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• A sentimental journey - a belated Thank You to Georgia (the one on the Black Sea) of my childhood...

  Georgia rushed at me almost every summer after an endless four-day journey by train, where we, kids, stuck our heads out the windows and watched the world go by and grow taller with every few hundred miles. We started in the frozen black and white flatlands of the tundra, and slowly the world speeding by the dusty windows of the train acquired yellows and greens, and one morning, exotic trees would tower over the fields, the parapets and the people, and the first faint whiffs of seaweed and oysters would float towards us with a silent welcome. We knew we arrived then, a pack of translucent-skinned kids, longing for the sun, the sea, the adventure. There was no mistaking this place for a part of Russia. We were in a foreign land, and we knew it from everything we saw, heard and smelled. The humongous map in our geography classroom must have been mistaken.
  
  Somewhere, not far from where something or other is currently being blown up, was the house of my great uncle on my dad's side. The house, as I remember it, was somehow uneven any way you looked at it. He built it from scratch, from what I was told. He was a very short stooping old man who would pick up huge boulders in the yard and show me a scattering of scorpions, so I knew what they looked like, and then pluck a few, destined for the jar of olive oil which magically served as antidote against scorpion bites.
  
  The house smelled of cilantro and peppers, which grew in the yard out back, and some spices whose pungent smells could wake up the dead, and make the plainest of grains dance a tango on one's palate. The grapevines, that were covering the trellis of the upstairs terrace with their impossibly elastic thread, produced the most remarkable fruit - their juice turned to wine as soon as the grapes were pressed, and we would get giddy drunk on it. In this house, my dad taught me to tie my shoelaces, so we could keep going for our long walks along the promenade to the place at the end of the boardwalk where we could race bumper cars. It was probably a few miles each way, with the scent of magnolias mingling with that of the sea... I remember looking at the sea at night and knowing suddenly why it was called Black. Years later, I would force myself to jump into it headfirst at night off of a pier, just to prove that I knew the black silky sheet of glass was indeed made of liquid.
  
  In that house I also learned that those purple figs only looked like they had worms in them, and when the wormy-looking veins looked white, it meant the figs were ripe.
  
  Mom and us had Turkish coffee with scoops of vanilla ice cream, served in tiny silver cups in the little sidewalk cafes, as we sat there speaking of mermaids and magic, overlooking the restless sea. Later, mom taught me that the sea would hold me up, if I trusted it enough to do so, unless there was a storm coming, and then I had to watch out for the ninth wave, as those could be deadly.
  
  We didn't always go to the same place on the Black sea, but my guess would be that all these places were somewhere in Georgia. In every one of these we were guests, tourists. We took it all in, the smells, the food, the language, the people. There was nothing even remotely Russian about any of it, and as kids, somehow we knew that a terrible mistake had been made somewhere. We knew that these loud people who haggled at the bazaars just for the fun of it, who made their own wine and made soda out of goats' milk had nothing at all in common with any of us, and we were guests, grateful for the gift of their beautiful cities, their mysterious sea, and the overall sense of restless and exotic that made one want to fall head-over-heels in love. We took back our stories and a trinket or two grudgingly salvaged from some gift shop. We peeled off our half-baked tans, and eventually no longer could smell the sea or the night-blooming flowers of the sub-tropics... Everything else had to remain, such as it had, for all these years.

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