Georgia Part 3: First week and impressions of Batumi

The first week or so followed a fairly predictable pattern. We’d wake up around 10 or 11, lounge around for a while, then, driven by starvation, finally make our way out into the bustling town. Every “morning” we ate breakfast at the same café: octagon-shaped with floor-to-ceiling windows all around, the kitchen and counter filled the center of the restaurant, with seating all around the edges by the windows. Our first time there, some boys were setting off homemade firecrackers in the park next to the café. Every time one went off I jumped. But mostly it was quiet at that café, which is why we liked it (though he grew up in a noisy culture, where people talk loudly and often gather in large groups to shout over one another, Rezi doesn’t like a lot of noise. Thus, his evaluation of a restaurant hinged on the quality of the food and whether or not it was quiet). Every day we had the same breakfast (after Day 4 or 5 our waitress stopped even asking what we wanted): we started with a cup of thick, sweet Turkish coffee, which we followed up with khachapuri Ajara-style and a glass of orange juice.

I’m going to write a lot more about food later, but I want to take a minute to discuss khachapuri. Khachapuri, at its most basic, is a flat bread filled with cheese, and is one of the most common foods in Georgia. There are several ways to make it, each indigenous to a different region in Georgia, and often it is reminiscent of cheese pizza without the tomato sauce. Ajara-style is definitely my favorite. The bread is football shaped and formed into a shallow boat, into which is spread Georgian farmer’s cheese (which should be salty, but not too salty, because the more salt, the lower the quality), about four tablespoons of butter, and a raw egg. You then mix up this delicious mass with your fork (and if you’re me, you take about ¾ of your butter and add it to Rezi’s khachapuri, because that much butter makes you ill, but he likes it, and plus his metabolism can handle it), so you end up with a bread boat filled with a thick, yellow-and-white liquid mass. Working carefully so as not to allow the egg/butter/cheese mix to escape, you then tear off chunks of the bread, dip them in the goo, and devour. So. Yummy. I want one now.

After breakfast we would walk around Batumi, sometimes in silence, as time went on, more often in conversation. We went to the aquarium, which was kind of small and sad and Soviet, but still had some interesting fishes, and to the zoo, which was mostly closed up for winter, though we did see a couple of monkeys, a baboon, and a whole herd of guinea pigs, which delighted me. We wandered around the port and up and down The Boulevard. We would walk for a while, then sit on a bench for a few minutes, then walk some more. The first week the weather was wonderful – sunny and in the 40s (though poor Rezi was still freezing all the time. I joked that if he was cold already he’d be better off not visiting Iowa in winter). Basically, we didn’t do much at all except get to know one another, which is exactly what we needed. This also provided the perfect opportunity for me to unwind, which I’d been longing to do since the BEGINNING of the semester.

As we wandered around those first few days (and more later as I saw more of the town), I noticed a sharp contrast between “touristy” Batumi and real Batumi. Batumi (population 150,000) is the capital of the Independent Republic of Ajara within Georgia (Ajara was once a separatist region like Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but was reintegrated into the country peacefully several years ago), and is an important port city. It’s most important economic activity, however, is tourism. Once a Soviet resort hot spot, it now plays host mostly to Ukrainians, Azerbaijanis, Armenians, and other local folks (except Russians). The coast (along The Boulevard) is teeming with cafes, restaurants, and bars, which sat eerily quiet while I was there. They were typically open, but often we’d be the only clients in a restaurant with seating for 50. I imagine in the summer it’s quite a different story. In addition to The Boulevard, Batumi boasts a large park by the sea, home to exotic birds, trees from different parts of the world, and fountains that dance and light up to music at night. A sign at each of the park entrances proclaims in pictographs (like the no-smoking sign): No bikes! No littering! No dogs! No cows! Yep, folks, it’s NOT okay to drive your cattle through the seaside park in Batumi (Flossie was very disappointed – she’d so hoped to see the peacocks). In addition to the upiquitous park benches, I was happy to see numerous garbage urns, which were emptied on a daily basis (I’m not going to get into a huge Russia vs. Georgia thing, but seriously, what few trash urns there are in Piter get emptied only when the dvornik feels like getting around to it. Kind of like sidewalk snow removal. Actually, kind of like EVERYTHING the dvorniki are responsible for doing). A large billboard near the movie theatre proclaimed in English: “Batumi: A part of Europe!” They’re certainly trying to make it look that way, at least where tourists hang out. In this part of Batumi, there’s lots of construction, including the city’s first skyscraper (which looks oddly out of place among the mostly two- and three-storied buildings). Unfortunately, after the August war, much of the construction was halted as materials became scarce and money dried up, giving certain areas a half-finished feel. At some point, however, there will be a fancy new set of apartment buildings that only foreigners will be able to afford, an oceanarium with dolphins, a new stadium, and more hotels.

As you move inland and towards the mountains, the real city becomes visible. The streets and sidewalks tended to be in pretty bad shape – a couple times I cursed myself for wearing heels, particularly at night, because walking was just plain treacherous. Buildings were brightly painted in lots of different colors – even the high-rise apartment buildings, leftovers from the Soviet era, have been redone in vivid reds, blues, purples, greens, and yellows. Most houses were two-storied affairs with balconies, laundry hanging out to dry on clotheslines, and stone walls enclosing yards with mandarin and kiwi trees (I ate kiwis fresh from the tree in the backyard – in January!!) and, of course, grapevines. From what I saw, oder houses, like Rezi’s, had the staircase on the outside of the house – so you end up getting rained on on your way to the second floor. Rezi’s house has no corridors – either all the rooms lead one into the next, or you can only access a room from an outside door. The bathrooms, while they had plumbing and electricity, all tended to be separate from the house (once again, getting rained on). Additionally, the houses tend to be headed by wood-burning stoves and electric heaters, since gas became too expensive for most people once it was privatized after the fall of the Soviet Union. That means that I ended up being cold a lot more than I thought I would, since it was cold both indoors and out (especially in museums. Brr!).

There were slot machine casinos EVERYWHERE (like in Piter three years ago, before they passed a law that shut most of them down); although I don’t really understand the appeal, they must be pretty popular (and successful) for there to be so many of them. Streets were lined with shops whose wares spilled out onto the sidewalk, blending one into another so it wasn’t always clear where one ended and the next began. There were definitively western-style stores in some places – like for clothes and electronics and stuff – but most of the stores for food and day-to-day wares were more like closets than stores, the inventory stacked in magical ways to make it all fit and not come tumbling down.

One street we crossed to get to Rezi’s house was lined with loitering men toting tool belts, chain saws, and other equipment. “You can tell how good the economy’s doing by looking at this street,” Rezi explained. “Those men are all unemployed. They congregate on this street, and if someone needs a worker for the day or a project done, they come here to find someone to do it. The better the economy, the fewer of these guys you’ll see standing here.”

Batumi definitely has a small-town feel. Near the end of my second week there we had to go to the airport to make some changes to my plane tickets. While we were waiting in the parking lot afterwards for our ride to pick us up, I heard a rooster crow, which tickled me pink – it was the first airport rooster I’ve ever heard (there’s also a rooster on Rezi’s street somewhere that is bad at telling time and insistently crows at all hours of the day).