Food culture

Posted December 6, 2009, under Georgia
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The 24 hour restaurants are not busy at 6 in the morning but they still serve the full menu and the whole kit for anyone awake to eat it. I payed a visit to one of these god forsaken venues last night as they were cleaning up, chairs on the tables, half sleeping staff punched out by a table. The service was not bad for the late/early hour and compared to many places here in Tbilisi, including the up-market restaurants it would be considered really good service.

I have been working on the photos for a cook book on Georgian cuisine in one of the fancy restaurants in the old town by the river. The music played in this place has started to give grey hairs and full day head aches, it is really the very least attractive music available here in Georgia. They also follow a scheme where the volume is increased rather than the opposte when more guests arrive. anyhow we have managed to get some pretty fair photos of the lovely Georgian food.

Green bean sallad

Green bean sallad

stew

stew

click the images to get to my Flickr page for more photos.

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Magnum

Posted December 3, 2009, under Georgia
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A new photo book about Georgia just came out. It was an order from the Georgian president and as I have understood he wanted to show the bright sides of Georgia. He brought some of the Magnum photographers over to document the spring of 2008 in Georgia in a different way.

For sure the photos are different, but not in the way Saakashvili anticipated. There are a certain degree of questioning in the pictures that he did not like. Some beautiful and simple photos of Tbilisi was added in the beginning and the end to dampen the emotions the rest of the photos might stir up. It is also very comic that the georgian text in the book got mixed up with complete jiberish at the printing house and the first batch was decided to be donated to libraries. But at the end of the day, it is a beautiful book with text and photos far beyond. it is as always the very vanguard of photography, an inspiration for the mind and eye!

Regional meeting, greens from Sweden and the Caucasus got together to talk about the future

Regional meeting, greens from Sweden and the Caucasus got together to talk about the future

I have started a photoproject about the Green party in Georgia, the Swedish Green party is engaged in helping them and supporting them. Now as my time is mostly focussed on the food photos and the teaching I have only met them a couple of times, I think there is potential for some really interesting work here, they have a big challange facing them or many rather.

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SIDA and the football

Posted November 26, 2009, under New
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Diplomatic plates on the car and “pick up”-food from a french style bakery in the posh part of town. Equiped, with camera, a somewhat naive mindset and the sandwich i mentioned I came along for a ride out to a camp for Ossetian refugees. SIDA, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency, is funding part of this camp and they were invited to see a small football cup organized by the mighty energetic souls at the regional football association.

On a small field, the size of a basketball field, divided in three along the long side, three teams of 8-12 year old were playing at the same time. Energy and happiness, mixed with a dose of anger over some foul play filled the air. We had a tour of a school they built about a year ago and it was already cracking up since the builders did not let the concrete dry out enough. Same goes for the mostpart of the 2400 dwellings in the camp and people are not quite fit to do much. There are no jobs and the men and women gets depressed, more so the men it seems and when alcohol gets involved thing start to rott from within. It might seem worse to me due to the cultural role of alcohol but clearly these people are very unhappy. For many of them it is the second time they are displaced one of the SIDA workers tells me.

It is a mean feeling to look out over the field of identical houses stretching for hundreds of meters in each direction. The drive back to Tblisi is one filled with reflections over the dilemma of displaced people from all over the world. One of the more traveled SIDA men tells me about the camps in Lebanon, outside Beirut where people have been living since 1948, still holdning on to the key to the house they once left behind. Still hoping to go back one day.

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photos

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I tagged along when SIDA was invited to one of the Ossetian refugee camps outside Tbilisi. They are funding a local football association.

I tagged along when SIDA was invited to one of the Ossetian refugee camps outside Tbilisi. They are funding a local football association.

My brother came to visit, he looks better in kodak chrome, but B/W works!

My brother came to visit, he looks better in kodak chrome, but B/W works!

Me and my brother went to a small village outside Gori. Here we are disturbing an old man who is mustering his cows.

Me and my brother went to a small village outside Gori. Here we are disturbing an old man who is mustering his cows.

And we went to the Kaheti region in the east of Georgia. brilliant light, brilliant food and lovely people!

And we went to the Kaheti region in the east of Georgia. brilliant light, brilliant food and lovely people!

I have a new job taking photos for a cook book about Georgian food. this is katchapuri, a very representative dish.

I have a new job taking photos for a cook book about Georgian food. this is katchapuri, a very representative dish.

Food is a passion, thats for sure. I dont agree fully to the way the food is presented. it is very “Jante”, there is no ambition to make it beautiful to match the taste, of course with exception but today i was trying to photograph a fish that looked more dead than is pleasant.

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brother to bother

Posted November 24, 2009, under Georgia
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After a week full of exploring the city and its surroundings along with my brother who so brilliantly came to pay me a visit I have caught a small yet irritating feeling in my throat, many times correctly associated with the flu.

However, It was a real good time, seeing the city with four eyes is way more pleasant I’d say. Apart from the scoops we made on the back streets in Tbilisi we took a taxi to visit Gori. I had met a man, a children book author on a seminar in Tbilisi, who met up with us after we had walked through the deserted Stalin museum as the only guests. Vasil, the author of a small book of poetry for children took us to a nearby restaurant and treated me and my brother too a vegetarian (for my brother) dinner. Salads, walnut filled aubergine and cheese filled breads that I believe would be fantastically popular in Sweden, there is room somewhere in the land between a cheese toast and a pizza, pure love in other words.

We had a rumbling night at a local restaurant in my neighborhood with bad vodka, more cheese bread and some song to allow for better passage for the vodka down the road it was heading. I woke up the next morning without any recognition of self, on an alcohol diet since.

We travelled by machutka or minibus to the Kaheti region, east of Tbilisi, to see the wine production and the mountains. We found a more than lovely couple to stay with. They cooked us some dishes that surely had some divine hand laid upon them and we slept through the night in squeaky beds on the second floor in their large house while the cold winds hollowed outside.

We woke up in a sunny morning and to a hearty breakfast. The landlady asked if our kind did not like normal bread and since we were down on conversation since she only spoke fragments of English we pointed at the cheese filled bread and then patted our stomachs and we payed for the room and the board. 30 GEL/pp or some 12€. We took a taxi to a summer palace just outside town to see how the Georgian aristocrats lived 150 years ago and had a tour in the cellar to see some bottles of Chateau yeqem from 1861.

The ride back to Tbilisi was merely 2 hours this time rather than 2.5 since the driver were pushing the poor bus beyond sanity. I was crammed in the far back, resting m legs on a large parcel and opening the window to give space enough for my lungs to breathe. Good ride though, the people are not bad at driving, they just don’t care about rules, there is a difference.

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market in the mud

Posted November 5, 2009, under Georgia
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market in the mud

market in the mud

Seems I have manage to get another job. I will write about my trip, about the cultural collisions and about my photos for a tabloid magazine here in Tblisi. Good life! at the same time I was introduced to the very interesting online magazine “Beat magazine“, check it out!

Life in Tblisi, what a life it is. I went for the food and produce market on a rainy morning this week and made some new friends among the cheese monglers at the corner. My shoes were not fit for the mud and are not loosing their “one week old”-look for the more rustic, ” been there done that”-look that I try to avoid when since I am only owner of one pair of walkable shoes (the other pair eats holes in my heels the size of silver dollars).

Leaving the complaining aside I’ll tell you about a real ruff taxi ride home yesterday. It makes me really wonder if biking here is such a good idea. Everybody is driving a taxi it seems, no real rules for who can or how to do it, just add a taxi like sign at your roof and go for it. Anyways, I waved down a small golf and got in. It costs about the equivalent of 20 SEK to go anywhere in the city (metro and bus is about 2 SEK). The driver accelerated the little car up to 90 on the small road, dodging cars and pedestrians while leaning over the steering wheel, like beginner drivers do, not really givning the impression he was familiar with drivning at all. We stopped at a red light (thank god!), he did the cross sign three times, rushed the engine and raced out, passed a police car and accelerated the wreck to 110km/h on the city street. I was trying to look as if it was normal practice but in reality I was scared shitless.

little lady trying to scoop up a small lake that formed at her market spot

little lady trying to scoop up a small lake that formed at her market spot

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From the first of it

Posted November 3, 2009, under Georgia
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It is not always possible to get along with the neighbors, after last year, nearly impossible

It is not always possible to get along with the neighbors, after last year, nearly impossible

Got up dead early this morning, hoping to catch that first light and first movements of the city. It was still dark when I stumbled out from my apartment, leaving my coffee cup half full on the kitchen table. I walked through the pools of water, jumping over the spots of mud I could see in the dark and reached the metro, already with wet shoes and a silly balance since my shoes were slippery on the marble stairs.

I roomed the citys market area just in the early hours. A woman tried to showel a small lake of water, that had gathered at her spot, into a bucket and a blind man with an accordion was composing a rythem to support her in her doing. Along with the smell of coriander and the background made up from old soviet buildnings it is very exotic in a daily life type way. There are no pink flamingos but well cars filled with potatoes, little ladies with big round blocks cheese on mats in the mud and a great deal of cigarette smoke.

I don’t think I got any of those really fancy shots that I hope to get when I sacrafice my well being for a morning in the mud and the rain but I does give some energy to see the life in the market. I was slidning around in the mud of the site for over an hour, talking to the locals, trying to convince them to let me take photos of them. I ended up hungry in the school just before starting my first lesson for the day, English for 9:th grade students, good fun.

Yesterday was a small adventure, I started out in the morning by visiting the local green party office, funded by some swedish organisation. I got the tour of their activities before i had to dash to catch a taxi out to a village nearby. I was traveling with a girl from Holland, here for NGO work and she arrange a taxi. The driver changed his mind about the sum he felt in need of and stoped for filling the gas and got hit by a car from behind before we finally reached our destination.

Out in the country, with a sign pointing in the right direction, a large house with facilities for some 20 people and large areas for constructing and displaying sustainable and alternative techniques for energy and food production. Solar collectors, a straw bale green house and dry toilets were part of a large scale program for improving rural life within a sustainable frame work. I had a great day siting around reading up on straw bale construction after an extensive and delicious lunch.

The city is filled with creative people and it has an air of creativity, hidden in the old blocks of houses and in the holes in the streets. The unorganized sides gives birth to so many ideas and energy to start so many new things. It is great fun!

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I have a job, or two, maybe three!

Posted October 27, 2009, under Georgia
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I have only spent one day in Tblisi before I meet with the Swedish Consulate and if I already felt things were amazingly brilliant before, it got a whole lot better. I was offered two jobs, one teaching English to kids at a small private school, in fact one full day a week with four classes, 5th, 6th and 9th grade. First day today, real lovely job! The other job, teaching Swedish to a group of entusiastic adults at an office is also starting today and i am quite excited. It is totally new to me and if i never thought when I was a kid that I would grow up to study engineering I even less considered teaching to be an option. change is good.

I might also have a photography job coming up, it is more unclear and it will be sorted in the near future. I do hold my thumbs and fingers crossed for this one.

It is likely that I am the luckiest man alive since I met up some NGOs the other day, during a demonstartion in the town center. The neede an engineer for some straw bale construction and I hope to have tiome to get engaged in that as well. I feel happy to have a few balls flying again, i realise how much I like the creative stress of haveing loads to think about and for sure my brain has had a fair bit of rest lately.

I am renting an apartment with a German girl, we are sharing a two bed room russian style dark apartment in the Delisi district of town. Even though hot water supply seems to a bit irregular, when we have it is from hot spring, thus smells of shit, but is apperently good for you. Not for the social partof life though, smelling of sulphur has not proved to be an aphrodisiac. Food is so cheap and tasty that cookinjg at home becomes almost hard to motivate, at least before getting tired of melted cheese and dumpling style pasta.

So, what more, yes, did I mention that some things here are quite fucked? Like the use of educated people? I met a man on the bus yesterday, he started talking to me. He looked like a bum, dirty clothing and an old dirty cap on his head. He told me he was collecting cans, while pullling out a no name bottle from one of the bags, he told me that the money in the coca cola bottles, not in the no name ones. I was surprised to hear that he acctually was a translator, German and English to Georgian but that he had to collect cans. It is a world of contrasts, last night coming home i also met a doctor working in a tobacco store. It is clear that some thinks that things were better during the Sovjet times, while others are more satisfied with the current government.

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Tblisi

Posted October 22, 2009, under Georgia
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After searching the streets of Tblisi for a couple of hours I could duck into an internet cafe on Rustaveli street, the main drag in Tblisi. The city is love for me and there are so many photos out there waiting to be taken.

I was lucky to find a place to stay just close to the center and the streets around the house is filled with old men and women selling veggies, fruits, soap and books. One can explore the strange russian/nouveau riche/alcoholic/friendly atmophere here for weeks.

I crossed the border to Georgia a few days ago, it was in fact already late when I came into Batumi, a town on the Black sea and reading the shear madness in the traffic I knew I would have to stop somewhere soon. Here it is not a matter of left or right, it is a matter of where there are less holes in the road and where there is free space to run the car into. In northern Europe we would call it madness. I picked a house, or rather a shackle, not more than some planks and some corrugated iron stiched together, just outside town to get some water. A short man without teeth offered me to come in and have something to eat.

The livingroom in the little house, a table, two couches and a small tv was hosting already six people. I was seated and the food was brought in. The men, three brothers and I were eating melted cheese with butter, sausage omelett, soups and bread from some small plates. Soon the vodka was brought in and since we finished the first bottle for fast another one was sent for, and another. By that time I was well drunk and I promised to attend a wedding that was going to take place in the village the day after. I do not remeber quite well, half a liter of vodka on an almost empty stomach after 145km of biking, that is just more than necessary.

I woke up in a room next to thew livingroom, in a bed shaped like a bathtub. The morning was spent drinking coffee and resting. Around three the brothers that apperently slept somewhere else arrived and we were of to the wedding. It is another story but for sure it was quiote and experience to live through that mount of food, people and wine that an georgian wedding suggests.

I got my kit together on my third day in the country, ready to get myself going. I bed farewell to my hosts and rolled of into the streets where the traffic still was a complete mayhem. Soon I understtod that my back rim was just too crooked to continue, I did an atempt to get this sorted but after another 60km I had to give in a get a minibus to Tblisi. It is all well, it was an experience as well and after seeing how they drive I know now it is the small roads with less traffic that are the only feasible option.

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Trabzon

Posted October 16, 2009, under Turkey
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A long philosphical breakfast with Xavier, a French recumbrant bicyclist who is heading for Korea and then the hills. That is just the start of an extraordinary wednesday on the bicycle.

After slowly moving up to the top of the hills that separates the highland in the east from the Black sea I paused in the afternoon sun to have a drink of water and look at the view. I was hoping that I would be able to see the Black sea from here, since my map indicated that it was all down hill from here it would be possible. I was wrong. I just saw more hills infront of me and most of the higher than the pass I just climbed. I started decending throught the autum colored forests and I had a quick satop in a town to get some bread before the last push for the day.

The road stareted another climb into the hills and a car stopped me just outside the town to warn me about the wolves that in this area are particularly big and violent. Well, I had already heard the wolves mentioned and decided not to care too much but now, when the sun was setting I falt all the more vulnerable. I kept pushing till after dark without really finding any place to pitch a tent. I was loosing hope a bit but finally arrived in a small village where I staopped to talk to the locals that were gathered outside the tea house. After explaining my situation to them they went to get the imam who had an extra room in his house for needy guests like myself. I was quickly acoomodated in the room and dinner was brought forth before i could even say “yes, please”.

If I had any doubts about if this is a good life or not I’m now quite certain of the obvious benefits. Meeting people that readily invites a stranger for dinner and offers a place to stay. Great life!

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