Tbilisi is Neverland or Is World Travel Necessarily Meaningful?
This is the first photograph I ever took of Tbilisi.
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.”
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
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.