Transcaucasian ODD-yssey, 2017

Prologue

A wedding, a detoured route home through Spences Bridge and down the mighty muddy Fraser River via Spuzzum and Boston Bar and Hope to Vancouver. Who says you have to travel far to see exotic places?

Home for 40 hours before departing on honeymoon. Vancouver and our own bed.

There are cities one can love. Cities to write about, film, write odes to in the milky night. Mexico, New York, London, shanghai, these are cities with weight. Vancouver is ethereal, it has no body. One can love its setting, its access to nature, its liveability, but the city itself is ephemeral. There is no decent weight of history to the built city. Witness the constant ploughing under of buildings and the sprouting of newer, more a la mode replacements. There is no city to love because there is no city at all. It is merely a dwelling place, a lean-to, a shelter from the rain and a provisioning stop. As has been said of other places 'there is no there there.'

It is not barren but it is the slenderest shadow of a city, a barely tangible idea, but that fiction supports its million or so people. 

The real thing that is there is the infrastructure, the conduits, the sewers, storm drains, bridges and roads. Vancouver is a lovely setting with good waste management. It is a bland family from Utah standing in the way as you try to snap a photo: too nice to dislike but an annoyance and a waste of your time. 

At heart, Vancouver is essentially the cloacal track within a Cheshire Cat and one is left looking into the trees forgetting what was and what is. 

No, my city is no city. That is why it is always enervating to travel to a city which is so solid that one imagines it without its natural environment, that it can exist floating alone in a bubble, a pocket universe, without the inhabitants much realizing it. 

History began with resentment. So too art and literature. Music … ehh, maybe not. But history, yes. And we’ve been recording our resentments and petty victories ever since. Transcaucasia exemplifies this thesis and we are going to wander into the swamp of it. 

Transcaucasia. It has tremendous history but exists no place: neither Europe nor Asia. It is the perineum of Eurasia. 

Consider the area as a valley running northwest to southeast between the Black and the Caspian seas. The Greater Caucasus Mountains are the north side of the valley and are traditionally (but not politically or culturally) seen as the barrier between Europe and Asia. On the south side are the Lesser Caucasus Mountains and the Armenian Plateau. In between is a fertile hourglass with Batumi on the broad base to the Northwest, Tbilisi in the centre, and Baku (Azerbaijan) on the broad Southeast base.

Chechnya to the North with the breakaway (and Russian-backed) pseudo-states of South Ossetia and Abkhasia; Azerbaijan and the still-disputed (with Armenia) territory of Nagorno-Karabakh to the East, Iran and Turkey to the South, what can go wrong, holidaying in such a place? 

Someone who might possibly been Douglas Adams once wrote that human beings like to aggregate at boundaries: where land meets water, where earth meets sky. I think of travel like that as well: go to where comfort teeters on the brink of anarchy, where poverty asymptotically approaches wealth. The aristocracy of today is tedious; all-inclusives stuffed with the bourgeoisie are just as bad. Poverty porn is for the jaded. No, go to where there is ferment, to where hope and inspiration bubble up through the rawness, the newness; taste the overly bright vintage.

And try not to get murdered or trafficked or conned or robbed or any of the other things co-workers, family, friends, supermarket clerks imagine happen in foreign parts.

Wow. A perfect wedding and now some time to fight with four languages of increasing complexity: German, Polish, Armenian, and Georgian. Life is for living. 

Make it happen.

Munich next.

1 Munich

Almost missed our flight. So used to traveling with just a carry-on that we missed our baggage drop-off time and then were preceded in the 'Trusted Traveller' Nexus line by eight people needing five bins each, and an X-ray scanner operator determined to deduce the state of each individual's underwear. She was practically sniffing the screen. 

But Vancouver soon dropped behind us behind as it continued to revolve eastward at a mere 1000 miles per hour to our relative 1530 mph and soon too did Montreal, glinting frenchily in the twilight as we continued to Munich, scribbling thank you cards and trying to catch some sleep.

On the roads of Germany, on the roads of Germany / honey, these are the roads of the twentieth century / and there's blood and steel and leather mixed into that concrete / and you can't help thinking these things on the roads of Germany. Well, quite, Bob. 

Good roads, smooth rail lines. A smelly old man in a shiny elbowed suit asleep on the S8 train under his ropy beard and Tyrollean hat while young people of various ethnicities and uniform politeness milled around. These are the roads of the 21st century.

 A switch to the U4 train and then a short skip and a jump without the skip and the jump into our small Airbnb and a cup of tea. Road dust sluiced off and then exploration.

I don't know. Munich old town. I'd probably avoid it if I lived here. Beautiful, reconstructed after the War, friendly, and fun. We are staying just outside the old city walls (aka the ring road, which I keep pronouncing portentously as "'The Ring' road" out of some sense of Wagnerian fun). 

I've recently been reading Nietzsche to help me fall back to sleep when I jolt awake in the night and I think I understand him better now that I've had to flatulate my way through half-litres of beer, sausages, sauerkraut, and mashed potatoes that I swear have asparagus mixed in.

This is Germany that was. I think i prefer Germany that is. We are staying near the old gay district and although I haven't yet seen a well-stuffed pair of lederhosen the area is enough to give Goebbels palpitations. Actually, it reminds me of home: transvestites, bike rentals, and international late-night 'cuisine.' 

Do I prefer it solely because it reminds me of home? Maybe, but the old town is full of high end shops and the grotesquery of all those boutiques makes me think of this (beautifully) reconstructed old city as a stretch-faced aging harridan, a faded debutante queen with one too many facelifts and veiny wrinkled hands. M found a church crypt housing the crowded coffins of the ruling family of Bavaria whatstheirnames to be psychically loaded; I found a galleried mall of LV, Gucci, Lagerfeld, Bose, etc. to be a psychic dead zone akin to a cellular phone dead zone in which one feels uncomfortably detached from the world and incipiently panicky about possible attack or death. It was an anaerobic sinkhole in the centre of Munich and I made a nuisance of myself flailing petulantly while trying to get out.

But don't let me mislead: hell of a lovely city. Friendly, well-mannered, slightly schizoid in that it has had to battle self-harming whispers of Protestantism (then Humanism and Atheism) throughout its post-Reformation Popish history, and a pleasingly walkable layout. Possibly that is why Munich's Archbishop Joseph Ratzinger couldn't quite get his mind around the crises shaking his papacy; perhaps had the Faithful been more Romantic he would have thrived.

Sometimes I wonder about myself and why M married me ... I appear, in print and conversation, to detest things when, in fact, I am having a ball. Part of my fun is in inverting the tropes but I enjoy it for what it is as well. 

Allowed myself to be drawn into a conversation with an Evangelical type (who used the trick of getting me to take a pic of him and a fellow Christian) because his eyes swivelled wildly in opposite directions. He must have been a chameleon in his past life. We agreed that Martin Luther sure was something, all right, and I said Praise Jesus and walked away. M was detained (due to my selfish behaviour) by a similarly mentally encumbered young lady but handled it well by referring to the dozens of bibles at home and alienating the young woman by trying to get her to admit to being a Baptist. Praise Jebus! 

Bart: "Church shoes? What do we need church shoes for? Jesus wore sandals."
Homer: "Well, maybe if he had better arch support they wouldn't have caught him."

Beer and sausage. I'm done with that. Maybe. Pig knuckle isn't what I thought it was: little things floating in brine in seedy bars; instead, it is a massive joint with what looks to be a little bit of tasty meat on it. Seems like a lot of work. And beer: this city has volume but is low on diversity. 6 million hectoliters, or 158 million gallons, of beer spew forth from the Augustiner, Hofbräu, Paulaner, Hacker-Pschorr, Löwenbräu, Spaten and Franziskaner breweries every bloody year. There are supposedly small breweries in business but not in the town centre. The high volume pilsner (aptly named Hell) leaves the sort of aftertaste that would drive someone to gnaw on a pig's knuckle to erase the flavour. The darker beers are a bit too sickly sweet for my taste. I'm heading for the white/wheat beer next. Must stop eating pretzels, though. Too tasty for my waisty. Good salt, though: Munich was built on the salt trade. I suppose that's why they load it into all their food. That and to keep the monks (monks:Munich) busy making their beer.

With 2 hours sleep en route to Montreal and another 2 en route to Munich sleep came easily and the jet lag is almost gone. I buck the trend and insist that flying east is easier than flying west. M, on the other hand, is still out of kilter. I blame it on the movie 'King Arthur,' which she watched between the Prairies and Montreal instead of sleeping. But I am a judgemental SOB.

Anyway, Munich is for the rich but there's lots of cool little shops that unfortunately are closed on Sunday, the day we put aside for light wandering. The famous Glockenspiel that depicts a wedding party serves as a reminder how the rich party; in modern terms the Glockenspiel would have cirque de soleil tumblers and the Rolling Stones playing while a boxing match or bullfights take place.

Wealth, too, is conspicuous in the Residenz, the palace of the dukes, duchesses, electors, electresses, kings and queens of Bavaria: endless halls of tapestries and cranial bones of Disciples and looted bones of popes and various riff-raff saints. Gold crowns from 1000 years ago, intricately detailed medieval artworks, fine porcelain ... all a bit much, It's like Celine Dion and Donald Trump both vomited and from their commingled vomit was born a homunculus with masturbatory anxieties assuaged solely by gold leaf and pursed-lipped cherubs. 

Overall, enjoyable but one's feet begin to squawk after a while. The old town resembles Florence in its loveability; of course, behind the facade are shops not for the likes of you or I. 

But the facade is something of a facade as well; remember, Allied bombing in WWII was so thorough that hundreds of tonnes of unexploded bombs are still underfoot. The Munichers determined to rebuild in a style sympathetic to their history so it has a feel of Poundbury--the 'traditional' town created by Prince Charles to extol historical virtues--in that it is vaguely pleasing to the senses but I can't quite shake the feeling that I'm ... well like I'm in the TV show The Prisoner in which we are all playing at being somewhere that resembles something other than what it probably is but we can't put our finger on what that 'is' is. 

Take the Residenz: any number of rooms have written descriptions that read: 'this was the green room, used as a council chamber and decorated with heavy imposing manly furniture covered in antlers. It was totally destroyed and has been rebuilt in pink to represent a traditional ducal pooping chamber with commodes and bumwipe taken from the Hochtenberschpoken Palace in Augdensregensneuschfanfangelstrudel.'

Still, they do it well. The oompa band in the Hofbräuhaus seems to enjoy itself; the department stores are full of lederhosen and dirndl and suits made in traditional cuts with antler buttons; locals like their pork products; and people get married in the churches. Speaking of, this is the most Romish of Roman Catholic places I've been. One Pope or another gave them the skeleton of Saint Munditia, the patroness saint of spinsters, for their success in fighting the Protestant heresy. Popes can get away with giving shitty gifts.*

 Note: *the poor woman is still on display in St. Peter's Church, covered in gauze and jewels and reclining with a come-hither gaze like a sloppy whore; those chauvinists couldn't even build her her own church.

Sure, the Latin countries have all the bleeding hearts and sacred tears and mouldering bones one can want but these Germans seem to be overexerting themselves, perhaps as a way of telling the Protestant north that they are special. That's probably why they were so susceptible to resurrecting the Holy Roman Empire under Adolf (not the ugliest of leaders if the portrait hall in the Residence is to be believed). Remember, Adolf was shrieking only some 60 years after the nation state of Germany was created from so many disparate principalities and fiefdoms, so snipping off pieces of Austria and France and Poland didn't seem quite so profane an ideas. Probably sounded quite reasonable after a few litres of beer and kilos of cabbage. Especially since they had been a kingdom before (the Wittelsbach family were elevate from Dukes to Kings by Napoleon as thanks for having graciously opened their borders to him, the sauerkraut-eating surrender monkeys).

Anyway, they lost, taking some millions of Jews, gypsies, queers, leftists and assorted others with them, a fact I don't need to harp on. But it is odd to go from the birthplace of National Socialism to the birthplace of probably the only murderer greater (in number of victims) than Adolf, Stalin. That will be in Georgia, don't you know. Back to the now, a few of the descendants of that most successful of families, the Wittelsbachs, still live in the corner of one palace. 900 years of lording it over the place ... I bet you at least a few are biding their time, waiting for this general affection for lederhosen to grow into a desire for obsequiousness. 

So, Munich. We slept through our planned day trip to Salzburg, but that was required.  Probably a good thing too because if Salzburg is anything like Munich everything is shut on Sundays ... everything except museums and bars. Oh, Jesus doesn't want us to buy a dirndl but we can get rat-arsed and look at painted pictures of naked women all we want. I'm sort of OK with that from a non-tourist perspective.

So we ate a meal in an Egyptian-themed restaurant/bar laced with hieroglyphs that we soon deciphered to spell out lewd homosexual transactions. A fine place but a little mixed in its messaging: what are monkeys and fuchsias doing in Egypt? Not fuchsias but those broad Hawaiian flowers, you know what I mean. Decent goulash.

And that sort of spelled the end for Munich. Fitting, really. Tomorrow, an early start so as to get to the airport for our flight to Warsaw. At the moment? A street echoing with some Cyrillic-based language overlaid with electronically tweaked Arabic music. It might be German, I suppose, but I like to think it is passive Muslim resistance to having to wash the dishes after all those pig knuckles slid greasily around them.

Munich is a bit like lederhosen, I suppose: once you get there you sort of understand the appeal and begin to buy into the concept but you balk because you aren't quite sure about the washing instructions. And besides: no one back home will really understand the appeal and will suspect you of telegraphing the tenets of National Socialism in some cute but obscure way.

And that's quite unfair.

2 Warsaw (i)

I have had it suggested to me that these scribblings are a touch too long, to which I can only reply: tough. Were I being paid properly for my efforts I could afford an editor; in the meantime, I suggest only reading every third paragraph. That will give you the dubious pleasure of reading my work thrice over an extended period. 

But really, I assume anyone reading this is either retired, using work time, or literarily masochistic, so I shall continue.

Also, please accept any grammatical or spelling errors to be the enthusiastic overreachings of Apple's autocorrect: we're instead of were, etc. Other than a situationin which I am writing about werewolves and it produces we're wolves it is nothing but annoyingly wrong.

And speaking of annoying, I can live without wifi, but the unfulfilled promise of wifi drives me nuts. I become unhinged: walking into pillars and tripping over my own luggage trying to get the promised airport wifi to work. Even when I don't really need it I want it. In this respect German and Polish efficiency are on par. Actually in all things airport-related, Munich and Warsaw airports are on par, though I have to give the Poles slightly higher marks for efficiency. At least for arrivals; departures will have to wait.

Half the public services in Munich don't work: Stamp dispenser, coffee machines, urinals: all are as likely to be taped off with unapologetic notices of dysfunction as they are available. People are efficient but things are not. And even the people: I've never seen slower queues outside of Africa.* So points off for the Germans.
Note:*Except Safeway since the Sobey's takeover.

Warsaw is a good example of keeping expectations low. Nice airport, polite people, honest taxis: all unexpected. Me, my assumptions were stuck in 1988. I quivered deliciously at the thought of surly passport control officers and breadlines. Nope, Warsaw is a quite nice so far. 

Now, I'm not saying that we are not staying in a wretched old communist block ... with the cutest little apartment inside ... with glassware greasy with old fingerprints ... and a great location ... but the possibility that these itchings stem from bedbugs. This, this is why AirBnB can fail: less the destructive potential on housing markets and more the destructive potential on one's personal hygiene. The sharing economy is great only so long as one shares only within one's tribe.*
Note: *no, as of yet, bedbugs. Greasy dishes aside, a very good place to stay.

But, as written above, we are just a few minutes walk from the old town and it is charming as hell, as are most of the Poles we meet. Except the one who insists on blowing his vuvuzela. And, well, OK, there's no getting around the fact that a good number of Poles were very happy to send their Jewish compatriots to death camps ... so were any number of French and Dutch and Germans. And Brits and North Americans were sympathetic to the idea. Hell, Argentinians and New Zealanders as well. But, and this is a big but, I cannot CANNOT for the life of me understand why tourist shops are selling Hasidic figurines--some holding menorahs, others Torahs, some accordions, but the majority holding an authentic one cent piece. Some even hold bags of money with a penny piece sticking out of it. This is reconciliation? 

Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but the cartoonish Shylock figurine is not a recognized symbol of goodwill in today's society, is it? even putting the best light on it-- 'no, no, these are good Jews: they are giving money away instead of hoarding it'--still falls far short of decency. Might as well stamp Rothschild onto its coat and New World Order onto its sack.

Must investigate fuhrer. I mean further. Damn autocorrect.

So I will put aside the possibility of vile overt antisemitism for the moment, even though it might explain why, as M pointed out to me, the locals are not shy about making eye contact. They could be trying to identify the enemy within. I wouldn't know, having kept my gaze averted from humanity since a young age. Eye contact with strangers is humiliatingly cringe-making. So I have missed out on a number of potential erotic liaisons in my life but at the same time ... we'll ... I can't see any benefit, actually. 

Bloody read that! we'll instead of we'll. Damn, well. Well, you damned machine, WELL. 

I'm itching all over. The thought of bedbugs has sent my paranoid tactile sensory system into overload. To the shower I go.* Well, by shower i mean bathtub with a shower hose attachment. Squatting therein, I decided that the human race should agree to live with bedbugs for generation after generation of the suckers: offer ourselves to them. Let evolution bring along bigger, fatter, slower moving bedbugs. And then, when they are the size of housecats, sleeping alongside us ... then we strike.
Note: *again, no bedbugs as of yet. Probably.**
Note: **Assuredly.

Gods below, this place is bringing out my basest instincts. Europe, I mean. 

So, anyway, we arrived via LOT Airlines and taxi on Monday, September 4, relaxed, then wandered into the Old Town which is just beautiful. Totally reconstructed, of course, having been flattened in the mid-20th century. How does that make it different from Disneyland and other fakery I have railed against? Well, people live in it and they are on repairs and renovations to the reconstruction so I suppose it is a part of the fabric of society: it existed, was destroyed, defiantly rebuilt, given an UNESCO stamp of approval, and endures. It is not slavishly faithful to a particular ideal. Plus it has graffiti and all that. And a tasty little craft beer cellar. Best oatmeal stout I've ever had, and I've had not a few. M even (I quiver and shake here) enjoyed 20 centilitres of a rose and citrus white beer and would have gone back for more had I not stopped her: No tempting fate by demanding two miracles in the same afternoon.

Then dinner at the oldest restaurant in town (a dubious qualification) called U Fukiera, owned by the larger-than-life Madame Gessler who went through husbands like I went through the glorious steak tartare, and competes with former Gessler in-laws in the restaurant trade. She is winning in that she is the Gordon Ramsay or whatsisname or whatsername of Poland. Her restaurants are visually ... stunning? Some would say garish. Sort of like if you took the heated conversation from a hair salon full of orange-coiffed Polish women, solidified it into tchotchke form and sprayed it all over the place with a firehouse. Unique.

Our friend Rob suggested that we never turn down mushrooms in Poland and it was good advice. Steak tartare and a garden salad (greens! east of the Rhine!), veal dumplings and sautéed mushrooms. Rye vodka and then quince brandy compliments of the house. The waiter agreed with us that rye based alcohols (vodka, canadian whiskey) are, when good, very good; otherwise, very bad. 

Sufficiently libated and liberated we wandered through the night past castles and palaces, around a park, and back to our Trainspotting-like tenement and our cute but possibly infested* digs with its 12th floor view over the city. 
Note: *Sigh, again ... why doesn't he just drop this?

And today, another day. A cup of tea (oh, Europe! where there is something in the water that creates a slick on the surface of the tea and leaves a thick patina on the sides of one's tea cup such as takes a year or more to appear in a Canadian teapot), and the potential for food.

Selah.

3: Warsaw (ii), the Jewish Question, and why milk the cow when you can kill it and eat it?

I really like Warsaw and the Varsovians we've spoken with. Let's get that out of the way.

As a city it is a fine place to spend time. Oh, and our apartment is great. The previous tenants probably decided to wash their dishes in the dishwasher without detergent. And there are no vermin. It is a lovely, central, cheerful little place located in a dystopian-era concrete shoebox.

OK, we'll get to anti-semitism in a bit. Everything in its place and time. And if you detect a macabre joke in that last sentence you win a prize.

Oofda. Meat. And starch. With more meat. And more starch. Germany and points east are desperate to shove as much flesh down their collective throats as humanly possible. With the odd cabbage to help it pass through the digestive tract.

I couldn't find milk for my tea in any convenience store. But sausage? Wow.

Processed meats. I suppose when your crops have been trodden into the muck and livestock stolen for so many centuries you have a tendency to kill and preserve as much as possible, keeping it in various cellars and hidey-holes. Keep a cow for yoghurt and as a sop to whichever army is goose-stepping its way through your front parlour.

A lot of walking. Trams and buses are inexpensive, taxis also, but we hoofed it all around the shop for a day, getting to see various neighbourhoods. The construction industry is thriving here. every block seems to have a project on the go. I trust the city government has a development plan to keep the place from looking like a schizophrenic quilt. Probably not.

Does photographing so many crumbling alleyways ignore the present? i suppose i could take photos of the endless Costa Coffee houses, or the KFC, or shiny glass buildings. Warsaw is a modern city and very pleasant to stroll through. There is also a sense of humour here: they gave the name John Paul II to the street with loads of booze shops (24 hrs Alcohole), sex shops, and abortion services. Perhaps they expect the sainted one to clean it up. Or perhaps they dislike the fact that he wasn't Warsaw's archbishop. Plenty of pretty streets and statues to their local priests.

A fine city. Then we stumbled across the last remaining stretch of the wall that surrounded the Warsaw Ghetto. Chilling. And with luxury buildings going up all around.

The relic wall sort of stands in weeds and I got the (unjust?) feeling that the city would like to develop it out of existence. 'We've got a museum for the Jews, right? isn't that enough for them?' An unkind feeling but ... I've read through the four booklets produced by the tourism bureau and neither 'Warsaw, what a history!' nor 'Warsaw, city of free people' even addresses the issue. 'Warsaw, top 10' and 'Warsaw, top museums' mention the memorials and museum but seem more enthusiastic about the newish sports stadium ('Emotions guaranteed!'). There is consistently a blank between 'before WW2 Jews accounted for 30% of the vibrant cosmopolitan city' and 'the post-1989 renaissance of Jewish communities.'

Now, certainly, the German Nazi machine was behind the holocaust but no country should ignore the depth of its collaboration and long-standing periods of persecution. Come on, by the end of the war, three million Polish Jews—90 percent of the prewar population—had been murdered. The Polish police, railways, and individuals had a direct hand in this. At the same time, the majority of European Gentiles who helped the Jews were Poles, specifically Varsovian Poles, despite the government imposing capital punishment via the local police for anyone found helping a Jew in any way. Where are these stories--both heroic and shameful--in the national consciousness?

The museums were closed (being a Tuesday) so we shall have to wait to see.

A couple of books in translation from a super English bookstore near our apartment, some unfruitful shopping, a late lunch at the Belvedere, located in an orangery behind the Presidential palace. Deer and peacocks wandering about, cocktails and steak tartare for me (not as good as the previous night but with a wasabi mayonnaise, grapes, edamame and crispy chicken skin), a vegetable ratatouille for M (turnips, radishes, lima beans, and yellow runner beans in a white sauce ?!), then a lovely strawberry tart.

A nap, then dinner at the Radio Cafe: a club and restaurant for the former 'members' of the Polish Radio Free Europe who risked their lives in the fifties to broadcast Western news/propaganda (depending on your slant). DC's recommendation and treat--being a place that serves the food his grandmother made--and one that had us reeling home with a doggy bag.

So Tuesday was a quiet day, perhaps of the sort which we are meant to have on this our honeymoon.

Then Wednesday blossomed with the light rain we have become accustomed to on this trip.

This morning we went to Polin: an absolutely phenomenal museum about the history of European/Polish Jewry from the medieval period through to the modern. The arrival via southern Europe around 1000, their protection under various Royal statutes (echoed in Canada's Indian Act), the interaction with various Christian leaders and/but the general isolation from antisemitic violence until the late 17th century when various pogroms took place but so too did the destruction of the the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Bloody Cossacks.

The museum does a great job of exploring the millennialism and messianic conflicts within the 18th century Jewish community, as well as the splitting of Poland among Austria, Prussia, and Russia and the mass emigrations that took place under the varying policies of those kingdoms. Jews stopped having special protections and were to be citizens just like anyone else. Another echo we find today is of 19th century politicians arguing the need to 'civilize' these Jews, to educate away their Jewishness.

The community itself was split between traditionalists and those who wanted to modernize; the 'barbaric' practices that accompanied the shearing of a new bride were seen as proof of backwardness. Hello Canada ...

The assertion of a Jewish political identity and Zionism, labour unionism and education accompanied a flowering of literature, music, and other arts. Obviously, the first world war saw much of this as Bolshevism and the reactions could be severe, but generally, the Jews who made up such a high percentage of the population were flourishing, despite reactionary policies from various governments (eg quotas on university students, etc.)

Canada and its allies failed Poland in 1939 and the Jews were rounded up in ghettoes across the country, used as forced labour, starved, robbed, murdered. 1942 and the mass deportations to the East, the work camps, the death camps, the heroism of the Poles who hid Jews. 300,000 dead in Treblinka in the first two months. All very well documented by the German bureaucratic machine.

The German invasion of the Soviet Union with the accompanying death squads coming through Poland (100,000 shot in a forest near Vilna): the Germans got this started but it worked so well that Heydrich told his forces to perhaps inflame the local Gentile community but stand back and let them do the massacre and the looting. And they obliged. 3 million Polish Jews alone died in WW 2. And while most Poles did not fire a bullet, they took the trams to work and kept shopping while the Ghetto was being destroyed and the resistance with it.

Then the Soviets came and since Jews are all Bolsheviks, they should have been treated royally, right? Nope,  they were suddenly agents of Western Capital, Zionists unwilling to swear their entirety to Communism, moneylenders. After 1968 only 10,000 Jews left alive in all of Poland.

Since 1989, a revival. But I can see why the community would be jaded at the prospects of it lasting.

And I can see why the Poles want to say: 'stop griping, the Germans killed us too, the Russians killed us too, this is ancient history,' because we Canadians like to say the same things about our 'Indian Problem.' Not that I equate the Shoah with the Department where I work but human nature is pretty consistent and if a continent/world can ignore the enormity of the Shoah, Canadians don't have any trouble ignoring the deaths of a relatively few Natives (not counting the millions felled by disease).

Hell, I was amazed at how well the museum showed that even into the 1980s our governments wanted to subsume the Shoah into the more general Holocaust of undesirables. 'Those pesky Jews ... always wanting special recognition. Don't they know trade unionists died as well?'

Anyway, a great and tragic museum. I've written a lot about it because it was not just a holocaust memorial but it did so good a job at portraying the flourishing of a wide and great culture over 900 years that was fed into the wood chipper over the space of 5 years. Cultures do come and go, do flourish and fade,  but it took 19th century industrialism and 20th century Fordism and the indifference of the general population to almost completely reduce this one to mulch.

Now to the Jewish figurines: The statues, portraits or figurines are commonly given as gifts on special occasions, such as to mark a new job or moving to a new house and are said to bring prosperity. There are other customs too, such as turning it upside down on the Sabbath so all the money the Jew has amassed falls out of his pockets. Some Poles will deny charges of anti-semitism merely because they 'have a Jew at home.' Geez, they nail them to their doorways like a mezuzah. Seriously, they think that Jews should stand in solidarity with them because they believe (sic) that they share common persecution. And there are even political sentiments emerging to that effect: get Germany to pay reparations and any suggestion that Poles were complicit or active in burning their Jewish neighbours to death in their synagogues and churches is just German propaganda to avoid their responsibilities.

Lord above, is there no end to the spiral of blame and finger-pointing and self-righteous indignation our world is descending into?

So that is why I was and am pissed off at the magnets of money-grasping Jews that the shops of Warsaw sell as souvenirs.

But ignorance and willful blindness are not limited to the Poles and I really like Warsaw. It is a friendly city and lovely, it has great food and is experiencing a blooming of culture (yes, including defiant Jewish culture), it is easy to walk around and easy to navigate public transit. It is all that, all that, but still I think that were I a Jew I'd probably not plan on my neighbours hiding me the next time western 'civilization' turns on the Jews. Actually, that's probably true in most places.

Next time: the tragic events that saw a Warsaw reduced from 1.3M people in 1939 to a mere 1000 in 1944. The Poles have their own reasons for distrusting Germans, Russians and, hell, the international community.

Ain't this an uplifting honeymoon?!

4: First they came for my neighbour

OK, more death but then dinner, I promise. I know, preachy, but when we get to Armenia I will just gloss over the atrocities.

Art Spiegelman's cartoon memoir of his father's time at Auschwitz, Maus, is a fantastic book and one that is used in schools to teach about the Holocaust. He uses animal imagery (jews as mice, germans cats, americans dogs, french frogs, finns reindeer) to great effect.

He has, however, come repeatedly under attack for portraying Poles as pigs. The Canadian Jewish Congress as recently as 2016* wrote that:

Unfortunately, the image of Poles as being “unclean” has a long and shameful tradition. In Poland, when a Jew wanted to insult a Pole, he called him a “Polish pig.” This went hand­in­hand with the image – popular among Jews – of Poles as “stupid goys" ...
Note: *To get the Ontario School Board to stop teaching using the book.

This is a fascinating glimpse of a people viewing themselves as always the victims. 'Sure we killed some Jews, but not as many as the Germans so why pick on us? cats are cool, pigs are filthy. Poor us. Typical Jew unkindness.'

Well, fuck off. I understand that there are biases in the book. I also understand that I grew up hearing and telling Polack jokes. Here's a nation that gave us Copernicus and Madame Curie and Chopin and really good, hardworking citizens in all countries in which they have settled and they've been denigrated. That's all wrong. But after the Holocaust, to deflect some personal responsibility by saying 'Jews used to insult us and still do' is shallow, pathetic, dangerous, and sadly part of where the right-wing politics of this country are going.

But Poland has been a victim, and Poles have been massacred in numbers that are not generally taught in history classes, and that can't be denied. The second traumatic museum in Warsaw teaches about the Warsaw Uprising.

1944 and the Allies are pushing east and the Russians are pushing west. The Varsovians rise up to fight the Germans. At this point, the population of Warsaw is about 900,000, down from 1,300,000 in 1939.

So Adolf Hitler told his generals that he wanted Warsaw to become just a geographic notation, to be obliterated from the face of the earth. And whereas a similar instruction regarding Paris was ignored by the local generals, those in Poland took it to heart. Bang bang, some Allied air drops of supplies, but no official recognition of the insurgents as soldiers so Germany was not bound by the Geneva Convention (if they would even respect it anyway). Shades of Guantanamo Bay and 'enemy combatants?'

The Germans outnumber the partisans 10 to 1 and augment their troops with squadrons comprising criminals and other prisoners. They shoot girl guides who are acting as medical orderlies, they shoot boy scouts who are messengers, they shoot doctors and nurses and the wounded. They force a surrender then ignore the terms and start to ship the Varsovians, Slovaks, remaining Jews and others to labour camps in the East. By the time they were done there were only 1000 starving Varsovians left and the Germans had reduced the entire city to rubble.

Which was pretty much what Stalin wanted because what would he do with a Warsaw full of battle-hardened partisans?

So then came the Soviets. And then came 1989 and a resurgent Poland.

What?

maybe I missed a museum but why have I seen nothing about Warsaw between 1945 and 1989? How did they rebuild Warsaw? What about the Soviet horror? Stalin's dropping of an enormous Russian anchor of a building into the centre of town? Solidarity? The role of the Catholic church?

The Poles still have a lot of things to bitch about but maybe the Varsovians are taking their time. And the Pope and Solidarity came from other cities so Warsaw ignores them. I don't know.

But what I do know is that after visiting the Polin museum on Wednesday we met up with our lovely lovely friend T from London who not only went to our wedding in Summerland but came to Warsaw to see us here. Unbelievable. A sweet, sweet man under his looming 7-foot tall Norwegian exterior.

So we took him through the Old Town and stopped in for some craft beer in avoidance of the rain, and then crossed the river to a restaurant--Dom Polski--where, again, we had a phenomenal meal of pierogi, pear stuffed with goat cheese on sausage, potato pancakes with salmon, pork ribs, goose, and then meringue cake, cheesecake, apple pie, and a fruit tart.

And, yes, I had a wretched sleep.

Then we met up with T to walk to the Warsaw Uprising museum I discussed above, an experience that he called the second most depressing he has been to in his life, after Auschwitz.

He took off in a taxi and we relaxed, had some borscht, went to the top of Stalin's "gift" of a building, the colossal Palace of this and that full of theatres and cinemas and museums for a panoramic view of the city that somehow (don't ask me how or why) was rebuilt from nothing. A damn fine city full of green space and fine architectural detail. A hell of a graveyard, some massive psychicheadaches from all the screaming, I can tell you, but a fine fine city.

And after some light shopping, we are resting up before catching a late night red-eye flight (there is no other kind it seems) to Yerevan, Armenia. We will swap our rain jackets for sunglasses as it is mid- to high-30s there.

Anyway, that's Warsaw. Entire families lost, lineages broken, ground down by two evil empires, some denial, some anger, but resilient and determined to get on with life. If only they can break out of this increasing nativism, nationalism, nihilism, whatever, that seems to be sweeping the globe. If only we all can.

Anyway. That's Warsaw.

5: Dreams under Ararat

It was not the best of times. It was not the worst of times. it was the Yerevan Royal Plaza hotel and still is, I regret to say.*

Note: *No, it isn't. It is the Hotel National which is so very much better.

I don't think most people like to travel or even be tourists. And why should they? Either you go to a place worse than where you live or you risk finding a place where people live better than you do. Why would you want to do either?

Armenia. M pointed out that she had heard a great many preconceived and contradictory notions about Armenia before our trip and I had to concur: it is far enough off of most people's maps that it has the exotic, esoteric scent of the Orient, the Silk Road, threats of white slavery and castration into eunuchdom. People said they would pray for our safety.

All of which is not untrue.

In fact, Yerevan is a pleasantly safe city addicted to gambling, garish lighting, and pink architecture. It sits on a plateau under the presence of Mount Ararat where Noah made landfall. It was through a great-great grandson of Noah that the Armenian people came to be. And why not? I've heard sillier creation myths. Although, come to think of it, the sillier the creation myth the more I am inclined to believe it. Hydrogen, gravity, helium, oxygen, carbon, time, protozoa, fishies, monkeys, Kim Kardashian? Pretty silly.

Anyway, where was i? Yerevan at 3:50 in the morning. Flights are almost always in the wee hours. Must buy a visa to enter the country, can only do so in Armenian drams, can only get those through the premium-charging government money changer. It is all very efficient, about $8 cdn for a visa, and then a cab ride into the city. Now, either you arrange a cab in advance for $4, pay the official airport taxis $6, or run the gamut of scammers who start at $50 but haggle down to $4. Hotels will arrange one for $25 so someone is always pocketing something. We went with the $6 official taxi.

Ah, Yerevan at night. I've jumped forward in time here because we've just strolled the 11pm streets full of people and fountains and lighted buildings and musicians and the temperature was fabulous (being 1km high, the plateau cools off nicely in the evening). It is an absolutely enchanting city, much as you might imagine coming across in your caravan after weeks in tents and caravanserai and there are handsomely dressed adults and comely youths and rich shops and artisan workshops and a general laid-back beauty to the place.

Yerevan at night. Now that's a city. A Marco Polo city. An Italian Calvino city. A Scheherazade city.

Yerevan in the day, backwards in time, saw us deal with a screw up in our hotel arrangements requiring a change to a better hotel and an early check in, and a breakfast loaded with caffeine to deal with the short night flight. Not much open. Yerevanis don't seem to want to get moving until after the afternoon heat wears off butshops and cafes grudgingly open from about 10 to 10.

Some general waffle about Armenia:

Armenia is poorly ranked on the global corruption scale. I didn't see it at the local level but consider: Yerevan was designed on a hub and spoke system with Republican Square at the hub and various streets running out to a green belt perimeter, delineating certain sections of town (cultural area, education area etc). It was also designed such that one could see Mt Ararat from anywhere in the city. Well, somehow, someone got planning permission to erect two buildings that total block the view of Ararat from a large part of Republic Square, the heart of the city. That's decent corruption.

Now, let me get the genocide question out of the way.

It did happen: even the Turks admitted that fact until Kemal Ataturk decided not to. Nowadays Turkey argues like this:

1. It never happened.
2. All the so-called evidence is fake.
3. Even if it did happen, the numbers are inflated.
4. Anyway, we did kill them but they killed more of us than we of them.

A short history of Armenia, largely wrong, I'm sure: they assert that came from Noah's line (though wouldn't we all?), fought Nimrod among others, were pagan. Lost a lot of battles. Had kingdoms of varying sizes. Lost battles to Greeks, Assyrians, others. Got a bit Romanized. First country to adopt Christianity in 301. More losses. Ended up as a kingdom at Cilicia near Syria. Pockets all over Asia Minor. Denied that Jesus was all human or all God or a mixture of the two but instead existed as an intersection of the divine and the human. It was probably this fundamental, despicable heresy that led to lots of losses to Mongols, Persians, Turks, Russians, more Turks and more Persians. Sort of self rule for a long time under various Empires,up to the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman Empire breaks up, Armenians backed the wrong horse (Russia). Turks decided to Turkify the country to create cultural and territorial integrity. Armenians fought, lost. Turks slaughtered men, tortured infants, sent the women and children packing into the desert where Kurds and bandits raided their refugee columns and took slaves (among other filthy things).Armenians lost a lot of battles, held their eastern provinces and took refuge within the Soviet Union. Some million plus Armenians had been killed, forcibly converted to Islam, voluntarily converted, disappeared in the slave markets of Baghdad and Cairo (1920s!), or otherwise disappeared. Stalin then betrayed them by giving some of their territory, including Ararat, to Turkey (big game politics).  Soviet life not as great as hoped: Stalin didn't want strong ethnic pockets and relocated whole towns and regions in a program of enforced multiculturalism. Soviet Union ends, these relocated Armenians in Azerbaijan and Azerbaijanis in Armenia started fighting to be part of their homelands. Armenia lost a lot. Now there's stalemate and the country relies heavily on the diaspora for funding.

A great people, proud, strong, but not great fighters. That's a problem when you lie at the crossroads of Asia and Europe.

They actually seem to take pride in all their losses. They enumerate them at length. Then they list the great Armenians of history (Cher, Kim Kardashian, and Charles Aznavour). Plusa whole lot of others you never heard of. Lots of statues to these heroes.

Back to Yerevan. Architecturally, in a century or so, barring wars, Yerevan will be a beautiful city. The Armenians have made a design choice that buildings should be constructed from pink tufa (volcanic) blocks, that there should be columns--doric, ionic, corinthian, scooby doo, no matter--anywhere and everywhere on the building, and that entranceways and/or windows and/or anywhere should have semi-circular arches. And the tufa is laid down in a patchwork of shades of pink: no attempts at pleasing harmony, just pleasing disharmony. Anything goes so long as it has plenty of these four elements. Consequently, every building looks vaguely monumental but you don't know why and the city glows rosily at dawn and dusk. Midday, however, the sun ruthlessly stirs up the smog and throws 30-40 degrees of heat at you and everything has a vague dusty look. Cigarettes are a buck a pack and you need them to filter out the heavy metals in the air. My lungs feel like they are full of gel.

As it is, Yerevan is a pleasant city with safe streets, decent pedestrian-driver relations: essentially each party may slow but never stops moving and so long as there isn't a car immediately present you can cross the street like a whatchamacallit on a loom. Unless there is a walk signal. At those intersections the pedestrian lights count down the seconds left (not unusual) but also the time to wait until the next crossing opportunity. so too do the traffic lights! In the central (amber) lights, drivers know how much time they may have left to wait or to safely cross the intersection on whichever oblique or acute angle occurs to them.

Soviet suburbs do abound, with enormous apartment blocks almost designed to violate any notion of sympathetic architecture, but these are slowly getting replaced. It will be a long project because Yerevan is larger than it should be. In typical bureaucratic fashion not limited to former SSRs, Yerevan authorities decided in the 60s? that the city deserved a metro/subway/underground. However, with a population of 130,000 they fell short of the 1 million person population required to justify funding fromMoscow for such an extravagance. So, suddenly, Yerevan expanded in size to 300 square kilometres, absorbing every podunk town in sight and thus they got their 8-stop metro from nowhere to no hope. They didn't reckon on the infrastructure requirements for a city of such magnitude so things all look a bit stretched like old toffee.

Still, there is plenty of (planted and overwatered) greenery, drinking fountains that spout (usually) tasty mineral water, and easy pedestrian access to everything. A great statue that was Stalin overlooks the city. They recarved the statue into Mother Armenia with a sword and shield. Lots of vanity projects funded by wealthy Armenians from abroad. So a good looking city is poking through the Soviet grime on the Armenian plateau. Pity about the people.

Well, that's unfair. In any sort of subservient job, Armenians are generally a surly lot. They seem to exude resentment that they aren't all nobles in a kingdom stretching from Lebanon to the Caspian Sea. Given their history I don't blame them. And in any non-subservient job they take their time before eventually deigning to interact with a peasant like you.

Guidebooks say that Armenians are a fashionable lot. True if you believe that bourgeois fashion is jeans and brand-name tops and that high-end fashion is … well ... imagine good glitter lipstick on lips swollen from collagen injections ... hold that image, tack on a look of complete disdain, stiletto heels, a couple of squalling brats, a man in a polyester polo shirt with chest hair and gold chains, a cigarette, and add on an extra layer of disdain. Add lumpy distended facial features. Now put that into clothing form and you have Armenian high fashion. Basically Donald Trump's decorating style made flesh.

So give it a century of peace and Yerevan will be a gem of a city. This is a bit of an abrupt ending and on a bit of  a sour note, so ignore the last bits and imagine, if you will, a dry dusty plain, a long trudge through its gorges and over its few humps of mountains, and then arriving in a cool evening of families with ice cream and children in electric cars and teenage males acting in that overtly homoerotic (to western eyes) way that is common to the near and middle east and teenage girls trying to do whatever teenage girls do anywhere in the world and duduk- and accordion-playing musicians and impromptu dancing and smokers chatting and old people on benches and a parade of familial projection on pedestrian boulevards under trees and with fountains and all thatand knock the dust off your clothes and go and wander under the moon because tomorrow will be hot and dusty as you continue on your way.

6 My home is not my home

Damn I dunno it's hard to get your head around this place even when sober and awake. It confounds expectations, Transcaucasia does. Me, I have tried cutting the written word pie a number of different ways: thematically, chronologically, alphabetically, whatever; none of it works. I'm not quite sure why this is so. Perhaps it is the pace: this is a part of the world where people have lived for millennia. They were old in the time of Herodotus. The travels of Marco Polo mention Armenia and Georgians and their cities. So too does that great lying scoundrel Sir John Mandeville. Any amount of history has trodden these people underfoot and lifted them upand trodden them down again. History appears in layers here, which is possibly what makes it so fascinating to me. It is as if … if you could make the English language manifest itself in physical form it would resemble Transcaucasia.

Poignant at a time when Canada is celebrating 150 years of statehood, these lands are full of kingdoms flourishing for 150 to 200 years before being laid waste for another few centuries before again flourishing. I'm sure that they were just as certain as we are that the peaceful world we have created is eternal, immutable, right. And there will be a few petroglyphs, or cuneiform figures, or Greek or Roman, or Armenian, or Persian, or Arabic, or Russian, or Georgian, or English inscriptions left to weather and wait for the future curious individuals to dream over.

oh hell, i don't know where to begin. maybe with bob geldof:

we are a shadow of what we were
A long long shadow
And in that shadow is a shape
And in that shape is a name
And where we hide it is dark
But in that dark it is warm
we are born in this dark
and we are safe
When it is time
We'll come again.
- bob geldof, song of the emergent nationalist.

I've got my buddy R to thank for that song, from the album "the happy club" circa 1994.

Song of the emergent nationalist. And here we are in the lands that broke free after so many centuries of domination. But which land? and whose? Given centuries of dispersion and consolidation it is difficult to know who belongs where. Hell, Stalin even set about destroying nationalist sentiment by the enforced resettlement of communities elsewhere: thus azerbaijani peoples in georgia, dagestani in armenia, georgians in siberia. So what constitutes a home?

Let's think about religion.I'll begin with churches. There's a lot of them in this trip.

When you have a church you have something, even when you have nothing. Especially when you have nothing.

Where is your culture? It's been stolen
Where are your ideals?They've been stolen
Where is your nation?It's been stolen
Where's is your language? Gone
Where are your tradition? robbed
Where is your future?It's been stolen
Who are you now?
- bob again, same song but earlier.

But maybe chronological is best. So we climb up from Yerevan's 900m to 1400m. Sere hills. Largely a plateau with gorges but rises to 1900m in places. Armenia is mostly plateau but the Lesser Caucuses rise up on its northern border and there are lower bits as well.

It is poorer now, outside the city. Armenia is a hydrocephalic infant: half of the population lives in Yerevan. there's little investment and much less incentive, so the youth export themselves to Russia and neighbouring countries to work in domestic service or construction. The cars are getting older: we see more Ladas and other Soviet-era makes. They have engines that can be fixed with chewing gum so there is an advantage to keeping them around. Mack, an older Pole traveling with us points out an old army truck that he remembers getting 2km per litre.

We walk down into a gorge to view organ-pipe-like columns of hexahedral ... no ... they are hexagons in two dimensions but extended indefinitely in the third. Anyways, basalt columns, cows, and a hot steep hike up to Garni and a former ... well, it has long been held to be an old pre-Christian Solar temple to Mithra that was not destroyed when the first Christian kings were obliterating the pagans. Instead, it is said, the king's sister thought it would be a good place to build a palace and the temple survives, with a basilica beside it, and a palace, until the sixteenth century when it began to fall into disrepair.

Another more recent theory is that it was a tomb for a Romanized local baron. Take your pick. There's enough geometry that I incline to the latter view. It's a romanized copy of a Greek building, Anyway, it was beautiful and a man playing the duduk (A clarinet with a reed the thickness of something thick indeed) in haunting melodies.

All Armenian poetry and music seems to be haunting. We're I to compose a poem for Armenia perhaps it would be:

Underneath, my secret sighs.
Every mountain reminds me of you.
My lover's pimple on the end of her monstrous nose
Reminds me of you,
Ararat, my heart's true companion
Ararat.

And so on and so forth. They do go on. Homeland.

Homeland is important. For Armenia the challenge they face is that their mountain is in Turkey with a NATO base on it, all of their best churches are in Azerbaijan, and their art spread around the world. But they have their churches and they are slowly rebuilding them after centuries of enforced neglect.

Homeland is important, though possibly misguided. Like Greeks who lived in Turkey for 2100 years being deported to their 'homeland' in Greece, and vice versa, Kurds and Yezidis are viewed by Armenians as living in Armenia, but stress that their homeland is elsewhere. So many little (deaths in the five figures, maybe six) wars fought since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Anyway, so many tribes, ethnicities, religious groups have settled in these lands that all territorial claims are necessarily displacements and, probably, refer to earlier groupings that bear little resemblance to the peoples of today. So Vladimir Putin takes an interest in archaeology, biblical-based mythologies are given serious consideration, and everyone is looking to arm themselves against their neighbours,

The Garni temple is a perfect example. At the site they have found a neolithic encampment, an 8th century BC Urartian cuneiform tablet, a Greek fortress, a 3rd century royal palace with Romanized baths, churches from the 5th and 6the century and so on and so forth as Zizek would say. The temple fell apart in an earthquake in the 17the century but was pieced together in the 20th. It looks like a mini Parthenon in basalt.

So many years, so much blood. Periods where cultures flourished and then lay dormant due to war/oppression.

After the Soviets began to thaw post-Stalin, religion was, if if not tolerated, not immediately persecuted. Most priests had been exiled into the afterlife but the Armenians trickled back to their church. After all, it is the Armenian Apostolic Church so they have a name to clutch. And the diaspora have things to fund. So all over the country ruins are being resurrected. Are the people religious? In perhaps a loose Oriental Orthodox sense: services are two or three hours long and people come and go, step out for a cigarette and a chat, wander around and get a drink. Church, you see, is for the priests. The buildings are set out with a small floor plan in the shape of and equal sided cross. Some churches may have a narthex; bell towers are removed from the church itself. There's very little room for the faithful. In the more popular churches weddings, baptisms etc. take place in a separate building. Religion is more a social obligation than a devout one. This will likely change with the multiplying of seminarians. A priest has to choose one of two tracks: graduate, get married, become a parish priest, or go on as a celibate academic and rise through the ranks, perhaps attaining the top position, that of Katholikos.

Why am I going on about the seminary? It helps explain why, at our next stop--the Geghard monastery--there were people flying drones, wandering unhesitatingly through the praying clusters of people while the few priests sold candles or smoked and talked on their cellphones.the church is not supported by taxes so they have to get their livings somehow.

Here the monastery is high up a mountain gorge and is built half into the cliff and half outside it. Various little chapels and hidey-holes are built into the rock around or deeper than the main church. It was in this church where they kept the spear that pierced the side of Jesus. At least two other countries have churches that claim to have the spear but this one is oldest.

Yup.

Oh, and our traveling companions: a generally companionable lot with some Canadians and Americans, a Kiwi, Brit, Swede, Pole, and a Belorussian. The usual mixture of average, introverted, and exuberant. It is too early to form anything other than immediate prejudices.

The name Geghard refers to the spear, but before that it was known as the "cave monastery' founded in the 4th century, burned and plundered in the 10th by the caliph of Azerbaijan, was revived in the late 12th from which the current churches date. 22 rooms carved into the cliff, I believe, with the main cathedral built in the 13th. A striking building on the cross-dome plan with surviving depictions of ... well, google it or wait for my photos. In one room the acoustics are so good that one woman on the tour whistling sounded like a whole choir being piped through a sound system.

Back to the city to wander through the streets, see the opera house and the megalomaniacal Cascades that lead up to Mother Armenia. Oh, the idea I passed on that it was carved from the statue of Stalin is a myth: it is 5 metres taller and is forged copper.

The Cascades: a series of fountains that cascade down a mountainside with stairs up both sides, galleries of modern art and internal escalators. Designed to commemorate 50 years of Soviet life but they ran out of money so the upper levels are not complete. Something else for the diaspora to fund. In the city. Big project. And the rest ofthe country? And there's Yerevan in a nutshell: they dream big and are building out of stone so things are for the ages but they never quite finish anything. Think in decades: as I said, in 100 years this will be a beautiful magnificent city and if you squint squint real hard you can see it now but when you open your eyes you just see some brilliance but also a lot of decrepit ruined buildings and half-complete shells of buildings.

Not all half-complete: Burberry, Armani, Desigual all have their locations, so too do repurposed soviet buildings. And it was on the central square where we sat either a few of our companions having drinks and chatting until midnight while the city moved around us.

Which makes for a tough 630am wake up call. Time to go to Khor Virap, formerly a palace but now a monastery, where St Gregory the Illuminator--responsible for the conversion of Armenia--was kept prisoner in a hole in the ground for six or a dozen years. A cramped hot hole now in a church chapel just across the DMZ from Turkey and Mt Ararat. So add all that up and you get one of Armenia's holiest sites. And a large military graveyard. But that's to be expected on the world's biggest playground for mass murderers. Great people- watching: from the holy to the profane. The area was once described by Plutarch as the Carthage of Armenia and it certainly suffered a similar fate. All that remains of the ancient city of Artashat spread over five or six hills are archaeological digs.

But as to what remains: Most of these churches and monastery complexes are austere, largely because they haven't the money, i suppose, but there is no plastering over the bare rock or fitted stone, just smoke stains, perhaps the remnants of a fresco, a few icons on the walls with candle stands in front, and then the altar dais. It is sort of like a small school gymnasium with the stage on one end: you can play around but the eastern part of the cross is pure spectacle. Often there is a stone throne there, or more central, for the highest ranking ecclesiastic. The buildings now at Khor Virap *only* date from the 16th century. Things get old slowly, here. Oh and men sell pigeons to take your wishes to Mt Ararat. They are actually homing pigeons that return to the men so they are onto a good thing. It is something to see a man with three pigeons clasped by the feet between the fingers of his left hand holding a cigarette which he lights with a lighter clasped in  hand holding two more pigeons.

Equally industrious perhaps was the old fellow in an older suit seated on a stone lined path picking the stones apart each day and then 'repairing' the path, hoping for a few Armenian dram.

Russian troops 'help' guard the border. Armenia is in a hard place, feeling European, attached to Western society, but its principal enemy is part of NATO, its largest expatriate group is in Russia, and with Azerbaijan (its most recent enemy) and Iran its friend but itself no friend to the West, it has little choice but to join the Russian economic area. Jeez.

The afternoon saw us head to Ejmiatsin, the 'Vatican' of the Armenian church. No expense spared. it was here where St Gregory the Illuminator set up shop after converting the king who had Gregory imprisoned in the first place. The Armenian Church as such began in a basilica on the key pagan site which later--when St Gregory appeared in a dream to a monk-- was replaced by the now-requisite cross shape. A cupola and four apses or four cross arms of equal length, with perhaps rooms either side of the altar. Most often the outside shape of the church is a square with either rooms or stone filling in the spaces between the cross arms. Well, I say replaced but given invaders, etc. it is now only a 16c church but with 9c bits in the north wall.

Anyway, the Armenians have poured money into this complex with seminary, dormitories, other halls of exquisite architectural style, and the residential palace of the Katholikos. We arrived during a service on the Sunday so witnessed the milling crowd, the procession of priests to go get the Katholikos (even he doesn't attend the whole ceremony) and the deafening bells that accompanied the returning priests and hierarchs. M pointed out that the processing of priests goes from tall and young to increasingly shorter and fatter with fuller beards until finally the Katholikos at the end of the procession who resembles a black-robed dwarf sorcerer.

As they processed people ran in to be blessed by him and then that was that. Into the church they went and the crowd just imploded into a black hole of jostling humanity and we got the hell away from the tinnitus-inducing bells overhead. We went instead to have lunch under apricot trees, drank some local hooch which was terrible and wine which was not awful but could have been described as such. Armenia produces some good wine but we didn't find it.

Back to town, a cool down, the open air market selling everything from strings of walnuts coated (like wax) with various fruit juices to soviet memorabilia and fake soviet memorabilia. How can we buy anything? Our apartment is like a victorian cabinet of curiosities already.

Ah well, another day, packed up and headed to Georgia. With more churches en route.

Apologies for the scattered mess of all this. Been a long few weeks. hard to be coherent.

7 Through the Lesser Caucasus

“This is a great country. It begins at a city called ARZINGA, at which they weave the best buckrams in the world. It possesses also the best baths from natural springs that are anywhere to be found. The people of the country are Armenians, and are subject to the Tartar. There are many towns and villages in the country, but the noblest of their cities is Arzinga, which is the See of an Archbishop, and then ARZIRON and ARZIZI.

 "The country is indeed a passing great one, and in the summer it is frequented by the whole host of the Tartars of the Levant, because it then furnishes them with such excellent pasture for their cattle. But in winter the cold is past all bounds, so in that season they quit this country and go to a warmer region, where they find other good pastures

"And you must know that it is in this country of Armenia that the Ark of Noah exists on the top of a certain great mountain on the summit of which snow is so constant that no one can ascend; for the snow never melts, and is constantly added to by new falls. Below, however, the snow does melt, and runs down, producing such rich and abundant herbage that in summer cattle are sent to pasture from a long way round about, and it never fails them.

 “The country is bounded on the south by a kingdom called Mosul, the people of which are Jacobite and Nestorian Christians, of whom I shall have more to tell you presently. On the north it is bounded by the Land of the Georgians, of whom also I shall speak.”

- Rustichello of Pisa. “The Travels of Marco Polo"

Now, Marco Polo never did have a chicken shauarma the likes of which I had the night before this part of the story begins. Most places have heaters to roast the turning spits of fatty meat, but not here: charcoal. It made all of my clothes reek just to stand and order the sandwich but it was a tasty tasty dish. After all of our massive meals--consisting as they do of cheese, bread, tomatoes, cucumber, different cheese, various meats, cheese in bread, etc.--it was great going for a small if unhealthy option.

And breakfast was followed by a trip to the local food market. oddly, for a hot country, there is no early morning trade. Merchants sort of start at 9 or 10, maybe 8. One merchant had a pile of saffron the size of a small baby and I cannot imagine it was authentic because it would probably be worth more that the entire market. We did pop into a booze shop and got some apricot hooch and--via mistaken sign language--some mulberry homemade firewater. The proprietor insisted on us having a wine toast before we left. Cold red wine. Perfect for getting on the road.

Oh, but the vendors have a great tool: like a fine round sieve/grater with a conical catcher. What is it for? To shave the peaches! Fuzzy peaches can go to hell, Armenians like their peaches shaved. Whoever introduces nectarines to this place may just make a killing.

“And therefore whoso will go right way, men go from Trebizond toward Armenia the Great unto a city that is clept Erzeroum, that was wont to be a good city and a plenteous; but the Turks have greatly wasted it.  There-about groweth no wine nor fruit, but little or else none.  In this land is the earth more high than in any other, and that maketh great cold.  And there be many good waters and good wells that come under earth from the flom of Paradise, that is clept Euphrates, that is a journey beside that city; and that river cometh towards Ind under earth, and resorteth into the land of Altazar.  And so pass men by this Armenia and enter the sea of Persia.

“From that city of Erzeroum go men to an hill that is clept Sabissocolle.  And there beside is another hill that men clepe Ararat, but the Jews clepe it Taneez, where Noah’s ship rested, and yet is upon that mountain.  And men may see it afar in clear weather.  And that mountain is well a seven mile high.  And some men say that they have seen and touched the ship, and put their fingers in the parts where the fiend went out, when that Noah said, Benedicite.  But they that say such words, say their will.  For a man may not go up the mountain, for great plenty of snow that is always on that mountain, neither summer nor winter.  So that no man may go up there, ne never man did, since the time of Noah, save a monk that, by the grace of God, brought one of the planks down, that yet is in the minster at the foot of the mountain.”

 - Sir John Mandeville, "The Travels of Sir John Mandeville.”

Yes but Sir John also reported on people with their faces in their chests, monopods who used their one great foot as a parasol, and a river of moving stones.

There are great waters in Armenia and we were driving to one such: Lake Sevan, a good sized lake of some 5000 square kilometres, making it about 1/6 of Armenia's territory. It wasn't always this size. It was larger and then drastically smaller. Under Stalin some dingbat Armenian's plan to use the lake productively was adopted: the idea was that draining most of the lake would produce hydroelectric power, allow for the planting of vast nut and fruit orchards, and increase the number of fish. You can imagine how well that went. So they then had to build tunnels from two other lakes to bring Sevan back up to something less than its former size such that the monastery of Sevanvank which used to be on an island is now on an isthmus. Still pretty as hell, though, belying its use as a penal colony for badly-behaved monks.

As I mentioned last time, as is typical in the caucuses, there were periods of cultural flourishment followed by oppression. This monastery was the first to be built (9th century) in the region after 200 years of Arab suppression, so it follows a 7th century design. All very cool but words don't do any of these buildings justice.

From the blazing sun, the sere landscape, we climbed up in the Lesser Caucasus and passed through a good long tunnel that brought us blinking into a lush verdant set of steep hills. People with great big stockpots and chimnied stoves by the side of the road selling corn, and a winding road through to the town of Dilijan which is where people with lung conditions have been sent for ages: oxygen and mineral water. Everyone loves oxygen and mineral water.

Actually, the mineral water here in Armenia is so pervasive I'm sure it is why I found their beer to be wretched: too much of a metallic aftertaste. In fact, after a few days in the country I was unable to rid myself of the slightly sour silty taste in the back of my throat.

Now here my narrative gets a bit skewed.

It is poorer outside Yerevan but some places have been luckier. The closer we were to Dilijan the less I saw roofs made from asbestos. Really: like those wavy plastic roofs but made from pressed asbestos. The architecture had more of a chalet feel, perhaps an Austrian or Swiss quality with fretwork and steeper roofs. Rain and possibly snowfall, I suppose. All roads converge at a roundabout in the centre of town where we endured the post-Soviet post office in which, as in all post offices here, the woman selling stamps had to affix the stamps herself, no matter how many dozens of letters with the same postage we were sending. She tears them out carefully, wets them, affixes them, recounts everything, demands payment, then cancels each one and puts it in the appropriate box.

Here the building are starting to have more second floor wooden balconies with carved handrails, supported by wooden struts. There is a finely restored street with many artisans in which we purchased some thises and thatses but time rolls on and so do we.

The city of Vanadzor where ... I dunno ... maybe we stopped for lunch. Outside the city, not in it. An industrial Soviet city with chemical plants rusting away. To be honest, lunch is something that I have completely forgotten but probably involved bread, cheese, tomatoes, cucumbers, some meat, some dessert. Oh wait ... dolmos ... meat stuffed in peppers, in tomatoes, in pastry and in eggplant. Fruit for dessert. I remember a very boozy lunch under the trees where we had a fine white wine, then some wretched apple hooch, and then asked for a second glass of wine. For the second they first said they had run out ... then they found some. And I am sure--nay, certain--that they had a half glass of wine left, portioned out to the three of us, added water and apple hooch. It was vile. But the food was good and plentiful. A lush country, in some ways.

All the men, Shelly the Kiwi remarked, look like Fred Flintstone.

More interesting was the Sanahin monastery complex of which I recently posted a picture on Facebook. Yet another UNESCO site, it sits at the top of Alaverdi (Allah gives) a split city: half in the gorge bottom where the smelter is (the smelter chimney now climbing the gorge walls and opening out on the upper plateaus). Before that was installed I can imagine the lower town being horrendously polluted by the eighty-foot brick chimney. There is a cable car connecting the two parts of the city but it is broken. Of course. So a wild switchback drive up the canyon walls to the upper town and a 10th century monastery with two churches and an Academy where students would have been taught (essentially an arcade with the students sitting between pillars while the priest strode up and down peripatetically. It is a piecemeal sort of place, paved with gravestones. That wasn't a snub: at the time it was seen to be important to have horizontal gravestones to show that when you died you were no better than the earth in which you were buried. Anyway, it is a working monastery but you'd never know it to look at it. Overgrown and not a priest in sight. I danced around the graveyard taking pictures in the gorgeous light and was late (not for the first or last time) for the bus.

Back down the gorge. Now this certainly puts wear and tear on the brakes but also the nerves. Drivers enjoy passing trucks on corners and suddenly everyone is braking and trying to get back into the proper lanes and there is swearing and terror. We had five such incidents in four hours.

Anyway. Rusting factories and houses reclaimed by the forest. Up another gorge and a bad road to the border but an easy border crossing despite the DMZ, and suddenly we are in Georgia where English makes an appearance on the signs and in the speech, which is good given the general incomprehensibility of the language-even Luke, a companion with 20 some-odd languages under his belt didn't even attempt to master. He stuck with Russian.

And an evening drive into the sparklingly wonderful, magical, exciting, vibrant city that is Tbilisi.

Are we in Europe yet?

“In GEORGIANIA there is a King called David Melic, which is as much as to say "David King"; he is subject to the Tartar. In old times all the kings were born with the figure of an eagle upon the right shoulder. The people are very handsome, capital archers, and most valiant soldiers. They are Christians of the Greek Rite, and have a fashion of wearing their hair cropped, like Churchmen.

"This is the country beyond which Alexander could not pass when he wished to penetrate to the region of the Ponent, because that the defile was so narrow and perilous, the sea lying on the one hand, and on the other lofty mountains impassable to horsemen. The strait extends like this for four leagues, and a handful of people might hold it against all the world. Alexander caused a very strong tower to be built there, to prevent the people beyond from passing to attack him, and this got the name of the IRON GATE. This is the place that the Book of Alexander speaks of, when it tells us how he shut up the Tartars between two mountains; not that they were really Tartars, however, for there were no Tartars in those days, but they consisted of a race of people called COMANIANS and many besides.

“In this province all the forests are of box-wood.There are numerous towns and villages, and silk is produced in great abundance. They also weave cloths of gold, and all kinds of very fine silk stuffs. The country produces the best goshawks in the world. It has indeed no lack of anything, and the people live by trade and handicrafts. 'Tis a very mountainous region, and full of strait defiles and of fortresses, insomuch that the Tartars have never been able to subdue it out and out.”

- Rustichello of Pisa. “The Travels of Marco Polo"

Are we in Europe yet?

Oh hell, where is Europe. What is Europe? Europe is the hooked nose on the face of Asia. Telephonically, Armenia has a European telephone code while Georgia does not. But how can Armenia be in and Georgia (which is on the European side of Armenia) not be? Georgia does compete in the Eurovision Song Contest. Georgia and Russia are constantly at odds with each other while Armenia relies on Russia and Iran and is at odds with our NATO partner, Turkey. So, politically, Georgia is more European, culturally, it feels more European, geographically it is a mixed bag: the Greater Caucasus mountain range is sort of seen as the divider but--then again--Alexander the Great is supposed (in medieval romances) to have built the Iron Gate in the Caucasus to keep the Asian Scythians out. Armenia would like to be in Europe but it has a strong Turkish (sorry) feel to it.  Georgia's last president Saakashvili invested heavily in contemporary architecture in the centre of Tbilisi and weird postmodern town halls and police stations in the countryside. Armenia does its own weird architectural thing. Azerbaijan ...

... well, perhaps it is best that the Europe/Asian border is not a line but a region. Transcaucasia has been the stomping ground for almost every empire Eurasia has developed. It is a mashup of cultures but fundamentally itself. So let's not worry about the boundary. I'd be inclined to put the whole of Russia in Asia as well, but that's just me. Inscrutable sons of bitches. No no no. when you encounter a new culture you can fight it, hide from it, or try to have a dialogue with it. I have only come within 15km of the Russian border so I can’t comment. Except on their tourists.

Isn’t it amazing that in our first interactions with other cultures we do not send our best and brightest but the riff-raff and assorted scum? Adventurers and thieves? Columbus and his crew, Cortez and his, et al. Same too with tourism: the worst come first.

There are similarities between the Armenian and Georgian scripts but where Armenian looks like the arches and swoops of their architecture, Georgian looks more like a series of Neolithic emojis.

We switch guides at this point from the ebullient and talkative Sonya to the more darkly humourous and ironically informative Anna or Anya or ... well: 

My girlfriend's name is Anne but she says the 'k' is silent
Put the 'h' after the 'l' or she gets really violent.
- B. Geldof, Attitude Chicken.

Don’t even try to pronounce the words here perfectly unless you can hiss, click, and roll your ‘r’s.

Darkness descends on the road to Tbilisi. Oncoming buses show LED crosses dangling from the driver's window. Dry lightning lights up the sky as we cruise on the highway.

As I was saying, darkness descended on the road to Tbilisi and we came into the city with the twilight dying into darkness.

Tbilisi was stretched out quite a bit by Stalin but the core of the city is in a river gorge. On one side is the old town steeply climbing up a cliff and hanging from the rocks underneath an old fortress. On the other side, the roads wind up a touch before the houses really start, including the giant stature of King whoever wolfhead*, the national hero, various churches and forts, the postmodern presidential palace. On that river bank is the contemporary architecture playground Saakashvilli started but the successor government is ignoring, leaving various tubular buildings unfinished. From there a gondola runs up over the old town to the fortress.
Note: *Vakhtang I Gorgasal, ruled Iberia around 500AD

Georgian architecture here is heavily defined by the sort of balconies we started seeing in Northern Armenia.

Georgia is poorer than Armenia because it does not have a massive diaspora to fund it. It benefitted from subsidies under the Soviet system, particularly for fruit and vegetables but other industries as well and it has taken a long time to bring things back. Heck, a large percentage of formerly collectivized farmland is still auctioned and lying fallow. Fruit and veg taste soooooo good because they haven't had all the genetic manipulation to make their fruit extra firm for transport. Result: flavour. Tomatoes and cucumber are fantastic. Tomatoes are sweet and will make the ones back home seem like acid-filled coral sponges. Watermelon ... oh, the watermelon. And the grapes, the endless variety, the sweet teardrop grapes with their pips and goodness.

later on that evening when i thought I'd had enough
I sat down in a restaurant and over powdered drugs
I ordered up some dew-soaked lettuce picked by virgin hands
Nesting on a bed of pearl-encrusted clams.

Well the waiter's name was René and he told me 'bout his aunt
Who had 47 children and how they'd always planned
To grow the finest vegetables in all the kingdom's land
They're poor, he said, but happy and, well, that's what really counts.

And every evening after their 20-hour day
They'd sleep content imagining that restaurant far away
Where fat fucks in designer suits would order over deals
The smallest portions of these tiny morsels for their meals

Still, the blood it clots and the heart gets stricken
See, everybody's searching for that attitude chicken.

- B. Geldof, Attitude Chicken

Hard to praise the result of poverty but worthwhile to remember what we've voluntarily given up in pursuit of lower prices.

Oh, gas pipelines! so, imagine the natural gas lines that run through your city and into your houses. Got that? Now them above ground, running along at the roadside at a height of four or five feet off the ground and then when they come to your driveway they right-angle up to a height of 16 feet, over, and then down to continue along the road. In a highly seismic region it makes sense, I suppose, but where everyone drives like loons, it doesn't.

Georgians (and Armenians) aren't bad drivers, they are just highly opportunistic drivers. Thus, they drive in the middle of the road as much as possible, and as a point of pride never slow down when coming up behind a truck; instead they just swerve out to pass regardless of visibility, only begrudgingly falling back behind the truck when a larger vehicle looms up towards them from around the blind turn they are on. If they trust their car they will even speed up to pull in ahead of the passee, indulging in a game of chicken with the oncoming driver. I saw some horrendous statistic that in the Svan region of Georgia 5% of the population died in car accidents in the 90s. Particularly drunk driving. That might include those who died in the resulting clan feuds. Anyway, at the shrines they erect at the collision spot, they include bottles of firewater so any friends driving by can stop, toast the memory of the dead, then keep driving.

Hard to fathom. Hard, too, to fathom that our guides, Sona in Armenia and Anna in Georgia are both too young to remember Soviet times. Hell, I kept popping into vintage clothing shops forgetting that 'vintage' refers to the mid-2000s, the late 1900s at best. Theres's no Soviet stuff, it's all Benetton and knock-off Pierre Cardin. The Soviet Union is dead and buried. Buried over a quarter-century ago. There's Russian trickery and deceit and local opportunistic squabbling/wars (with Russia's hand in it) but the Soviet Union is about as alive as the hopes of Milli-Vanilli fans for a comeback Las Vegas residency.

So we enter Tbilisi and it is bright and jovial with people milling in the old town and the sound of music and the illuminated statue of whatsisname Wolfshead*, the national hero, and the fortress and the ... everything. Tbilisi is a fun town.

Note: *Vakhtang I Gorgasal, ruled Iberia around 500AD

But bear in mind that fun is fun because people are determined to make it fun. After the horrendous earthquake they had a dozen or more years ago, the centre of the Old a Town was propped up and rebuilt with concrete to ensure the existence of a cute tourist zone. Go beyond that zone up the cliff side in search of a recommended restaurant as we did and you enter a maze of crumbling--beautiful, achingly beautiful but crumbling--houses and courtyards and staircases. Balconies propped up by 2x4s, stairwells propped up by hope, roofs held together by prayer. This is a poor country and the bright lights and restaurants and enamel jewelry can't pay for all the reconstruction.

It is like looking at Brigitte Bardot now and remembering what she once looked like and just thinking (with less guilt) 'can someone please fund some reconstruction work?'

An unChristian thought, here in the second country to become a Christian nation and the only to have a church building allowed to operate during the Arab Caliphate. How did they become Christian? A young woman came to town, performed some healings, including on the king's sister yadda yadda yadda. The king is out hunting one day in 319 and the sun begins to disappear; so he prays to one god and then another and the sun disappears completely so he prays to this Christian God and the sun reappears.

So that was that and Christians they became but only notionally: it was a hermetic religion so there were stylites and cave-bound misanthropes until the second half of the century when some Georgians trained in Syrian monasteries came along and began building monastic communities in the harshest places and burying each other up to the neck in desert sand, and (consider the lilies) refusing to store food. One such monk used to run up to the pagan fire temples and thrown water on the fires and laughing at how stupid the pagans were for worshipping something the real God could so easily extinguish. So they stabbed him to death. Probably would have been better to set him on fire and laugh at how stupid he was for worshipping a god who wouldn't extinguish the fire.

Then the Byzantines came in and we have the luxuries of proper church worship and there you have it: the ongoing battle between Christianity as a sparse, humble religion and Christianity as the 'prosperity Gospel.' Join us and get rich, because God loves a winner.

Nearby to Tbilisi was the the first academy, imported from the Greeks. The Georgians added two courses to the curriculum: both in viniculture. Wine. Blessed wine.

150 years later the Mongols destroyed it. As I might have already written, in Canada's 150th year this trip is a great reminder of the hubris and impermanence of our civilizations. Over and over again, time and time again, up jumps a new bunch of johnnies who pop over the walls, take what they want, tear down what they don't, and then demand tribute until they too are overthrown.

But Georgia rolled with the punches. Over time they got used to sending their religious treasures into the mountain strongholds in times of troubles. They would rebuild and that was largely due to being on the silk road so there were always plenty of people coming to trade. We see that in the architecture: without regard to the religion or culture they were borrowing from, houses and public building incorporated Hebrew, Arabic, Persian, Western motifs. If they thought a design was pretty they put it on their house.

So Tbilisi has hot springs with bathhouses of various ancient design, a mosque shared by sunni and shia alike (divided invisibly down the middle), a synagogue, the central bank that Stalin and others robbed to fund their revolution, tens of thousands of years of history, a jazz festival in cafes and restaurants around town (jazz which includes Georgian rap over Buddy Rich beats), and people fishing on the river that bisects the town.

Good Soviet architecture competes with ex-President Saakashvili's desire to Europeanize the country by inviting various architects to add a mushroom patch that is the Hall of Justice, Shiny tubes that are to be a concert hall and something else if the successor government ever decides to stop shitting on it, a 'peace bridge' that resembles a sanitary pad, and a presidential palace that looks like a cross between the White House and the Reichstag. He also put odd postmodern police stations and town halls in cities and towns across the country to odd effect. But he did bring corruption down and fired the entire Tbilisi police force and it is a damn safe country to walk around in (except for the war zones and the bandit zones and the drunk drivers). Words can't express the discordance of some of his projects but what the hell, at least he tried.

What words can express, however, is the tension in the Church between the monks and the historians. The monks see in front of them churches with grooves worn in the floor from centuries of walking, defaced frescoes, crumbling roofs and walls. They generally would prefer to rebuild, not restore. Some new brickwork, some thick whitewash or plaster, a marble floor, these are things the monks want. Except, except, they do need the revenue that visitors bring. And visitors want history.

The monks are conservative to a fault. This may stem from being not only an orthodox church but also being the Georgian Apostolic Autocephalous Orthodox Church. They do not recognize the validity of almost any other Christian church in the world. So imagine their chagrin when their Patriarch signed them up to the World Council of Churches and invited Pope John Paul II to visit? Oh, the gnashing of teeth. The monks and their fierce bitter-faced female devotees will have another kick at the can, rest assured. Particularly as the Jehovah's Witnesses and various evangelical churches are increasing their numbers.

eh, that's it for now. Again a bit of a jumbled mess. M and I been laid low by a small but leaky virus and I'm sort of bored with writing so i might get to Stalin, the Georgian Military Highway, wine, and the grotesque beauty that is Batumi or I might not.

I’ll serve you when I’m good and ready and maybe not even then, comrade

You lads see me wash the glasses, wipe the floors,
Make the beds, I'm the best of servants.
You can kindly throw me pennies and I'll thank you very much.
When you see me ragged and tattered in this dirty shit hotel,
You don't know in hell who's talking,
You still don't know in hell who's talking.
Yet one fine day there will be roars from the harbour
And you'll ask, "What is all that screeching for?"
And you'll see me smiling as I dunk the glasses
And you'll say, "What's she got to smile at for ?"
And the ship, eight sails shining,
Fifty-five cannons wide, Sir,
Waits there at the quay.

- Marianne Faithfull, 'Pirate Jenny'  by Bertolt Brecht and translated by an irish playwright whose name escapes me at the moment.*
Note: *Frank McGuinness

It'll come to me. Great translation. And in the former soviet republics how can citizens adopt the subservience we've come to expect in the West? The whole 'have a nice day,' 'i'm eric, i'll be your server tonight and let me tell you a bit about the scrumptious wonderfulness on offer.' No, equality is not easily divested. There's a Pirate Jenny waiting in everyone for the ship to arrive and blast the hell out of the town.

And that's what Stalin did. The shitty house in which his parents rented two rooms when he was a baby still stands. Why? Because he ordered all the neighbouring houses demolished and his house be made the centre of town. Then when he died, when the rest of the Soviet Union was tearing him down, a temple was put up around the house to protect it from the elements and a museum created to showcase ... well, whatever it was meant to showcase, it is now a Norman Rockwell depiction of Uncle Joe. And that doesn't matter because plenty of people in this town would love to live in a heaven ruled by Stalin. Yes, he maybe he killed all those Polish people but not all at once ...

Pictures of good Uncle Joe petting little children on the head, embroidery with him smiling, his refusal to swap his POW son for a German general, his death mask. Oddities of history. Only begrudgingly did the museum renovate a janitorial closet under the stairs to mention the people 'who had been killed' under his regime. Passive tense. Stalin did wonderful things. Mistakes were made under his regime. The guide was either a) ironically Soviet in her monotonic recitation of what each artifact was, b) actually Soviet in her monotonic etc., c) bored to death with her job, or d) being monotonically neutral because she has no desire to be yelled at for either desecrating or revering the memory of Stalin. M found her far more interesting than the museum. She looked like the daughter from the Addams family The popularity of Stalin is so strong in his hometown that the national government had to sneak in at midnight to remove the statue of him in the town square. This was in 2010. I'm actually surprised that when the Russians were bombing Gori a few years back that the Georgian government didn't use the opportunity to blow up this museum.

I mention bombing. We are traveling along the border with 'so-called South Ossetia' as our guide would have it. Saakashvili fell into Putin's trap by attempting to retake the area with force and Russia slapped him down hard, defying the West to come to his defence.  We didn't, so Russia has since been emboldened to physically move the border in some places in the middle of the night. There’s the occasional skirmish. Not today.

We did see some church where a young jewish lady is buried in Jesus's cloak (her brother, being a stereotypically canny fellow, bought it off the Roman soldiers and she held it with such joy that she died clutching it and they could not remove it from her fingers) and where, too, we are told, the cloak of the prophet Elijah is kept. So it is a pilgrimage place for Jews as well as Georgians. But ... it's like seeing sheep in New Zealand or zebras in Africa ... after a while a church becomes a church becomes a church. This one has the toe of St. Anthony (no, not that one, the St. Anthony who is patron saint of standing on a piece of Lego at three in the morning whilst on your way to wee), that one the skull of Jesus when he was a ten-year-old, the other, the hangnail of St. Jeffery. Churches. And mosques. I can't count the number of mosques I've been in where a few hairs from the beard of the prophet drew rapturous ululating praise. Anyway, this was an exceptionally large church as these churches go. Fragments of the earlier churches on the spot are incorporated into its walls. Anyway, one miraculous robe I can imagine, but two? Greedy. Sveti Tskhoveli! That was the name of the place. Another bloody UNESCO site. Wood, then stone, then earthquake, then stone, then Tamerlane, then rebuilt piecemeal in 15th, 17th and 19th centuries. And, oh, I love this: The cathedral interior walls were once fully adorned with medieval frescoes, but in the 1830s, when Georgia was part of the Russian Empire, Czar Nicholas I was scheduled to visit Mskheta so the authorities whitewashed the frescoes to give the cathedral a "tidier look"; in the end the Czar never even came.

Then--golly, this is old country--we visited a cave city--Uplistsikhe--used from 1000BC to 500BC when it was a major trading centre, then throughout the greco-Roman period until, in its decline it was a monastic community. The rock was soft enough to carve homes, market stalls, wine storage, cattle storage, a basilica, etc etc etc all of which has worn down over the years but still provides just enough (barely) for the imagination. Anyway, the basilica collapsed early on so there is a first millennium church on the hilltop to replace it. Very first millennium with its rectangular construction and outside galleries. Didn't stop the Mongols from slaughtering all the 5000 monks who lived there. 5000? for one church? there must not have been many career opportunities back then. Good defensive position but when Genghis Khan's son came calling prayer was not materiel enough.

Then backtracking past Tbilisi, we took the Georgian Military Highway north deep into the Greater Caucuses, along hairpin turns and steep inclines and declines, with cars zipping in and out around trucks like those fish that pick at sharks' teeth. Remoras? Remonas? Why so-named? Because it has been a military highway for 2500 years or more. Some ancient described it as a god having drawn a finger through the otherwise impenetrable Caucuses. The border with Chechnya, to which we came within spitting distance, is the likeliest candidate for the legend of Alexander the Greek building an Iron Gate to keep out the Scythians (as mentioned in a quote in the previous missive). Chechens and Dagestani now on the other side ... with the Russian bear. The Russians probably want the road back  because it was their Czar who spent a fortune improving it so Russia could help Georgia fight the Persians. The Persians came (peeved at the Russo-Georgian alliance) but the Russians didn't. So, yet again, grape vines and mulberry trees were put to the torch and the Georgians to the sword.

Up here it is chalet country. It looks a bit like the architecture in the film 'The Lady Vanishes.' Beautiful river, forested hillsides, a dizzying array of turns, dramatic folds and gullies in the mountainsides to the left, forest to the right, and then switch. Watchtowers centuries old line the valleys, ready to give off smoke signals. And the men are driving the cows home along the road so that's a new hazard, and the boys driving the sheep, and the cars hooning past and the driver remarkably calm. We are going up to a ski resort town for the night, the next day to climb only about 400m in an hour and a half (could have been an hour) to the 2100 metre mark where rests ... a monastery.

So, this one, the Gergeti Trinity Church, sits high on a ridge west of our evening rest stop town of Kazbegi, silhouetted against the beautiful glaciated mountain Mkinvartsverti on which ... ok ... Prometheus or the local equivalent was chained and where the tent of Abraham stood. The elders of local tribes would meet here to parlay. So, anyway, the king wanted to know where to build a safe monastery so someone told him, or he had a dream, or whatever, he was to throw some meat to an eagle and follow it. Where it landed, that would be a safe spot. Well, he bloody well had to chase that eagle fast to find this place. And in fact, there has recently been discovered the ruins of another monastery at the 4000m mark on Mkinvartsverti. Built 700 years ago. I didn't bother going inside, I climbed another hill to get some shots of this place nestled deep in these mountains. And to smoke a pipeful of Peterson's Connoisseur's Blend.

Here, as in much of Georgia, animal sacrifices still take place at these churches but so too does modern tech, with solar panels being used to charge monks' cell phones. Paganism is alive and well, particularly deep in these mountains. Independence and robbery: hand in hand.

Caucasians love their phones. They smoke with them, drive with them, eat with them, and argue with them. I mean at the same time. In Armenia anytime there was an argument (say about our room) one party would reach for the phone and call someone. Immediately, so too would the other party. I began to think of it as a symbolic thing, like an invocation to the deities, with no one every answering the calls, but the thing being to see which side breaks first.

Anyway, robbery. We popped into a fortress used by one of these robber barons alongside the highway, A fortress within a fortress within a fortress; they obviously were not expecting brotherly love. The townsite had a wall, then the church had a wall, and then they built the belltower a mere metre or less from the side of the church and made its entrance at about the two metre mark. So they could climb up a ladder and pull it in after them. I went up a different tower that was far too dangerous to enter and slipped on a floor made of cracked and cracking poles, and twisted and turned to the top to get some pictures. Down was worse. So I made it to the bus late and we headed to wine country.

Whining out of my system, now for wining and dining

There ... I got the bile and diarrhoea out of my system. Having a virus is one of those things that requires purgation. Anyone reading this on email or the website won't know what I am talking about, and that's just as well.

Recovering from this illness that struck us both down, I find it hard to even think about food and drink which is going to make this instalment challenging, I think.

When last we left our intrepid duo they had just rocketed down the ancient Georgian Military highway in the footsteps of the Scythians, Comanians, Tartars, Mongols, Russians, and various traders from a multitude of cultures. Medieval watchtowers, strongholds for robber barons, churches for the most ascetic of monks, slower trucks fell behind as we raced the sun back to Tbilisi and then eastward over another mountain range* before it got dark. Too late. Our indifference to time had us battling herds of cattle on the highway, but eventually we made it to Alaverdi. The castle where Whatsisname Wolfshead* died flitted past, as did gorgeous mountain dips and crags (well, not really crags ... this lower mountain range is much less craggy than the Caucasus ranges).
Note: *Gombori Range
Note: **Vakhtang I Gorgasal, ruled Iberia around 500AD

Oh, and anytime you get a form to fill out and the ethnicity list uses "caucasian" as a catch-all for the pigmentally deprived you should complain. That term comes from the pseudo-scientist whatsisname who divided the races into Mongoloid, Negroid, Caucasian and perhaps some others. His Caucasian covered Morocco to Finland to the Middle East: the "clever race." We dropped his other categories, why do we hold onto this one?

Anyway, Kakheti: deep wine country: a wide vee of an ancient river delta that has produced grapes for centuries, mulberries as well for silk production, and gorgeous fruit and vegetables. This was the centre of Georgian culture and Christianity for the centuries when the Arabs held Tbilisi. Alaverdi Cathedral is a wonderful juxtaposition of styles, being a romanesque basilica on one side, gothic on the other, with stylistic elements from Persian, Arabia and Russia scattered among repairs and patches throughout. It feels alive where postmodern pastiche just feels amusing. Anyway, some of the Syrian-trained monks who brought the second wave of Christianity through Georgia settled here but the pagan traditions continued because this is really just the edge of the lowlands. It is highlander country where traditions hold hard. After the Persians swept through and burned all these lands they took 100,000 prisoners to Isfahan in Iran where they still maintain their religion, traditions and various dialects.

Being stubborn does not mean that they are intolerant. They know the power of grudges and feuds and like their neighbours up in the Caucasus mountains they are careful who they insult (in fact, 'you fool' is probably the harshest thing you can say to a highlander before they start a blood feud and eradicating members of your family. So, for example, in respect for their Muslim Dagestani neighbours to the east, they did not eat pork or allow pigskin shoes (...yes, common footwear ...) in their villages. At the same time, not terribly far away, the locals still sacrifice pigs each year because hundreds of years ago they drove off a Persian army by rolling pigs' heads down the hill at them. Long shadows.

Anyway, this is rural country but more prosperous looking than elsewhere. There's money in grapes and everyone has them, even if only a small pergola. Their varietals are old. Very old. Over 500 of them. They look like grapes, like real grapes, like ancient Spartans compared to modern Greeks. It is Rtveli (harvest time) and the roads are lined with trailers, dump trucks, pickup trucks, anything and everything that can drive and hold grapes is parked along the roads brimming with green and translucent and purple and blue grapes.

Traders have come through here for millennia. It has been an important part of the Silk Road despite the varied attacks and despoilage. There is a fine example of the fortress at Gremi which guarded a town site, market, caravanserai, and wine facilities. Grapes have been trampled and turned into wine here for eight years. Hell, apricots had their origin here. Check out the latin name. And any sweet cherry you've every eaten? This is its ancestral homeland ('send 'em all back to where they came from' I don't hear you say).

So back to the wine: they produce some enticing and excellent wines using the European method, but also an increasing amount using their traditional method. Some reds: saperavi, tavkveri, otskhanuri sapere, usakhelouri, shavkapito, dzelshavi. Some whites: rkatsiteli, mtsvane kakhuri, kakhuri mtsvane (i know ...). chinuri, rachuli tetra, avasirkhva, tsolikouri. We are fans of the mtsvane. Lovely white.

So, the traditional method: qvevri. Huge clay pots (or small if in your own house) are buried in the earth. Stomped grapes are poured into these, skins, seeds, stems and all,  and only the natural yeasts already on the skins produce the fermentation. They are sealed and left for several months (or only weeks for whites -- creates an amber colour) to mature. The juice is then dipped out and put into another underground clay pot to mature for some years (again -- reds) while the stems, skins, and seeds are distilled into cha cha, a jet fuel that I am told can be quite good. I have also been told to "pull my finger" and "close your eyes and open your mouth," so I have a healthy skepticism about such things. Anyway, these traditional reds are very tannic and further aging only makes them more so. The young white or amber wines are definitely quaffable by the hornfull.

Different regions have different methods and different (or the same) grapes, so I am generalizing. Anyway all of this seen in Khareba Winery, which uses 3 or 4 of some 15 km of ex-Soviet military tunnels to keep everything a constant 14 degrees. Lunch there overlooking the broad valley and then another, more relaxed, evening in town, aware that the programmed adventure is coming to an end.

The next day, a pop into Tsinandali, a great house once owned by so-and-so Chavchavadze and then used by Tsar Nicholas II and family as a country home. Guides as personable as those in the Stalin museum.

A traditional lunch with these fresh wines to the music of a troubadour family. Georgian foods? I'm glad you asked:

Khachapuri: generally a shallow oval bread bowl with cheese and an egg baked in. Break off the handles and then the rest of the bowl to scoop up the hot cheese and egg.

Eggplant (or other vegetables) rolled with walnut/garlic/spice paste (baje)

Mchadi: cornbread

Khashi: broth cooled from beef offal and lots of garlic.

Mtsvadi: skewers of mean grilled over a wood fire, with fresh pomegranate juice squeezed over it.

Khinkali: dumplings shaped like large garlic bulbs, filled with meat and broth. The thick 'stem' is too thick to eat so those left behind allow the house to know how many you have consumed.

Churchkhela: shelled walnuts on a thread, repeatedly dipped in a grape juice and flour paste and hung to dry.

Cheeses: I did see an enticing array of aged cheeses in a shop but for the most part the ones we had were similar to feta with varying degrees of salinity. Cheese. bread. Cheese baked in bread. Khachapuri. The constipation may be what keeps the locals so po-faced.

A return to Tbilisi, a group dinner overlooking the gorge that is the old town and then M and I ventured westwards to the Black Sea on our ownsome.

Give 'em what they want: the Las Vegas of the Black Sea

"'The idea of universal happiness in Communism has perhaps a certain beauty as a literary notion, but brought to life it leads to crime and murder'--I am about to utter that hackneyed and ultimately false sentence. What beautiful idea are we talking about here? The idea itself was crime and murder."
- Mr. Traba in Jerzy Pilch's 'A Thousand Peaceful Cities,' translated by David Frick

Dry rolling hills out of Tbilisi. Good byes said to our traveling companions—good eggs all of them, mostly double-yolked—and a taxi to the train station, wretched food supplies purchased from the lacklustre cafeteria tucked high above everything, possibly to keep the smell of the cooking away from management, and a modern smooth train westward to the land of ancient Greek settlements, the landing of the Argo, the ill-fated (for the kids) trysting of Jason and Medea, and the tale of the Golden Fleas. Vermin was never before or since so welcome. We are going to rest up in Batumi on the Black Sea for a few days. Southwest corner of the country, near the Turkish border.

Lusher and lusher as we go west. Subtropical you can tell is approaching. Train is silent and modern. Full to the tits. The ping of mobile phones. Only issue is that it is a comfortable train only for up to three hours. The last two are uncomfortable what with the hard seats, lack of recline, and the annoying feature of Georgian Railways assigning seats based on purchase order not personal choice. Thus, M and I were in a block of three facing backwards, rather than the double seat on the other side of the aisle, facing forwards. On the way back we were split because we were in seats 3 and 4, which was in a block of six seats (three facing three) and I was in 3 on the aisle facing forwards while she was in 4 at the window facing backwards, which meant that not only did we have to rub elbows with strangers we had to play footsies with them as well.

Ah well, these are details. If a commuter train is all Georgia can afford right now then God bless them. The seasoned travellers, M points out, are likely those who spend their time standing by the doors doing various stretches and scowls. The tracks are largely lined by trees so there’s not always a lot to see. The cars are double deckers so it would have been interesting to have been up top for the view of the hills, the eventual delta, widening to infinity, and then the coast. 

Houses are squares, equal triangle of tin on each side of roof. If balcony or verandahs, they usually wraps around the house. Sometimes nice fretwork around the eaves. Cows. some rusting rail stock, a dishevelled stationmaster or signalman with his round paddle, the repetitive clack of the train hitting the breaks in the track.

Batumi is a marvellous, a splendid Disneyland of architectural horrors. From a distance one sees first a sparse few towers and wonders what the hell one is doing in such a place. The ferris wheel comes into view. The port. But the drive into Batumi is like cutting into a wedding cake, cutting through the thick, almost sickly, plastic icing into a treasure of fruit and ... well, whatever goes into a wedding cake. I’m possibly confusing it with Christmas cake but anyway, the metaphor goes something like: all around the city is a layer of every kind of postmodern pastiche a bevy of second-rate (and some first-) architects could devise and then the old town is a joyous collection of late-19th, early-20th century houses and courtyards and Soviet-style apartment blocks but in colour(!), and this and that with ordinary life mixed in with tourist life. 

Saakashvili and others dreamt of turning this town into the Las Vegas of the Black Sea and they poured money into it. There are a some pastiche reconstructions around a square, some odd towers, statues, fountains, promenades, and not jut a ferris wheel but a building—a white and gold needle—with a ferris wheel of eight golden gondola cars built into its side on the 20th floor. This eye-hooking sight was to be a technical college but funds ran dry so it was to be a Le Meridien and may still be slated for that. 

Further out, a casino hotel replica of Flavian’s amphitheatre, the Colosseum, buildings of various angles and curves, inside, an extraordinarily safe-feeling, walkable, pleasant set of streets and neighbourhoods. Those tend to the dilapidated (both ancient and modern)-witness, for example, the cement stairwell up to our apartment, worn smooth and curved down its centre from decades of feet, yet pulling away from the wall and propped up on the other side by some random sticks of steel and iron—but busily inhabited with washing on lines or on balconies, the traffic calmed by a large one-way network of roads. Green and lush with trees, palms, bamboos. The beach a sea of flat smooth stones, skippable. 

Dinner at Chocolatte and then up to the 20th floor of a Sheraton that is supposedly inspired by the lighthouse of Alexandria but looks like Stalin’s idea of a wedding cake topper, and a terrace with a gorgeous view of the city night and a glass of their best wine (well, for by-the-glass wine) for $12. Check your guns at the door in the casino. We just wanted to pass through a casino into the hotel to check the restaurant and had to provide passports (no passports? what about driver’s licence?), get photographed, and then issued an identity card, and go through a metal detector and some serious heavies to enter the smoky rooms.

I forgot to mention that about Georgia: generally, you smoke in the restaurant and sit on the patio to avoid smoke, although that is changing: people are now smoking everywhere.

Batumi might be the most enchanting city--architecturally speaking--that I've ever seen. And then back to the apartment, our lovely large apartment with 18 foot ceiling, 14 foot doors that make me feel like an aristocrat flitting around a mouldering palace, an Armenian church across the street the entrance of which I have both flashed and mooned, and also across from a schoolyard or daycare with children screaming such as i haven't heard since i was a child doing such screaming myself until I lost my voice and my power to screech: like a child abattoir over there. 

Then sick: something we ate, perhaps a salad or chocolate crepe, or train station food. More likely a virus. 24 hours of something vile but we got through it. Appetites massively suppressed. 48 hours, 72 of subdued behaviour, my cantankerous Facebooking, light wandering.

Things seem less enchanting when I am sick. I get The Fear when everything becomes more sparkly. The sun is unbearable, people are all uglier and venomous—clomping around like Igors and praying mantises—and incomprehensible, and I shake and sweat my way through it because staying in bed is even more perverse. You may have noticed a turn in my writing over the past few missives as my memories and thoughts were filtered through a haze of misanthropy. One day I’ll have a switch and filter it all through lechery and venery. Until that happens, things like a schoolyard of shrieking children, a Pomeranian two balconies over, two drunken locals arguing at 2am when every window and balcony door has to be open to draw a breeze, things like these are not cute peculiarities of a new place, they are the accumulations forming an enormous “fatberg” of psychic grease, wet wipes, sanitary pads, condoms, hamsters, and diapers in the cloacal undercurrent of my mind and the pressure builds and the exit valves start spewing what excreta they can like when you put your thumb over a garden hose and send out a powerful spray and then … well, then I dive deep into myself with chainsaws and explosives to break up and push the fatberg out through my arteries to my fingers and spread it into the world lest it overwhelm me.  

Anyway, Batumi. There’s more Roman Catholics in this part of Georgia than elsewhere, not because of any particular doctrinal conviction but because the Grand Turk had an agreement with the Vatican not to persecute its adherents. All other Christians—being as they were apostates, heretics, in error, out of communion, etc.—were fair game. So … convert to Islam, convert to Roman Catholicism, or be relentlessly—if slowly at times—ground down.

Anyway, Batumi. We were able to meet up with a companion from our more recent travels, J., for dinner and otherwise take strolls fueled (for me) by ice cream, Sprite, and toast. And what can I say? There was nothing particularly individually noteworthy but it was a flaneûr’s dream. Buildings are decorated with chimeras, mermaids, other mythological creatures. Poseidon presides over one square, Medea, clutching a golden fleece in the European Square. This is all exquisitely framed by subtropical flora: cypresses, magnolias, oleanders, laurels, lemon and orange trees, etc. etc., are delightful. The residences are pastel in the evening light (no one in Georgia ever sees a sunrise except perhaps from the wrong side). Before postmodern pastiche, the Georgians were doing their own, combining—as I believe I’ve mentioned—arabesques, pPersian, Turkish, Hebraic, English, French, and Imperial Russian elements. Contemprary statuary dots the place: statues that move and pass through each other (Ali and Nina), colourful hearts, whimsical women on water-powered penny-farthings.

The bizarre architecture that has some buildings melting down into pig snouts, others resembling Chartres as seen through a kaleidoscope, and too many just tacking follies onto facades at odd angles. An upside-down “White House.” Well, well. A 8km long seaside boardwalk with Segues, trikes, even old-fashioned pedal carts for rent. Who can’t like this place?

And a few days to just be ourselves as best we can and it is time to leave and we take the train back along the same route past children playing soccer on a field with crumbling concrete bleachers held together only by the rebar, like some 2000 year old ruin but probably only 60. Past the same cows in reverse, and into Tbilisi for an evening check in and dinner in the Old Town below the high cliff top where the Soviet “Eye of Sauron” (a TV broadcasting tower) cannot see us.

And then a 3am cab ride to the airport where we managed a breakfast of chocolate and biscuits. A flight to Munich where Oktoberfest is underway and we managed … a breakfast of white sausage and white beer. Some final strolling around that charming but much less shabby city, then back to the airport for our Lufthansa flight to Vancouver which was a reasonable 9.5 hours (Eurus was kind to us while Zephyrus seemed otherwise occupied) over the North Sea, Greenland, Baffin Island, Great Slave Lake, and so on and so forth as Zizek might say, to return home. Home. Home where D. left us with bananas, yoghurt, milk, bread, butter and other kindnesses. Home, where people don’t smile anymore than they do in Transcaucasia but at least they do so (don’t so?) in a language I can comprehend. Home, where a farmer’s market on Comox Street is full of GLBTTQQ vibeness, overpriced organic carrots, and a medly of cuisines. Home, where the fall colours are coming on and my local crow is cawing at me for having taken down the hanging basket where he used to sit and yank at my ratty plants.

I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down
I get knocked down, but I get up again
You are never gonna keep me down

He drinks a Whiskey drink, he drinks a Vodka drink
He drinks a Lager drink, he drinks a Cider drink
He sings the songs that remind him of the good times
He sings the songs that remind him of the best times
(Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy)

- Tubthumping, by Chumbabwumba

Bavaria. Poland. The Caucasus. A hell of a trio. A good reminder of the transience and resilience of all things. I get knocked down, then I get up again. Not necessarily the typical honeymoon destination, but from a Stoic perspective, probably perfect.

September, 2017