All posts tagged Georgia

  • Kaynanalık: the Turkish Word for Mother-in-Lawness

    Esma Sultan from the show İstanbullu Gelin. The show is entirely based on a mother/daughter-in-law conflict.

    The Middle-Eastern mother-in-law, so the common story goes, believes with all her might that no other woman could possibly be worthy of her son. The stereotype is so prevalent in Turkey that Turkish actually has a word – kaynanalık – that literally translates to “mother-in-lawness.” Usage example: Yes, I know your son prefers his stuffed grape leaves without meat, but stop with the kaynanlık. If I like them with meat I’m allowed to make them that way! Despite what you may believe, your son won’t starve!

    My own grandmother, herself from a different country in the Middle East, was (she isn’t dead, but she’s mellowed with age) so good at kaynanalık that she could have served as a lighthouse for other bad mothers-in-law who’d lost their way. Her own kaynanalık successes, however, did not stop her from becoming concerned that I may be mistreated by the very culture she so enthusiastically participated in. As soon as she could after the wedding, she sat me down and asked, “So, how’s your mother-in-law?”

    I actually have a great mother-in-law. She doesn’t make foods she knows I don’t like, constantly asks me what foods I do like, says things like, “you’re not my daughter-in-law, you’re my daughter!”, gets me to call her Mum, tells me about unpleasant experiences she had with her own mother-in-law many years ago, and enthusiastically tries to teach recipes I’ve taught her to her own sisters, who are skeptical about them to say the least.

    Anyway, I told my grandmother that I lucked out in the mother-in-law department, and she said, “Oh, I’m glad to hear that. You know, Middle-Eastern mothers-in-law are famous for being mean.” She paused for a too-short moment of self-reflection. “You know it’s funny,” she said after a while. “Everybody always talks about bad mothers-in-law, but nobody ever seems to have anything to say about bad daughters-in-law.”

    My brother would later text me to say that “With one short quote, she elevated herself to Plato’s perfect form of a bad mother-in-law.”

    If I’ve learned anything from the little time I’ve been married, however, it’s that mothers-in-law actually do talk a lot about their “bad” daughters-in-law. Mostly I’ve heard about this from my own mother-in-law, who when responding positively to questions about me, is often regaled with stories from other women about their own daughter-in-law-related misfortune.

    “I met a friend today,” she said to me one day a few weeks after Adem and I were married. “And was she ever complaining! She said her daughter-in-law never comes to visit and they never invite her to visit either. But they do invite the daughter-in-law’s mother.” She shook her head. “Oh, these women,” she said. “They’re so old-fashioned. Why do they feel like they need to be mean to their daughters-in-law? That’s how it was supposed to be in the old days, not now.”

    A few days later, Adem ran into the same lady who, after asking how our marriage was, used the subject of marriage as a springboard to launch into another volley of kaynanalık lamentation. Adem immediately launched into his, “oh my gosh, it’s been really great to see you” routine and extricated himself from the situation with as much grace as he could.

    That story reminded me of another story we heard from Cihan, a friend of ours. About five years ago a good friend of his got married. At the time when they were married, the wife was working a better job than the husband. One day Cihan’s phone rang. It was his friend’s Mom.

    “Hi Cihan, how are you doing” crackled (I imagine) her voice from the other end of the line.

    “Good, and you?” said Cihan.

    “I’m good, I’m good,” she said. “Listen, I just wanted to ask you. You know, you know my son well. I just wanted to make sure that his wife isn’t getting uppity because of the employment situation. She isn’t bossing him around or anything is she?”

    So far I’d been spared any mother-in-law jeremiads, until today, when I discovered a small table at my local bazaar selling a few products from Armenia. Foreign products are worth their weight in gold in Turkey, so I couldn’t believe my eyes. Pork sausage, condensed milk, halva made out of sunflower seeds! What luck! I asked the lady, a woman in her sixties with severe drawn-on eyebrows, if she came to the bazaar every week.

    “Yes,” she said. “I do. When I go to Armenia I bring things back here and sell them here once a week.”

    “Oh, you’re Armenian?” I said stupidly, because it was obvious from her accent that she was.

    “Yes,” she said. “But I’ve been here 15 years. Every time I travel I have to go through Russia because the political situation between Turkey and Armenia isn’t that good you know.”

    “Oh!” I said, surprised. “You don’t come back through Georgia?” (This would be a much cheaper option, and she could bring more stuff into Turkey to sell.)

    “NO!” she said. “My daughter-in-law is Georgian! I don’t like Georgia. My daughter-in-law is so greedy. I would rather go through Russia.”

    I took some of the halva and left her alone.

    I’ve spent the rest of the day feeling smug about my own good luck and trying to think of silly titles for articles or books by mothers-in-law for mothers-in-law. I mean, there does seem to be a glut in the market, no?

    Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

    “The trick one mother-in-law has to avoid ever setting foot in the homeland of her daughter-in-law, (and how you can do it too). HINT: It costs money!”

    “Uninvited: The mother-in-law story.”

    “Why Change when You Can Stay the Same?: Kaynanalık traditions of the Middle East through the ages.”

    Yelling: A Guide to Getting Grandchildren without Compromising your Son’s Care.

    “How to cope when your son gets bossed around by his wife instead of by you.”

    “When bad daughters-in-law happen to perfect people.”

    …other suggestions are welcome.

  • Tbilisi is Neverland or Is World Travel Necessarily Meaningful?

    This is the first photograph I ever took of Tbilisi.

    IMG_2760

    I remember taking this photograph. I took it because it represented a huge shift from the Turkish graffiti I’d grown accustomed to, which mostly consisted of cheerful political slogans like “Fuck the AKP,” “Israel is a murderer,” and “The PKK kills babies.” After my first night spent in Georgia I burst into somewhat-relieved laughter at the giant penis spray-painted on the wall across from my guesthouse. No political slogan to go along with it, no nod to the country’s myriad problems, no in-your-face accusations of baby-killing – just pure juvenile vandalism.

    I forgot to take a picture of that penis, but a few mornings later while I was making my first explorations of Tbilisi I noticed the “Never Grow Up” graffiti and snapped a photograph to preserve a memory of the sense of possibility that Georgia seemed to possess.

    Graffiti isn’t necessarily a good lens through which to understand a country, and it wasn’t like Georgia didn’t have any problems or people who talked about them. In fact, some of the Georgians I met seemed even more pessimistic about the state of Georgia than many Turkish people, despite the optimistic graffiti that adorned their capital city.

    Still, looking back, this graffito encapsulates a certain type of foreign experience of the city; for many of us non-Georgians, Tbilisi was a Neverland and we were Peter Pans running away from our parents. Citizens of many countries have the right to 360 day visa-free access to Georgia, so we came in droves to partake in the cheap cost of living, cheap wine, endless possibility, and stalled adulthood. Not all of us had work permits, but that didn’t matter much because most of us worked remotely for companies based in countries with did have permits for. A few worked under the table. A few, who knows how many, bucked the trend and actually paid taxes.

    Everybody had a different way of refusing to grow up. There were the party animals, who lived to drink and have a good time. There were the artists who couldn’t support themselves on an artist’s salary in their country of citizenship but moved to Tbilisi rather than suck it up and get a day job. There were the small business owners, people who were trying to innovate in a place where it was less risky to do so because . . . how much money did they really need to support themselves and their families? Then, of course, there was the posse of travellers and temporary residents like myself who were there for lots of reasons – adventure, a chance to see another part of the world, a lack of desire to settle down and follow established societal scripts of getting married and buying a home or even just getting a “real job.”

    IMG_2761

    Some foreigners were long-term residents, but most didn’t really integrate. A few were married to Georgians; but I only met one or two foreign people who could actually speak the language. A few Georgian members would show up to language and sports clubs that consisted of mostly foreigners, but not many. Foreign resident after foreign resident confessed to me that they didn’t mix that much with Georgians – and not because they didn’t want to. It was because they felt like Georgians were closed in among themselves and preoccupied with their families and the friends they grew up with.

    When I reflected on this, I wondered if we were really living in Georgia or in some kind of limbolike facsimile – between Georgia and our metaphorical parents in godknowswhereverwewerefrom. We weren’t necessarily trying to live in an imaginary Georgia without Georgians, but we sort of did since we spent only a small percentage of our time with locals. Furthermore, the locals we did tend to spend time with were generally Georgians that had spent significant time in Europe or elsewhere; it was mainly their understanding of our cultures that made our meetings possible, and not the other way around.

    Tbilisi from atop the funicular

    Tbilisi from atop the funicular

    Did Georgians share in this Neverland experience? Probably not like us, they didn’t. One time at a language exchange group one of the two Georgian people there complained to a group of a dozen foreigners (mostly from the Euro-zone) that taxis had gotten expensive lately. Her comment was met with a chorus of denial. Taxis weren’t expensive in Georgia, because we did not say it was so. It was enough that they didn’t seem expensive to us.

    Certainly, the average Georgian salary was much lower than what we, as come-from-aways, were generally earning. The childishness of our automatic chorus of denial was two-fold. One, we couldn’t acknowledge that spending our money carried some sense of responsibility. We just had so much of it that it didn’t really seem to matter. Second, it was hard for us to understand how hard others had to work for their money. It was as though, like children, we believed in some sort of imaginary money tree that everybody had access to. Selfishly, we couldn’t look beyond our noses to acknowledge that even a three to five dollar taxi ride could be beyond the means of some.

    It was only when drinking that I began to feel like this Neverland-style of living sometimes did seem to extend to Georgians. One time at the salon I became an inadvertent part of a Georgian fete – in this case, for the salon owner’s birthday. When I descended the stairs after my manicure, a group of middle-aged adults were already merrily slammed and were getting enthusiastically drunker near the entrance. I was handed a plate piled with food as well as glass after glass of vodka. I wasn’t allowed to refuse because I had to toast everybody and their mother. We communicated in butchered drunken Russian, and butchered drunken English, and they taught me words associated with drinking and birthdays in Georgian. I walked home full, and a little too drunk for my normal I’m-an-adult tastes.

    Despite this one experience, as I reflected on the nearly two months that I spent in Tbilisi, I realized that I learned a lot less about the country than I would have liked to because I engaged it as a child would. For Georgians, possibility of drunkenness aside, your chances of getting a visa to go elsewhere probably aren’t high like they are for foreigners like me. You might not earn enough money to pay yourself a taxi across town. Everybody knows you, and your mother, and your father, and what your brother did in high school. I doubt that Georgians enjoy the kind of freedom from established norms of adulthood within their own culture that us foreigners did. We just packed up and left our societies behind, while Georgians in Georgia likely contend with what it means to be an adult in Georgia every single day.

    I don’t want to make Georgia out as necessarily being a bad country for Georgians, nor do I want to say that we foreigners were bad people for not integrating or for having a good time (by and large, I really enjoyed the people that I met, and couldn’t blame them for seeking out the more relaxed life that Tbilisi gave them. I was in exactly the same boat.) I want to say that I had a childish experience, that in a Peter Pan-like way I never came to understand what I was seeing and, shamefully, didn’t make any real efforts to. All I can say is that life in Tbilisi was easy and fun. The alcohol was cheap and plentiful, the food was delicious, and my money went much further than it does at home.

    I didn’t learn Georgian in Georgia. What I did learn was that even though people laud the experience of travelling as a good way to give you a wider perspective of the world and create meaning in your life, this is not always accurate. Travelling can certainly be a catalyst to gaining a wider perspective, but the truth is that it can also be an exercise in superficiality and childish non-engagement that few wish to acknowledge. Travellers are not necessarily more worldly than people who stay at home, and travel is not synonymous with meaning. Travel is travel, and that’s all there is. If you find meaning in it, it’s neither better nor worse or more likely than finding meaning in any other aspect of life.

  • Take Care of Your Breasts!: Nostalgia for the Soviet Period in the ex-Soviet Union

    As I planned my trip through Russia and the Caucasus, I began to prepare by interacting with more and more people from ex-Soviet countries. Mostly, I met them online. My friends were typically born after 1980, and spent their childhoods in the perestroika-era Soviet Union. Many of them professed a kind of nostalgia for the Soviet Union of their childhoods. “In some ways, it was a great childhood,” I remember one Russian telling me. “We didn’t know a class system. Of course there were problems but as a child, I wasn’t aware of all that. It was a great childhood, for me.”

    A few friends from other ex-Soviets spoke well of the Soviet education systems of their childhoods, and decried the loss of the education quality that has occurred in their countries since 1991.

    I was surprised to hear these perspectives. The North American collective consciousness had left me with little knowledge of social life in the Soviet Union. Sure, I had nebulous ideas about nuclear armament and Stalin’s purges, but no real timeline or concept that the Soviet Union wasn’t a static entity and that it had undergone massive changes across its history, even if North Americans weren’t easily privy to them. I couldn’t think of anything that the Soviet Union had done that could be considered beneficial to its population. It wasn’t that I had anything against acknowledging that there might have been some good things about the Soviet era. It was simply because, as a North American, my exposure to the social culture and history of the Soviet Union was limited.

    Now that I’ve been to a few ex-Soviet countries, I’ve found that the nostalgia I noticed before I left is common – although not universal – across the ex-Soviet Union. A few months ago I wrote about how little of this nostalgia I noticed in Georgia, but I spoke too soon. At a language-practice meeting in Tbilisi, I met a woman in her fifties. “How was it living in the Soviet Union?” I asked, expecting her to reiterate what the other Georgians had told me about how the evil Russian occupation had not managed to subdue proud and tenacious Georgia. (These statements, I later learned, were somewhat ironic as Stalin himself was . . . Georgian.) She didn’t. “Oh,” she said, “It was wonderful. The education system was excellent. We learned many foreign languages. And it was so cheap to travel from here to Moscow.”

    What characterizes collective memories of the Cold War period for North Americans doesn’t seem to be the same across the post-Soviet world. Did Soviet citizens live with the same terror of nuclear war that North Americans did? I don’t know.

    What I do know is that, these days in the ex-Soviet Union, nostalgia for the Soviet period abounds. It’s certainly not universal; many people have terrible things to say about the difficulties endured during the Soviet era. But . . . it is common, and it takes many forms – from lamenting how expensive travel to Moscow has become since the break-up, to buying postcards and magnet editions of vintage Soviet posters, to spending time at one of the three museums of Soviet Arcade Games that grace Moscow, St. Petersburg, and Kazan.

    This is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Yes, you can play the games. They only work if you feed them Soviet money though.

    This is the Museum of Soviet Arcade Games in Moscow. Yes, you can play the games, but only if you feed them Soviet money.

    Another Russian friend pointed out that North Americans also have some kind of nostalgia for the Soviet period. “For example,” he said, “the game Fallout is about Nuclear War, which was a big preoccupation of the Cold War.” He was right – with one major difference. In the ex-Soviet Union, nostalgia for the period is about many different aspects of Soviet culture and society whereas in North America, Cold War nostalgia tends to be about . . . the threat of war.

    I picked up these postcards at a gift shop in Moscow. They came in a pack of twenty. Many of them are military themed, but what struck me were the four related to public health campaigns.

    These two cards both address the issue of overdrinking. The one on the right reads, “A river begins with a small stream” and dates to 1929. The Soviet Union obviously continued to struggle with this public health issue as the card on the left, which simply reads, “NO,” dates to 1954. 

    IMG_3276

    These two posters are also about public health issues. The one on the left reads, “Take care of your breasts” while the one on the right reads “After work, go to the bathhouse.” In the Soviet Union, many apartments did not have baths inside, so inhabitants were forced to frequent bathhouses (back before they had connotations of homosexuality.) Both of these posters date to the 1930s.

    Stalin’s purges aside, the social history of the Soviet Union is not well-known in North America. It’s a shame, really, that it isn’t. To conclude this post, I present you with a question my Ukrainian roommate in Georgia asked me about the social culture of North America that proves that a mutual lack of cultural knowledge exists up until the present day.

    “Kate,” he said. “Do people in North America read on the john, or is that just something that people in ex-Soviet countries do?”

    I was quick to assure him that piles of books and magazines are common features of many North American bathrooms. Although the Soviet Union has been gone for 24 years, the vestiges of the Cold War live on in a mutual lack of knowledge about these – admittedly perhaps insignificant – cultural details. Still, I don’t think that a North American one-dimensional understanding of the Soviet and ex-Soviet space is insignificant at all (although, in the case of bathroom reading, perhaps it is.) In fact, the more you know . . . the more you are likely to make reasonable judgments about North American and post Soviet people and their mutual relationships. Sure, there’s bad stuff, but there’s also good stuff. And if you aren’t the sort to divide social movements into such easy moral categories, I can say for sure that there’s plenty of interesting stuff to be learned about the countries that make up the ex-Soviet Union.

    So come on in! The water’s fine!

  • I Love Platzkart

    The legacy of the Cold War has left North Americans with precious little knowledge of the post-Soviet world. Sadly, some of the things that North Americans don’t know are rather nifty.

    Ex-Soviet transportation infrastructure makes North American transportation infrastructure seem an ersatz, shameful excuse. Expensive North American taxis, buses that take forever to arrive, and subway systems that only privilege huge cities pale in comparison to post-Soviet transportation infrastructure, which tends to be efficient and affordable. Yes, the subways are creaky, the buses look like they haven’t been updated since 1940, the marshrutka* drivers clearly have a collective death wish, and the taxis are uncomfortable and painted in jewel-tones, but I’ll be darned if the whole system doesn’t just work better than it does in North America.

    Vladikavkaz tram

    A tram in Vladikavkaz.

    This isn't a taxi, but many post-Soviet taxis do look like this.

    This isn’t a taxi, but many post-Soviet taxis do look like this.

    Although I geek out about all aspects of transportation infrastructure in the former Soviet Union, one particular type of transportation is special.

    Platzkart. I love platzkart.

    Platzkart is a class of train travel. When you travel by train in North America or Europe, you buy either a seat or a berth in a cabin. In the post-Soviet republics, platzkart is an intermediate option. If you buy a ticket in platzkart you will spend the night in a bed in a train car that contains 54 beds. It’s like a hostel . . . in a train.

    Russians tend to feel disdainful towards the idea of platzkart. I told a group of men from Krasnodar about my love for platzkart. “What?!” they yelled all together. “Is it the not showering? Is it not having hot water? Is it feeling dirty and smelly that you like?” They mimed showering with a bucket of cold water in a postage-stamp sized bathroom in platzkart over a several day trip.

    I told another group of Russians from Moscow. “What is it you like about it?” they asked, perplexed. “The smell?”

    I told my Russian teacher, and now every time I change cities she asks whether I travelled platzkart, and then laughs her head off. Of all my Russian friends, she is the kindest to platzkart and can understand why I choose to travel that way – but she still finds it hilarious that I’m such a big fan.

    Each wagon in platzkart contains 54 beds. Half of them are lower berths, and half are upper. At the beginning of the journey, everybody sits on the lower berths. As evening approaches, passengers roll out a provided mattress pad and make the beds with the provided linens.

    Platzkart upper berths

    Platzkart from above, before making the beds.

    Platzkart doesn’t really smell. (There was one time the toilet broke, but that was just once.) Yes, if you have back problems or are a light sleeper, or are taller than 5’6/168 cm or so, platzkart might not be for you. The berths are usually a bit hard, sometimes people snore, and people will probably bump your hands or feet if they stray a few centimeters off the bed, which is easy to do because the beds are only about 170 cm.

    The pros outweigh the cons though. Platzkart is a great social mixer. Spending 12, 24 or 36 hours in the same space with no internet starts conversations flowing. I’ve met missionaries, political scientists, tourists, a girl who moved to Azerbaijan for love (yikes), people who grew up in the train’s destination, and so on. Platzkart holds people captive and all but forces them to exchange stories. Half the time I leave platzkart, I leave with a phone number of somebody who lives in that town. “Give me a call if you need help,” they say. “Really, if anything goes wrong, just call.”

    That’s not to mention the funny things you witness in platzkart. The woman who was trying to get 20 packs of diapers across the border without paying duty? Well, the whole train had to wait, but only the folks in platzkart were able to laugh because we were the only ones who knew what was going on.

    In platzkart, people have shared their food with me, given me advice about travel, patiently corrected my broken Russian, invited me to breakfast in their homes, and promised to help me celebrate my birthday. They have also provided me invaluable information about the cultures of my destinations, things I might not have learned only by travelling to the destination because conversations are more difficult to start when people are not forced to occupy the same space. In fact, a few of my upcoming blog posts started as conversations in platzkart.

    Platzkart is also the safest way to travel as a woman travelling alone in the ex-Soviet Union. It is possible to buy a bed in a four-berth (kupe) or two-berth (lux) cabin, but unless you are travelling with friends, it only means that you will be sharing a cabin with one or three strangers instead of 53. In platzkart, not only will 52 people hear if something goes wrong, stealing is more challenging because everybody keeps an eye on others’ stuff.

    In the upcoming weeks and months, I am planning a series of posts inspired by platzkart conversations. Stay tuned.

    *A marshrutka is to the post-Soviet world what a dolmus is to Turkey.

  • Georgian Food I: Acharuli Khachapuri

    Khachapuri is a pride and joy of Georgian cuisine. Many varieties of khachapuri are available in Georgia, but this version, known as acharuli khachapuri, is particularly popular. Georgian chefs create a base of bread, fill it to the top with salty cheese, and top it with an egg – nearly raw – and copious amounts of butter.

    There's so much butter you can't see the egg.

    There’s so much butter you can’t see the egg.

    Acharuli khachapuri sounded like a heart attack on a plate, so I went in with some trepidation. I knew it would taste good, of course, but didn’t want to be sick.

    I considered washing it down with a bottle of red wine to stave off heart attack, but decided that if nausea was not the goal then this probably wasn’t the best idea.

    Although I didn’t eat enough of this thing to feel nauseated, fifteen minutes after leaving the restaurant my hand broke out in tiny water-filled blisters. Maybe it was a bit too much for my system after all.

    Still, if you go to Georgia, go with a friend or three and share one. It’s worth trying at least once, blisters or no.

  • Honey, I Trusted You

    Real or fake?

    Real or fake?

    A few weeks ago, I found myself in the east of Turkey, quite literally on the road to Damascus. And while I wasn’t struck blind and motivated to turn my back on Phariseeism, and while the readership of these epistles remains quite miniscule (alas!), the road had at least one thing to teach me.

    I discovered fake honey.

    One of my travelling mates got stung by a bee as we were buying fruit by the roadside. We were far away from any pharmacy, so I suggested she put a bit of honey on it to reap the anti-bacterial and anti-inflammatory benefits.

    The owner of the stand by the road got wonderfully excited that his services were being called for and said, “You need honey?! I’ve got all kinds of honey! Real honey, fake honey, whatever you need!”

    Fake honey? This was the first I’d heard of the thing.

    The Road to Damascus

    The Road to Damascus. The fake honey stand is barely visible on the right.

    I assumed that fake honey was another word for syrup, which can be made by dissolving large amounts of sugar and flavouring into water. But I turned out to be mistaken.

    A few weeks later I met a guide at a Georgian monastery. As he was leaving, the guide told me, “The tour group and I are going to buy honey now. They make the stuff they’re selling here, so it’s guaranteed to be the real thing. Not that fake stuff you get all the time in the stores.”

    And again, I thought, “fake honey? Really?” So I said, “Fake honey? Really? How do that make that?”

    “They put sugar out for the bees, so the bees make the honey out of the sugar and not out of pollen.”

    I didn’t know you could even do that. Was this common knowledge? I’ve never heard anybody in Canada or the United States talk about this. I would even have gone so far as to say that we don’t have this in Canada. So I said, “Wow, really? I’ve never heard about that in Canada.”

    And the guide, bless his heart, shook his head ruefully and said, “You guys are so honest.”

    In Armenia, I asked a Russian woman from my guesthouse if they have fake honey in Russia. She said, “Of course! Actually, I was talking to a guy who made it once about how he did it. They mix different kinds of honey to get different flavours and sometimes they add different things to flavour or colour the honey. In Moscow, we have honey stores where you can buy all kinds of honey – even eucalyptus honey, which is impossible because eucalyptus doesn’t even have flowers [actually, eucalyptus trees do have flowers, according to google, but the point stands – she knew way more about fake honey than I did.] It’s impossible to have two different-tasting honeys that come from the exact same region, so if you see something like that, you know at least one of them’s a fake.”

    Beehives in Northern Armenia

    Beehives in Northern Armenia

    Ah, but how to tell whether one of those hypothetical types of honey was unadulterated? Now that I knew honey could be faked, I had to know how to tell the real thing from its fake counterpart.

    The Russian girl didn’t know. The Georgian guide told me something about real honey and fake honey reacting differently when set on fire, but when I googled it to verify, all the sources seemed to indicate that this is pretty much a myth.

    When I googled “fake honey” in North America, almost all the information I found was about honeys containing additives such as corn syrup, and very little about feeding bees sugar. Is this something that North American beekeepers do as well? What actual effect does it have on the honey? Is the honey less healthy because of it? Or is the process by which the raw sugar is converted to honey similar to the conversion of pollen, rendering the sugar-based honey at least calorifically similar to pure honey?

    I’m assuming that we also have fake honey in North America, considering the fact that much of our honey is produced in other countries such as China, but would like to know more.

    Does anybody know anything about this?

  • Till Divorce Do Us Part

    When I first arrived in the Caucasus, I stayed at a guesthouse run by a Georgian man in his late forties or fifties. Over a dinner of potatoes, alcohol, coffee, and cigarettes, he popped the question.

    “So, when’s your wedding going to be?”

    I answered as I always do. A noncommittal shrug and a “No idea.”

    It struck a nerve.

    “You have to get married! When I was your age, I already had my daughter! You’re 23 already! If you don’t hurry up, you’ll never get married!”

    What does one say to this stuff? Fortunately, it didn’t matter. After telling me that the end of my period of eligibility was nigh for a while, he asked a question that I could answer.

    “Do you have a boyfriend?”

    “No. No boyfriend.”

    He looked crestfallen.

    “Have you ever had a boyfriend?”

    Fortunately I have had a few boyfriends and was able to assure him that my current lack of prospects has little to do with my ability to attract men in general. I then explained that none of my boyfriends had worked out and that if I did marry I would want to be with somebody that I would be happy to call the father of my children because, if I have them, it’s important to me that I give them the best.

    Suddenly, the entire tone of the conversation changed. He said, “Good for you!”

    It was a first conversation in a series about the culture of marriage and divorce in the Caucasus. I get asked if I’m married and when I plan to marry a lot here, much more than I do in Turkey. From what I have gathered, people in Georgia and Armenia tend to marry young – around 20 – and women are considered rather old to be married around the age of 25. But people who refuse to live in a bad marriage appear to be respected. It’s strange.

    In Tbilisi, I met a woman at a guesthouse I was staying at. I would have pegged her at around 32. A man around my own age came into the kitchen. Since this woman lived with her parents, I took him to be a brother.

    “This is my son,” she said.

    I looked confusedly from one to the other, and then curiosity got the better of me.

    “How old are you?”

    “I’m 36,” she said. “And my son is 22. I got married when I was 13 and had him when I was 14.”

    “Are you still married?” I asked.

    “No!” she said. “I only lived with that husband for about one year, but it was enough time to have a baby. When I got married, it was the old days. Everybody got married very young. And I didn’t know nothing – about sex, about being a mother, about love. The marriage was arranged, so I just went and then I hated it. But – and now it is not like this – in those days people talked. If I left my husband people would say that I wasn’t a virgin and that nobody else would marry me. But I was so unhappy that I called my parents and said, ‘If you don’t let me come back home, I will take my baby and move to Europe.’ So they said that I could come back home. It used to be very bad. Even when I asked my mother if she loved my father when she got married, she said no. But now I have a second husband and he is younger than I am and he has helped me live like I’m younger.”

    In Yerevan, I met a woman at the post office. She asked me where I was from and then started telling me about her children. One of them lived in Brazil, the other in Moscow. “I love to travel,” she said. “And it’s hard when you have kids, but now that my kids are grown up I can. And it’s so good that you are travelling now and that you are able to take advantage of your youth.”

    I asked, “Are you married?”

    She said, “I’m divorced,” as though it were a point of pride.

    “I married my husband when I was 20, and I was far too young, but in our society we got married that young. A girl that young – she wants to go to the theatre, to go travel, but I was just married. And I divorced my husband when my kids were 8 and 6. I took them by myself and it was hard – very hard. But I gave them a very good education, and now they both speak English very well and have very good jobs. My daughter went to the American University, which was the best university she could go to, and she is married but she is waiting longer to have children. She is only 28. She has some time. It is better, I think. When my kids tell me that now I can have my own life, I tell them that I am older and it’s not the same as having a life when you’re young. I still feel like I missed out on having youth.”

    In Ijevan, I met a two women, neither Armenian. One was Swiss but lives in Armenia; the other, Lena, was on vacation from her home in Moscow. The two reported also being frequently asked about whether they would soon be married.

    Lena said, “At first I would say no, and they would say, ‘No! You shouldn’t think like that! You’ll be happier if you’re married and it’s getting late for you. Why don’t you want to be married?’ So then I started telling them I was divorced, which I am, and the conversation completely changed. People reacted more like ‘respect for getting out of your shitty marriage’ or ‘men are such complete morons,’ or ‘we understand you.’”

    These three conversations were fascinating to me. I wouldn’t have expected the two attitudes to coexist in this way, nor do I understand how a society where people seem to understand why living in a bad marriage is not ideal seem to still promote young marriage. Or perhaps they don’t. Perhaps these conversations are the natural outcome of a society in transition, where people cannot figure out whether their culture is in favour of the old way of doing things or the new.

  • Expats’ Relationship with Georgia and the Georgian Relationship with Russia

    The day I arrived in Tbilisi, I dropped my bags where I was staying and went out to walk around aimlessly. Soon I was approached by a man who asked me if I wanted to have a drink with him and his friend because “I looked alone.”

    After asking whether they were creepy and receiving the necessary assurances that they were not, I sat down. The two turned out to be from Cyprus; one worked in Georgia, and the other was vacationing. Later, two 18-year-old German girls who were doing a social-service gap year in Tbilisi joined us. I, sandwiched between three expats and one other vacationer, did my best to gauge what Georgia was all about.

    Fortunately for me, conversation soon turned to life in Georgia, specifically what was backwards about it. As the conversation continued, the sense of incongruity that had followed me since I arrived in Georgia became more and more disorienting.

    Cypriot: “It’s so bad that people don’t recycle here! Even when I was living in Turkey, they recycled.”

    (Note: I have never seen anybody recycle in Turkey, and I’ve been to almost every major Turkish city except Antalya. Dear Turkish friends, please enlighten me as to how I’ve managed to miss the thriving Turkish recycling scene.)

    German girl: Oh yes. It’s SO bad! In Germany we have a place for paper, glass, plastic, and metal. Here they are not even separating their GLASS!

    Cypriot: There is not even a company for them to give their recyclables to! Back in Turkey ten years ago we were separating our recycling.

    German Girl 2: I even saw a German product here that had a sticker on it that said that you would have gotten money back for it in Germany!

    Ah yes. Quite terrible.

    The next topic was pharmacies.

    Cypriot: It is so terrible that you can just buy things here without a prescription! It’s very dangerous to take drugs without having them prescribed by a doctor.

    (Note: This is the same Cypriot who lived in Turkey, where you can also buy drugs without a prescription.)

    German girl: Yes, this is very dangerous! They should make going to the doctor necessary before you get a prescription.

    Me: Uh, but maybe it’s better for the pharmacists to do the counselling for some more usual drugs. Like I don’t know that it should be necessary to have to go to the doctor to get a birth control subscription.

    Cypriot: Yes, but this is very dangerous. They should really change this.

    I don’t disagree with them. At home I’m an avid recycler and I generally support the prescription before purchase system. Still, having had no time to engage Georgia, something about the conversation rubbed me the wrong way. It was as if we had collectively decreed that Georgia should be exactly like us without understanding why Georgia wasn’t exactly like us.

    Later that night, I my host in Tbilisi invited me to a Couchsurfing meeting. He ended up not showing up for two hours after he said he would be there, so seated myself next to two Georgian men. The first was small and full of intensity, the second other taller and calmer.

    Guy 1 spotted a gay couple being openly affectionate.

    Guy 1: Oh, they shouldn’t be doing that! They’ll get beat up. You can’t be different in this country. Can’t be openly gay here! No way.

    Guy 2: There’s lots of openly gay people in Tbilisi…

    Guy 1: Nope, sucks to live in Georgia. People earn no money. Unemployment is 80 percent.

    Guy 2: Unemployment’s only about 40 percent

    Guy 1: And the borders aren’t open. Russians can come here, but Georgians have a huge amount of difficulty going anywhere.

    Guy 2: Things are getting better

    Me: If Georgians could emigrate, do you thing they would?

    Guy 1: If you told Georgians right that they could go to Europe, that they could go to Germany or Switzerland, Tbilisi would be ghost town tomorrow.

    Guy 2: Makes small, almost imperceptible noise of protest, then shuts up.

    Guy 1: Russia just keeps fucking with Georgia. Russia is like an evil child with a bag of toys. Instead of distributing the toys, Russia just can’t let go of the handle of the bag, which is Georgia. And the government supports them.

    Guy 1 started to talk to somebody else, so I asked Guy 2 what he thought. His evaluation of the situation painted a rosier picture, although I’m not sure if I would have found it rosy if I had not first listened to Guy 1.

    “Well, there are a lot of difficult things in Georgia, it’s true. Peoples salaries are low, for example. And the most recent government is very pro-Russian. But in general things are getting better. When I was growing up in the 90s, it was during the war. And it was just people in the streets with guns killing each other. And everybody was poor. My parents were academics and we were as poor as everybody else. Now, things have gotten a lot better. We’re not at war with each other any longer. In 2011, the unemployment rate was only 21%. Now that we have this pro-Russian government it has gone up to 40%, but I am hopeful that the next elections will give us something better. But the biggest problem we have to solve in Georgia now is lack of education. People really aren’t educated and so they don’t know how to solve their problems.”

    Finally, my Couchsurfing host showed up with a Dutch girl who was a prolific traveller and somewhat familiar with Georgia.

    Dutch Girl: It’s true that people make very low salaries – not so much in Tbilisi, but definitely in the country. Day to day it’s fine, as people typically grow or farm their own food. But if you have to go to the doctor, you’re screwed.

    Aha! Perhaps it is better for Georgian pharmacies to offer drugs without prescriptions, at least for now.

    I still had one burning question though. What does it mean that the unemployment rate is 40% or 80%? Is that percentage of the population that is not working, or is it the percentage of people who want to be working who are not working?

    Later that evening, in conversation with my Couchsurfing host, Russia came up again.

    CS Host: Oh, Russia is a very big shit. They think they own Georgia and all the post-Soviet countries. They have this imperialist attitude. Like, all people who come from those great imperialist countries have it. France, the U.K. It is all a big shit. But I am mostly hosting girls from Russia.

    Wait-what-why? Why would you do that if you hate them so much?

    Me: Why do you host people you don’t like?

    CS Host: I must understand their psychology!

    Me: And what have you learned?

    CS Host: They are talking like parts of Georgia are part of Russia! Like Abkhazia is part of Russia! And they are talking about Sochi and they are not even KNOWING that Sochi was normally part of Georgia! Or they are unwilling to say that all of these places are part of Georgia – like they don’t say it’s part of Russia either, but they won’t say that it’s part of GEORGIA!

    You may be surprised to learn that writing this blog doesn’t pay the bills, so I spend a lot of time teaching English lessons on Skype. My greatest student-base comes from post-Soviet countries. And while I don’t think any of my students would advocate any kind of return to the Soviet era, many of them display a certain nostalgia for the Soviet period, especially in the area of education, which was apparently not bad and free.

    Not so in Georgia! So far I have uncovered no trace of nostalgia.

    Intrigued by these conversations (and their intensity), the next day I decided to go to the museum of Soviet Occupation.

    The museum of Soviet occupation is composed of pictures of martyrs in the struggle to free Georgia from Soviet occupation. Wall text is in Georgian and English, not in Russian, even though most tourists to Georgia are Russian speaking. A short video juxtaposes clips of protesting Georgians with clips of Russian bombers during the 2008 war and compares them to Hungarian protestors of 1956. That is pretty much all there is. I didn’t even see any discussion of collaborators.

    I can’t blame Georgians for their feelings about Russia. But coming from Canada, where one of the cultural features is a certain non-intensity, these conversations were at once intriguing and uncomfortable. The idea of hosting people you dislike in order to understand their psychology seems distinctly unethical, and the intensity of the feeling towards Russia is alien to all my cultural identifications. On the other hand, I still really don’t understand this country. The pieces of the puzzle have not all fallen into place, and my erstwhile sense of incongruity and disorientation remains.

  • Impressions of Georgia

    Being so close to Turkey, I expected Georgia and Turkey to be similar and for Georgia to feel familiar. However, while market merchants were hawking the same vegetables, and although I could still hear many people speaking Turkish in the streets, Georgia seemed suddenly, incongruously, European.

    IMG_2737

    As I formed my first impressions of Georgia, this feeling of incongruity remained. I’d stumbled into a perplexing almost-version of what I knew of Europe. The gorgeous buildings were there. The cheap alcohol was there. The people walking around in short dresses were there. Other details, however, seemed distinctly un-European, and the first of these was traffic.

    My first day in Georgia I stood perplexedly at the corner of an intersection watching the cars go by. It was a basic T-intersection, the sort that might have qualified as a four-way stop in Canada had there been stop signs and less traffic going through it. As I watched, four cars approached the intersection, all turning left. For a moment, all four drivers hesitated. Then they all turned left at the same time. Simultaneously arriving at the middle of the intersection, they formed a roughly swastika-like formation that turned on itself until all the cars had successfully found themselves going in their desired direction.

    Nobody died. Hurrah.

    I thought that Turkey had taught me to cross the street aggressively, but I was wrong. For one thing, Turkish roads are generally narrow and congested. This means that you have less space to cross, and cars are moving more slowly. Also, Turkish people, even perfect strangers, are always looking out for me.

    Georgia’s cities, however, have wide boulevards with few traffic lights. To cross a street in Georgia, I walk into traffic and stare down drivers as if I’m daring them to try running me over. If I manage to make it halfway across the street and no opening presents itself in traffic going the other way, I stand on the median line and wait for a driver going slowly enough that I can make eye contact.

    Rinse, repeat. Rinse, repeat. I am convinced that the more aggressively I pose myself the more likely a car is to stop, but the experience is terrifying.

    Sunrise over the Georgian mountains at the Batumi train station.

    Sunrise over the Georgian mountains at the Batumi train station.

    I have now been in Georgia for a few days, and my sense of incongruity is growing. Georgia is a beautiful country with lush forests, spectacular mountains, delicious food, great architecture, big-name designer stores, and hospitable people. It has all the ingredients for a relaxing vacation. Yet there is an undercurrent of tension. I don’t understand what I’m seeing, and two weeks is not long enough to learn, but I’ll do my best.