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Published: August 8th 2007
Cyrus the Great
Cyrus at my favorite wig shop in Tblisis.I got rave reviews as a tour guide from the guys I took to Georgia a few weeks ago, so this weekend Cyrus wanted me to take him. I can't imagine why. If Seinfeld was the show about nothing, then my tours are the tours about nothing. I sit on Nino's balcony and read. Sometimes I sit in a cafe, usually the same ones. I don't go to old churches, I don't go to cultural events, and I don't go anywhere that's hot.
Getting There The marshrutka (mini-van) ride from Yerevan to Tbilisi takes about 6 hours, counting the two hours it takes to cross the border, and costs about $18. It seats 15, including the driver. Throw luggage in there too and you've got a claustrophobic's nightmare. I was relieved to see that this particular marshrutka was missing one seat. That would give us a little more space. But the marshrutka, like nature, abhors a vacuum. The driver simply placed an ordinary kitchen chair in the space and voila, room for another paying customer.
Of course the road is horrible. That's a given in the Developing World. (I am always reminded of the guy who wrote
Tbilisi Cafe
We got a goat to snap this photo of us in a cafe in Tbilisi. Chasing the Monsoon. He got a permanent neck injury from riding public transportation on the bumpy road over the Hindu Kush.) To add to the torture, a cassette featuring frantic music played on homemade instruments is blasted at top volume.
My strategy is The Cocoon: with my earplugs in and my sunglasses on, I project myself out of the marshrutka window into the ancient landscape. Occasionally I will harvest a breeze wafting through one of the cracked windows.
The compensation for the long dusty drive is that it ends at Hotel Charm/Boni, this time with Nino in residence. (Last time she was cavorting around Italy with her boyfriend and our mutual friend, Liesel, while I had to make small talk with her mother in halting Russian.) Nino says she thinks of me as a friend, not a guest. Either that's true or she's the world's greatest hostess.
Mugged by a bear! In the evening I bumped into Jane. She's one of the PCV's (Peace Corps Volunteers) that I hung out with a few weeks ago. (My God the world is a small place. It's almost as claustrophobic as the marshrutka!) Jane was in Tbilisi for
Boder Crossing I
Crossing the border from Georgia to Armenia is always fun... waiting in long lines while the guards wait for their bribes. the weekend with her daughter, Barbara. They invited me to accompany them to the opera. On the ride to the opera house some idiot got on the subway with a bear. Naturally, when the damned thing saw me it came bounding over and latched onto my leg. My shrieks were muffled by a chorus of "Awwww! Isn't that cute" coming from the other passengers. The opera was sold out. I limped home in the rain.
Hanging by a thread Later that night a strange feeling came over me as I squeezed toothpaste onto my toothbrush. I remembered tossing this half-used tube into my suitcase as I was leaving my home in Santa Cruz last May. And now I felt like I was holding a last thread connecting me to that home, to Santa Cruz, to its beaches and forests, to my family and friends. I wondered what would happen when the toothpaste ran out. Would the thread leading back home be broken? Would I be without a center, or would the center be everywhere? I had a sense of an approaching horizon. Perhaps when the toothpaste runs out I will become a citizen of the world. A
line from Yeats
And what rough beast, his hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?
Bloom in Night Town "Hans und I vould like a jungen fraulein. Surely you've been to Bangkok. Surely du vershtest mir, Ja?" That was Karl, one of the two Germans accompanying Johanna, Nino, and me on our evening on the town. Probably Nino invited them so it would seem less like a date. Was Karl asking me to procure a prostitute for him? I was surprised; not surprised that he thought I was a pimp; I just assumed he and Hans were gay.
Our evening began at one of those restaurants where it seems like a wedding party is taking place, permanently. A band plays lively music at a volume that makes conversation and digestion impossible. Eventually the collective blood alcohol level reaches some sort of tipping point. The band plays a sentimental favorite and everyone is up and dancing.
I didn't have any reason to know the old Russian and Georgian songs the band was playing, but when people started dancing, I suddenly got it. Georgia is a patchwork of cultures: Adjarans, Svans, Ossetians,
border crossing III
... and still waiting Abkhazians, and a healthy dose of Russians thrown in for good measure. Each has their own soulful style of dancing that defiantly asserts their cultural identity. That's probably why the greatest dancers come from this part of the world, and some of the people in the restaurant were really good. Somehow the vodka made them even better.
+++++
We left the restaurant around 11 PM and headed to a disco. The dancing at the disco was another revelation for me. A Russian girl with astonishing moves demanded my total attention. How did we win the Cold War? These people have soul, they have moves, and they all have Masters Degrees.
Of course I didn't have enough sense to not dance. I would start dancing with one or both of my "dates," but then they would invariably disappear into the bathroom to gossip about something and I would find myself dancing with Hans und Karl. At one point some tiny blond girl in blue jeans and a lumberjack shirt walked up to me and started dirty dancing. Johanna yanked me away and said the girl was a teenage prostitute. She said the place was crawling with them.
gogos
Nino and Johanna Maybe Karl saw me with the blond and thought I could hook him up.
The next morning at breakfast some of the other guests were complaining. Who was it that came in at 4 in the morning? Glances went from face to face and stopped on the one with bloodshot eyes. I shrugged.
Yerevan, July 5, Das (Social) Kapital I spend most of my time in my office, even on days that I don't teach. Why? Well, it's air conditioned, it has an Internet connection, and there's always lots going on. But last week I thought it would be a treat to go home early, fix dinner for myself, and work in peace. When I got home around 5 PM I discovered what I suppose I would have discovered earlier if I ever spent time there. My neighbors are remodeling their apartment.
Remodeling jobs in Yerevan apartments usually include replacing the outward facing wall so that apartment buildings resemble those patchwork quilts where each patch is contributed by a different ancestor. You can tell from looking which ancestors suffered from the deprivations of war, poverty, sloth, or tragically bad taste.
The workmen were
White man's overbite
Dancing with Johanna. assiduously hammering out my neighbor's wall. Besides the ring of sledge hammers, I could pick from the symphony contributions made by jack hammers and concrete saws. I glanced at my watch. 5:05 PM. Quitting time had to be soon, right? Two hours passed. I noticed neighbors in the alley below shooting malevolent glances at the workers through the hole they had cut in the wall. I grabbed my Russian-English dictionary and looked up the word for "quiet". "Ti-khi." I made my way down to the alley and caught the attention of a plaster-covered workman smoking a cigarette in the hole. "Ti-khi!" I pleaded, and then pointed at my watch. He shrugged with a marvelous economy of movement, returned his gaze to the view, and took another drag. The racket continued until after 9 PM.
The next day I complained to Michael Conrad, one of my colleagues. Michael is one of those transient academics who have made an entire career out of bouncing from one backwater university to another. I don't think he calls anywhere home. I suppose in a way he could be a role model for me.
I met Michael at AUA last summer. I remember that
Georgian dancing
Two women doing some great tribal dance from one of Georgia's ethnic regions. he was excited because he was getting ready to leave for a long-term position at some university in Kazakhstan. I was surprised to see him back at AUA when I returned this summer. In a conspiratorial whisper he told me that the experience was so horrible that he could only tell the whole story bit by bit over many glasses of beer. In other words, if I wanted to hear the tales, I'd have to make with the ales.
On this occasion Michael did give me a free taste. He said that one night in Kazakhstan he was awakened at 3 AM by a chorus of angry shouts. At first he thought some sort of insurrection was brewing in the streets below. He looked out his window and saw a sight that he said he would never forget. Workmen were constructing a skyscraper in the next block. Michael said it's common for work on major construction projects to continue around the clock. If there are laws in Kazakhstan that dictate hours of quiet, which he doubts, then they are universally ignored. What was unusual about this sight was that the residents of a neighboring apartment building had risen up
from their beds in anger. In a rare display of unity they had all come to their windows and were showering insults and burning objects onto the workers below. I imagine the scene was similar to what one would have witnessed if present when the Golden Horde arrived at the gates of Moscow.
Sadly, there are many Armenian examples I could give where an individual thinks nothing of inconveniencing many people for some small gain: blocking a street, smoking in a restaurant, cutting power or water to an entire block without warning or permission, smearing a pristine landscape with billboards, dumping sewage into the gutter, blasting a stereo in a campground. They do it because there are no consequences. A complaint from one person is easy to ignore and there is little possibility of a group protest.
In his book
Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam defines social capital as the "features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks that can improve the efficiency of society by facilitating coordinated actions." Putnam goes on to claim that while capital measured in dollar terms might be on the rise in America, there are signs (such as the decline in popularity
of bowling teams!) that social capital is decreasing. In War and Peace and War, Peter Turchin uses the Arabic word "asabiya" to refer to social capital. He asserts that the rise and fall of empires through history can be explained by the corresponding rise and fall of asabiya.
I think that 70 years of Soviet rule, especially during the Stalin era, has bled the asabiya from Armenian society. I can see it in the way drivers rudely ignore pedestrians. I can even see it in the sour faces of shopkeepers and passers-by. A nod, a smile, or, God forbid, a "hello" to a passing neighbor in the stairwell would be grounds for commitment to a mental hospital. (This actually suits me as my Russian isn't good enough to support any potential follow-up conversation, but also because my personal asabiya was drained by cynicism years ago. The mere though of joining a bowling team gives me chills.)
I join a bowling team While the asabiya of Armenian society as a whole seems to be non-existent, the asabiya of my students at AUA is paradoxically high. The computer science major at AUA is a two year program that leads
Bowling unalone
My students from last year took me bowling to a Masters degree, so there are always two cohorts of about 20 students: the first year students and the second year students. Each cohort is a tightly knit group of friends with additional strong ties to the other cohort. If anything their asabiya is too high, as none of them would ever consider denying a request from a classmate for the answer to a homework or exam problem. Their bond even seems to trump the sexual imperative. The women are all stunning (I suppose the men are okay, too, I haven't checked) and yet I would characterize the relationships between the men and women as relationships between brothers and sisters. Why aren't their more romances, I wonder but don't know how to ask.
Although both of the classes I teach are for first year students, last week I gave two "nostalgia" lectures to the second year students, who were my students from last summer and are now among my friends (but they still call me "Doctor Peerz".) I suppose it didn't hurt that I fed them pizza after each lecture. A few nights ago, perhaps as repayment, they invited me to Play City (sort of an Armenian Chuck
Annie
A great student from last year E. Cheese) for a night of pizza, bowling, go-cart racing, and The Catapult.
I accepted the invitation, but shuddered at the idea of bowling. I have yet to break into three digit territory, and this night would be no exception. My score was a pitiful 86. But it turns out this score was high enough to make me a bowling legend in Armenia. Apparently Armenian's don't know how to bowl. Just a glance across the lanes suggested that Armenians aren't even clear on the distinction between bowling and horseshoes. On one alley after another I saw high arcing balls crashing to the floors with sickening cracks, only to roll obediently into the nearest gutter. While the replacement costs of boards must be astronomical, there is probably some compensation in the longevity of the pins.
I want to report that I also tried The Catapult, but my students read my blog and would catch me in the lie. The Catapult is essentially a gigantic slingshot suspended from two 50 foot towers. I watched as they strapped Artur into the harness. A single rope anchors the harness to the ground while machines in either tower stretch the slingshot to the
Bowling champs
My score of 90 beat their combined score! breaking point. The operator's kid yanks the knot out of the anchor rope and a millisecond later Artur is just another speck in the firmament. Seconds pass and I can see Artur reentering Earth's atmosphere. Like a marionette controlled by a drunken puppeteer, Artur's spine lurches and jerks at stomach-turning angles. The look on his face is fear, not joy. And then he is quickly restored to his place in the heavens.
Fellow Iceman Jennifer is the new director of Environmental Studies at AUA. She's a botanist from Montana via Alaska with a brief stop over in Santa Cruz. (She is also a travel blogger, Dr Jenny. Here's her first entry: The first blog.) The other night I asked her what her husband does for a living. She explained that he accompanies expeditions to the South Pole. Whenever they encounter a crevasse, it's his job to rappel into the crack and take the temperature of the ice. This information is used to determine if the crevasse should be bridged or dynamited. I was about to tell her about the time last winter when I skated the entire circumference of an ice rink in Boise without falling down,
but decided to save the story
for another time. I wonder what her husband writes for "occupation" on loan applications.
P.S. If any mothers of the children I injured in that ice rink are reading this, please allow me to apologize one more time.
Payoff AUA, being an American university, celebrates the Fourth of July. The university shuts down and everyone heads to Lake Savan for a picnic. At this year's picnic the sandals (flip-flops, really) that I bought in Armenia last year gave up on me as I was walking on the rocky shore of the lake. Not a problem. The road leading to the lake is lined with stands selling beach balls and inflated whales. I assumed they also sold rubber sandals. I was right. Sandals yes, English no.
I had been training for this transaction. On Tuesdays and Fridays for the past three weeks Tag comes to my office and we work on bargaining skills in Russian.
Me: How much does this computer cost?
Tag: It costs 3000 drams.
Me: That's too expensive. 2500 Drams?
Tag: Good.
Me: How much does this pen cost?
Tag: It costs 3000
school for models
I did notice that my female students from last year were all gorgeous! drams.
Me: That's too expensive. 2500 Drams?
Tag: Good.
When Tag leaves my office after ninety minutes of this I notice the secretaries in the outer office struggling to stifle their laughter.
The Lake Savan negotiation went just as rehearsed:
Me: How much does this shoe cost?
Guy: It costs 3000 drams.
Me: That's too expensive. 2500 Drams?
Guy: Good.
Ultimate Compliment
Thanks to Marco, who posted a great compliment on my last blog.
P.S.
This entry contains two pages of photos. Be sure to click the "next" link below.
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