Budapest!

Well, I only had a little under three days in Budapest (and in usual fashion, I spent at least some of that time berating myself for not getting out more and doing more) but looking back, I see that in that time I managed to:

meet up with friends for dinner (the Hungarian travel friends I met in the mountains in the north of Georgia!), attend a really big, fun board games night at a cool bar, see the big synagogue, see the castle (and the view of the city from up on the hill), walk along the Danube, ride Tram #2 along the Danube, cross the bridge to Margitsziget (Margaret Island) and wander there in the autumnal falling leaves and sit by the fountain that's bizarrely synchronized to rock music, see Andrássy Boulevard and Heroes Square (weird, too pompous, also what is that guy doing with that snake he's holding aloft?) and Városliget Park, see Parliament (huge!!), wander through the Central Market (so much paprika and garlic!), relax in the hot pool and cold pool and sauna and steam room at the Rudas Baths, hang out at the wonderful Cat Café (twice!), take a peek at couple of the famous "ruin pubs," eat pogacsa, eat langos, drink different kinds of palinka (fruit schnapps), learn that the Hungarian word for peach is "barack" and chuckle together with Hungarians about US president Peach Obama, eat palacsinta (which, in turns out, are basically synonymous with crepes, blintzes AND bliny – mind blown!), eat "something with poppy seeds" (another must-have recommended by a Hungarian friend), and discover a new favorite chocolate bar in Túro Rudi – chocolate around a filling of cheese curd (oh, Hungary, you and your "cheese curd" – sounds so gross, but is so delicious!).

Here are pictures:

Budapest

Pictures: More of Tbilisi

Some last sights and thoughts from Tbilisi – meals and friends, day trips and markets full of delicious fruit, and a visit to the school where Lisa teaches:

GEORGIA: More of Tbilisi

Pictures: Kazbegi (a.k.a. Stepantsminda)

Stunning days in Kazbegi (also known as Stepantsminda), high in the Greater Caucasus Mountains, just a few kilometers from the Russian border. Stunning. Did I mention stunning?

GEORGIA: Kazbegi

Location Migration

Left Tbilisi with a strange and almost tearful feeling in my stomach – I got very used to hanging around with Lisa, living in her life! It occurs to me only now that I don't think the two of us had ever spent so long in the same place before; even in all these years I've been in Germany, we've always lived in different cities, and for most of that time on opposite sides of the country. As always, her presence was good for me – we're such opposites, in some ways, but all the right ways. Note to future self: Make the effort to acquire a housemate, wherever I next live; it helps to keep me more balanced.

From Tbilisi, a five-hour bus ride through a dark, rainy night to Kutaisi, where the budget airline flies. Well, when I say five-hour ride, I mean four hours driving plus one hour to stop so the driver could hang out with folks he knows at a small restaurant somewhere along the road. Georgia!

On the ride to Kutaisi, linked back up with Tibor and Gabriella, two Hungarian travelers I'd met in the mountains in Kazbegi, in the far north of Georgia; we met and hiked together in Kazbegi, and quickly realized we were going to be on the same flight to Budapest a few days later! (I also ran into André and Lee, the other travelers I befriended in Kazbegi, again on the street in Tbilisi on my next-to-last day. I swear, Georgia's not actually that small!)

It was nice having friends to arrive at the airport with, stand in line to check in with, board the plane with. I'm so used to traveling alone, it actually feels strange and surprising to sit on an airplane next to someone I know.

Now I'm in Budapest, because it made for a convenient way station on the way back to Berlin, and in all these years in Europe, I'd never been. Yesterday: wandering parks and streets, enjoying the wonderful Cat Café (cats! everywhere!), then dinner and conversation with Tibor and Gabriella. About to go out again and keep checking out as much of the city as I can in my limited time.

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Cultural differences: I'm writing this while eating breakfast in the hostel kitchen. The kitchen's been mostly empty so far, but just now a guy wandered in, leaned in close to peer at my laptop screen and asked with friendly curiosity, "What are you doing?" And then seemed surprised that I was a bit taken aback by him peering at a stranger's computer without asking.

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Pictures from Kazbegi/Stepantsminda and my last days in Tbilisi coming soon!

Georgian Road Trip

Four-hour taxi ride to Tbilisi with seven people and a chicken scrabbling around in a box in the back seat; on the side of a mountain, where drivers pass each other madly around blind curves, a herd of cows ambling along at cow-pace, taking up an entire lane of a two-lane road. Cars passing cars passing cows.

Yup, must be Georgia.

Pictures: Batumi

Beautiful days on the Black Sea Coast:

GEORGIA: Batumi + Gonio

Pictures: David Gareja and Sighnaghi

A monastery on the foggy, breathtaking expanse that makes up the Georgia-Azerbaijan border, an unexpected expat café in the middle of the steppe, a several-day jaunt into wine-making country, an outing with colleagues and many feasts. Days in David Gareja and Sighnaghi:

GEORGIA: David Gareja + Sighnaghi

Pictures: Tbilisi

Here's an album of pictures from my first week in Tbilisi! Good friends, cute cats, steep hills, gorgeous views, good food, all that sort of thing.

GEORGIA: Tbilisi

(Pictures from David Gareja monastery and the town of Sighnaghi will eventually follow...)

Life in Translation

The days I spent in Sighnaghi – a very small, very picturesque town perched on a hill in Kakheti, a wine-making region in eastern Georgia – were the first time in my life I truly wished I could speak Russian. I don't think I'd ever been in a place where Russian, not English, was an absolute given as the lingua franca that everyone speaks, fluently. It was pretty awesome! Even if it meant I couldn't talk to people...

("Why not speak Russian?" the guesthouse proprietor lamented at me more than once. I thought her English was perfectly adequate to the task, actually, but it was clear that her Russian is fluent – and if mine had been too, we could have had a conversation.)

The guesthouse and the family's home were one and the same, and both guests and family gathered all together at long tables in the dining room, so you couldn't help but fall into conversation with people. Over the course of my time there, I talked to an enthusiastic young Russian couple, a mother and daughter from Kazakhstan, a mixed group of Polish and Israeli travelers who hadn't known each other before but had simply been collecting new members in minibuses and at bus stops as they traveled along, a group of Israelis I played cards with, another group of Israelis I also played cards with, a Russian journalist from Yakutsk (coldest city in the world!), a couple of Germans who (unfortunately) fulfilled my stereotypes of German negativity, two fun young Polish women, some Slovenes who I was pleased to be able to tell that I'd actually been to the town they're from, another group of Polish women that included a woman who was celebrating her birthday so we all toasted to her, the Georgian relatives of the guesthouse owners... I'm probably forgetting a bunch of people. And of course Amanda, an American acquaintance and one of only two people I knew in coming to Georgia – she was a Russian professor back when I was at Oberlin, and now lives here!

The Russian journalist, Alexey, spoke quite good English, I thought, but whenever he wasn't sure of a word he would whip out his smartphone and type into some translation app he had, then show me the screen, which was kind of an amusing way to have a conversation! At one point (we were talking about my last name, which to my surprise he recognized instantly as Jewish – according to him, it's a common name in Russia!) he was asking me if my ancestors were Russian, and I said no, Eastern European but as far as I know not originally Russian, and he typed something into his app that came out in English as "All of Europe was Russian." Wonder if that's actually what he meant to say or not!

And today, back in Tbilisi now, I was in a little shop trying to find out if they sold envelopes (envelopes here are sold individually and thus very overpriced – the same way I remember bandaids being sold in pharmacies in India!); I did print out several pages of basic Georgian phrases at the start of this trip, but those phrases don't include "envelope," and I wasn't able to explain it in mime, either. So the woman in the shop called an acquaintance of hers who spoke English and handed me the phone so I could tell him what I wanted and he could translate. Now that's service!


Photos coming soon, I promise.

Georgian Modern Dance!

Lisa's neighbors, who I now firmly believe to be the fount of all things wise and wonderful (they also managed to charge Lisa's cell phone, when neither of her own chargers worked!), told us about a Georgian dance performance. Lisa really wanted to go, so I picked up tickets while she was at work. (And because this is Georgia, we ended up with third-row seats for a stunningly reasonable price.)

The performance was AMAZING. Modern dance, but with unmistakeable traditional Georgian elements worked in (like those big, dramatic jumping moves the men do). Endless gorgeous costume changes, music that fused traditional instruments with modern sounds. Oh, and a digeridoo. The whole effect was fantastic. I can't do it justice in words (and of course I didn't take pictures during the show), so instead here's a picture of Lisa and me inside the beautiful Rustaveli Theatre:

I'm out in rural eastern Georgia with very, very limited internet access (I finally found this one café with wifi and fell upon it eagerly, to catch up on a few things), so I have lots more pictures to share, but they'll have to wait until I'm back in Tbilisi.

Juice from Ukraine and Other Observations

Today at breakfast, I discovered that Lisa's carton of orange juice was from Ukraine. (The Cyrillic letters including an "i" with a dot on it gave it away, because Russian doesn't have an "i" with a dot, but Ukrainian does.)

It's fascinating to me to be in this place on the border between cultures and geographies, in between Europe and Asia. If I were in Thailand, say, I would simply expect everything to be different. Different fruits, different foods, and entirely different sources for where those things come from. But here, even though we're at the far end of Europe, lots of products in the supermarket are from Germany. Or presumably from Russia to the north of here or Turkey to the south. And then this Ukrainian juice! Easily transported here across the Black Sea, Lisa pointed out, so Ukraine actually makes good sense as a source of random grocery items.

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As is so often the case, this is a trip with multiple purposes; this is both "yay, interesting new country to explore!" and "boy, better use this month to get a serious start on researching and applying to grad schools, because otherwise it's going to be too late to meet the deadlines."

As is also, unfortunately, so often the case, I've been being really hard on myself. You know: I'm not going out and fully enjoying this great opportunity of being in Georgia, but I'm also not being effective at getting things done, what am I even doing with my time, etc. etc. (Was feeling this especially in the first few days. Am not very good at remembering that it's normal not to have gotten much done yet in a just a few days in a new place.)

After spending one day making some good progress on grad school research and the next day finally getting back to work on my maybe-it-will-someday-be-a-novel, I'm feeling considerably calmer. The trick is to hold onto that calm enough to keep staying focused and keep getting things done...

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Speaking of German things, today is the Day of German Unity (reunification of East and West Germany, 24 years ago) and Lisa and I are invited to a reception at the German embassy, with the ambassador. The perks of being part of a small expat community in a small land. (I also recently met the Icelandic ambassador in Berlin, speaking of small countries!)

Continuing Stray Observations

Accidentally bought what looked like it was going to be cherry-flavored yogurt, but instead was cherry-flavored cottage cheese. Very interesting. (Grocery shopping in another alphabet is always an adventure! The first time I tried to buy milk here, I ended up giving up and walking away without getting anything, because there were about 40 options and none of them made sense to me.)

I went and bought bread from the bakery woman again (a little basement corner redolent with the scent of wood smoke, from a little round wood-burning stove) and again she cackled with delight at my attempts to ask for bread in Georgian. Then I think she tried to tell me I was beautiful (Lisa said people here give compliments all the time, and her students are always telling her how very, very beautiful and smart and wonderful she is), but I'm only guessing, because I don't know the word. Then I said "madloba" (thank you) and she was super impressed. Well, come on, that much I can manage...

People smoke indoors here, unabashedly.

Just getting to the other side of the street can be quite the production, involving first finding then traversing a series of pedestrian underpasses, because traffic is mad and there aren't any traffic lights, so crossing the street itself is not really an option. These underpasses become basically small, underground shopping malls, lined with miniature stores selling clothes or food or electronics.

Oh, goodness, and these uneven streets of scattered stone, and the half-broken sidewalks, with women walking around on them in their super fancy clothes and little high heels. I don't know how they do it, and manage to stay both upright and not covered in dust.

There's a Georgian appetizer that involves wrapping one kind of cheese (cottage-cheese-ish, with herbs) in another kind of cheese (very thin, salty sheets of a mozzarella-like cheese). Cheese in cheese. Hee! Good fun.

The pigeons are unusually small and pretty. Maybe they're doves?

Acquaintances

In this city where I've only even met a few people so far, I keep running into acquaintances. Yesterday, it was Lisa's neighbor – she teaches German at the Goethe Institute, and I was there to return some teaching materials Lisa had borrowed from the Goethe Institute library, so not such a surprise. Just now, though, I ran into a friend of Lisa's, another teacher, when we simply passed each other on the street.

I like that. I liked it in Reykjavík, too, that it was a city small enough that I'd walk into a café and see somebody I knew (even though I only knew a few people). I love Berlin and will always love Berlin, but I'm definitely feeling ready to live in a small city or a college town again, in a country where people out and about in public actually talk to each other.