Ten days...and definitely counting. This also means that I have 10 days before I
want my Michigan
apps done, so I’m ignoring that fact and trying not to salivate at the thought
of Taco Bell, fresh fruit, and Apple Barn toffee.
What is a great way to forget about American food? By going to see the origins of one of the
biggest monsters of the 20th century, of course. Stalin was born in Gori, a town about an
hour’s drive from Tbilisi. As the Wikitravel article on Gori explains
it, “relatively few people in the world "cherish" the memory of one
of the 20th century's greatest mass murderers, Joseph Stalin, but most that do
live in Gori.”
Three guys from my training group and I decided to take a
day trip to Gori, mostly to see the Stalin house-museum. Stalin was born in a one-room apartment his
family rented in a small house. His
father, a cobbler, had a shop in the basement of this house. Since the 1930s, this house, still in its
original spot, has been memorialized as part of the museum. It is surrounded by a nice roof with a
glorious Soviet design and surrounded by marble pillars.
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| The guys in front of Stalin's encased home |
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| Me in front of Stalin's family's room |
Behind this humble building is the
museum. It cost 10 GEL to get in, which
seemed incredibly steep, so the extra 5 GEL for the English tour guide and tour
of Stalin’s private railroad car did not seem like much extra, so we opted for
the tour. Our guide was a
twenty-something young woman with a decent command of English. Perhaps because the museum is unheated and
was cold enough that you could see your breath, or perhaps because of the
inappropriate comments by one of the guys in my group and the others on our
tour, our tour guide probably gave us the fastest tour of the museum humanly
possible. It did not help that soon
after we started, we were joined by three Polish men who worked in Tbilisi. As Kelley, one of the guys who was with me
put it succinctly, “nobody hates Stalin as much as the Poles”.
They joined us after learning about the promising poet that
young Stalin was. One of his poems even
became a regular part of elementary school curriculum (before he became a
revolutionary) and during the Soviet Union,
several of his poems were used in school under a pseudonym. It wouldn’t fit a dictator to write poetry,
now would it?
Still, while we got to admire a model of an underground
printing press and look at a map of Stalin’s exile and return, the Poles were
literally cursing Stalin. It definitely
added another dimension to the trip. They
were so pleased when we saw a copy of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, which was
when Stalin and Hitler agreed not to invade each other. While that obviously did not last, the pact
also carved up Poland
between the two of them, a knife in the back, as the Poles put it.
Most of the museum was filled with old photos that were
blown up like lots of other Soviet museums, but they also had his office
furniture, pipe collection, mother’s china, and gifts he had received from
people around the world. Perhaps the
best exhibit inside the museum is a gloriously displayed death mask, 6 of 9
created after he died. After seeing
these normal exhibits, we followed our guide downstairs to a locked room which
briefly touched on the “repression” during the Soviet
Union (they never blame it on Stalin). It is replete with letters sent home from Siberian
exile, a secret police’s interrogation desk, and a recreation of a prisoner’s
cell. At least they acknowledge
something terrible happened under Stalin.
That’s something, right?
The best part of the tour came last, when we went
outside. We got to go into the house,
which has the original Jugashsvili (Stalin’s family) furnishings, or so they
claim. Then we toured Stalin’s very
swank private railroad car. I took
pictures of 2 of my friends on Stalin’s toilet (his personal bathroom had a
toilet and a bath!) before a tour guide yelled at me.
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| Kelley on Stalin's personal toilet |
The rest of our trip included walking up to a snowy Gori Castle
(it’s a fort that isn’t that special) and warming up in a café, where some
drunk Georgians bought us xachapuri and beer because they loved one of the guys
I was with. It was a reminder of how
different male-female interactions are in Georgia because the two men wanted
their picture with Kelley and wanted the boys to drink with them while they
totally ignored me, not even asking my name. (More Gori pics are on Facebook; the link is on my "Pictures" page.)
The next morning, one of the guys and I played tour guide to
a German we met at our hostel. He was
very appreciative and bought us breakfast and tea, which for a German is quite
extraordinary. If you think I’m being
mean, he regaled us with stories of German stinginess. I, however, was playing tour guide simply
because it is one of my favorite things to do.
(If this whole grad school business doesn’t pan out and I can’t stand
the idea of another year of children shouting “Hannah teacher” ad nauseam, I’m
looking into being a tour guide.) It was
also very cool to realize how much I’ve learned about Georgia
This weekend, I was back in Tbilisi to say goodbye to some of my group
members and other friends who are not coming back. Most of my group got together, which was a
great time. We went to dinner at the
restaurant next to our training hotel, “where it all began”, which was a lot of
fun, especially to think about how much had changed and how much had not. We still received terrible service but this
time it was not due to our linguistic inabilities. We discussed what we had done, where we still
wanted to go, what we missed at home, our plans for break, and our respective
school experiences. In four months,
strangers with various reasons for coming to Georgia had become good friends, a
sort of “family” for me. I will miss
those who won’t return but look forward to another 6 months with those who
will.
The night turned out to be very interesting. Knowing that there was a new group at the
hotel, we went to introduce ourselves and invite them to join us in our night
out. Things worked out that I found
myself in charge of getting 10 newbies downtown from the hotel by myself. I have never taken a bus in the city, but I
led all of them fearlessly onto a bus and walked them down the main street in Tbilisi to meet up with
the rest of my group. We soon went to
another place, where a few of my friends got themselves and therefore the rest
of us invited to a supra (Georgian party) for some stranger’s birthday. It was so very Georgian, I loved it. In the States, only drunken college students
and twenty-somethings invite perfect strangers to their private parties. In Georgia, I’m not even surprised
anymore.
As far as school is concerned, the most notable event is the
addition of firecrackers to daily life.
Last Wednesday, I walked into the school yard for my first class (2nd
hour) to see a gaggle of my 5th grade boys clearly up to no
good. When I went to investigate, I saw
one of them had a lit firecracker in his hand.
As a sign of my cultural assimilation or an affirmation I am not meant
to be a teacher, I simply shook my head at him and kept walking. Now, booms are regular parts of breaks, and
the halls smell like gunpowder.
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