Fieldwork

So.  I have arrived in Istanbul.  Culture shock and jet lag have conspired to make my first 30ish hours here very tame indeed.  I don't have any good stories yet.  I do have a phone, and I'm not entirely sure said phone parted ways with its previous owner by choice.  I do have a temporary apartment with no heat, no hot water in the sinks, barely tepid water in the shower, and a toilet that currently will not flush.  Oh, and a Georgian-sized can of Turkish beer.  Because, well... when you have all those other things, beer just sort of follows as a matter of course.

Amenities or no, I'm still incredibly jazzed to be here, and plan to conquer the metro tomorrow, to see a couple sights before school (yikes) starts on Monday.

But all this Grim Adaptability has brought Georgia once again to the front of my thoughts.  To piggyback on my last post, this apartment would Not Have Been Acceptable two years ago.  Now, I know to pour kettles full of water down into the toilet bowl and to layer up with fleeces and long underwear.  I'm kind of relieved this place is only temporary, though.  It's very possible even my best Grim Adaptability Face would falter if I'd signed a full four-month lease here.

To compensate for a lack of Istanbul stories, here's a treasure from my early Georgia Days that I have been holding on to for quite some time.  I submitted it to a humor contest at the Washington Post, and they didn't want it; then I submitted it to my Program's official blog, and they didn't want it.  (I cannot for the life of me imagine why not.)  So now, you get it here.  Cast your mind back to late spring, 2011.  I'd been in Georgia for little over a month.  And this is the day I had.  I swear on a stack of LOTR first editions that every single word here is true, if in places condensed for maximum humor value.  Name of my officer companion has been changed however.


_______________________

I am sitting in the passenger seat of a battered beige Lada. It is pouring rain on a late spring day in Poti, Georgia.

I came to Georgia to teach English, and that’s what I thought I would be doing this particular morning, as it was supposed to be the first day of my summer work – teaching English to Poti’s police officers. Instead, after being told that the textbooks had not arrived and that “no one is there. They are not ready”, Zaza is driving me back to the house where I currently live with a host family. Zaza is my assistant, the local policeman assigned to be my translator during classes. I’ve met him for the first time this morning, when he arrived to pick me up. For some reason, we had driven halfway to the police station before he informed me that classes would not, in fact, be starting that day.

Only now, instead of driving me all the way home, Zaza has suggested that he take me on a tour of Poti. I have accepted, mainly because of the very good chance that this tour will end inside a local restaurant. My Program’s monthly volunteer stipend does not stretch terribly far, and the possibility of scoring a free meal has become something of a grail quest among the small but tight community of Poti expats.

Except that Zaza is proceeding at a brisk seven miles an hour in the exact opposite direction from the town’s center, straight out of Poti. I swallow, and remind myself that this guy is a policeman and affiliated with my Program. He must be legit, right? Probably. Almost certainly probably.

“Meri. You are married?”
I’m used to these straightforward questions out of nowhere from Georgians by now. “No, Zaza. I’m not married.”
“Boyfriend?”
“Nope.”
At this news, his grin widens. He is now driving the car by – I assume – purely muscle memory as his head is turned a perfect 90 degrees to the right, eyes fixed on me with delighted determination.

“Meri.” A pause. Now we’re getting to the crux of things. “I want…. so much… to come to America. How I get to America, do you think?” He punctuates this question with a bout of maniacal laughter.
When he subsides, I say in my best cheerfully clueless voice: “Well, I think you should apply for a visa.”
"Oh no. I try, many years ago. They say No.”
Gee. Imagine that.

“Where are we going, Zaza?”
“You want the see the Sea, yes? Very beautiful, the Sea.”

The sea he is referring to is the Black Sea, on the coast of which this industrial shipping town sits.  I suppose the Black Sea could technically be considered part of a Poti tour.

It is a lucky thing that I happened to have recently bought a bicycle, so have done a little exploring on my own and do have some idea now as to where we are probably going – a small wooded park just outside town called Maltaqva, which does indeed have paths out to the coast. It is still possible that I am not being kidnapped.

Zaza pulls off the main road onto one of Maltaqva’s narrow dirt tracks that wind through the woods. But instead of actually proceeding to the sea, he stops the car and executes a smooth 27-point turn until we are facing the way we came. We’re still just in sight of the main road… but from where I sit – literally and figuratively – the Lada is very much in the middle of nowhere.

I turn to him and give the calmest, brightest smile I can manage. “What are we doing, Zaza? Aren’t we going to the Sea?”

“Meri. You like beer, yes?”
“Sure I do, yeah,” I say, thinking ‘Holy hell, please let now be when he starts the car and we go to a restaurant which will also conveniently not be in the middle of the woods.’

Instead, Zaza leaps out of the car, goes around to the back seat, and produces a half-empty 2-litre bottle of Georgian Kazbegi beer that has apparently been rolling around back there, along with one greasy plastic cup. He gets back in the driver’s seat and ceremonially hands me a half-pint of the warm, flat stuff, and proceeds to watch me intently.
“Aren’t you going to have some?” I ask.
“Oh no, is okay. I drink after you.”
My thoughts running a mix of ‘well, this is awkward,’ and ‘man, I really hope I am not being roofied,’ I finish my beer as quick as I can and hand him the cup. He pours himself a glass and downs it. A thought occurs to me.
“Zaza, should you be drinking that if you’re driving?”

He flashes me the biggest grin yet. “Oh no,” he says, obviously intensely proud of himself. “Is okay. Because I am… police.” A dramatic pause, as he suggestively wriggles his eyebrows at me and pats at his hip.
“And I have… gun.”

It is at this moment, when I am staring out the cracked windshield in an unsuccessful search for a reply, that I see, way out where the track meets the main road, a cow streaking past at a full sprint, followed in two beats by a Georgian man in business dress, also at a full sprint. I blink. I wonder what my friends back home in DC and Northern Virginia are doing.

“Meri.” Zaza is still leering at me, perhaps hoping I will ask to see his gun. I do not. “Meri. You are drunk, yes?”
‘On one cup of your warm flat Kazbegi beer?’ “No, Zaza. I am not drunk. Are you drunk?”
He laughs. “Oh, I am SO drunk!”
It is then that I realize where the first half of that 2-litre must have gone.

Zaza flashes me another bright smile. “What we do now?”
I grin back. It is important that I make this next suggestion sound like the best idea in the entire history of time. There comes a moment in every broke expat’s day when even the possibility of a free lunch starts to seem no longer worth it.
“I think you should take me home now, Zaza.”

And by some miracle, he does. Classes, he reminds me, will start on Wednesday.