Steamed up in Tbilisi, Georgia

The stonework tops of the Persian Baths, Tbilisi

Persian Baths.  What does that sound like to you?  I thought of mosaic tiles and cave-like walls, steam floating between me and several dozen other silent bathers, the drip of water from the ceiling to the tile...  It sounded exotic and heavenly to me.

One of the archways inside

I descended into the waiting room to enjoy a halting conversation with the attendant at an indistinct midpoint between English, Georgian, Russian and Sign Language.  After reassuring myself that I knew how much it all cost, I was sent to a space that looked like someone’s living room, complete with a brown leather sofa and chairs, coffee table, ashtray, and a box of unexplained Q-tips.  The attendant left me a packet of Head and Shoulders shampoo, spoke a few unintelligible things while gesturing toward the clock, the door, and somewhere off in the middle distance.  O---kayyyyy.

At eye level, the room looked normal enough, but it’s underground.  The rolling brick and stone bubbles I saw from the street are the rounded roofs of these little rooms.  When you look up, the dome peaks at the top with a little stained-glass window “nipple”:

– not unlike the tip of the Khinkali dumplings (eaten not half an hour ago.)

  

 

It’s not like I’ve never been in a spa before.  I knew enough to get naked.  What would happen after that was mildly mysterious, but not frightening – more like intriguing.  Off the back of the living room a clangy metal door led me to the water room, with a marble slab and a pool of steam.  The water ran lazily over the sides of the rectangular pool, slowly but constantly,  a constant inflow of natural spring water.  Hot sulphur smell was part of the ambience, but not overwhelming.

DON’T look at the water, I kept telling myself as I lowered myself in, slowly, slowly, getting used to the heat.  Yeah, there are some floaties.  I don't... know... what... they... were.  This might gross me out in the U.S., but damn, seventy quadrillion Georgians throughout history can’t be wrong.  Not to mention the Persians, Turks, Russians, and everyone else who ever took advantage of steaming mineraly water coming out of the ground.  Just rest, breathe and rest.

I came out ten or fifteen minutes later, showered off a bit, and cooled off in what I’d named the Sofa Room.  Nana knocked for Phase II of the Persian bath – massage and skin scrubbing.  She took me back in the water room and laid me on the marble slab, giggling at my attempts to speak Russian.  She filled a bland little kitchen bucket with the steaming spring water and poured, poured, poured it over me.  Then she got out a scratchy mitt and scrubbed the crap out of me.  I worried about my skin – it turns REALLY red with something like this, and I didn’t want her to worry.  Then I realized – me and my white, indoor, sensitive skin – that was probably normal here!  All those Slavs and the like?  They probably all turn the color of beets just from brushing up against their clothes.  I belong!

Next it was soap.  Nana took what looked like an old, narrow pillow case and put some kind of soap in it – from the smell, I would swear it was Joy.  Anyway, she then blows into the pillow case, knots the top, and shakes and squeezes it till it makes an ungodly amount of foam.  She scrubs me down again with that, repeating the whole pillowcase-shaky-foam business a few times.  I don’t quite get it, but it’s making me laugh. No pictures - couldn't get the camera wet, sorry.

Then, oh, massage.  Brusquer and shorter than the lay-on-a-cushy-table-in-Vail-while-all-your-minute-aches-are-surveyed-by-someone-with-more-degrees-than-you massages I’m accustomed to (and lots cheaper), it still has the effect of loosening me up and cracking my back.  Wonderful.  Finally, with a resounding pair of thwacks on my shoulders, she states, “Finish.”  Then she pours another ocean of that hot, hot water on me, while I’m laying down, after standing me up, and as I try to walk toward the shower – throwing the bucketfuls at me from across the water room. 

In the guidebook Ali and Shane loaned me, there’s an essay about this place from a couple centuries ago, stating that, come what may, pay for the tea to end your bath.  “Sell your white stockings if you must, but have your tea!” it states, fervently.  So I did.  (Have my tea, that is.  I have no white stockings.)  A perfectly Russian little teapot and teacup, at least 600 cubes of sugar (you know, just in case), slices of bitter orange, and me.  I sat there a good twenty minutes before the attendant came back to see why I hadn’t left yet.  “One hour?” she asked, pleasant but bothered.  I got my ducks back in a row and went out into the cold night.

Entrance to the Persian Baths, at night

All I do is Eat (Georgia, continued)

What a lovely day.  I spent the first several hours of it just reading a novel, sitting on the front patio of the hotel.  It felt so indulgent and extravagant.  At about 3:00 I finished my book, changed into sneakers and a t-shirt, and hiked up the mountain behind the hotel.  At the top of the mountain is an asymmetrical tower - the Georgian Eiffel:

A spaghetti bowl of paths weave up and across the mountain; lots of individuals, families and couples were traipsing up or down as I climbed.  It took less than an hour - maybe I should call it a hill instead of a mountain? - but it was lovely to see the city from so high up.

 
I felt rejuvenated after the hike and walked back to the old city in Tbilisi for more sight seeing.  Lucky I did!  Because the first time I went to the old city, yesterday, apparently I never made it!  I was off by a few blocks.  So this time, today, I went a little farther... lost myself a bit more convincingly... and found amazing sights.  Each one made me think of a friend or family member, like the Barselona Totalizator sign (which made me think of Kyna, when we watched the Barcelona game together...) or the Absinthe Bar sign, which made me think of Shane and meeting an absinthe drinker on H St NW.  Or the Simpsons donut kiosk sign, which of course made me think of (my niece) Lauren and (my brother) Kyle, who love the Simpsons like I love M*A*S*H:

And everything about the city reminds me of Ali, all the things he told me about this place.  How beautiful it is, how cultured, how much they're into food and wine. 

I studied Russian so avidly as a kid.  It was like I wanted to BE Russian, not to say Soviet.  Now only a fragment of the language remains.  But I unearthed some of it in Dom Vina, a wine store I happened upon.  The elderly shopowner drew me in with a warm greeting, and we spoke for twenty minutes or so.  He didn't speak any English nor I any Georgian, so whatever was communicated, came through in Russian.  He was a mechanical engineer, many patents to his name, and multiple science awards to his credit - they were all hung along the back of the shop.  He hadn't worked in Irkutsk (home of the Soviet scientocracy) but he was impressed that I'd been there.

Alexander Kurdadze is his name - if anyone googles him, let me know what you find out.  There were even a couple of books about him in the shop.  Okay, so that's a little vain, but hey - if wine sales taper off, maybe he could get one or two book sales to keep him going.  Anyway, he was cool, and gave me an excellent glass of dry red saperavi wine.  I asked to buy the bottle, and it was only about $4.  Of course it came in a one-liter plastic bottle with a screw top, but whatever.  It tastes pretty good!

This is me at dinner later that night.  I'm on a balcony and it's getting pretty chilly - but the restaurant lays blankets over every chair, so you can sit out comfortably and watch people.  I had the best salad EVER - lots of spicy things over arugula - and Georgian red wine, plus the pretty cappuccino you can see in the pic.  What a lovely night.  The taxi ride back to my hotel was cheaper even than the bottle of wine.  Gotta love Georgia...

"Your colleagues are waiting for you."

"Your colleagues are waiting for you."

That was the first thing I heard this morning - a nice, Slavic voice telling me to wake up and get downstairs to the meeting.  The new job has begun.  I'm in Tbilisi, Georgia, meeting the team of people here that are working to improve government.  My job is to help them track their progress.  So I got myself together, bustled downstairs, and started to learn what this project is all about.

This blog is three weeks late, which should come as no surprise to anyone who saw me during the last three weeks.  I may have kept my wits about me, I may have been smiling, but it was utter madness up in here.  I was leaving my old job, receiving daily e-mails from the new one, planning to visit my mom for her 75th birthday, balancing that visit between parents and siblings, finishing (or trying to finish) a report for the old job before leaving, and then, of course, starting the new one by flying to the other side of the world. The flight was the easy part.

It's not doing so much that is hard - it's doing it all well.  "Underpromise, and overdeliver" - that's great advice and very hard to make happen.  One does silly things in an attempt to do the impossible: for example, I worked while on vacation, and took "sanity breaks" while at work.  Maybe things will smooth out now.

Lots of people asked me, "So you're taking a job that doesn't require so much travel?"  Why would I do that? I wanted to ask in return.  The travel is part of my professional fun.  Travel is hard, of course, and some people don't like it.  But I do - I like airports, I like planes, I like the new faces at the other end, not to mention the new streets and buildings and languages and food. 

This was the look on my brother's face when I told him I like airports:

He and his family and I went skiing while we were back in Colorado for Mom's birthday.  Kyle's daughter, my superniece Lauren, is in the following photos, along with my brother and me.

Back at Mom's house for her birthday party, our sister Kyna insisted on a few accoutrements for the festivities:

Just because my mom looks like Gene Shalit with this fake moustache doesn't mean we shouldn't leave it on her.

More soon!

Work-life balance, and a new job

This is Raya!  Only the cutest cat in the WORLD.  She keeps me laughing...

Most of the people I know work too much.  The workweek is far more than 40 hours – more than 50, probably more like 60.  It’s not like we’re attorneys who are making well into six figures our first year out of law school, either.  But it’s not just dedication.  It’s expected. 

Today I’m waiting on a file to be sent to me for review.  It's not impossible - 40 pages of text to read and comment on.  But it’s Saturday, and I have plans tonight.  I'd really rather not have work impinging on my time to read, watch Glee episodes, or try on outfits for the concert.  But that’s how it goes at our office – everything takes longer than planned and I’ve got to play my part for the team.  (Lord knows, the team has all been there till late at night, most every night, for at least a couple of weeks.)  So they’re not asking more of me than they're giving.

I also love what I do.  The work is interesting, and it has taken me all over the world.  Don’t I owe this kind of devotion?  I am compensated: I get a paycheck, and amazing travel that I’d never get to do otherwise.  I’m involved with people and projects on the other side of the world – isn’t that enough for me?

But then again, what about that work-life balance thing?  I think I owe that to myself.  I’m not a kid anymore – I’m a grownup, coursing through my life as if it’ll last forever, and there will always be time for things like… writing a novel, or meeting someone special.  That’s not necessarily true.  I’m not guaranteed any of that, unless I guarantee it to myself.  Unless I take the time, set the boundaries, make those my priorities instead of making money for The Man.

In the middle of the coming month, I’m starting a new job.  Yesterday I was on the phone with my new boss and we were talking about all the cool projects I could get involved with when I start.  She stopped for a moment, and in all seriousness, said, “We’re going to have to watch you.”  I was shocked.  What did she mean?  “You could easily get yourself in over your head.  There’s so much interesting work going on here – we’re going to have to develop a signal for when we’re in meetings, like I pull on my ear and you know you have to say “No” to what they’re asking of you.”

This is the person who’s hiring me, who needs someone to take work off her plate.  But she doesn’t want me to do all I can do – she wants me to stay sane and keep a lid on the number of tasks I take on, the number of hours I work.  Refreshing, but a bit weird too.  

And here's a weird thought: have you ever had some idle time and wondered, “What do I do now?”  I think it’s almost easier to be overburdened.  With all that noise going on around us, we can’t hear the quiet hiss of our lives zooming by. 

So maybe this new job is a chance for me to start fresh, not take on too much, not get carried away with the excitement of new work and new travel.  Even the way I’m starting is already nuts: I end the old job one day, starting the other the next, and that evening flying to Georgia.  (The one on the other side of the world, not the peachy one in my time zone.)  Not a good sign.  If I can keep this in front of my mind, though, I don’t have to take on every piece of work that’s thrown at me – I’ll have to let some drop.

DC vs. Anywhere Else

Back in Washington.  Now that I’m a blogger, I’m obviously required and trained to notice the differences between life on the road for work, and life at home.  Here are some contrasts:

In DC: I go online, pay some bills, read the newspaper, send some e-mail - usually all at the same time or with nothing but a few clicks and tappity tap in between.  Bam! Everything's taken care of.

On the road: Theoretically I can do this, but it’s infinitely less gratifying to check the news websites, or send off a few e-mails, when each page load takes three or four minutes.  On a good day.  And the connections are rarely secure: paying bills or buying books on Amazon would not be wise.

In DC: I wear a miniskirt.  No one notices, or if they do, they never mention it.

On the road (think Liberia, Sudan, Zambia): If I wear a miniskirt, I look lascivious or just plain slutty, and any notice I get is more than a little unnerving. 

In DC: I play with my cat, cross the street to pet dogs that are being walked, and go to giant box stores where people bring their animals to join in American consumer activity.

On the road: I’ve seen some animals on my travels that would surely pass on a strain of disease untouchable by modern medicine.  Scratching, mangy, logy.  Frothy, wheezing, hobbled.  Stinking, earless, chewed.  Kicked, avoided, scary.  If one of them tried to drag me out of a burning building I’d scream “ewwwww!” and crawl back into the flames.

In DC: I go to the grocery store, buy stuff to eat, take it home and cook it.

On the road: Most everything is stacked in unfamiliar rows under quivering fluorescent lights.  Labels are often in Arabic.  (“Coke adds life” in Arabic script is a pretty weird thing to see.)  Some stuff looks really appealing – like candies and cookies – but has a distinct taste of bacon fat upon ingestion.  I think it’s the lard.  The alternative is to splurge on imported brands – like $4 for a can of recognizable soup.  So I buy the stuff I don’t recognize, make faces while I eat it, and usually come home a couple of pounds lighter.

In DC: I take clean, quiet, well-lit, rather pricey public transportation everywhere.  My fellow riders sneer at someone who has their headphones turned up too loud.  When I need to drag home a big bag of cat food, there are cars located all around the city that I can unlock with a keycard at my convenience.

On the road: Seems like every place has its variation on the minibus, available for a few cents, that’ll take you on long, stutter-stop journeys across a city’s main drags.  In Liberia they are tiny taxis that fill up with seven, eight, nine friendly commuters; in Mexico City, a succession of jaunty green buses that are inordinately tall, given the average height there.  Nairobi has matatus that careen and weave with exceeding speed and recklessness while standees swing on the straps like so many weary Gumbies.  In Southern Sudan, a $50 taxi ride will take you on cratered and rutted side streets, filled with lake-like puddles, to avoid the ungodly congestion, almost all of them UNDP land cruisers.

In DC: I get up, go for a run, take a shower, get dressed, pack my lunch, go to work, and come home.  I look pretty much the same as when I left.  I have time and energy at night for something else – TV, dinner out with friends, a show at a club.

On the road: There are no patterns to what I do on the road.  But at the end of every day, I’m invariably sweaty and covered with dust.  Reports and papers stick haphazardly out of purse or briefcase, and if they're not marked "URGENT" in red ink it's only because I didn't have time to write it.  I probably forgot to eat lunch.  I take something to the room or eat in the cafeteria at the hotel, laptop open, finalizing refining fixing planning prepping.  I collapse on the bed way too late, and set my phone to “screech” for 6 a.m.

Life's just not easy on the road.  It's not predictable.  I have moments where I'm confused, or lost, or don't know what's coming next.  Usually all three. 

So why is it I can barely wait for the next trip?  (Now accepting psychological comments at this address.)

Liberia on the Flip Side

Second installment.  Okay, I learned something new today.  If you’re not abjectly miserable in your hotel room, don’t ask for a better hotel room.  The one I had was funky, a bit dark, and the pillows were weird (as if filled with crumpled poster board) – in short, a Pretty Good Hotel Room for a developing country.  I heard that some of the other rooms had ocean views, so I asked to change.  The room I got was so pretty!  It was freshly painted in bright sky blue (that’d be a Colorado sky blue, for the family folks who know what I mean) and had a little nook by the window with a table.  What a nice spot to work! 

However.  The table top was not actually connected to the table bottom.  That was a surprise.  There were no towels, no toilet paper, no TV remote, no trash can, hairs on the sheets, something slimy on the bathroom floor, and the promised internet wasn’t working.  The front desk did call me to ask if they could send up the IT fellow – though it was at 10:30 p.m., which I found a bit odd.

The air conditioner was conveniently placed in that cute “nook” but since I couldn’t work there, I couldn’t enjoy the cool air.  The air in the rest of the room remained muggy and warm.  I would have been better off sleeping with the window wide open.

Oh, you say, you can’t sleep with the window wide open – what about the mosquitoes?  No, no, I’d never do that.  Nevertheless, at 4:00 I woke up out of a sound sleep, itching in every direction.  Something had hatched and entered the room somehow, and I had more than a dozen bites all at once.  I’m getting some malaria pills today to keep in my purse, just in case I start to get wicked sick.

I went to a rural county on Sunday to start data collection with the newly-trained field teams.  The road goes past a “town” called Firestone – actually a rubber tree plantation run by, of course, Firestone.  The red taps on the trees collect the sap, which is shipped to the U.S. for processing.  Small, neat brick houses are clustered around, offering better conditions for workers than just a few years ago.  We have to stop at one such row of houses.  One of my team members just learned that his stepmother died, and it falls to him to inform his stepsister, who lives in Firestone.  He tells her husband.  When he gets back in the car he tells me it’s their cultural way of doing things – information goes through the husband.  Our project challenges male-female roles, and my American brain sees his way of doing things as a bit sexist.  But maybe the bereavement period is a bad time to try to change attitudes.

The town where we base ourselves is called Buchanan, and sits on the coast south of the capital.  The place was ravaged during the war and still shows it, very clearly.  The ocean is also taking its toll on the coastline.  It’s very run-down.  But they have the best doughnuts (pronounced “doffnuts”) ever, so that’s a plus.  Everything I buy costs many times more than when one of my Liberian colleagues buys it, but for the doughnuts it’s worth it.  For the hotel, it’s not - $125 a night for a very spacious but horrible room.  $4 for a can of locally-made Pringles, $12 for a piece of chicken and French fries.

The first school we visit is modest in the extreme – wattle and daub, and I’m guessing it hasn’t been daubed very recently.  151 kids under school age are seated on the floor at one end of a long room, a broken blackboard on a stand acting as the room divider.  The teacher is a little old guy named Arthur, without any teeth, or at least not many.  Next to him (in the same room) is a class of 30 kids who are in grades one and two; the room for grades three and four has about 14 total on the roster and six have shown up.  Drop-out is serious here. 

But the teachers and the principal seem pretty devoted to this motley little place.  It’s tidy and friendly.  Kids get a meal of bulgur at mid-day, provided by the World Food Programme and cooked up by local moms.  At the end of the visit the kids huddle around me for a handshake or a wave, and I notice they are imitating me, so I start doing weird jumps and spins and they all join in.  We’re all laughing and half of them are falling on each other because everyone’s crowded around so tightly.  It’s very sweet; check out this pic.

On the rough dirt road to visit the next school, we get a spectacular flat tire.  “Spectacular” because when we get out and see the puncture, it looks like a big sinister smile – the tire is cut wide open, sidewall to sidewall.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  The driver changes it out with the spare in about six minutes flat – really fast, considering he has to set the jack on the sandy road and it’s sinking in as he works.  But the spare has a big bulge in it – it has clearly been poorly repaired and doesn’t look like it’ll last.  It doesn’t – twenty kilometers later, we’re stopped again and this time without a spare.

There’s a family across the road from our vehicle’s resting spot.  They show us the mound we have to stand on to get enough cell signal to call the other team for a rescue.  The mom brings us fruit and the dad whacks at some coconuts for what seems like a really long time, trying to give us coconut milk.  Grandma is wearing a black bra and skirt and sitting in the shade, weaving a crawfish trap out of reeds.  Her daughter demonstrates it to me, how the crawfish swim in but can’t get out, and how you open one end to get them out.  Ewwww.  Funny that they’re the poorest people I’ve seen in Liberia so far, but instead of seeing me as an ATM machine (like the hotel owner in Buchanan) they see me as a stranded traveler and help generously.

Monrovia, Liberia

I’ve been so bad about keeping in touch that I thought I’d write something once a week.  Seven years now I’ve been running around the world with this very strange job, and I’ve been so busy I’ve never really kept track of where, when, how long, why, or – the important one – what’s it like.  I thought I'd make an attempt to write at least one thing a week. 

Today I’m in Monrovia, Liberia.  I got in last weekend, Friday night.  After leaving the stormy snowy Washington environment, bitter winds and icy roads, it was a shock to land here.  It’s hot, sticky and humid.  It feels like a blanket when you don’t want one on you.  I’m here to train data collectors and take them to schools in rural areas, to gather information on school life for girls.  Girls drop out here much earlier than boys, and there are lots of early marriages.  The US government will enter into a compact with Liberia to help them develop if Liberia can raise the girls’ enrollment and attendance rates. 

The training is just about done.  We had two days in a classroom together (twenty data collectors and I) and today the team split into three groups and went to practice what they’d learned.  They’re at schools here in the capital – very different, probably, than those in the rural areas where the teams are headed.  Sadly, the schools in the capital are generally much better, though often more overcrowded.  “Overcrowded” means 101 preschoolers in a classroom (with an actual enrollment of 150 and counting), half the kids sitting on the floor, and no textbooks, not even to share.  Most did have a pencil and notebook, though, and there were chalkboards – so not completely deprived. 

Everything’s slower and more difficult at the school when I go on these first days after training.  Me being white, I attract a lot of attention.  They fall in around me like so many octopuses, with their hands all outstretched for a shake.  They wave, giggle, shrink away when I lean toward them.  One girl in the hallway had bent over to see up my skirt – I’m not kidding – to see, I think, if the white went all the way up.

Today I watched one of my trainees lead her first focus group, with kids in grades 2, 3 and 4.  Not an easy first focus group – it can be hard to get kids to open up, especially little ones.  She did well, as far as I could tell.  She led the group in “Liberian English” which has lots of common words with American English, but the way they speak is so different.  Anyway, I could tell by her animation and comfort level that she has worked with kids before.  She got each one to talk at least a little.  We had a boy and a girl from each grade.  But the age difference!  There was an 11 year old in fourth grade and a 9 year old in third grade – fine, right?  Then the two second graders were 15 and 14.  So many kids here missed years during the war, they’re trying to catch up.  The idea would be to teach them some sort of accelerated curriculum, but it’s fairly difficult just getting the basics.  I asked the 9-year-old third grader to add 7 and 3 for me.  She got it, but it took a long time.  Reading speed in Liberia has been “clocked” by my peers in another project at about 17 words per minute for grades 2 and 3.

Aside from that I’ve had a little time for socializing and whatnot.  I have a friend named Rebecca living here with her husband Morris, so we met up on Sunday for margaritas and a football (that is, soccer) game.  She has a cat – loved seeing that!  I hope to take Saturday off this weekend and go to the beach.  If it’s going to be so hot, I at least want to stick my feet in the water. 

My sister had told me that the U.S. Embassy sits at the edge of the water – quite right.  As in many countries, the Embassy is being replaced by a big ol’ concrete American fortress, a bit further inland.  My driver, Tony, said that he saw some of the construction and that there was no wood involved at all – only iron and concrete.  He said “That iron was as big around as my thigh!”  He also said the reason it was being built inland was because the current embassy is actually out on a point, Mamba Point, from which the Chinese Embassy can see in from their strategic point further down the coast.  I never know if this stuff is rumor or truth, but it’s fun to spread it around either way.

Tony the Driver is Ghanaian but has lived here two years.  He likes Ellen Johnson, the president here, who is the first woman president in Africa.  I asked him what “people” thought of her, and whether she’d get reelected, and he said she’s much beloved, stays at the office till 9 or 10 at night every night, does what she promises.  But then he looked at me a bit sideways and I guess he understood that I wanted more story, so he said, “You like politics?” and I said I did, so he turned on the radio and we listened to some sort of talk show (shouting match) for awhile.  Not, as it were, completely beloved.

I am really exhausted tonight.  I almost never get jet lag – but this time, I have it in spades, even five days later.  My head has been pounding today because I didn’t sleep enough last night.  I’ve been laying awake at night thinking of the things I need to do the next day.  Anyway, I’m glad the day is almost over and I can get dinner, watch a little TV (one of the four channels must have something on, right?) and get some real sleep.