An in-town ramble today, after yesterday's wine tasting tour to Kakheti. The guesthouse I am staying in is very nice, though I suspect that due to it being 2 metro stops away from the thick of things, it is officially off the path to beat. The tour yesterday included a 20-something Chinese-Australian mermaid off the Gold Coast beaches, and, like the 20-something Russian older sister, also had many travel tips. If there was a Miss Lonely Planet Georgia, she would rank high as a contender. The English language bookshop 'Prospero', the French cafe Entree, and an Italian restaurant were warmly recommended as her regular haunts of the past week. We bonded as we both forego explaining precisely to our parents where we travel. The other two, aside from our driver Altor, was a 20-something couple from Poland, both who speak very good English, and who opened up our driver with an impressive mash-up of Russian and German. If it weren't for their interaction with Altor, it would have been a day of refining the art of hand gestures.
Today was a typical travel day for me. It combined Getting Lost - which involves chunks of time in both unforgiving parts of the city, as well as in places of grace - and The Hunt. The Hunt is for the Doll Museum. Many online pages point to it in the Old City, but the Information Centre (at which the man asked me if I had a map, clarifying his role as providing information only) said that it is in fact on a street near where I live. Confusion ensues, as I walk there (without a specified address) and find nothing, and in Damascus form think, do they do this too here? I.e., provide a response, but not the correct answer? I walk home and google up an address, which was last facebook-posted 9 months ago. Recent enough. I return to the street, and find '103-105'. These numbers are on either side of an open gate which leads to a courtyard about the size of a city block. Nothing. My guesthouse hostess said she will call tomorrow - I have read that she herself has made dolls for the museum. But it seems odd that puppets are nowhere to be found. If this was New York, and if these were Muppets, there'd be a movie.
Museums are not really part of the wine world that is coincidentally the happy meeting point between this host culture, and the current and significant 20-something subset of the tourists here. I find many museums cultural artifacts themselves, pocket time-pieces so to speak, and worthy of inspection. I wandered into the State Museum for Folk Music today and, true to times past, two uniformed guards were at the front watching tv, while a young woman - who spoke English and sings in the group Nanina - gave me change out of her purse, and turned the lights on in the 3 rooms that compose the museum.
In my room, as I read online more about Georgia. Georgia is, like Greenland, a name that a country has because of what others call it. This country is otherwise referred to by its own as Sakartvelo, and the important part of this word is 'Kart' which indicates an ancestral lineage. Georgia's new president is a philosopher, fairly unknown, disliked by other former presidents and so may therefore show promise for Georgia's future. The current news is that he plans to 'enter into wedlock.' This news agency also prides itself on providing each morning with an uplifting 'mood elevator.'
Well, happy full moon, with or without an elevator.
No comments:
Post a Comment