Georgia Part 2: Arrival

I arrived at the tiny Batumi airport around 2:30 PM. Ours was the only plane on the tarmac, and, despite my nerves, I was delighted by the warm rays of the sun and the gentle, +12C air. In the airplane I was on the verge of tears as Batumi came into view. “What am I getting myself into?” I thought. Sure, Rezi and I had chatted online for five whole months, and I felt fairly confident that he was who he said he was – but what if I was just being extraordinarily and uncharacteristically naïve? And even if he wasn’t some sort of con man, what if it turned out that we just didn’t like each other? Of course, these thoughts didn’t just occur to me as we were landing – they’d been spinning around my brain for weeks as the date of my departure grew closer and closer. At one point during the last week of classes I even considered calling off the whole trip. But the prospect of spending my 3-week vacation in Petersburg in the deadest, darkest part of winter spurred me on. “I can always just leave early,” I reassured myself.

Waiting for my suitcase to come down the baggage claim conveyor belt, my nerves were all on edge. What would our first reaction be? What would we say to each other? Suddenly, someone walked by the automatic doors that open into the lobby and they slid open with a whoosh. A throng of about fifty Georgian faces all eagerly peered in at the recently arrived (я хотела написать «смотрели на надавно приехавших»), seeking their friends and loved ones. Which one of them was mine? Then I spotted him. Standing near the back of the crowd was the tallest, lankiest Georgian I’d ever set eyes on. He saw me too, and we waved to each other before the doors slid shut once more. “Hey,” I thought to myself. “Not a bad start. We waved. That’s a good first reaction.” Reunited with my bag, I strode resolutely into the lobby, parting the sea of curious faces as I slowly made my way forward (I was definitely the tallest, blondest girl in the airport, and everyone eyed me with interest. I didn’t see another natural blonde the whole three weeks I was in Georgia). Rezi and I hugged awkwardly, then made our way to the waiting car, where his close neighbor, Avto, patiently sat, smoking. “I wanted to take a taxi,” Rezi explained, “but my friend Avto insisted on driving us.”

Avto drove us to the apartment where Rezi had rented us the loft for the duration of my visit. We climbed three flights of stairs to get to the apartment, then inside the apartment made our way to the third floor – our home for three weeks. It was a spacious room with slanted ceilings, mustard-yellow walls, and a curious selection of framed posters, including a couple of bikini-clad pin-up girls and one larger-than-life depiction of a very small dog. We slept on the saddest fold-out couch I’ve ever laid eyes on – the springs were all broken, and the foot of the bed sagged so heavily that the first night we slept practically sitting up. We subsequently propped up the end of the bed with a footstool – but I’m getting ahead of myself.

Rezi took me out to dinner at a restaurant by the sea. We sat in awkward silence. He’d say, “So say something,” and I’d say, “I don’t know what to say. You say something.” I giggled too much from nerves; he mumbled, shy of his spoken Russian, and I couldn’t understand anything he said. After dinner we went for a walk down The Boulevard – a brick-paved path lined with benches and palm trees, their fronds tied up for the winter, which stretches for no less than two miles along the rocky beach. We still didn’t talk much, but it wasn’t as awkward as at dinner. It was more that we’d spent 5 months doing nothing but talk, so now we were being quiet.