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