Or in English, "Greetings to your Abkhazia!".
You might recognize the older man packing a bottle into his suitcase in one of the opening segments: he's none other than Vakhtang Kikabidze, the Soviet film actor who is most know for the his role in the film Mimino.
Mimino was, of course, the inspiration for Mimino.Org.
I'm continually amazed by how narrowly people define normality and how committed they seem to their definitions.
For the last three days Tbilisi has been swamped by men in Scottish kilts. They really are everywhere and you can hardly go a block without seeing a group of about six of them either walking around drinking beer or squinting at some tourist sight. Apparently, Georgia has been doing rather well at some kind of rugby championship and now they are playing a home game against the Scots. The men in the Kilts are the Sottish fans.
The Tbilisians really don't know what to make of these guys in skirts, but they somehow understand that happenings like this are connected with being European, so there is a kind of guarded enthusiasm.
Leaving the kilts aside for a moment, this morning, for the first time since winter, it was not sweltering hot. I'm not sure but I'm guessing it was maybe a nice comfortable 15 degrees. As I came out of my morning cafe, what do I see in neighboring park but a huge bonfire that people who play chess there all day put up to keep warm. I was in my t-shirt and these guys, in full Arctic expedition gear still felt cold enough to build a bonfire.
But it gets stranger. On my way to check out the Caucasian survivalists I came buy somebody's (I suppose only for the time being) pet baby turkey that has somehow loose. I say baby because I know how huge turkeys can get. This thing was by no means a small bird – it was already about half a meter high.
The interesting thing was people's reaction: everybody ignored it, or at most gave it a passing glance. The only person that gave it any attention was a young mother who wanted to show it to her child (who it turned out was just as bored by the turkey as everyone else).
What these three stories illustrate is how reality and normality are much more flexible than most people think. The bonfire and the turkey would have caused a huge uproar where I'm from in Ottawa, but here they were taken as normal. The Kilts would be relatively normal in Ottawa, but here the police went to all the bars and told them if they served alcohol to the Scots, they could be be held responsible for the consequences. (Another funny fact: the Scots, knowing their reputation may have preceded them are behaving impeccably – they even had scarfs printed up with Georgian/Scottish logos espousing their common cultural friendship).
Seeing first hand how different contexts and realities share differ is for me one of the neatest things about traveling and living abroad.
If you're a middle aged guy from the West one of the strangest things about living in Tbilisi is that you get to hear all the music you grew up with all over again.
The last time I was here about three years ago everywhere you went you would hear Hotel California by The Eagles.
Now, thankfully, it's been supplanted by Pink Floyd's The Wall.
It's really weird to see young hip people getting into music that only grizzly men with beards listen to back home.
Remember Ali And Nino and Lev Nussimbaum?
I got the article as an email but since the link to it seems to be dead I'm posting it here.
A big discovery about Lev Nussimbaum (Essad Bey) (1905-1942) has been found in the Azerbaijan National Archives. The research was made by Azerbaijan International Magazine and carried out by Azerbaijan International Editorial Staff member Konul Samadova who was involved researching the archives for three months from July to September 2007. Konul with her colleague Sevinj Mehdizade at Azerbaijan International had read hundreds of documents from Realni School, Men's Gymnasium No. 1 and No. 3, when Konul came upon the Lev's class records in Men's Gymnasium No. 2 the week of September 17, 2007.
Congratulations to Konul, 25, a recent graduate of University of Languages. Researchers have been hunting for Lev Nussimbaum's school records for years. This is the first time that documents prove that Lev Nussimbaum actually lived and went to school in Baku. It is a significant find.
The school records for those six years prove the following:
- Lev Nussimbaum attended Men's Gymnasium No. 2 from 1914-1920.
- Lev was born October 20, 1905.
- Lev's father's name was Abraham Nussimbaum (not Arslanoghlu) who was from Georgia.
- Lev Nussimbaum was Jewish (not Muslim).
Lev's mother tongue essentially was German. His mother committed suicide in 1911 and Lev was raised by German governess. In 1918 in Third grade, Lev got the grades "4/5" in German class, 4/4 in Russian and he failed Azeri (2).
Lev was almost nine years old when he started school. Essentially, he had very little formal schooling before he and his father fled Baku for Europe due to the Bolshevik Revolution (1920). Despite the fact that Lev was enrolled for six years in Men's Gymnasium No. 2, apart from Junior and Senior preparatory classes (1914-1916), he only completed the equivalent of two years of schooling because of illness and political turmoil those the four years of high school (1916-1920).
By the way AZER.com displays scanned covers of Ali And Nino in all kinds of languages (22 so far).
