Check out this new site, SOS Georgia. It's surprisingly well done. Apparently, it's backed by some guy who used to make video games and now lives in Georgia, which seems odd, but whatever.
It's running huge, graphic ads in the Economist this week and its billboards are all over Tbilisi.
Here are some of the posters they've created:
Revoke the Games Via We Georgians
I was thinking of initiating a boycott of Russian goods and services, then it occurred to me: I can't think of one Russian product I want to use in the first place!
I hope this turns out better than all evidence suggests it will, but if you're curious what Tbilisi is like under Russian bombardment, Carpetblog friend Wu Wei is on the scene and
contemplating the mechanics of evacuation.
I am having a really hard time imagining Tbilisi -- lazy, decrepit Tbilisi -- under attack by Russia. I took that photo of the old city, which always looks like a warzone even without the help of the Russians, in February. I have to say I am glad that Georgia has the pipeline, compelling people other than us to care.
You certainly should! Carpetblogger and the Beirut Correspondent headed up to 
the Caucasian village in Georgia two summers ago and had a great time hiking around
the Holy Trinity Monastery, listening to polyphonic singing and falling into pits filled with sheep heads.
Hans at Kaukasus alerted us to the helpful, well-written site Kazbegi in the Caucasus that details all the homestays in the villages located around the 5000 meter (16,500 feet) Mt Kazbegi. It includes great details that remind me why Georgia is such a bad-ass place to travel, such as:
"At the time we visited the homestays in Jutta, the village didn’t have any phone coverage. That’s why there are no phone numbers listed, ask the locals! But try to remember the first name of your host—because the surname for all the people from Jutta is the same: Arabuli."
"The friendly family might want to give you their huge Caucasus dog as a present."
A giant Kavkaz shepherd is the perfect souvenir from a trip to Kazbegi!
Did this highly influential blog force a change in marketing strategy at our beloved World of Urine/Wine in Tbilisi?
On the left, August 2006. On the right, February 2008.
Surprisingly, there aren't that many museums or monuments to Stalin anymore. I guess killing more people than Hitler and drawing national borders that are still causing inter-ethnic bloodshed doesn't merit as much admiration as it used to.
Except in Gori, Georgia.
Located about 80 kms from Tbilisi, Gori probably doesn't
have much more going for it than it did when იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი (Ioseb Vissarionovich Jugashvili. If you haven't noticed, I love the look of Georgian script) was born there in 1878. For example, a lot of people still don't have running water in their apartments. Still, you grasp the tail of fame where you can and Gori residents embrace their native son more intensely than ordinary Georgians do, which is to say, pretty intensely.
I had heard the museum was lame so I wasn't disappointed to find out it, in fact, was. I was much more disappointed that I had to pay $10 for a ticket. (Full disclosure: this was my second visit to a Stalin museum. The first was in Batumi in 2006, described here. I didn't like Batumi.)
Built just after his death in 1953, it's a typical Soviet-style museum, in which a bunch of uncurated, unanalyzed crap -- newspaper articles and photos and random memorabilia -- is thrown up on the wall ("unanalyzed" is probably the kindest criticism of this museum. It's a lot like the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California in that sense).
Not only that, it's all in Russian and Georgian, it's freezing cold and museum ladies stop to stamp your ticket every time you enter a new room, even though you're the only one in the museum. Though you have to admit, their stamp is pretty awesome.
Neither of my Georgian colleagues had been in the museum before. One was excited to see it, the other less so. Naktia was particularly reluctant to have her picture taken in front of one of the multiple statues, suggesting that her hostility is a response to the repatriation of her grandfather.
"Repatriation?" I asked. "What does that mean?"
"Sent to the gulag," she responded. "No one heard from him again."
"That's a completely reasonable point of view," I said. "You're not cutting off my head in that photo, are you?"
But even she softened up a little when we got to the room with all the gifts Stalin received from his admirers within the empire Formerly Known as Evil. How could you not be impressed by carved chess sets from Tajiks? Ivory boxes from the North Koreans? Silk weavings from the Chinese? Wooden shoes with his and Lenin's face on them from the Dutch. Wait, what? The Dutch?
Naturally, I went straight to the personalized face carpets bestowed by Turkmen and Azeris. The Turkmen carpet was seriously beautiful, even if Stalin's features were oddly Asiatic. As gifts, personalized carpets really do stand the test of time, even for people who are not dictators. However, the going price for one these days in Baku is about $600 and I can't think of many friends on whom I'd spent $600 for a carpet. If they were dictators, maybe.
Disappointingly, the Stalin Museum has no gift shop. However, Tbilisi's flea market is one of the most reliable places for Stalin memorabilia, if you're in the market for that sort of thing. (Are you also in the market for Hitler memorabilia? That's what I asked myself after I bought a 1950's alarm clock with his visage on it in Tallinn. I told myself it will would add a bit of dictatorial balance, sitting next to my Mao alarm clock. But no, I am actually opposed to Hitler memorabilia. I realize this is incoherent. I guess I got a thing for dictators).
Knowing my taste for Georgian wine, my Georgian friend told me to watch out for a delivery he had sent over to my hotel. "Make sure they give it to you," he warned.
Having already purchased six bottles at my beloved World of Wine/Urine. I worried that I had already reached maximum capacity (Carpetblogger Travel Hint #1: half empty suitcases are convenient for transporting wine and carpets). If it didn't all fit, I figured I could always go local and drink a bottle before leaving for the airport at 3 am. Or on the plane.
A wine gift bag arrived and as I pulled the heavy, dark bottle out, dirty flakes of old label fell onto the bed. Capped with what looks like a heavy glob of dark chocolate, the bottle seems to have spent time in the ground or a dusty cave. A wood tag tied around the neck indicated the contents were vintage 1961 and "Rkatsiteli." The bottle leans slightly to the right.
From the Cradle of Wine, a blog devoted to Georgian wines, says this was one of the most popular varietals in the Soviet Union.
Rkaksiteli (pronounced "rkah-tsee-tely"; Georgian რქაწითელი; literally "red stem") is a variety of grapes grown along the Black Sea coast of Georgia, used to make dry white table wines of the Kakhetian style...
Rkaksiteli grapes are often blended with other grapes: with Khikhvi and Mtsvane to produce Rkatsiteli Khornabujuli wine; with Mtsvane to make the aged white wine Tibaani; with Chinuri and Chkhaveri for sparkling wine; with Saperavi and Cabernet Sauvignon for a semi-dry rose wine; or with Khikvi and Mtsvane for the fortified white port Kardenakhi. Rkatsiteli is one of the oldest varieties of grapes in the world; clay vessels have been found in Georgia with Rkatsiteli seeds dating from 3000 BC.
We can all agree that this is a pretty awesome gift. I do think there are some pros and cons to consuming a bottle of 47 year old wine made during Soviet times, however. Not that I doubt the skills of the mid-century Soviet winemakers in Georgia, but there's a reason why you don't see a lot of 1961 Volgas or Zhigulis on the streets any more. Other, more tangible considerations than "quality" and "longevity" frequently guided production decisions in those days.
But I think the best reason not to drink this is that it is history in a bottle. The early 1960s were the era of the Khrushchev thaw, when it began to become more OK to say that Stalin had made a few mistakes. The Berlin Wall went up. Khrushchev gave millions of landless peasants the right to migrate to the cities and built millions of gray, poorly made five-story apartment blocks ("Krushchyovkas") to house them, shaping the psychological landscape of Soviet cities for decades. In Georgia, dissident and first democratically-elected President Zviad Gamsakhurdia began resisting Soviet efforts to Russify Georgians. There was a lot going on when the wine was bottled.
Where did this wine sit out the stagnation of Brezhnev's 70's? Why wasn't it drunk by a Georgian looking over the precipice of the '80s? How did it survive the chaos, civil war and hardship of Georgia's first years of independence?
I think it has too many stories to drink.
Instead, it will sit on the shelf, next to the "Za Karabagh!" ("To Karabagh!) Jubilee vodka I bought in Baku (on the left) and the limited edition Turkmenbashi vodka from Ashgabat (in the green cylinder).
Just because I wasn't terribly kind to Batumi, or the mashrutka driver that delivered me from it, doesn't mean I don't love Georgia. Absolutely not the case. What's to love about Georgia? Here's a list:
Food: It's not Turkish, let's be 100% clear on that. But Georgians know how to combine simple ingredients like walnuts, spinach, garlic, tomatoes, onions and eggplant together so harmoniously it's like living on a higher plane and incredibly hard to replicate successfully beyond the border. HoM and I visited our favorite Tbilisi restaurant (World of Urine) twice.
It was about 1000 degrees in Tbilisi and the cafe is down in the wine caves, which made it even more appealing than usual. Its spinach balls are divine and the owner spent a lot of time explaining to me, using helpful hand gestures, that Abkhazani sausages are different, but just as good, as kupati. It's just that they're made of different contents of the pig's stomach. Or something like that.
World of Urine is also great because the old dudes there know their wine. If you say, "I need a good wine to take to Kazbegi," they can offer several suggestions. If you say you need a good wine to take to Baku, they'll politely suggest something sullen and dusty that tastes like ass.
Sans Souci is also a fantastic little cafe. The food isn't quite as good as World of Urine's, but it has wireless and sits right next to one of Tbilisi's ancient churches.
It's owned by Georgia's most famous puppeteer (puppets are surprisingly big in the Caucasus, so degrees of fame in this realm are plausible) who staged "The Battle Of Stalingrad: a Requiem" using puppets, which seems pretty ambitious to me. They served a fruity little summer red the evening we were there, making it awfully difficult to walk home.
Mountains: The Caucasus are like the Himalayas without the Indians! We traveled up to Kazbegi and I experienced pangs of regret at my failed mountain climbing career (so many careers, so many pangs of regret).
The view from my bed
If you've ever seen the old Lonely Planet Caucasus edition, the Holy Trinity Church on the cover is where we were. Unfortunately, the light was exceptionally harsh so the photos aren't that great.
Kazbegi is about 20 kms from the North Osseti...I mean, Russian, border. Vladikavkaz, a city with a great name, is just 27 kms away.
One of the best parts about hiking in the Caucasus is coming across a pit full of fresh sheep heads. While Holy Trinity church is of the Georgian Orthodox variety, just up the hill from it stand a little white shrine covered in melted candles and surrounded by empty vodka bottles, where Georgians come to sacrifice a sheep or a calf. There's a pit available for convenient head disposal nearby. I'm not sure where throwing the heads into a pit fits into the orthodox theology, but there are a lot of modern traditions that haven't really taken up there in those mountains.
Georgians: Georgians are hospitable, open, sexist, family-oriented, stubborn, headstrong, inscrutable, horrible drivers, fantastic cooks, hilarious -- everything you need for an entertaining visit. While up at Holy Trinity, I was fortunate to hear polyphonic singing. Georgians will break into song for any old reason, and that day it was a group of workers laying concrete at the church. It was the most otherworldly sound I've ever heard and I find it impossible to describe.
