it is. In fact, America’s pop culture has been encroaching on the Iron Curtain for some time. Every fifty feet, without fail, is a small stand manned by some hapless, usually old, woman in a shawl or heavy coat. These are the Coca-Cola stands, and they sell, in addition to chocolate and other small edibles, Coca-Cola, Fanta (a Coke product), and sometimes Pepsi. Their red Coca-Cola tents are unmistakable on the side of the road.
Puma, Nike, and Adidas stores line the avenues. Archil’s daughter wears a pair of red North Face mittens. In fact, everyone here wears black. MTV is one of the one hundred channels here, though it comes through in French. Nickelodeon, Animal Planet, and the Hallmark Channel are in Russian. Only the Cartoon Network is in English, but few people in Georgia understand English. Most understand Russian. In fact, even five year-old Giji, her real name Elene, understands Russian. This is the legacy of a more tangible conqueror-Russia. Georgia was taken over by Russia in 1919. It is famous as the birthplace of Stalin, a dubious distinction. In a historical context, the problem with Georgia is that it is the only land bridge connected in the east and the west, making it a geographic nexus, and as such its history has been of one occupation followed by another. Beginning long ago, the Persians, Turks, and Russians in turn all took advantage of it. Most of the tv stations here broadcast in Russian. Georgia is torn between Russia and the West for consumer products. The food has Russian labels, the toothpaste is American. Colgate, actually. The tv is Sony, their cell phones Nokia. The only thing, it seems, that Georgia makes and sells for itself is mineral water, which I find brackish and unwholesome. Agriculture should be our biggest industry, Boris the expat Frenchman says, but we import all our meat here in Georgia.
Georgia wants to join NATO and the EU. It would rather join with Europe than be a slave to Russia. Europe has come to Georgia as well. The cars are almost all BMWs and Mercedes Benzes, ancient and run down; early nineties models at the youngest. A new green VW bug speeds down the road, and a new Lexus SUV is illegally parked on the sidewalk, but these things are rare here. The Italian embassy is less than a block from the EU embassy. Other European embassies are undoubtedly here as well.
An official at Tblisi State tells us that they are implementing a two-year plan to Westernize. I’m not sure what that means. We sit in a room with heavy tables arranged in a giant U with some 25 chairs arranged around it. The class could be a seminar room, but you would have to yell to hear each other. Everything about the university screams that it was built for grandeur. The huge staircase is of marble, and busts of important men line the hallways. But the eight-foot tall doors are just one sign of the stretched feeling in the university. It is too ol.d It is outdated. One classroom that we were in had ancient wooden bench desks and a tiny chalkboard. A hallway that we travel through to leave the university is like the shady underbelly of a city-we could be mugged in the eerie light. We are told that the university has 20,000 students.
But Georgia’s problems are more deep-rooted than having to choose between the West or Russia. Driving through the residential areas of the city one would think that the people are living in ghettos. Everything seems rundown form the outside-paint is peeling, buildings are ancient concrete, and the 5-cent operated elevator, which smells awful the first week that we ride it, is a risky proposition every time it shudders up the floors. What you realize, however, in looking out over the city of similar poor apartment buildings with the laundry drying over the sides, is that the issues is not one of poverty but of history and space. These buildings are old, but there is no room to knock them down and build new ones. Even if there was, where would the tenants stay in the meantime? Once the new building was built, the old tenants would probably be evicted in favor of newer ones who could pay higher rents.
At two a.m. the water turns off, part of water rationing, and even in Tblisi, the capital city and the most developed city in the country, there are sometimes electricity blackouts. During the wave of privatization in 1991, the electrical situation was in crisis. The infrastructure of Georgia is outdated. It cannot handle a modern country, much less one modern city. In the countryside, a hole in the ground is still the most common toilet, and that won’t change any time soon, especially in the areas that don’t have running water either. In the end, it doesn’t matter much. Georgia cannot keep up with technology-driven places like the United States. Less than a ten minute drive out of Tblisi reveals that under the sophisticated front that Tblisi wants to present, it is, at heart and in the words of a famous Georgian. “just a peasant country.”
My family in Tblisi might have internet, but life in the countryside is still rural at best. Cows and pigs wander free near the rutted and potholed road. The only buildings are small farms or the houses that border the roads. I don’t know what those families do, if it’s not farming. There is no electricity, no running water. Expectations are low. For centuries the people have farmed, and it’s all they know. This is the true spirit of Georgia. Georgia is a land of farmers-that is its past and in agriculture lies its future. I do not condemn it to a hickish, ignorant sort of farmer hell, but recognize that if it specializes economically it will find that its farmers are its greatest asset.
As European as Georgia tries to be, it will never succeed. Poor old women with scarves over their heads sit on the steps to the street and rock in the cold. It’s the Russian women. They are truly poor, Professor Jones says. The Georgian old women have family to support them==the Russians have no one. Other old women sell organs for pennies. One orange for ten cents. There are popcorn makers on the sidewalk, as well. Street venders sell icons of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus, but also drinking horns and cheap metal daggers. And, something even the “most civilized country in the world”-the United States, mega-churches and all-doesn’t do: the people cross themselves every time they walk in front of a church. This sort of thing does not, I think, happen in Europe.
However, despite the Western and Russian influences upon Georgia, to say that Georgia has no culture of its own is to overlook, among other things, its unique “hatchapuri ” and the natural pride of its people. They can poke fun at themselves-the Georgians are the laziest people, Archil says. They never work. It’s true that worker productivity is a problem. Work generally starts at about ten or eleven, then lunch lasts an hour and people go home at five. If Georgians could only be more industrious, Alex the wunderpolitician says wistfully. But if they suddenly took up the Western practice of hard work and long hours, what good would it do them? Why should they work any more than they do if they are happy with how they live right now? Workers in the United States work more hours and have fewer holidays than anyone else in the world. We are richer, but are we happier? This is the tradeoff that higher productivity would cause, and for now Georgians are unwilling to make that sacrifice.
There are other things that are unique to Georgia as well. Its language and its script, for instance. Due to its proximity to Russia, it would have seemed logical that the Georgian language be related to Russian or at least use the Cyrillic alphabet, but instead it is one of the few languages in the world that is unrelated to any other. Originally its script was based on the Greek alphabet, but now it bears no resemblance to it, and in speech Georgian is distinctly different from Russian even to the untrained ear. In fact, in terms of sentence structure it is similar to the Sanskritic family of languages, in that the verb comes at the end of the sentence and indicates a great many things about the grammatical structure of the sentence. Even the script reminds me-who had just learned Hindi a few months before-of the Devanagri script, only without the rekha, the line from which the individual letters hang. However, this is just a visual similarity that I cling to in order to compare the unknown language to something that I am familiar with, and it is a superficial comparison that has no basis in a true linguistic link between the two languages.
Overall, however, the most striking thing about Georgia is its pronounced adherence to Christianity. Christianity really took root around AD 500, when monasteries and crosses were being built all around the countryside and saints were a dime a dozen. The Georgians, like so many Catholic nations, believe that they are the chosen nation of the Virgin Mary and they revere here especially. Their churches are all built looking exactly the same, with a dome in the center and walls bare except for copies of icons. Sometimes the originals once hung in those churches, but most of the time they are copies of icons hanging in other churches. During worship, a candle is lit and placed in front of these icons. In ancient churches, the walls were covered with elaborate frescoes, but during the Soviet era the Russians whitewashed the walls and restoration in many cases was impossible. Christmas mass, the only service that we attend is, unlike the Protestant masses more familiar to Americans, a continuous event in which people come and go at leisure, never staying for any great length of time.
Georgia adheres to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church does not recognize the Pope, does not hold traditional ceremonies in Latin. The Bible was translated into Georgian by at least AD 500, and this prevented what happened in the West: namely that the Bible became something out of reach of the people since only the priests could read Latin. In Georgia, Christianity is a religion of the people. In fact, other than the reverence for Christ and belief in the Bible there seems little similarity between the Roman Catholics and the followers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Orthodox Christians believe in the duophysite nature of “the” Christ. He for them was both a god-the Christ-and a human-Jesus. For Roman Catholics, he was all God. This difference in theology is actually quite important and is the greatest difference between the two sects.
Blending in with the Georgian populace if you are a foreigner is impossible. Just as any Eastern Europeaner is immediately obvious to American eyes, anyone not born in the Caucasus sticks out of the Georgian crowd like a sore thumb. I attribute much of this to the fact that all Georgians look unhappy when they walk along the street. They look as though they are grumpy and tired. Smoking has probably contributed a lot to this sallow-faced, dark-eyed look, since everyone smokes here. For women, dark hair is not entirely the rule, but the blondes are for the most part not the same sort as are found in the United States, though what the difference may be is hard to describe. Women one and all wear high-heeled black boots. Not a single one of them wears flat-soled shoes, and tennis shoes are heresy. Black is the norm in Georgia. Every single person, man or woman, wears a black coat. Some older women, however, wear huge mink coats, which take up an unhappy amount of room when the buses are crowded.
The people are guarded with their facial expressions with people that they do not know, but at home they are just as merry and good-tempered as anyone else. Parents are especially quite loving with their children. Like any country, Georgia, is still a patriarchal society, which is evident in the fact that it is women who sit manning the cold Coca-Cola stands and women who stay at home to cook and do laundry. But times are changing. My host mother Keti is a dentist. Whatever her husband Kaxa did we never learned.
Cooking seems to be quite easy in Georgia since it revolves around a few main staples: bread, cheese, and meat or soup depending on the family’s income. And potatoes, of course. These foodstuffs are served in different combinations for all meals, but the Western style of breakfast has been making headway into Georgia. One morning we ate salad for breakfast, but another we had oatmeal. I saw a variant of Coco Puffs as well, though we never actually ate it. Dinner at my house every night was a soup, usually potatoes in the form of French fries, and meat done in one way or another. We had hot dogs twice, but no buns. Desert was uncommon, but sometimes chocolate or some other sweet thing was presented in the evening. We also had oranges for breakfast and commonly after dinner as well, adding fruit into our diet.
On our first night with our host family, our host father Kaxa took us to eat at the most Georgian place he knew. It was a large pub-like restaurant with Georgian men sitting around heavy wooden tables smoking and laughing. The chairs were almost too heavy to move, and the menu was all in Georgian. All menus are in Georgian. We had three loaves of bread, two mineral waters, four “lemonades,” pickled vegetables, cheese, khinkale, and dozens of other things, all for just four people. When we left, we left behind two full loaves of bread on the table, a plate of pork cubes, lots of kinkale, and most of the cheese and vegetables. Georgians, said Professor Jones, are extremely wasteful.
Driving, of course, is an adventure all of its own in Georgia. The streets have no lanes, probably because people could not drive in them anyway. Though drivers will not go against the light, they will do everything else. They will park on sidewalks, cut buses off, cut across all lanes of traffic, and almost drive on the wrong side of the road if they have to. They lay on the horn with such frequency that it is as if they were saying hello to every other car they meet. To make matters worse, very few cars have seatbelts.
Riding in a car is like riding a rollercoaster with no bar to hold you down. Death seems inevitable, but we all escaped uninjured, amazingly. Even more incredibly, despite the craziness of drivers and their disregard for anyone else, pedestrians bravely cross the streets with no crosswalks, weaving between the speeding cars with the skill of ballerinas. Westerners, when they try, look absurd. When the seventeen people in our group tried to cross a road once, we stood like a gaggle of ducklings stuck in the middle of the road while cars whooshed around us for several minutes until we could make it to the other side. Somewhere, I’m sure, Georgians were laughing at us. Drivers believe that they have the absolute right of way, and woe to the pedestrian who presumes differently. For the Westerner, the only way to cross safely is to go under the street or else to follow in a pack of Georgians or stand at a traffic light and wait for it to turn.
Around AD 1300, a Moroccan traveler named Ibn Battuta went from his home in Morocco through all the countries of the Dar al-Islam (literally “The House of Islam”), including Turkey and Azerbaijan all the way to India and possibly beyond. Because he remained within the Dar al-Islam, he never went outside of his culture and never had to know any language but Arabic. For him, anywhere he went was like being at home. For Westerners, there has never been an officially recognized equivalent of the Dar al-Islam, but in this age of globalization we are seeing a similar sort of effect. Within Europe and North America there is no cultural different so great that we cannot comprehend it. Europeans from England to Latvia may share a metropolitan, sophisticated point of view that is slightly different from America’s youthful cowboy enthusiasm, but we still are, in the aggregate, Christians with a similar belief system. English, like Arabic in the Dar al-Islam, is becoming a sort of lingua franca to bridge the gap between the Western nations.
Perhaps we can all it the Dar al-Rarb (“The House of the West,” not to be confused with the Dar al-Harb, “The House of War”), and it stretches from North America to Russia. It is defined by faith, but also by technology and a certain standard of living. It is bluejeans and MTV, neon billboards and the internet. It is electricity and progress, the equality of women. The Dar al-Rarb means that a Westerner traveling from one place may go to any other country within the Dar al-Rarb and not feel as though he or she was in a completely alien place.
Georgia falls squarely in the Dar al-Rarb, but Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan (which is a Muslim nation) are the boundary of the Dar al-Rarb, for below them starts the Dar al-Islam, which still exists in almost the same shape that it did during the time of Ibn Battuta. It is amazing, really, that Georgia did not become more intermixed with the Dar al-Islam. After all, when Ibn Battuta passed through the area, it was under the Khanate of the “Golden Horde,” one of the four successor states to the Mongolian Empire and it was Muslim. All of the area conquered by Genghis Khan, except for Kubilai Khan’s Chinese Khanate, eventually became Muslim, in fact. After the Golden Horde, Georgia was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, who were originally soldier-slaves Genghis’ armies. Georgia’s 11% Muslim population is all that remains of that time.
In summary, it would be easy to say that in this age of globalization Georgia is losing whatever culture it once had. But to say that would be to overlook the people of Georgia. Zaza, for example, who keeps alive the age-old tradition of toasting to everything and drinking out of the special horn. Alex, who is working to hold his country together against the internal corruption and the external power plays of Russia and the United States. Elene, who wants to be a ballerina and Maryam, who wants to be a tennis player. Alex says that the country might not be able to be independent. It has been a conquered country for so long that it does not know how to live on its own. Maybe it will reintegrate back into Russia. But I think that it will not, because the people, despite their low worker productivity and easy-going manners, still see themselves as Georgians and nothing else. Their country might stay permanently in the world’s second tier economically, but they will never allow themselves to be controlled by Russia militarily ever again.
Georgia in the Modern World
Georgia is a borrower country. As we stand on the sidewalk before Tblisi State University, we watch a decrepit trolley creep by on its wires. Archil, our perennially disheveled host, points at it and says, “We bought those from…Czechoslovakia.” When it was still united and not the Czech Republic and Slovakia, it looks like. They are old trolleys. A beautiful yellow bus goes past, its sides covered in what could be dust-covered mud. Those, it turns out, come from the Netherlands. Their cast-offs still look pretty nice. The Netherlands must upgrade at least every five years. It’s not that Georgia has no culture. It is that most of the visual things in Georgia are not its own. Take for instance the buildings. The city hall and theater as well as all the government building as beautiful, done in a Roman-type style seen in many European countries. Even in Washington the towering buildings recall a history that is barely our own, and here it is no different. Georgia is, as a Georgian student in American told me before we left, just like any other European city. Maybe it is. In fact, America’s pop culture has been encroaching on the Iron Curtain for some time. Every fifty feet, without fail, is a small stand manned by some hapless, usually old, woman in a shawl or heavy coat. These are the Coca-Cola stands, and they sell, in addition to chocolate and other small edibles, Coca-Cola, Fanta (a Coke product), and sometimes Pepsi. Their red Coca-Cola tents are unmistakable on the side of the road.
Puma, Nike, and Adidas stores line the avenues. Archil’s daughter wears a pair of red North Face mittens. In fact, everyone here wears black. MTV is one of the one hundred channels here, though it comes through in French. Nickelodeon, Animal Planet, and the Hallmark Channel are in Russian. Only the Cartoon Network is in English, but few people in Georgia understand English. Most understand Russian. In fact, even five year-old Giji, her real name Elene, understands Russian. This is the legacy of a more tangible conqueror-Russia. Georgia was taken over by Russia in 1919. It is famous as the birthplace of Stalin, a dubious distinction. In a historical context, the problem with Georgia is that it is the only land bridge connected in the east and the west, making it a geographic nexus, and as such its history has been of one occupation followed by another. Beginning long ago, the Persians, Turks, and Russians in turn all took advantage of it. Most of the tv stations here broadcast in Russian. Georgia is torn between Russia and the West for consumer products. The food has Russian labels, the toothpaste is American. Colgate, actually. The tv is Sony, their cell phones Nokia. The only thing, it seems, that Georgia makes and sells for itself is mineral water, which I find brackish and unwholesome. Agriculture should be our biggest industry, Boris the expat Frenchman says, but we import all our meat here in Georgia.
Georgia wants to join NATO and the EU. It would rather join with Europe than be a slave to Russia. Europe has come to Georgia as well. The cars are almost all BMWs and Mercedes Benzes, ancient and run down; early nineties models at the youngest. A new green VW bug speeds down the road, and a new Lexus SUV is illegally parked on the sidewalk, but these things are rare here. The Italian embassy is less than a block from the EU embassy. Other European embassies are undoubtedly here as well.
An official at Tblisi State tells us that they are implementing a two-year plan to Westernize. I’m not sure what that means. We sit in a room with heavy tables arranged in a giant U with some 25 chairs arranged around it. The class could be a seminar room, but you would have to yell to hear each other. Everything about the university screams that it was built for grandeur. The huge staircase is of marble, and busts of important men line the hallways. But the eight-foot tall doors are just one sign of the stretched feeling in the university. It is too ol.d It is outdated. One classroom that we were in had ancient wooden bench desks and a tiny chalkboard. A hallway that we travel through to leave the university is like the shady underbelly of a city-we could be mugged in the eerie light. We are told that the university has 20,000 students.
But Georgia’s problems are more deep-rooted than having to choose between the West or Russia. Driving through the residential areas of the city one would think that the people are living in ghettos. Everything seems rundown form the outside-paint is peeling, buildings are ancient concrete, and the 5-cent operated elevator, which smells awful the first week that we ride it, is a risky proposition every time it shudders up the floors. What you realize, however, in looking out over the city of similar poor apartment buildings with the laundry drying over the sides, is that the issues is not one of poverty but of history and space. These buildings are old, but there is no room to knock them down and build new ones. Even if there was, where would the tenants stay in the meantime? Once the new building was built, the old tenants would probably be evicted in favor of newer ones who could pay higher rents.
At two a.m. the water turns off, part of water rationing, and even in Tblisi, the capital city and the most developed city in the country, there are sometimes electricity blackouts. During the wave of privatization in 1991, the electrical situation was in crisis. The infrastructure of Georgia is outdated. It cannot handle a modern country, much less one modern city. In the countryside, a hole in the ground is still the most common toilet, and that won’t change any time soon, especially in the areas that don’t have running water either. In the end, it doesn’t matter much. Georgia cannot keep up with technology-driven places like the United States. Less than a ten minute drive out of Tblisi reveals that under the sophisticated front that Tblisi wants to present, it is, at heart and in the words of a famous Georgian. “just a peasant country.”
My family in Tblisi might have internet, but life in the countryside is still rural at best. Cows and pigs wander free near the rutted and potholed road. The only buildings are small farms or the houses that border the roads. I don’t know what those families do, if it’s not farming. There is no electricity, no running water. Expectations are low. For centuries the people have farmed, and it’s all they know. This is the true spirit of Georgia. Georgia is a land of farmers-that is its past and in agriculture lies its future. I do not condemn it to a hickish, ignorant sort of farmer hell, but recognize that if it specializes economically it will find that its farmers are its greatest asset.
As European as Georgia tries to be, it will never succeed. Poor old women with scarves over their heads sit on the steps to the street and rock in the cold. It’s the Russian women. They are truly poor, Professor Jones says. The Georgian old women have family to support them==the Russians have no one. Other old women sell organs for pennies. One orange for ten cents. There are popcorn makers on the sidewalk, as well. Street venders sell icons of the Virgin Mary and of Jesus, but also drinking horns and cheap metal daggers. And, something even the “most civilized country in the world”-the United States, mega-churches and all-doesn’t do: the people cross themselves every time they walk in front of a church. This sort of thing does not, I think, happen in Europe.
However, despite the Western and Russian influences upon Georgia, to say that Georgia has no culture of its own is to overlook, among other things, its unique “hatchapuri ” and the natural pride of its people. They can poke fun at themselves-the Georgians are the laziest people, Archil says. They never work. It’s true that worker productivity is a problem. Work generally starts at about ten or eleven, then lunch lasts an hour and people go home at five. If Georgians could only be more industrious, Alex the wunderpolitician says wistfully. But if they suddenly took up the Western practice of hard work and long hours, what good would it do them? Why should they work any more than they do if they are happy with how they live right now? Workers in the United States work more hours and have fewer holidays than anyone else in the world. We are richer, but are we happier? This is the tradeoff that higher productivity would cause, and for now Georgians are unwilling to make that sacrifice.
There are other things that are unique to Georgia as well. Its language and its script, for instance. Due to its proximity to Russia, it would have seemed logical that the Georgian language be related to Russian or at least use the Cyrillic alphabet, but instead it is one of the few languages in the world that is unrelated to any other. Originally its script was based on the Greek alphabet, but now it bears no resemblance to it, and in speech Georgian is distinctly different from Russian even to the untrained ear. In fact, in terms of sentence structure it is similar to the Sanskritic family of languages, in that the verb comes at the end of the sentence and indicates a great many things about the grammatical structure of the sentence. Even the script reminds me-who had just learned Hindi a few months before-of the Devanagri script, only without the rekha, the line from which the individual letters hang. However, this is just a visual similarity that I cling to in order to compare the unknown language to something that I am familiar with, and it is a superficial comparison that has no basis in a true linguistic link between the two languages.
Overall, however, the most striking thing about Georgia is its pronounced adherence to Christianity. Christianity really took root around AD 500, when monasteries and crosses were being built all around the countryside and saints were a dime a dozen. The Georgians, like so many Catholic nations, believe that they are the chosen nation of the Virgin Mary and they revere here especially. Their churches are all built looking exactly the same, with a dome in the center and walls bare except for copies of icons. Sometimes the originals once hung in those churches, but most of the time they are copies of icons hanging in other churches. During worship, a candle is lit and placed in front of these icons. In ancient churches, the walls were covered with elaborate frescoes, but during the Soviet era the Russians whitewashed the walls and restoration in many cases was impossible. Christmas mass, the only service that we attend is, unlike the Protestant masses more familiar to Americans, a continuous event in which people come and go at leisure, never staying for any great length of time.
Georgia adheres to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Orthodox Church does not recognize the Pope, does not hold traditional ceremonies in Latin. The Bible was translated into Georgian by at least AD 500, and this prevented what happened in the West: namely that the Bible became something out of reach of the people since only the priests could read Latin. In Georgia, Christianity is a religion of the people. In fact, other than the reverence for Christ and belief in the Bible there seems little similarity between the Roman Catholics and the followers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. Orthodox Christians believe in the duophysite nature of “the” Christ. He for them was both a god-the Christ-and a human-Jesus. For Roman Catholics, he was all God. This difference in theology is actually quite important and is the greatest difference between the two sects.
Blending in with the Georgian populace if you are a foreigner is impossible. Just as any Eastern Europeaner is immediately obvious to American eyes, anyone not born in the Caucasus sticks out of the Georgian crowd like a sore thumb. I attribute much of this to the fact that all Georgians look unhappy when they walk along the street. They look as though they are grumpy and tired. Smoking has probably contributed a lot to this sallow-faced, dark-eyed look, since everyone smokes here. For women, dark hair is not entirely the rule, but the blondes are for the most part not the same sort as are found in the United States, though what the difference may be is hard to describe. Women one and all wear high-heeled black boots. Not a single one of them wears flat-soled shoes, and tennis shoes are heresy. Black is the norm in Georgia. Every single person, man or woman, wears a black coat. Some older women, however, wear huge mink coats, which take up an unhappy amount of room when the buses are crowded.
The people are guarded with their facial expressions with people that they do not know, but at home they are just as merry and good-tempered as anyone else. Parents are especially quite loving with their children. Like any country, Georgia, is still a patriarchal society, which is evident in the fact that it is women who sit manning the cold Coca-Cola stands and women who stay at home to cook and do laundry. But times are changing. My host mother Keti is a dentist. Whatever her husband Kaxa did we never learned.
Cooking seems to be quite easy in Georgia since it revolves around a few main staples: bread, cheese, and meat or soup depending on the family’s income. And potatoes, of course. These foodstuffs are served in different combinations for all meals, but the Western style of breakfast has been making headway into Georgia. One morning we ate salad for breakfast, but another we had oatmeal. I saw a variant of Coco Puffs as well, though we never actually ate it. Dinner at my house every night was a soup, usually potatoes in the form of French fries, and meat done in one way or another. We had hot dogs twice, but no buns. Desert was uncommon, but sometimes chocolate or some other sweet thing was presented in the evening. We also had oranges for breakfast and commonly after dinner as well, adding fruit into our diet.
On our first night with our host family, our host father Kaxa took us to eat at the most Georgian place he knew. It was a large pub-like restaurant with Georgian men sitting around heavy wooden tables smoking and laughing. The chairs were almost too heavy to move, and the menu was all in Georgian. All menus are in Georgian. We had three loaves of bread, two mineral waters, four “lemonades,” pickled vegetables, cheese, khinkale, and dozens of other things, all for just four people. When we left, we left behind two full loaves of bread on the table, a plate of pork cubes, lots of kinkale, and most of the cheese and vegetables. Georgians, said Professor Jones, are extremely wasteful.
Driving, of course, is an adventure all of its own in Georgia. The streets have no lanes, probably because people could not drive in them anyway. Though drivers will not go against the light, they will do everything else. They will park on sidewalks, cut buses off, cut across all lanes of traffic, and almost drive on the wrong side of the road if they have to. They lay on the horn with such frequency that it is as if they were saying hello to every other car they meet. To make matters worse, very few cars have seatbelts.
Riding in a car is like riding a rollercoaster with no bar to hold you down. Death seems inevitable, but we all escaped uninjured, amazingly. Even more incredibly, despite the craziness of drivers and their disregard for anyone else, pedestrians bravely cross the streets with no crosswalks, weaving between the speeding cars with the skill of ballerinas. Westerners, when they try, look absurd. When the seventeen people in our group tried to cross a road once, we stood like a gaggle of ducklings stuck in the middle of the road while cars whooshed around us for several minutes until we could make it to the other side. Somewhere, I’m sure, Georgians were laughing at us. Drivers believe that they have the absolute right of way, and woe to the pedestrian who presumes differently. For the Westerner, the only way to cross safely is to go under the street or else to follow in a pack of Georgians or stand at a traffic light and wait for it to turn.
Around AD 1300, a Moroccan traveler named Ibn Battuta went from his home in Morocco through all the countries of the Dar al-Islam (literally “The House of Islam”), including Turkey and Azerbaijan all the way to India and possibly beyond. Because he remained within the Dar al-Islam, he never went outside of his culture and never had to know any language but Arabic. For him, anywhere he went was like being at home. For Westerners, there has never been an officially recognized equivalent of the Dar al-Islam, but in this age of globalization we are seeing a similar sort of effect. Within Europe and North America there is no cultural different so great that we cannot comprehend it. Europeans from England to Latvia may share a metropolitan, sophisticated point of view that is slightly different from America’s youthful cowboy enthusiasm, but we still are, in the aggregate, Christians with a similar belief system. English, like Arabic in the Dar al-Islam, is becoming a sort of lingua franca to bridge the gap between the Western nations.
Perhaps we can all it the Dar al-Rarb (“The House of the West,” not to be confused with the Dar al-Harb, “The House of War”), and it stretches from North America to Russia. It is defined by faith, but also by technology and a certain standard of living. It is bluejeans and MTV, neon billboards and the internet. It is electricity and progress, the equality of women. The Dar al-Rarb means that a Westerner traveling from one place may go to any other country within the Dar al-Rarb and not feel as though he or she was in a completely alien place.
Georgia falls squarely in the Dar al-Rarb, but Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan (which is a Muslim nation) are the boundary of the Dar al-Rarb, for below them starts the Dar al-Islam, which still exists in almost the same shape that it did during the time of Ibn Battuta. It is amazing, really, that Georgia did not become more intermixed with the Dar al-Islam. After all, when Ibn Battuta passed through the area, it was under the Khanate of the “Golden Horde,” one of the four successor states to the Mongolian Empire and it was Muslim. All of the area conquered by Genghis Khan, except for Kubilai Khan’s Chinese Khanate, eventually became Muslim, in fact. After the Golden Horde, Georgia was conquered by the Ottoman Turks, who were originally soldier-slaves Genghis’ armies. Georgia’s 11% Muslim population is all that remains of that time.
In summary, it would be easy to say that in this age of globalization Georgia is losing whatever culture it once had. But to say that would be to overlook the people of Georgia. Zaza, for example, who keeps alive the age-old tradition of toasting to everything and drinking out of the special horn. Alex, who is working to hold his country together against the internal corruption and the external power plays of Russia and the United States. Elene, who wants to be a ballerina and Maryam, who wants to be a tennis player. Alex says that the country might not be able to be independent. It has been a conquered country for so long that it does not know how to live on its own. Maybe it will reintegrate back into Russia. But I think that it will not, because the people, despite their low worker productivity and easy-going manners, still see themselves as Georgians and nothing else. Their country might stay permanently in the world’s second tier economically, but they will never allow themselves to be controlled by Russia militarily ever again.