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.