Well, not really – or not anymore anyway.
Actually, even four years ago when this picture was taken there were plenty of normal modern gas stations but back then on country roads you could occasionally run into people selling gas at the side of the road like this.
Of course, the quality wasn't the best, but if you needed gas, you sometimes couldn't be too picky.
Sunny Georgia!
I forgot to mention yesterday, it snowed in Tbilisi.
At least learned some new vocabulary:
გარეთ თოვლი მოდის.
Garet tovli modis.
It's snowing outside.
This is the first time that I've been away from Canada without some kind of decent camera, and I have to say I'm finding it pretty frustrating. This time I just brought a point-and-shoot* with me, and though I must say I'm amazed just how much a $300 camera will do, it's just no fun to use, and I've been doing less and less photography.
To make up for this, I'm starting to go through the photographs I took when I was here four years ago. It's really interesting to see how the the atmosphere of Tbilisi has changed.
I'm going to post some of them better stuff here over the next few days.
Here is today's installment.
* It's really funny what a point-and-shoot camera is in Russian slang: мыльница. If you literally translate мыльница back to English you get soap dish.
I finally quit smoking.
I'm not cutting down, I'm not only going to smoke other people's cigarettes, and I’m not going just smoke socially: I quit. I really quit.
On my first trip to Georgia about 7 years ago I was appalled by how much people smoked here, but when I mentioned it to people they just gave me the kind look that foreigners usually get when they say or do the exact things like their expected to.
Well, things have changed here a lot faster than I would have ever thought possible. Georgians have both cut down their smoking a lot and my own smoking crept up. The last few weeks it was up to about a pack a day and I think I was actually smoking more than my friends here. Even more shockingly a couple of times bartenders and complete strangers told me I smoke too much.
This was getting ridiculous: it's over.
See the New York Times article on Kurt Vonnegut's death (I don't know how long the link will stay up).
For more general information on Kurt Vonnegut see the Wikipidia article about him.
If you've never read Vonnegut may I suggest you start with Slaughterhouse Five and Mother Night.
You might remember that I bought a house in Tbilisi, Georgia about two years ago.
Well, the plan was to renovate it and to build a second floor, and now after several months of planning and design the builder has already broken ground.
This is what it looks like now...
In Russia (and probably in other Orthodox Christian countries) there is an interesting greeting that is used only on Easter. Instead of saying “здраздстуй” (“zdravstvtui” – hello) or “привет” (“privet” – hi) the standard greeting today the greeting is an exchange. It goes like this:
First speaker: Христос воскрес! (“Khristos voskres!” – Christ has risen!)
Second speaker: Воистину воскрес! (“Voistinu Voskres!” – In truth, he has risen!
The greeting is used only on Easter day and, truth be told, there is a certain cachet value in remembering to say this when you meet someone.
Keeping all this in mind, there is a cute anecdote about the Soviet Afghanistan war (from which, by the way, we seemed to have learned nothing).
The story goes like this:
In Afghanistan, on Easter day, holiday or not, a small group of Soviet soldiers were on a routine training exercise. They were divided into two groups. The first group was to play Soviets, who were to be driving a convoy down a road, and the second group was to play Afghani partisans, who were supposed to ambush the convoy.
The second group chose the best point for the ambush and split up into tactical positions on cliffs over the road. From this point on they were supposed to coordinate the attack by radio. All was going well and the “Soviet” Convoy appeared. The leader of the “Afghans” turned on his radio and assigned targets to his men stationed on the cliffs. Everything was set by radio and as one of the soldiers signed off, true to his role, he said “Allah Akhbar!”, God is great!.
But some wise guy on his team, who probably resented the exercise on Easter, just couldn’t help himself and replied “Voistinu Akhbar!”. At this point everybody who was listening on the radio, including their commander who was supposed to be judging the whole exercise, erupted into spasms of laughter. The whole thing had to be called off and replayed from the beginning.
Acknowledgement: This story was told to me about 20 years ago by Serge Elnitsky, back when we were both students at Carleton University.
If you thought that Google's Free Wireless Broadband Service was cool, check out PigeonRank™ and Gmail's latest feature Gmail Paper.
But the strangest thing is this: a Google employee lost his pet ball python at the Googleplex. What makes this one cool is that it's for real.
Those of us who have kept snakes understand this is no big deal: snakes get out of their cages all the time but they almost always turn up after a while. But since snakes are really good at hiding and they will only come out when they have gotten hungry enough to start looking for food, it does take a few months to find them usually.
But then in most cases you don't have the greatest search company in the world looking for them either.
Neat, huh? Google will obviously not only let you keep a pet snake at work, but thinks it's interesting enough to post it on their blog when one gets out of it's cage.
I don't think anyone anyone at Microsoft even has a goldfish at work.
