Our Trip to Istanbul Part 2

If you go to Istanbul for less than a week, expect to run around like chicken with no head. This post is about stuff to see in this city.

The Stuff Featured on History Channel. God! The carpet store with an underground cistern was right by our hotel! The hippodrome that the History Channel dude explored! The giant aqueduct! We saw the underground water reservoir! With a head of medusa at the base of the column!!! Ah, the Cities of the Underworld and the thrill of diving under the concrete to discover layers upon layers of history!

The Touristy Stuff. Visiting Istanbul and not seeing Hagia Sophia is going to get you on a “you suck” list for the rest of your life. The enormous historical value of this Byzantine monument needs a bigger document than my blog, so let me just say that, “famous in particular for its massive dome, it is considered the epitome of Byzantine architecture and is said to have "changed the history of architecture”[1] .It was built by 360 A.D. It has a monetary value too: entry fee was the most we’ve paid for any museum—20 Liras.

Facing the Hagia Sophia is the Blue Mosque. As in every mosque, you are supposed to take your shoes off before entering (picture me struggling to take off my thigh high boots and wondering about the structural integrity of my socks—a.k.a. holes). It impressed me so much, every tile done in a unique way, people actually praying, the sense of presence... Avoid butting in during the prayer times.

The Palaces. Topkapi and Dolmabahçe. Make sure you pay additional fee and see the harem. Topkapi is where the Turkish rulers used to live before the 19^th century and Dolmabahçe is more of a we-are-trying-to-be-European-over-the-top-baroque. Dolmabahçe palace has a beautiful garden and we were lucky to have the most amazing guide ever! He concluded the tour in the impressive ballroom, with the world's largest, Bohemian crystal, 4.5 ton chandelier. As we stood there, speechless, he said: “I just got married last month and I asked if there is any chance of me having a ceremony here. They told me, you can’t, because you’re not a sultan”. He was so serious when he said it too!

The Stuff in Bosporus. So, you navigate best you can past the people who try to sell you 50 Lira Bosporus tours, approach the last ferry on the dock and take a 10 Lira tour. You look around and you realize, wow, you could spend 3 days just walking and observing the streets that you see from the ferry. Including churches, mosques, city walls, castles and houses!

The Stuff We Discovered. Pier Lotti hill. So, this writer dude comes to Istanbul and decides to settle away from the city, on a hill with the view of the Golden Horn and the Constantinople. Of course, that hill is part of Istanbul now, and there’s a cute café with Turkish tea and spectacular view!

The Fancy Stuff. Finally, the Taksim Square and İstiklal Caddesi, the “Shardeni” street of Istanbul. Place to get Turkish coffee, wet burger, chain department stores, the cutest little cinemas (we saw Harry Potter there) and a crowd of tourists. Very busy during night—kinda cool, since the old city dies out after sunset. Looks like lot of other walking streets in other big cities, but with a Turkish flavor. Pretty hip!

Final Note: try to see more than one place; for example, don’t spend all of your time in the old city, and the Bosporus tour is a must!

pics: Giga took wonderful postcardish pics! Here you see: the view from the Bosporus Tour, Me by the Blue Mosque entrance, Hagia Sophia at night.

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[1] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagia_Sophia

Our Trip to Istanbul--Part 1

What can I say about Istanbul? Three words come to mind: breathtaking, historical and expensive.

Visiting Istanbul has been my dream since I saw “The Cities of the Underworld” on the History Channel. Unlike many other places, people and stuff in general, my high expectations were fully met and even exceed. This includes transportation, food and accommodation, the topic of this post.

Transportation. Let’s start from the beginning—the Sabiha Gokcen Airport. It is a newly built thing, lot further than the Ataturk Airport, but comfortable and nice-looking. Discount airlines land there. It took us two hours to get from the airport on the Asian side to our hotel, but it was fine, because when else would we travel through that part of Istanbul? To get to the historical city, we took a bus, a ferry (crossing Bosporus from Asia to Europe) and a 20 minute walk. We could’ve taken a tram from the ferry, but the overwhelming presence of the city at 8 a.m. made us jump up and down, despite the luggage.

Transportation in Istanbul includes ferries across Bosporus, trams, buses and a subway. There is no subway in the historic part—I guess it makes sense, given that there are Byzantium antiques lying everywhere you dig. Mostly, we walked around, cause when you’re in Istanbul for 7 days, you don’t want to spend time looking at it from the tram window.

Accommodation. I was afraid that our hotel room would look different than its ad picture—happens all the time. However, it was exactly the same. We requested a room with a balcony that overlooked the courtyard, but got something lot better—a courtyard itself! And, there was an option of having a room with the view of the Marmara Sea, for additional 10 Euros, but we decided to save the money and were right: all of the balconies were facing the sea, including our first floor, so we saw it perfectly. I guess the more expensive room was on the highest floor and had a better perspective, but I bet it did not have A SWING AND A LITTLE GARDEN!

You can get any kind of accommodations you want—from a 10Euro hostel to a 160 overlooking-the-sea suite. Breakfast is included. Receptionists everywhere are extra sweet and speak around 4 languages. Breakfasts are usually same everyday, but ours included so much stuff that we could eat different food for a week—and even the shittiest breakfast offers 5 varieties of olives and cheeses, which is like amazing!

Food. Foodwise, we went to Istanbul prepared. We watched my favorite TV chef’s Antony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” in Istanbul and marked the places and the food we wanted to eat. Among them were: a whole lamb cooked in a stone pit, a delicious, calorie-packed wet burger and a lamb wrap with an unbelievable lavash.

Food in the historic part of the city (which is where you’ll end up being anyway) is 10 times more expensive then where the normal people live, so we just skipped lunch or dinner and ate once a day (well, after having like 5 courses for breakfast) and munched on bread, fruit and cheese we bought in the discount supermarket.

The hotel provided two bottles of water and that was wonderful, because you can’t drink tap water and there are no drinking fountains. For water, try discount supermarket, because its prices triple (literally) in the touristy places.

And as an endnote: almost every restaurant and hotel has a rooftop terrace. It is absolutely the best idea ever, so please don’t visit Istanbul in the winter, you’ll miss the terrace experience!

pics: the rooftop terrace in our hotel (can you see the sea?), the Bambi Cafe (poor Bambi, do they serve venison?), and I am passed by a historic tram (modern ones cruise the rest of the city).

The 50s in Georgia

My stepfather once told me: “I understand why you want to go back to Georgia. It is like 50s in the states”. Now, he meant the good stuff about the 50s: family values, small grocery stores, neighbors being friends, sense of community.

As Giga and I got obsessed with the AMC’s series Mad Men, we both realized how true that is. It is the 50’s here, not only with all the good, but the crappy stuff too. For some reason, it makes me very glad that before the 70s, American people behaved much like Georgians do today: smoked all day, drank at work, objectified women, fired homosexuals from work, threw garbage in the park, had pretty housewives and promiscuous husbands. I was glad because: 1. aha, they had flaws too! 2. If they could change, we can change.

There is one thing in the 50s (or at least in Mad Men) that is unquestionably better than it is today: style! This is why Giga and me decided to have a 50s theme for our second wedding…wait what?!

As you know (or not), Georgian weddings have three parts: a church ceremony, a legal ceremony and a restaurant. 3 years ago, we didn’t have time, nor did we feel compelled to perform a legal ceremony and sign a marriage license. We just did the church thing, where Giga almost set the priest on fire and my maid of honor fainted in the middle of the bible-reading. Oh, and the drinking-eating-Georgian dances-drinking-eating-Georgian dances thing.

Now that we are thinking of producing little Gigas and Pasumonoks (this is where you go awwwwwwwwwwwwww), we decided to put our names on that paper.

We already had the restaurant and all that Georgian wedding festivity, so we came up with an inexpensive, American wedding: lots of flowers and no food. We even used paper plates!!! We did have alcohol though. Wine—not Georgian! As mentioned, for the first time in Georgia (to my knowledge), we also had a theme and kudos to my girlfriends, most of them showed up with 50s hair and dresses.

You can compare the pics from our first (real) wedding to this thing. Changes are apparent. That is the same man by my side, though.

And you know what? If we are half a century behind, we should at least have fun with it! Down with Justin Beiber, I want Marilyn Monroe!

P.S. and get this, we also had a second honeymoon! This time something exiting, not Borjomi, that we did the first time. Wait for the Istanbul in the next post.

Hot Girls

When I started this blog, I thought of doing sarcastic posts from a girl’s perspective. I’ve lost that somewhere between the sex ed and the infamous phalloimitators. Plus, I am extra busy this week, so I’ll post something that doesn’t require too much editing.

So, being married has lots of pluses. One of them is having male friends. I could never have boys that are friends, because our honest talks and midnight giggling on the phone always ended up with the dreaded “you have beautiful eyes” dialogue. Great, now I sound like I am bragging.

Being off-limits opens a new demographic for me: boys. Especially, husband’s friends. They are 100% harmless. One time, in Batumi my husbands friends and I discussed girls for 3 days. And finally found out what guys are thinking. At least those ones.

Also, I highly recommend Neil Strauss’ The Game (especially if you are a boy and you can’t get girls). Made me emphasize with the male population.

So, those guys in particular wanted nice-looking girls. Not great-looking (aha! Are they intimidated?) nice and, as they say in Georgia, “movlili”. Meaning, she’s taking care of herself. Meaning she goes to salon, waxes her eyebrows, spends evenings chatting with a nail lady and knows what looks good on her.

Two years ago, I told my hubby that new generation of Geo girls look hot. We were observing them in a Batumi park. He answered: “ No. They just learned how to take care of themselves”.

I’d like to add: they can take care of themselves, because they finally have jobs. They can afford to spend money on their Gucci’s. And this is where my liberal-minded readers sigh and tell me: “you too Brutus?! We thought you were above that petty, bourgeois, shoe-buying attitude!”

I object to female objectification. But is it wrong to improve physically, to try and look better? I mean, we have no problem when a person tries to improve intellectually, so why can’t he/she progress physically?

This dualism is bullshit. I want to reach perfection in every aspect of my life. A priori, I know that I won’t. But trying enhances me. Is this vanity or is this harmony with own self, own body?

Observe this chain: if girl is “movlili”, she is confident, if she is confident, she’s called a bitch. Or people think that she’s stuck up. But nobody thinks that a confident man is a bitchy slut. No! He’s a go getter and a an achiever. He has a competitive nature. Blah!

In the end, I refuse to be forced in categories. Nerdy smart or dumb beautiful. I am neither very smart, nor exceptionally beautiful. But just as I am reading --- (insert something pretentious-sounding), so I am prancing around in heels and a short skirt.

Girls are hot! Deal with it!

What The Hell Are We Building?

Imagine, you hear the airplanes, you look up but you can’t see them. You are haunted by that sound. You go into the basement, you hide under the car, you run, but it does not matter where you go, when the bomb gets dropped on you. So, you squeeze on a tractor with ten other people. And you leave it all. You are an IDP and this is August 2008.

Imagine that your home was burned. Just like that, burned. And everything in it was burned. Everything you bought, collected, valued.

Imagine that you've spent 4 months in the kindergarten, sleeping on a mattress, on a desk. They promise you a house. So, you get a little cabin, most of the necessities. You’re getting money and produce at first. Flour, pasta. They even give you a TV.

And then…you find out that the roof is leaking, that the walls are perpetually wet and that the floor has holes in it. You get pneumonia. Almost everyone in your family gets pneumonia. They give you a plot of land, but you can’t work on it, cause you’re sick. It sounds like a crappy melodrama, but you’re an IDP and this is January 2009.

And then, time passes, the walls get wetter, the holes get bigger, the food stops coming. PTSD catches up. Nobody cares about you, all the journalists, media, foreign help, NGO’s, everything is gone. The war is not interesting anymore. You’re an IDP and this is November 2010.

And then, you turn on TV and see this:

Flickering video. The track is a song written 7 years ago, during the rose revolution. Words go like this: “if we sing the same song together, we will build a house”.

The video goes on, and they show all the new shit erected in Georgia, mainly in Tbilisi, all the new, expensive, useless, worthless shit and the song, the song by a folk-rock-kinda singer that I liked, this song pours out of my TV, out of your TV, out of TVs the IDPs that watch it in their one-bedroom house! How could you, all the revolutionary, undergroundy artists, how could you sell yourselves?! Are you guys just getting old? Is that it? You were lying to us, you were lying to us, when you stood along those people, the people who promised us gold, but built us shiny, glittery bridges! How long can we stand this fakeness? Why doesn’t anyone mention that right now, people are living in card houses? One storm and those cabins will fall apart!

Oh, they will pay suitcases of Euros to famous singers, for a free concert in Batumi, they will spend a fortune on their own residencies, hotels and bridges, they will force everyone in the country to sing the same song and they will build, we will build, damn it, we will built all together, using our money, and finally, when all is sang and built, there won’t be anyone left to live in the house!

HOW TO USE THE PHALLOIMITATOR

This post is an answer to the recent “Asaval-Dasavali” article which claimed that TLG teacher Thomas Fletcher came to Georgia solely to teach Georgian children how to put dildoes in their mouths.

As I have recently learned from a very respectable newspaper, “Asaval-Dasavali”, the sole reason of foreign English teachers in Georgia is to draft our children in sects and teach them “lessons in homosexuality”[1]. Furthermore, the article said that after a while children will start holding “phalloimitators” (meaning dildoes) instead of pens and pencils in their tiny hands![2]

So, Georgians, wake up! The article is predicting future! We are not included in this new kind of knowledge! “The aim of this government is evolution of new kind of generation”[3], the one that knows how to use phalloimitators! Do you know how to utilize them? That’s awful! Neither do I!

I look in my crystal ball and I see Georgia in 20 years. A potential employee comes to a job interview. Instead of asking whether he knows English and Computer (Duh, everybody knows that shit now!), an employer asks him if he knows how to use a phalloimitator!

I see another picture. My boss approaches my office slowly, with an evil grin on his face. “Pasumonok”, he says, “Do you know how to operate an average phalloimitator and what is your experience in sects and homosexuality?” Desperately, I try to mumble something in my defense: “I’ve been to a gay Georgian’s birthday party once!”, but my boss does not buy it. Fired, I gather my things, stumble outside and jump into the Mtkvari River.

Alas, I’ve never had a phalloimitator and I am out of school, so TLGs won’t teach me “lessons in homosexuality”! Does this mean that I won’t be able to blend in with the “generation with no values or morals”[4] of tomorrow?

I propose we invade LGBT fond “Inclusive” and steal their phalloimitators! Because it is an established fact that gay people have those things laying all over their homes and offices. Even their dogs have one!

I propose we hire private tutors in homosexuality and phalloimitatorism, just like we hire tutors for every subject we study in school! The degradation of Georgian nation has already started and only the people who are smart enough to get the necessary skills and abilities will survive in this battle of the fittest!

I propose we start learning now, before it is too late, and indeed, it might be too late, just look at all the TV shows and newspaper articles of the previous week, full of one word and one word only: “THE PHALLOIMITATOR”!

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[1] Should He Teach Georgian To Our Children? http://asavali.ge/asdas1_2006/2010-44/1-20.PDF

[2] All of the references are from the same article

[3] All of the references are from the same article

[4] All of the references are from the same article

Why Are Georgian Husbands Pigs?

Everyone knows that if a boy “got…mind set on you”, than it’s “ gonna take money, a whole lot of spending money…and it’s gonna take time, to do it, to do it, t do it”[1].

One of my male friends wouldn’t get a girlfriend because: “I don’t have money right now and I don’t feel like spending all of my evenings in the Acid Bar”. That was a place to take a girl back then. Tbilisi has fancier places than the Acid Bar now. Ever been to one of those lounge bars where you have to spend 200 Lari to be seated at a table?

The algorithm: she has something that he wants (ranging from a platonic relationship to matrimony) and he needs to spend money, patience and emotional resources in order to get it.

Following are the two general reactions for receiving offerings from the suitors: 1.“Conservative”: a girl receives gifts (phone calls, flowers, dinners, etc…) only from the boy she wants to date. Receiving means giving boy a hope. Such girls usually marry their first boyfriend 2. “Liberal”: beautiful girl is entitled to attention and she can go on multiple dates with multiple boys and boys have to earn the grace of her presence. Such girls usually have fun (does not necessary mean sex) in their teenage years and later they either a. marry an older rich guy b. drive one of the suitors so crazy that he does something desperate, like kidnapping.

The post is not about the girls though. The point is that no matter what girl’s response is, everybody agrees that boys have to work for their girl. That sounds romantic, right? But combined with those horrible teenage years, when self-esteem is in a negative correlation with the number of pimples on your nose, and the number of bras you open directly correlates to the money your daddy paid for your car, it eventually results in a swine-like husbands. If the girl in question was not locked up in her room by an angry muscular brother, she probably had several of such suitors. It is likely that she preferred some boys to others: she had to choose. Hence, some teenage boys were left empty-handed, bitter and humiliated.

And of course, the more suitors one girl has, the more she will attract. Thus, what you, an average pimple-covered orangutan want the most, is always hardest to get.

So, when finally, after all the fancy offerings, she is your wife, your property, what do you do to her? You make her feel miserable to repay for all the degradation she has caused you. If she does not become your wife, what do you do? You marry someone “of a second sort” and you hate her for not being that long-legged dainty thing that never paid any attention to you.

IS THE ALGORITHM FAILING?!

P.S. This is a stereotype and there are happy exceptions (see my previous post). However, I believe this is symptomatic.

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[1] George Harrison, “Got My Mind Set On You”