Once we reach Kutaisi, feeling of being back again, new ideas, new perspectives after having time to digest the last dose of impressions, feeling this time that I will be able to make some clear distinctions between my feeling and what I see.

We are picked up by the bus station in Kutaisi where the first outlines of a Mac Donald restaurant is being drawn using cast iron and concrete. Some ladies are selling black sunflower seeds and lady stockings on the dusty roadside.

The lady that picks us up is a friend of a friend, she was a soldier during the war, came 18 years ago with her two daughters and her new born baby to Kutaisi. Life took a sharp turn. She is now working with an NGO that is giving legal advice to the IDP’s as well as giving some language courses, English mainly.

Our first stop, a beauty salon. To my surprise a man was given a manicure. I can’t help but wondering if this is something he would go do this along with his male friends. Positively surprised. Moving on through the day, meeting IDP women working on business initiatives in Tskhaltuba, the Soviet architecture, some boys are horseback riding outside Stalin’s favorite retreat. It is an unreal world. Nature and times impact, neither time nor money to hinder the slow collapse of this area.

Finally we end up in our host’s home. The family gathered, an apartment on the first floor in a derelict sanitarium, homemade red wine and toasts for friendship. Boys hanging out, an old BMW in the driveway: their retreat. Smoking cigarettes, reciting stories. Cows are roaming freely in the yard accompanying the evening activities. The washing is taken inside. The sun is setting as we head for a restaurant and the end of a long day.

The people we meet have not just lost their homes and jobs and often relatives and friends. They have lost something more abstract, peace of mind in some sense, the physical connection to their origin. Among all the burned out hope there are some coals still glowing. The women I met, the work they do to level out some of the barriers their situation statues, is remarkable.

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We passed another man laying some 25 meters down the road, bleeding, not moving. Life seemed just so precious then, at the sight of this sudden loss of life. When we arrived in Kutaisi some hours later I could still get the shivers from the sight of the men scattered down the road.

The dramatic morning on the road moved into a yellow house, a large conference room, filled with energy, and conversations. Women refugees from Abkhazia and South Ossetia met for the first time to share their common lot in the ‘fund Sukhumi‘ women center. I heard, through a translator, stories abut overcoming hate for the future of themselves and their families. Many of them had been living as IDP’s for 17 or 18 years. It is time to move on.

The next morning, a wind from the north, breakfast in the cozy guesthouse. We took of to meet some of the women form the conference the previous day in the their homes. Many of the IDP’s are living in health spa hotels from the USSR era. Dwellings that has been falling apart for the last 30 some years, thatched with bits and pieces of material. Some 30000 thousand people live like this as I understood it. They have been for 17 years.

Some IDP’s have moved into newer buildings or restored old ones, raised too quickly and already, after some two, three months mold is breaking through the walls. I meet women that are leading schools, who have started small businesses to make last the 28 GEL the IDP’s get in support from the government each month. It is life on the very edge in some sense, there is still some hope I feel, I think the way the women here have organized and support each other is one very important factor to why everybody is not just plunging down in despair.

I come to think about the sudden destiny of the people in the car, the slow destiny of the people here. There is a great deal more to do here than about the situation of the people in the car, they could have used seat belts and maybe been better of. The analogy here is the organized women; they might hinder the fall and give life more meaning and a better and more peaceful future. I hope.

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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

stew

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

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.

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.

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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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

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

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

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 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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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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