Georgia, Georgia

Hello folks -- this signals my entry into the fierce land of blogging. Why? Because I'm on a trip that I've found pretty interesting and I've felt the urge to share. For the past two weeks, I've been traveling through the Republic of Georgia, Azerbaijan and Czech Republic as a 'cultural envoy' of the US State Department. We've been asked a hundred times in interviews what the point of the trip is, and the best answer I've found is that we're trying to use music to bring people from pretty disparate backgrounds together. In typical fashion for me, I'm writing this a long time after the trip has begun, so I can already say that that objective is better achieved in some places than others. 

On March 28th, I flew from my home, New York City, to Tbilisi, Georgia, accompanied by Joel Harrisson, the artistic director of the American Pianists Association, who's the mastermind behind this trip of a trip. We flew Turkish Airlines, via Istanbul. Does any other airline have their logo on the wingtips of their planes? 

Tbilisi seemed at first grey and depressed. It would grow on me hugely during the course of the nine days we spent in Georgia. It's a city in transition, with a vast architectural and cultural heritage but a lot of rubble and grime still left over from the 1991-92 civil war that followed the country's independence from the USSR. Driving into the city from the airport is a lesson in communist architectural history: the fairly well constructed apartment blocks built under Stalin (who was incidentally from Georgia and apparently felt that a worker was entitled to a decent living space — one good point for the infamous Man of Steel?), the shabby constructions of the Kruschev era, with as-low-as-can-be ceilings and limited living space. Kruschev was of the opinion that since a worker should be working most of the time anyway and hence would spend a limited time at home, it would be wasteful for his or her living space to be anything but strictly utilitarian. Or at least that's how Natia, one of the charming employees of the US Embassy who accompanied us on our Georgian adventure, put it. 

Georgians are on the whole incredibly warm, real heart-on-the-sleeve people. In Soviet times, the country was the French Riviera of the USSR — a vacation retreat for those who could afford it, and really, what with some excellent local wine and delicious, subtil cuisine, it fits the bill perfectly. Georgians like to call themselves Mediterranean.