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WELCOME TO GEORGIA (THE 'ORIGINAL' ONE) - JUNE 14, 2003

As the plane climbed over the Manhattan skyline, all the phone calls I had meant to make and the emails I had meant to send became crystal clear to me in a heavy sort of way. I wanted to tell all the people we didn’t have time to see in the DC area that we so wanted to but that the time had been so incredibly short, and I wanted to tell them all at that very moment. Roger always says time is an odd commodity – and that is certainly no truer than when you have been waiting for months on the confirmation of a project when suddenly the government only gives you 2.5 weeks to pull it all together and get on that plane.

There was a full moon out my window on the overnight flight to Heathrow and it was kind enough to follow me from Vienna into Tbilisi the next night as well. It seemed a good omen, although I can’t tell you why.

Newark to Heathrow, Heathrow to Vienna, and Vienna to Tbilisi from Thursday afternoon to Saturday morning we traveled. We finally landed after ten final minutes of turbulent air at the Tbilisi International Airport at 4:50am, June 14th. For those of you who will visit us please consider absorbing the following paragraphs for your own amusement and reference.

To enter any new continent/world at 4:50 in the morning is to feel a quiet sort of anxiety grip your heart; feeling like a small child confronted by a big dog. You can’t see anything (except that moon), you don’t understand the language, you are trying hard to imagine what the countryside looks like (and your imagination is churning up all sorts of stuff that you will see the next day is quite inaccurate!), and you are so bloody tired that you can barely smile at the lovely man who has been kind enough to leave his wife in bed to sit in his vehicle out at the airport waiting just for you (and your 200 pounds of luggage).

We de-planed out the back of the aircraft, down the steps onto a dark tarmac (I suddenly understood why that moon seemed a good omen!) and Roger hollered over the noise to me, “Go to those VIP buses!” There was a large airport bus into which most of the plane’s passengers were squeezing, and then to the side there were two very old vans (of questionable safety) with “VIP” scratched into cardboard stuck inside the windshields. In the windy darkness a large blustery, middle-aged woman was yelling things in Georgian and occasionally English, “Are you on the VIP list”? I said yes, and climbed into the first van while Roger fished around in the bags for passports or something to prove we were on her list. It was obvious that the language issues were large: all her names where written in Georgian and whether our names sounded anything like what she had written for us will be a mystery forever. But we were getting into that “VIP” van, damned it!

Crushed into the back seat of the van in the dark, with our carry-ons piled on top of us, we waited while our shoe polish-brunette yelled to (at?) both the drivers a few times each, and finally climbed in with us. The driver kept stalling and was having trouble turning the engine over to start again (and again) before we finally began to move across the tarmac for parts unknown (the man next to us kept saying in English, “turn off the lights, turn off the lights.” Which would likely have helped the driver had he understood). While we rode, our blustery brunette collected our passports and our baggage claim tags. While I knew that this was all a legitimate set-up, there is nothing creepier than turning over your passports and your claim tags to someone you can’t communicate with in the dark in a place you’ve never been. I kept thinking what this would all be like in the winter or in the rain. It was suddenly too much to absorb at that particular moment.

So the “VIP” bus finished its very short journey to the “VIP” lounge that was located at one end of the airport at the top of some very wide, outside cement steps leading up to a brightly lighted room. We were instructed to wait for them to deal with our passports (we already had visas) and our luggage. And wait we did. The dark brown velvet (?), serpentine, high-backed banquette sofas were rather comfortable so we sat. And sat. And sat. Twenty minutes went by and we had our passports back in our possession (this is good, I thought, now I exist again) and we were greeted by a lovely, slightly balding middle-aged man who Roger identified as Tariel, a driver from the project and whom he greeted with a hug and big pat on the back. I love my husband. He makes people feel good. Tariel seemed glad to see us (perhaps because we had arrived when we were scheduled to have). After about 45 minutes, occasional vans began to stop out near the parking lot below the “VIP” lounge and unload luggage into a large steel mesh cage. None of it appeared to be ours, even after a number of vans. In fact, after some time and a number of vans, none of the luggage appeared to belong to the three jarheads waiting near us in civilian clothing either (and they didn’t seem very happy about that).

Although I did not want to seem ungrateful for our “VIP” service, I began to wonder whether it would not have been MUCH faster to pull all the luggage out of the plane there on the tarmac, bus us out to it and have us identify it (with our corresponding baggage claim tags, of course)? I wondered that aloud and Roger assured me that the chaos we were missing in the airport next to us was much worse and those folks were waiting even longer for their bags. I tended to believe him. This is not my first assignment in a developing country.

As the very last van pulled up to the steel cage near the base of our VIP stairs, we finally saw our four black suitcases, which had to be x-rayed before we could claim them. Tariel and Roger packed the bags into the 4x4 and off we finally went toward Tbilisi, as the sun was soon to rise.

Digression: Before we get to Tbilisi, I need to relate my first impressions of the Georgians I saw at the airport (not possibly, I believed then, a representational sample). The older women were carrying 50-100 extra pounds and the younger women were skinny as rails. Like the Bosnians and the Spanish, they all dyed their hair, sometimes a shoe polish black like that of the young pierced punks you might see in New York City or your local high school. Sometimes a deep, deep maroon that, in the right light, looked purple. The men (mostly drivers for the foreigners) were dark and serious, with shined shoes, trousers (no jeans) and buttoned-down shirts. The most popular color for both men’s and women’s attire was black; the second most popular color was black followed by very dark brown or very dark blue.

Most of the “VIP”s, like, uh, ourselves, were greeted by drivers, but a few entertained entire families (who had been allowed into the lounge by bribed gate-keepers). Besides the foreigners (all men, hmmmm, did I stick out?), most of the rest of the “VIP”s were Georgians who were indiscreet, dressed in what can only be described as disco-gone-bad, and behaved in an loud, look-at-me manner; I considered the term ‘mafia’. Roger said, “Of course they are, the upper class could never afford this”. New money (dirty money): you can try to paint the outside but the lack of ‘inside’ glares through the surface. And of course, they rode out of the “VIP” parking lot in their Mercedes SUVs, smoking like the Marlboro man.

On the road to Tbilisi in the early dawn, we could see the statuary (there is lots in Tbilisi and it is large and fantastic) the murals, the gas stations, and the crumbling communist apartment complexes (what a cruel thing the communists did, to make an artistic and cultured people live in buildings resembling, on a good day, cement blocks).

Tariel gave us a brief dissertation on the variety of license plates; which colors for which kinds of people. He also told us that he was an architect (“…but no work in my field here”), his wife an economist (“She is learning English, but my five years old son, he is very good English!”), and that he had worked for Doctors without Borders (both the Spanish and the original French versions), as well as a number of other development agencies, and spoke Russian, Georgian, English, Spanish and French. He was a lovely man with a kind and generous nature, and I suddenly wished him a job in his field, a wife happy in a job in her field, a big house, a new car, and everything wonderful in the world. And he, with the generosity of spirit bigger than the moon, eager to talk to us about his family. I was to learn that THIS is more of what the Georgians are really like: funny, kind, bright, and deliriously generous.

We pulled up in front of the Marriott after what seemed like a long, very bumpy ride (the original paving job on most of the roads seems to have been done in the 1950s and has not been paved again since), and checked in and moved like zombies up to our room. The bellhop who followed with our bags, initially had trouble getting the suitcases through the door (which would not stay open by itself). Thinking quickly, he used Roger’s computer bag to hold the door open and then move the luggage in. “A-ha, very smart,” I said to him with a smile, “you have done this before, maybe once?!” He looked at me and grinned with his eyes raised as if to say, “Once?”, and in an instant I said, “ok, maybe twice, am I right?” To which he responded, laughing, “yes, maybe twice!” I really like anyone with a ready sense of humor at 6:30 in the morning. This was going to be a good post.

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