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Arriving at Tbilisi airport, you realize instantly that you’re in a particular place. Georgia. The Caucasus. A feminine customs officer with modern glasses stamps my passport indifferently. A placid middle-aged Russian-speaking taxi driver drives me previous crumbling Soviet-era buildings alongside an ideal freeway framed by mountains and hills to Rustavi, half an hour from the capital. The vacancy and abandonment are palpable. We see the odd sheep grazing, and different indicators of life, however the taxi driver says: “All of them stay in Tbilisi. There’s virtually nothing left round right here, no person grows crops any extra, there’s nothing left.”
The landlady of the guesthouse the place I’m staying, Marika, is a primary-school trainer who has been educating since Soviet instances. She is adored by the schoolchildren and has lived right here all her life. Her husband, Avtandil, works on the well-known Rustavi metalworks in jap Georgia, which was one of many largest within the USSR. Avtandil is 74 years outdated and wakes up each morning at six to go to the plant.
He’s the brains of the pipes, as his colleagues put it: with out him the metalworks would go to wreck as a result of there is no such thing as a generational continuity. The identical factor occurs in Russia and different post-Soviet international locations with such a business. Salaries are low, even derisory, so nobody desires to spend time studying such pearls of commercial knowledge.
Marika and Avtandil come to go to us commonly. They create chacha (a kind of brandy produced from grape marc or fruit), which I’ve by no means tried, together with different glorious liqueurs – and truffles, which Marika bakes. In addition to singing, taking part in the piano and realizing Georgian and Russian poetry by coronary heart, Marika can be a superb prepare dinner.
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With me are Igor from Moscow, Nastja from Mariupol, and Yumi and Yuda from Osaka, a nice Japanese couple who arrived earlier than us and determined to increase their keep till the top of April. Marika adores them: they’re well mannered and modest folks, at all times smiling and serving to with the cleansing. In fact Marika dotes on us all, and whereas we’re right here we turn out to be a part of her household, alongside the 2 kids and grandchildren she already has.
A time machine
Rustavi has two souls: a brand new one and an outdated one. We stay within the new one, the one that’s teeming with life as we speak. The outdated city was constructed by prisoners after the battle. This was informed to me by a talkative fellow passenger on the bus, who spoke Russian even with Georgians. “It was not solely Germans who constructed it, however in fact there have been a lot of them right here… I used to show in the very best kindergarten, however after the collapse of the USSR it was a catastrophe, kids have been fainting from starvation. There was no electrical energy, the water provide was patchy, even the meals was dangerous. What exhausting instances!”
The traces of the decadence of that point are nonetheless seen. Ghost homes with sealed home windows, and so many deserted Soviet buildings that one loses rely. The distinction with the brand new ones is putting, it’s like travelling from one period to a different in a time machine. “We now have a brand new mayor, a girl, she is energetic. Do you see how town has improved along with her?”, says my travelling companion proudly.
If t…
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