Georgia on My Drunken Mind

It's 3:00 p.m. on a sunny afternoon and I'm half-drunk, risking my life without a seatbelt in the passenger seat of a rusted Soviet-era Lada. The driver is careening us down the steep mud streets of Borjomi, Georgia, a resort town best imagined as "the Banff" of the former USSR. He's got one eye closed from the smoke of the cigarette he is lighting with his right hand while he steers with the left. He's done this hundreds of times. He hasn't bothered to turn on the ignition as we coast two hundred metres downhill from his driveway. This is how I get the wood to fill my petchy, the stove that heats my apartment.

All this will be over mid-June when I wrap up the weirdest job I've ever had. For the past nine months I've taught English alongside nearly 1,000 foreign teachers employed by Teach and Learn with Georgia, the ambitious project of Western-leaning and U.S.-educated President Mikheil Saakashvili and Georgia's Ministry of Education. He created the program as a step towards curing the vicious Soviet hangover that has afflicted the country -- and more specifically, its education system -- since independence in 1991. I came here as a graduate of Concordia University's journalism program expecting to be an educator first and foremost. But lately I feel more like a cultural ambassador from Canada, here to sample old Georgian traditions and modern gritty ingenuity. 

No seatbelts, please

On a good week I spend almost 20 hours co-teaching English at a charming but ramshackle elementary school on Borjomi's main street, Rustaveli Avenue. I spend far more time making sense of life in a country with a culture far more distinct and insular than my own. I used to live with a host family in a tiny village, but had to move out, partly because of the stifling level of hospitality that is awarded to all foreigners who make it to this neglected corner of the world. Now, home is a small mold-infested concrete box in a Borjomi back alley that I heat with a wood-burning stove.

Back inside the Lada, I close my eyes as Andreu, the driver, swerves around a crane set up to deal with the daily electrical outages and the police car that is supervising the job. It helps my nerves a bit that I'm now half-drunk now on chacha -- Georgian grape moonshine -- after drinking only one small tumbler. At somewhere between 60-80 per cent alcohol by volume, chacha is incredibly potent. Andreu has swallowed three tumblers in my presence. But here in Georgia, it would be rude to deny his offer to drive me and my three 20-kilo bags of wood straight to my door. It is also considered an insult to do up your seatbelt.

Although it's socially acceptable here to be drunk at any hour of the day, I've only complied because Andreu sells wood cheaper to his drinking buddies. I get enough to heat my house for a week for six laris (about $3.50 Canadian), but I have to pay seven if I don't man up and drink the chacha. Drinking chacha is reminiscent of taking a bizarre hallucinogen. And the hangover is mind-bending. Luckily, my town has a cure.

Borjomi is famous for its eponymous spring water, which tastes like blood and is very popular throughout the former USSR. The Georgians I know will down a litre after a particularly heavy night and claim to be magically free of their symptoms. I've been told by many of my proud neighbors that it's Georgia's number one export. 

A slippery chaser

I like it here in Borjomi. Due to its history as a Russian spa resort, Borjomi is one of the few places in the country where you can find whole wheat bread and decent spicy sausage. (Georgians prefer their admittedly delicious Naan-like white bread and a scary looking bologna-esque sausage.) The air here is fresh, the mountains are green and the spring water is strangely appealing. Borjomi is also the entrance to the Borjomi-Kharagauli national park, one of the biggest in Europe. Though, if you ask me, Georgia seems to be in Asia. Despite it's relatively large size (population 20,000), cows and chickens roam the streets and chacha "stills" (read: barrels of moonshine) occupy a large place in most yards. Andrew's barrel is one of the most impressive.

But how did I meet this provider of wood and perilous rides? The same way I've met nearly every Georgian: by simply walking down the street with a big dopey smile, a loud Hawaiian-esque shirt and a thirst for alcohol. No matter where you are -- from Tbilisi, the cosmopolitan capital, to a village of three hundred in the mountains -- if you stick out, which you undoubtedly will, someone will invite you over for coffee, tea, or chacha. 

So it's now 3:05 p.m. and I've survived the ride down Borjomi's steep mountain streets to my front door. The green, white and red Lada is steaming and Andreu smacks the dashboard, muttering sheni deda under his breath. This literally translates to "your mom," and is the worst swear in the Georgian language. I can't help but laugh and he gives me a hard stare, followed by a wink smile that says, "We made it."

He untangles the coat hanger that holds the trunk of the Lada closed and plops a 20-kilo bag of wood on my back. I know I'm going to get an earful from my Canadian girlfriend when she catches a whiff of my breath. It probably won't be the booze that gets on her nerves, but the chaser, which consists of pickled minnows, caught from the Mtkvari, Georgia's biggest river. These little fishies are brined for a few days and consumed without any kind of cleaning. They are the worst chaser of all time, and it feels like these minnows desperately want to ride a wave of chacha back upstream and onto my staircase as I wobble Bambi-legged from the car with a heavy load of wood on my back. 

I slap the six laris in Andreu's hand and he gives me a nod and a slightly embarrassed smile. I nod and smile back and brace myself against the busted Lada, giving it my best push as it sputters to a start and rumbles down the road, filling my back alley with smoke.