Pétanque you very much

First, a disclaimer:  my wife, Debbie, thought of the title for this blog.  I stole it.

Every July, the French community in Tbilisi invites the entire city to join them in celebrating Bastille Day.  It’s held in Vakhtang Square in Old Town, sponsored by my favorite French brasserie, Tartine.  I frequent the Tartine often, enjoying a glass (or twelve) of pastis, a large charcuterie, and a baked-on-the-premises baguette.  For those of you unfamiliar with the joys of pastis, think Ouzo or some other anisette-flavored aperitif.  It is, unfortunately, a temptation I rarely overcome. 

The French community in Tbilisi is larger than you’d think.  There is, of course, the staff at the French Embassy and Consulate.  There’s also the senior management of Carrefour, one of the largest grocery/department stores in the Caucasus, along with the faculty of L’École Française, and many NGOs based in Tbilisi.  (The NGOs work in the displaced personnel camps, where refugees from South Ossetia and Abkhazia were settled after the 2008 war.)  It’s a surprisingly large number. 

Besides having the opportunity to practice my French (that sound you just heard was my wife, mother-in-law, and former French teachers cringing out loud), I sign up for the pétanque (pronounced pay-TONK) tournament. 

 

Pétanque is a game similar to bocci, where competitors try to throw hollow metal balls as close as possible to a small wooden ball called a cochonnet (literally "piglet").  You have to stay within a throwing circle and keep both feet on the ground during the throw.  It’s normally played on hard dirt or gravel, but here Vakhtang Square is covered with sand for the tournament.  The tournament takes all day and Tartine provides free pastis, bread, and water throughout the day.  (Frankly, the free pastis and bread is why I sign up to play.)

 

 

I showed up at 9am, dressed in my best pétanque clothes (blue jeans, a red polo shirt, and white sneakers – as close as I could get to the red, white, and blue of the French tricolor), with pastis glass in hand.  (Normally, I don’t normally start daydrinking at 9am.  This, however, was a special occasion, so I started an hour and a half earlier than I normally would.)  Dave, my playing partner, co-worker, and running/drinking buddy, showed up a little late – 3-1/2 hours late, to be precise.  So I was forced to draft some local Georgian girls to play alongside me.  Fortunately, they knew absolutely nothing about the game, so they had no bad habits to unlearn.

After a welcoming speech by the French Ambassador to Georgia and the playing of the French national anthem, the tournament began.  The game is pretty simple to play, the most difficult part being tossing the balls without spilling your pastis.  The balls are heavier than they look, approximately two pounds each, and they make a wonderful “tonk, tonk” sound when banged together, perhaps the origin of the game’s name.  Simple to play, yes, but not so simple to play well.  I’m blaming it on my partners’ inexperience (and my overindulgence in pastis), but we lost in the first round, 13-4. 

Undeterred by our ignominious exit from the tournament, I volunteered to take over the pastis table so the former occupant could play his round.  Of course, when he was done playing, I refused to give his position back to him (a purely noble gesture, I’m sure you understand).  From my new duty post, I had a perfect view of the final rounds of the tournament and I was right next to the Tartine’s “house band” – two middle aged Frenchmen playing an accordion and a large bass violin playing traditional French favorites. 

As the sun began to set over the Mtkavi River, the tournament winners – the team from Carrefour – were crowned and we all adjourned to the tables inside for more pastis, charcuterie, and bread.  I had a great day, and I’m already practicing for next year’s tournament.

 

Thanks for reading.

Georgia -- the Land of Castles

My running buddy, Dave, left Georgia for good this week.  So before he left we decided to visit the only two castles in Georgia we haven’t seen.  Let me back up. 

Dave is an engineer by training and an historian by hobby.  Here in Georgia, he combined those traits and specialized in castles.  Castles, in order to fulfill their burden, were built on top of the highest and steepest ground overlooking a village or villages.  Trails, even roads, were built so building materials and supplies could be more easily transported to the site.  Those roads, naturally, no longer exist.  The castles themselves have not been maintained so for the most part they have collapsed and now exist as a pile of stones and blocks.  That was Dave’s playground.  He enjoyed nothing more than climbing up to some pile of rubble and trying to figure out how things would have been a thousand years ago.  He liked to envision how the castle would have looked in its prime and what each pile of rubble would have been. 

There were two castles we had put off because of the remarkable inconvenience of getting to them.  As I said before, there is no road to get there, the terrain is always steep and rich with every type of thorn bush known to man, and what pathways may exist are littered with stones and rocks that have rolled down from the castle site.  Two in particular are particularly noteworthy for their pain in the ass factor:  the Manavi Fortress in a town called Sagarejo (don’t ask me how to pronounce it; even the locals can’t decide how to pronounce the “-jo”) and a castle outside a small village called Korjori. 

 

The Manavi Fortress also called the "Come and See Castle" because enemies could only see it and never could take it (guess they couldn't find the road, either).  It was never captured or destroyed.  It was the summer residence of the kings of Kakheti, one of the regions here in Georgia.  Since the temperature was only in the low 90s last weekend, and the humidity only in the upper 80s, it seemed like a good time to climb two miles up a steep hill to see a pile of rocks.  (Because, certainly, this pile of rocks would look different than the other 10,000 piles of rocks we’ve seen all over this country.) 

Arriving at Manavi, after catching our breaths, fighting back the urge to throw up, and overcoming the strong desire to pick up one of those ancient building blocks and braining Dave with it for talking me into making this “hike,” we each immediately fall into our “castle exploring duties.”  For Dave, that means putting on his engineer hat and walking the grounds.  He paces out the distances, looks for places where a cistern would have been, searches for where the pens for the animals would have been located, and tries to determine what the chapel would have looked like.  For me, that means going to the highest point and seeing how far I can throw rocks downhill.  If there are herds of cattle or goats or sheep in sight, it means seeing how close to the animals (or the shepherd) I can get with a rock.  There’s no worry about the shepherd confronting me about my hobby because shepherds are smarter than we are and know better than to climb straight up a hill that goats avoid just to yell at us in a language we don’t understand. 

When I get bored throwing rocks at livestock or shepherds, I try to see how close I can get to Dave with a rock.  That’s simply a way to pass the time until Dave starts to ask questions, and he’s going to ask some questions.

 

 

Typical Q:  “If you were attacking this castle, from which direction would you approach?”  Smartass A:  “I wouldn’t.  I’d ransack the village since everyone is in the castle, and move on to the next village.”  Next typical Q:  “How would you attack this castle?”  Next smartass A:  “Slowly, on horseback, and at night when it isn’t so damn hot.”  I try to turn this around by asking my own questions:  “Why in the hell would I want to attack this castle, anyway?  What’s in it that I want badly enough to climb this steep mountain where goats don’t even want to go while angry people throw rocks and shoot arrows at me?  These people haven’t done anything to me.”  Dave’s A:  “Because you’re a raider, a marauder; that’s what you do.”  Seems to me someone could have made a lucrative career back then out of job placement services.  “So, young man, do you want to be marauder, marching long distances in the heat of summer and cold of winter with little to eat or drink so you can climb a steep hill with no roads but plenty of sticker bushes while people try to kill you?  Or would you rather stay home and be a shepherd or a blacksmith or something that allows you to pay attention to the wives and daughters of those idiots who left the village to go marauding?”  I know what I’d choose. 

 

 

But I digress.  As I expected, we learned nothing new from the Manavi Fortress.  So it was time to move on to Kojori.  I did learn several things from Kojori.  I learned that no one goes up to Kojori.  I learned that the climb to Kojori is so steep and difficult that the government actually built a metal staircase so you can get up there.  (Of course, the staircase hasn’t been maintained since it was built, so you have to climb over missing steps, rusted handrails, and support bolts that only have about 1/32” left in the rock.) 

 

Then, once you get off the staircase and you think you’re there, you get to crawl on your hands and knees through what once was the outer wall to get to the inner courtyards.

 

I learned that once you do finally get to the inner courtyard – after the dry heaves have ceased and the vertigo has stopped – that it is a beautiful view.  I learned that beautiful views aren’t always worth the effort of getting to where you can see them.  Finally, I learned that climbing ridiculously steep hills just to look at piles of rocks is not a bad way to spend an afternoon.

 

Thanks for reading.

      

A quick trip to Istanbul

 Istanbul was Constantinople

 Now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople

 Been a long time gone, Constantinople

 Now it's Turkish delight on a moonlit night

 Every gal in Constantinople

 Lives in Istanbul, not Constantinople

 So if you've a date in Constantinople

 She'll be waiting in Istanbul

 Even old New York was once New Amsterdam

 Why they changed it I can't say

 People just liked it better that way

 So take me back to Constantinople

 No, you can't go back to Constantinople

 Been a long time gone, Constantinople

 Why did Constantinople get the works?

 That's nobody's business but the Turks

Don’t believe it for a second.  Istanbul has, miraculously, managed to hang on to both identities – the ancient and mysterious Constantinople and the modern, European Istanbul.  It’s a fascinating, but crowded and frenetic, city, worth a short trip.

And that’s what we did.  Last week was spring break here so my running buddy, Dave, and I decided to visit the extraordinary city of Istanbul where dervishes whirl, muezzins duel from countless minarets, and continents are crossed several times in a day.  (It was that or stay in Tbilisi and drink.  Since we’ve mastered that skill, we decided to apply our hard won knowledge to other cities to see if we could drink like the locals there.  Spoiler alert – we couldn’t.  Not even close.)

Founded in 660 BCE as Byzantium, modern Istanbul is a city of 14 million people, the second largest city in the Middle East (behind Cairo) and the third-largest city in the world by population within city limits (Shanghai, then Lagos).  It is a Moslem city, the fourth most populous Muslim city in the world (Karachi, Dhaka, Cairo, then Istanbul), but it’s easy to forget you’re in a Muslim city when you’re there.  While I’d say a third of the women wear head scarves, the remainder is dressed very European.  There are bars, clubs, cafes, lingerie stores, liquor stores, and European restaurants on every block.  While the muezzins announce prayer calls five times a day, unlike the Middle East, stores don’t shut their doors and life doesn’t stop until after prayer time.  Some stores shutter their front doors and one café asked us if we wouldn’t mind waiting until after prayer time to be served, but for the most part, religion is transparent in Istanbul, completely unlike other Muslim cities I’ve visited.

The weather during our stay was typical spring weather – rainy, chilly, and a bit windy.  We had one nice day out of the four we were there, but no stupid rain shower is going to keep us from doing the tourist thing.  Not a chance.  So after a typical Turkish breakfast at the slow food restaurant next door to our hotel (note the awning), off we went.

There are five absolutely “must see’s” in Istanbul.  They are the Aya Sofya mosque, the Blue Mosque, the Topkapi Palace, the Grand Bazaar and spice market, and the Bosporus Strait.  There are, of course, lots of other “minor” sights – the Basilica Cistern, the Beyazit Mosque, Ortakoy neighborhood, the Galata Tower, and Suleymaniye Mosque – but if you have limited time or energy, the “must see’s” will quench your thirst for something Istanbul-ish.  We, of course, being of unlimited energy, common sense, and an unquenchable thirst for all things Istanbul-ish, saw all of these as well as the top five.  We started with the Bosporus Strait neighborhood.  The Bosporus Strait (Bosphorus if you’re European; Bosporus is the Turkish pronunciation) bisects Istanbul and separates the continents of Asia and Europe.  It’s about 19 miles long and is one of the heaviest traveled waterways in the world.  By walking over the Galata Bridge, a distance of maybe 400 meters, you go from Asia to Europe and vice versa.  The bridge is a haven for fishermen, water and juice carts, and shoeshine men.  Thus began our first adventure. 

Dave decided to take advantage of the “American only!!” offer of a shoeshine for 5 Turkish lira ($1 = 2.2 TL, so 5 TL is roughly $2.25).  The guy did a nice job, tucked his shoeshine kit under his arm, smiled at Dave, and held out his hand for the 5 lira.  He must have worked in a binoculars store for a while, because he sure saw Dave coming.  Dave pulls out his cash and peels off bills looking for a 5 TL bill.  When he peels off a 50 TL bill, the shoeshine guy, obviously related to Usain Bolt, snatched the 50 lira bill from Dave’s hand and took off into the crowd, shoeshine kit under his arm.  We stood there; paralyzed with astonishment for about 3 seconds before we took off after him, just long enough to let him meld into the crowd (I did mention Istanbul has 14 million people, right?  Well, on this day, it seems every one of that 14 million were between us and the shoeshine guy.).  We thought of coming back the next day to look for the guy, but decided to write off the 50 TL as tuition costs at the School of Street Smarts.  Probably the best $23 Dave ever spent.

We wandered around the neighborhood for a while and then after a refreshing cup of salgam (sour turnip juice with a pickle), we headed to the Grand Bazaar and spice market.  

The Grand Bazaar is just that:  grand and bizarre.  The Grand Bazaar (GB for our purposes) began in 1455 and is the heart of Istanbul.  It is huge, with 61 covered streets and over 3,000 shops which attract between 250,000 and 400,000 visitors daily.  It’s surprisingly easy to navigate, though; much easier than Tbilisi’s Dinamo Market which is a rabbit’s warren of alleys and aisleways.  Like products are bunched together – clothes on this street, gold over there, silk down that way, etc.  The only bad thing about the GB is the aggressiveness of the shop owners.  I learned that the hard way when I noticed a leather jacket.  I stopped to look at it and was immediately accosted by the owner.  Even though I said I was just looking, he managed to convince me to come inside and try the jacket on.  It was a beautiful jacket, made of Canadian bison, but the price was a bit extreme for me – 1500 TL or about $700.  I tried to leave the store, but found my way blocked by the owner’s helper.  This gave the owner the chance to drop his price to 1000 TL.  Still out of my price range, I smiled politely and tried to step around the helper in a very narrow shop.  He backed up but I still couldn’t get around him.  The price dropped to 500TL ($225), then to 300 ($135).  I would have paid 300 lira for the jacket, but now I was so aggravated (a polite way of saying I was really pissed), I told the helper to either move or be prepared to get knocked on his ass.  He stepped aside and I left the store, the owner shadowing me another 200 meters down the street holding up the jacket and begging me to make him an offer.  This sort of aggressive salesmanship is, unfortunately, the rule rather than the exception in the GB, especially if you’re an obvious American.

I did, however, run into an interesting store where I bought some things for Debbie. 

            Right next to the GB is the spice market where you can find everything you’d need in the kitchen in unlimited quantities.  The smell is unbelievable!  In a good way, that is.  The salesmen aren’t as pushy here, but that might be because you don’t haggle in the spice market.  The price posted is the price paid.    Surprisingly, textiles are a part of the spice market as well, and you can even take a tour of the soon-to-be world famous zipper museum (how can it not be?).  You can tell it’s a good store when there are stuffed goats outside.

Day 2 was mosque day.  The Aya Sofya mosque and the Blue Mosque were both less than a five minute walk from our hotel.  They’re both very beautiful, but constantly crowded, and let’s face it, after a while all mosques start to look alike.  They are, however, two of those things you have to see so we spent most of the day dutifully oohing and ahhing at blue tiles, thick carpets, amazing chandeliers, and hundreds of Japanese tourists taking pictures. 

Day 3 was probably the most fun day we had, mostly because we got away from the tourist section of Istanbul and walked into the university section, a neighborhood called Ortakoy across the bridge on the European side.  Two highlights here:  the seagull phones, and a street where every stall sells stuffed baked potatoes.  That’s all they sell – stuff baked potatoes and Cokes.  My kind of place. 

We finished the day back at our hotel where we found, to our great joy, a reggae bar.  Yup, a reggae bar in Istanbul.  We spent a great afternoon and early evening there, sipping Turkish beer and talking to the locals.  At the table next to us was a group of Turkish school girls celebrating the 16^th birthday of one of their own.  They invited us to our party and we spent a couple of wonderful hours with what Dave would later label, “Rick’s harem.”  They had obviously dealt with drunken tourists before because posted over the toilet was very specific instructions. 

So, that was our week.  We spent four great days in Istanbul, despite the lousy weather.  I strongly recommend it as a tourist stop and offer my service as tour guide.  Especially if you’re interested in seeing the Reggae Bar.  The people are friendly, they like Americans, prices are reasonable, and there’s plenty to see.  But no swimming in the fountains, though. 

Thanks for reading.   

Translation fun

One of the more frustrating things about working here is the language barrier.  Khartouli, the Georgian language, is, as I’ve mentioned before, impossible to master unless you’re born into it.  So we rely heavily on translators to make ourselves understood.  Unfortunately, while the translators are usually very good in English, they’re not so good at “militarese.”  I’ve collected some samples of how the path of understanding from military jargon to English to Khartouli oft-times go astray. 

Now I’m not making fun of my translators.  They do a lot of very good work, and translating from English to Khartouli is difficult at best.  But it’s worse when the translators don’t understand the military terms they’re trying to translate.  Some of my favorites:

The “commander’s intent” is a short summary of what the commander wants to achieve in the upcoming mission.  We knew there was a problem when the translator asked if the commanders ever get to work in an office.  She was translating “commander’s intent” as “commanders in tents.” 

We taught a map reading class where we talked about the map being a visual representation of the terrain from “a bird’s eye view.”  Later, the translator asked me what we see when we “look into a bird’s eye.” 

Like any organization, we have to be concerned with budget restrictions.  So when we’re working with the Georgians to design training exercises, we try to avoid “high overhead exercises.”  And, apparently, it’s a good thing we do this because the Georgians don’t really have a functional air force.  Wait….what??  Yup, “high overhead exercise” was translated as “exercises conducted in planes.” 

The confusion is not always with the spoken word, either.  Once, we asked the translators to help us with a short summary that explained how aviation units can be found in brigades, divisions, and corps (a division is 3+ brigades while a corps is usually 2+ divisions).  You can imagine our amusement at the written translation:  “Attack helicopter battalions are found in brigades, divisions, and in regiments in a dead body.”  “Corps” was, of course, translated as “corpse.”

These aviation battalions, like all organizations, have “innate functions.”  We quickly realized why being a pilot is such a popular job here:  these organizations focus on their “intimate functions.”  Well, don’t we all?

Sometimes the problem is how we explain English idioms, especially military jargon.  How would you explain “canned attacks?”  While we, obviously, meant “scripted attacks that follow a strict sequence with little deviation,” the translators thought we were talking about attacks by tanks and armored fighting vehicles, “canned” being assumed to mean “metallic.” But not all exercises are “canned.”  Sometimes, we want the exercises to flow freely along different branches.  These exercises, unfortunately, are limited to simian units within the Georgian Armed Forces because “branches” was consistently translated as “tree limbs,” as in, “at each decision point along the route, the unit will decide on a different tree limb.”

I generally don’t get too upset at the mistranslations because all of my documents are stored on my memory stick.  Or, as it’s called here, my “tree branch’s brain.” 

This one is not uncommon in the US military, either:  fiscal is always confused with physical and vice versa.  So, the cadets go the gym for their fiscal training while the budget office sweats through an afternoon of pushups and sit ups as they prepare for the end of the physical year. 

Of course, all of the training occurs “along military lines.”  I do work, after all, in a military academy.  I have the freedom, though, according to the translators, to work outside of the academy on some things as “along military lines” has been translated as “adjacent to the army’s borders.” 

Medical training is hard enough in the US, what with the myriad of medical terms to memorize.  Imagine how hard it is for our poor translators who have to take a phrase that begins in “medical-ese” down the path through “militarese” to plain English to Khartouli.  It’s pretty easy to understand why “CPR” comes out as “external lung reanimation” and “evaluate a casualty” ends up as “estimate why a person is sick.”  At least those kinda make sense.

Military commands often confuse the translators, as well.  For example, facing movements such as left face, right face, and about face don’t have literal translations.  Khartouli has its own commands for these movements.  Our translators are not fluent in either our or Georgia’s military jargon, however, so they do the best they can.  So our lesson plans for facing movements came out as “do formation things in place without moving.”  Huh??

Technical jargon confuses almost everyone, regardless of native language.  If you’re a Spanish speaker or a French speaker, take on this phrase:  “the effect of humidity on a bullet in flight.”  How’d you do?  Probably not much better than our translators did:  “the movement of lead in the air through damp and stuffy spaces.” 

And my two absolute favorites:

“Fields of fire” is defined as, “the area that can be reached by ammunition fired from a gun or a group of guns.”  As in, the field of fire for a light machine gun reaches out to 800 meters.  You shouldn’t have any trouble identifying that field of fire.  Just look for the smoke.  That’s right – “fields of fire” was transliterated into “burning grasses.” 

And the one that still makes me laugh whenever I think about it:  “rear operations,” that is, operations that occur behind the front lines.  They’re difficult and dangerous.  Know I know why:  “rear operations” apparently means “surgery on one’s backside.”  It makes you really respect those special operations soldiers conducting such missions.  Better them than me.

Thanks for reading.