Since you have the aisle seat, I must be in the aisle

This week has been quite busy for me. Tuesday evening I spent cruising the streets, looking for girls to interview. It started raining right away therefore most stayed home. Of the ones that were outside, a lot were scared that we were from a media company and that we would video tape them. We drove around for three hours and found only three, of which one was underage so I couldn’t interview her. It was also an emotionally charged night for me because of the three, two were cutting their arms when they were nervous and when we saw them both had tiny cuts all over their forearms. And one of them had a fresh shiner so I am sure someone had beaten her a day or two before. The third woman was quite old, as much as I recall 40, with a bandaid on her face as well. I felt sorry for her because we passed her three times so she must have stood there in the rain for the entire night while we were out there. Once we interviewed and paid her, she left right away which means that she probably only earned that night the 15 GEL that we pay (about $8). I talked to a Georgian friend about this and she said that I should get real, that these women are much better off than a lot of other people in Georgia whom I don’t see since I spend my days in the center of Tbilisi with a bunch of expats. I suppose she is right.

Since we only got two interviews on Tuesday, we decided to finish the project last night. It was complete opposite from Tuesday. We found the remaining three women within an hour; all three were talkative and seemed to do fairly well, considering their circumstances. Not to mention that they all seemed to be socially adjusted with good eye contact and appropriate affect (oooh, there is a social work word of the day). Our taxi driver was also a funny and talkative guy who throughout the night insisted that he would never pick up a girl on the street. Instead, he wines and dines a woman until she falls for him. I suppose here he is considered to be a romantic. I am not sure how wining and dining a woman until she sleeps with him makes him a romantic. Unless I have some old fashioned views on romance, based on soft cover books with Fabio on the cover.

Speaking of Fabio, where has he gone? He must be hitting prime age, I bet his hair is beginning to thin and he is slowly developing a happy belly. In Georgia, a happy belly is a must; often you can see an older Georgian swaggering down the street with a shirt on that is a little tight around his happy belly and top buttons opened so there is a bunch of chest hair sticking out. They usually smell of garlic as well.

Otherwise, everyone here seems to wrap up. Of the kids who are here for the summer like me, most are finishing their final projects and heading back to the States or are planning continuous trips to other parts of Caucasus and Europe. It sort of feels like the end of camp, everyone all of the sudden becoming better friends, there are tons of good byes, people are planning picture sharing parties (yeah, I don’t know what that is all about either, I am just gonna show up with some sort of alcoholic drink and watch people cry over their wonderful times in Tbilisi). There is a group supposedly heading out to Svaneti this weekend, it’s a region that is right below Russia and next to Abkhazia. It’s known for its untouched beauty and Svans, the people who inhabit it, who are known to rip off tourists. There is one flight that goes to Svaneti on alternate days and, according to a friend who just returned from there, it is almost impossible to get on the plane as it is a 17-seater and a lot of Svans travel back and forth. Apparently, when they tried to get back, they had to wait for three days in Svaneti, which included coming to the airport at 5:30am to reserve a seat and each day, they had to turn back because they did not have a VIP status and they were not relatives of the woman who sells tickets, which apparently helps ones chance as well. He was really angry about it when I spoke to him and apparently, a fellow traveler is going to write an article about it in the local newspaper so I will try to post it as well. In the end, instead of taking a 50 minute flight back, they took an eleven hour marshrutka ride back. As a side note, although it is a seventeen seater, the plane takes on several other people who stand in the aisle of the plane throughout the flight. Needless to say, I was a little hesitant to deal with the stress of handling rude airlines employees and did not want to sit patiently in the plane for four hours until the pilot decided to take off, something that happened when my friend was leaving. The friend also mentioned to me that the plane flies pending on weather conditions so when they were leaving Tbilisi, airline employees were asking passengers to call their relatives in Svaneti to find out about the weather conditions there. So although I don’t mind taking a risk of possibly flying into a storm with a bunch of people hovering in the aisle, I really did not want to have to deal with stressful airport situations. Besides, we may go to Borjomi instead or to Shatili which is right below Chechnya and Ingushetia, but I’ll keep you updated.