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.
One of the most central societal values and structures in Turkey is the notion of hospitality. In a society that loves flouting the rules, one unwritten rule cannot be disobeyed: you must treat your guests well. Turkish people consider themselves very hospitable, and even if an Turkish person is less than talented in the art of receiving guests, he or she will still claim hospitality because being inhospitable is culturally shameful.