Things started to get interesting on the second day, with a long drive to Batumi, a town on the Black Sea that is in the process of turning back into the resort town that it once was. We checked into the Intourist Palace (how's that for a relic of Soviet times? In the Pimsleur language tapes that I've been going through prior to this trip in an attempt to revive my high-school Russian, the Intourist Hotel and Restaurants pop up all over the place).
The hotel still has that boxy, weirdly proportioned quality that I associate with communist architecture, yet it's now run completely as a market-driven business, with Israeli general manager and a basket of fruit in the room when you first enter. The kinds of odd associations between different times are common in Georgia, down to bar called KGB — motto "Still Watching You" that I found in Tbilisi. I'm sure the memory of the KGB isn't too pleasant to anyone who has grown up in a country where the agency was once all-powerful, but if anyone can laugh at that sort of grim past history, it's the Georgians. Like Poland, this is a country that has been screwed over so many times in its history and been ruled by so many different and vicious regimes, that the people here have learned to use humour as a tool of resiliency.
My concert that night was in a charming old theater/concert hall that sat around four hundred people. It was packed (all the concerts in Georgia were, thanks to the excellent work of the Embassy staff), and despite my jetlag, I was able to make some music happen. This was my first concert in Georgia, and it also served as an introduction to the local concert-going custom of making-a-lot-of-noise-while-the-performer-performs. Cell phones go off, kids run around, and as a rule, people feel a need to benefit their seat neighbor with a running commentary of the action onstage. Kind of like American movie theaters. There was almost always some kind of a low rumble in the audience at the concerts, a background noise that my best use of audience-shushing techniques (leaving a lot of space in the music, talking to the audience, sitting in silence at the piano for a while) couldn't quite get rid of. Despite all this, I was thanked with a standing ovation at the end of the concert. Perhaps, when Jorg leaned in to talk to Khatia during the concert, it was to say: "hey, this guy actually sounds ok!" I thought about the first jazz musicians to play in Japan, and how perplexed they must have been by the conservative clapping at the end of their sets — one must always take into account the local habits of the audience before judging whether it liked your show or not.
Of course, things weren't helped by the fact that the stage crew started loudly dismantling a theater set (behind the curtain in front of which the piano was) while I was playing.
And how's this for a bit of culture-shock: before going onstage, I headed for the bathroom, only to find that there wasn't any toilet paper. I checked in the ladies too, just to be sure. Remember, I'm about to give a solo piano concert in a nice concert hall — this isn't some dark underground jazz joint. I look for and finally find the hall custodian, who is at first perplexed by my request. After actually taking him into the bathroom and showing him the empty toilet paper holders, he goes back to his booth at the artist's entrance, finds a brown roll of paper and instead of handing it over to me, proceeds to deal out a length of it that he must have thought was appropriate for the job. Is toilet paper that precious here? Is everyone expected to walk around with a spool of it in their pocket? In any event, I grabbed the whole roll.
