Return to the Iron Curtain

Hello all,

I was writing to apologize in case I failed to respond to a recent e-mail or phone call -- in something of a sudden departure I've ended up in Spokje, Macedonia, en route to Albania. I should be back before Christmas, however.

Best to everyone,

Daniel

ps. Today was our first day in Macedonia and relatively uneventful so far. Sasha and I spent much of the morning searching for a place where our ATM cards could generate the cash necessary to purchase breakfast, as well as Internet time at this local cafe. Our on-hand funds had taken a severe hit last night when a linguistic misunderstanding resulted in an order-of-magnitude mistake in the price charged us by a taxi man driving us from Skopje International Airport to the city proper (in a surprisingly nice Mercedes.) Sasha looks bored in the seat next to mine so I will send a lengthier update from somewhere else. Take care.

Where They Drive on Both Sides of the Road

This little tale of my trip to a relatively obscure corner of the former Soviet bloc begins with two preludes.

Unfortunately, I tell them now for the second time. Five minutes ago, my Visor PDA--on which I am writing this account as I fly from Vienna to Chicago, and as the passenger next to me (a self-professed man of leisure) drinks himself to sleep on port--failed and reset itself. I have rotten luck, sometimes, when it comes to preserving my work. Sasha likes to say I enjoy a "unique relationship with objects." Perhaps. Now, I return to this particular object feeling the too-familiar pang of lost prose.

If all goes well, one rewritten prelude will detail the characters and context of my journey to Georgia, and the other will be about the second inauguration of a George Bush in Washington, D.C.

A caveat: the story of my actual travels will seem more a string of snippets than a steady narrative. They're easier to write, and besides, that way I can skip the boring parts (come to think of it, I'm not sure this trip had any boring parts--I guess we'll see in the retelling.)

* * * * *

There should have been three characters in this story, but Karen fled to Cappidocia early on, opting against Georgia in favor of a canned tour of Turkey. As for Sasha--twenty-five years old, married--Sasha speaks more languages than there are nations in Europe. On top of that, he is a true intellectual virtuoso, able to leap with equal fluency between topics like postmodern philosophy, political geography and the law, in all their painstaking particulars. I have seen him author three brilliant (if erratic) short stories, and wrestle his way through many challenging (and, again, erratic) business negotiations.

True, I often err on the side of exaggerating my friends' virtues. Sasha himself acknowledges a number of "imperfections" in his character, though he wouldn't term them anything such. Among them, a certain mathematical impotence, a complete inability to arrive anywhere on time, and a sardonic wit that can draw blood.

En Route to Tbilisi

I am on a bus with a Muscovian Jew who leaves tomorrow from Tbilisi to Los Angeles: quite a coincidence. He is instructing us to visit Israel--all Jews should, he maintains. At least, that's what Sasha says he is instructing us. It's handy to travel with someone who speaks about a third as many languages as there are countries in the world.

Nothing fits together here in Batumi, Georgia. The doors are larger than their frames, the streets than the town's population could possibly fill. At the restaurant where Sasha and I ate last night, there are four tables and five different kinds of chairs--in a space which could probably seat forty if it were efficiently used.

The local shopping mall sells the same thing on every floor, including a detergent named Barf. Down the street a farmer's market smells of fish and village capitalism.

Marathon Runners Who Date Young

There are three reasons why I haven't sent a travel update in several days (incidentally, if you haven't received any others, it's probably because I didn't have your e-mail address handy in Turkey or Georgia--directions on how to "opt in" to further updates, if you're interested, follow at the end of this e-mail.)

The first reason for the delay is that I strained a muscle in my left arm the evening before the trip--"a sure sign of aging," one DemiDec subscriber noted, with a grin--and that day by day, it grew worse lugging around the backpack, until a purple bruise spread from my elbow to my wrist. I've been trying to rest it by typing with only one hand. I can think of few better prescriptions for moderating the output of my muse.

The second is that after Tbilisi, I came across no computers until my final night in Istanbul, where I drafted the beginning of an update that I meant to complete the next morning at the Vienna airport. In Vienna, however, someone had broken the lounge's computer modem, so instead I wrote poetry for an hour. Not a bad use of time, really. In every country that I find / I find someone to leave behind / etc etc. It's hardly profound, as you can see, but then, few of my rhyming ditties are.

The last is that the lengthy update I did write on the airplane, using my Visor and portable keyboard, vanished in a haze of PDA operating system glitches. "Fatal error," the Visor proclaimed, as I wrapped up an introduction. "Mandatory reset." I'm not sure why it even bothered to advise me, since there was nothing to do at that point except turn it off and start from the beginning again. I still haven't deciphered what went wrong, though I rewrote a few bits and pieces later in the flight. Mind you, I had used some frequent flyer miles to upgrade to business class, so at least a six-course meal and lots of fresh orange juice helped assuage my sadness at the lost prose.

The passenger next to me was forty years old and had never worked a job. "I'm a traveler-philosopher," he assured me (this turned out to mean he had secured a large inheritance in his teens.) "And my girlfriend is a flight attendant." Said girlfriend dropped by a few minutes later--a recent high school graduate who bowed once, twinkled her eyes at us, then rushed back to the other cabin to demonstrate safety regulations.

"My girlfriends are always young," noted the traveler-philosopher, perhaps to preempt any questions I might pose about their very evident age difference. "This is the third. But I try not to make decisions for them, you know? I show them where the crosswalks are in their life, but not which streets they ought to cross."

"Nicely put," I said, politely, and didn't ask anything about his policy on jaywalking.

* * *

I plan on returning to bed now -- it's about 3:30 am -- in hopes of catching a few hours of sleep before the sun rises. I understand they adjusted the clocks by an hour in California while I was gone; for me that was lost in the general backwash of the 12-hour time difference between here and Georgia.

In the morning, I hope to complete the travel update I wrote on the airplane--reconstructing the lost portions.

Some things I'll try to cover:

-- how I spent the day with a Turkish televangelist

-- how I broke custom at a Georgian glass-eating party
-- how Chechnya looks from the other side of the border

-- how I was assaulted by an angry Abkhazi refugee

-- how Sasha and I learned firsthand that it is possible to overdose on cherry juice

A Secondhand Republic

In a smoky Internet "cafe" in Tbilisi, Georgia. Internet cafes seldon serve coffee--or anything at all--but the name has stuck. Only have about a minute left here before the smoke overwhelms me and the sun sets outdoors (I want to watch the sun set over the Caucasus mountains) so I wanted to check in with just a few words before writing something more substantial either later from this same place or in a couple days from Baku, in Azerbaijan.

So much to share... a few highlights:

-- I've now learned firsthand some reasons why communism, at least as executed in the Soviet Union, was an idea so bad it bordered on--no, crossed into--the absurd. Batumi, the first city I visited in Georgia, across the border from Turkey, looked as if it had recently been pillaged in a war. Everything was literally gray and collapsing: buildings, streets, cars, kiosks...

Here in Tbilisi, the population seems to be shaking off the gloom, but only slowly, and everywhere I can see bits of communism's legacy. One example: there was no incentive to use space in commercial buildings efficiently, since no one paid rent. The average restaurant is palacial in scale and has four tables. The department store has five floors, 50% functioning escalators, and features bored babushkas (older Georgian women) sitting behind counters where consumers must ask to see merchandise (there's no browsing the shelves here.) There are about four babushkas to every one shopper. And about 60% of the ground is bare.
There's also no inventory in the back. Everything for sale is visible right away.

-- Spent time in an Eastern Orthodox Church and in a synagogue today. More on this later. Outside the Church, a shop sold "super totalizators." No idea what they are; the door was closed.

-- People drive on both sides of the highway here. "The British influence moderated through the Ottoman Empire," suggested Sasha. Perhaps. There's nothing like the adrenaline rush of driving full-bore at oncoming traffic in a thirty-year old Lada.

-- The bus I was in crashed yesterday, into a car heading the opposite direction, of course. No one was hurt, we lost only half a front bender, and everyone continued on. The police, who were driving behind us escorting a Briggs-like money truck, ignored the incident.

-- At the home where we're staying, the owner knows two words of English: no problem. This is quite reassuring and also very reminiscent of Jamaica.

-- Used a toilet in the basement of what appeared to be a mosque converted to a sulfur bathhouse. Enough said.

-- Batumi was so war-torn that even the babies seemed sad. Not kidding here. The scariest thing is that the city one hundred miles up the coast *is* war-torn, and I have no idea how much worse it can be. In fact, the country is teeming with refugees from that particular province, named something like "Abkhazia." This sounds suspiciously like the prison in those Harry Potter books.

-- Lonely Planet refered to Batumi as a "beachside resort." I observed as we walked toward the stone-colored waters of the Black Sea, that it was more a "beachhead of last resort"--indeed, about the only non-gray thing in town was an out-of-place market with gilded walls laden in Baroque art. It, too, had about six employees, and no customers.

-- Breakfast in Batumi was baked pizza dough filled with a lightly-fried egg and topped with a slab of butter. Yum.

-- The people at the border wanted a bribe, but eventually one pinched my cheeks and let us through.

-- The public market was great fun--about the only bustling place in Batumi. We were the first tourists that the town had seen in longer than anyone could remember, and so were treated to lots of free samples, Priceclub-style, and repeatedly asked if we were sailors.

-- In Trabazon, on the Turkish side, high school students named Volcan and Durak invited the two of us to visit their campus on guest speakers on America. "Our school is very historical," they said. We went with them, of course, and had a great time--until the headmaster discovered we were interrupting the normal flow of the school's premiere English class, and promptly expelled us.

-- Met the Georgian consulate in Northern Turkey yesterday. He was, among other things, a chain-smoker, who glared at Sasha and me suspiciously when we asked him for a via.

-- People move into buildings as each floor is completed, producing the incongruous appearance of laundy hanging to dry off the third floor balconies while cranes and somber men work to assemble the next floor up.

Time to depart. I'll be sure to send more along at the next opportunity.

Tomorrow we may head for the Russian border along the Georgian Military Highway, but in light of visa issues and a certain degree of violence in Chechnya, we should stay in Georgia for the time being.

The March to Tbilisi

Another sleepless night, first at dinner, then at tea, then waiting for my plane; I dare say DemiDec is good practice for travel in Turkey.

At this very moment, I'm at Morat's place--Morat is a Turkish innkeeper who makes a wicked apple tea--checking e-mail while waiting for my 5 am shuttle to the Istanbul airport, from which I will fly to Trabazon. In Trabazon, Sasha plans to meet me at the Georgian consulate. Last time we visited a consulate or embassy together, in Venezuela, I suffered a concussion, and have never looked at ceiling beams the same way since.

Estimated time to get Georgian visas: about two hours. This evening we should cross the Turkish-Georgia border. Karen has opted out of this phase of the trip, and is headed instead to see some lunar landscapes in Central Turkey. At dinner, a local Internet millionaire--referred to as Mr. Gates by most folks at the restaurant, though only jokingly, I presume--took a liking to me, or at least to my cap, and paid for my fish dinner. Karen's, too.

Fended off an avid shoe polisher and a determined rug salesman today as well.

The Only Man in Istanbul

I was the only man in Istanbul, though I did pick up a stray cat outside a mosque. As the sun rose, more and more people filtered out onto the streets. Before long there was a call to prayer, and they all looked toward Mecca.

I think that's when I realized this place had little left of Constantinople in it. Even the great church ordered built by Emperor Justinian to celebrate his reign--and his admittedly tenuous reconquest of the Italian peninsula--is a mosque now. True, it's also a museum, and the curators are kind enough to refer extensively to the church's Eastern Orthodox past on the placards.

But I'm hardly the one to ramble historical about a place; after all, I'm still on leave--indefinitely--from a master's program in history (specifically, in the history and philosophy of science, which is full of relevance here in Turkey, near the cradle of Arabian civilization.)

So, before I run out to wake up my travel-mates, both of whom are still sleeping soundly, I thought I might share a few moments from the trip out here. A word of warning: few of them are actually improbable. That will come later, no doubt, after I cross the border into the former Soviet Georgia tomorrow afternoon.

* * *
On the Vienna Airport:

The escalators start as you approach them. This kind of technique might save power in California, but some reason no one has implemented it over there. Many of the women in their late teens and early twenties have red and green hair; they remind me of my sister circa 1995, though she favored purple and a half-shaved look.

* * *
On the Turkish Economy:

I knew something was wrong when I tried to change $200 into Turkish money.
"What is Turkish money called?" I asked the green-haired woman behind the counter (still in Vienna Airport.)

She licked her lips. "Turkish money," she repeated, as she ran her fingers over the wad of bills I had handed her.

"Yes," I said more slowly, resisting the urge to speak Spanish--for some reason, in other countries, even in Japan, I always need to resist shifting to my mother tongue. I wish sometimes the Spaniards had colonized more of the world, to make travel easier for me. Darn that Papal Proclamation that gave them only lands west of Brazil.

"What is it called?" I asked her again, holding onto my English.

She shrugged. "Just Turkish money."

"Ah."

Now she dipped her hands into a large box beneath the cash register, kept them there for a few seconds. "I do not have enough," she said finally, sadly. "I have only adequate to change 120 dollars."

"Okay." I glanced toward the departure gate. "That's fine."

She counted the Turkish bills out loud. "One million, two million, three million, four..."

I took the first bills. Each had six zeroes on it. I blinked.

I suppose that in Turkey, as in Silicon Valley, it is easy to be a paper millionaire.

* * *
On Oil Magnates:

I used frequent flyer miles to upgrade to business class en route from Washington to Vienna. Since I took up DemiDec, writing, and working for half-hearted Japanese companies, instead of becoming an investment banker or a lawyer, I generally fly Priceline-style, in the back of a plane. This was a nice change.

However, in my backpacking outfit, tope hiking boots ill-matched with a pair of black nylon pants, I didn't quite look the part--most of my fellow business class passengers could have been on their way to meetings or black-tie receptions, as far as I could tell.

The man next to me was very personable, until he realized this was my first time in business class on Austrian. What tipped him off? He seemed willing to accept my outfit, but when I asked the flight attendant to help me with the personal video monitor, thus evincing my ignorance, he fell silent. No matter. In an hour I had already learned all I needed to know about the oil industry in Kazhakstan, and I turned my attention instead to the Legend of Bagger Vance.

"Do you have a lot of money to throw around?" he had asked me, soon after I first took my seat. I had shrugged--maybe if I had already converted to Turkish currency I would have been able to answer in the affirmative, and a friendship would have been born.

I noted as I left the plane six hours after Bagger Vance disappeared into the sunset and Matt Damon won his golf tournament, that the man had manged to go one-quarter of a day without saying another word--even to the flight attendants, who communicated with him in a back-and-forth series of grunts.

* * *
On Water Pipes

Nothing of note here, except that I've never smoked anything before, so this was a pleasant and fragrant first experience. I kept referring to it as the peace pipe, because we sampled it as we debated our itinerary and tried to find a compromise that would please us all.

As for me, I'm rooting for Georgia, a bit of Baku (in Azerbaijan), and a dash or two of serendipity along the way.

Well, that's all from me for now. I better go wake them up and see if the peace pipe left them with a positive hangover. Internet-wise, I'll probably write again from Tbilisi. I hear it's the culinary capital of the former Soviet Union, and I imagine it has computers, too.