Gori Stalin and Ink

Thursday 3^rd November

We had planned to got Borjomi and Vardzia for the 3-day long weekend in the middle of October but Beso’s face kind of dropped when we said we were yet again not going to be there for the weekend so we decided to cancel it and take the girls to Gori for the day on Saturday and go on the school excursion on the Sunday.  The language barrier is huge to be honest as you never really know what people are thinking and unable to check it out. 

Gori is a fairly non-descript city, similar but more sprawling than Romford it is known as being the birthplace of Stalin and that’s about it.  It took a bashing in the 2005 2008 war with Russia and you can see the bullet holes in the buildings where the Russians drove down this wide street randomly firing.

 The day in Gori was expensive as we paid for both girls as well and we went to the Stalin Museum and to a restaurant.  We also took them to a trendy café that is a bit arty for drinks and cake.  I thought Nino said she wrote poetry and I know they do readings there and I thought it might inspire her a bit but as it turns out she doesn’t write poetry at all. I must have been confused when I said to her “Do you write poetry?” and she said “Yes”.  It is so darn annoying, they all do it, they answer a question with “Yes” or “No” even when they have absolutely no clue what you are talking about.  The Stalin museum was impressive in that they did not mention a single bad thing about the man who was responsible for a zillion deaths.  We saw the house he was born in and could walk in part way and his bullet proof train that he went in everywhere.  The restaurant we chose had meat on the menu which was the main attraction however, it was a cruel trick as anything with meat in was off the menu and when we said that we would forget it we were told we had to pay for all the other items as they had started to cook it.  So that was that. 

The other reason to go to Gori was to get ink for the printer.  If only I hadn’t said the previous week when we were in Tbilisi “Let’s not bother walking over that road to buy ink.”  I naively assumed that we could get ink elsewhere but this was not the case.  I had been to Kareli on the previous Thursday to try unsuccessfully and then TLG found us a place in Gori that sold ink.  However it was a refill place and did not sell cartridges and they failed to mention that we needed to bring the cartridges to get them refilled!  I had asked her to make sure they had 2 colour and 2 black inks but she ignored that obviously.  Martin had to make two further trips to Gori to get the ink sorted out properly and then it run out after about 20 pages.  We had to wait for another 2 weeks to get cartridges in Tbilisi.  You sure have to plan carefully in Georgia.  It is very frustrating that you cannot just get on a bus or a train or drive somewhere to go get something you want.  Everything is a military operation almost.

Maia was happy anyway that we had taken the girls out.  She has been a bit miserable the last couple of weeks and we had been thinking that it was because we hadn’t been at home much and therefore not engaging with the girls much.  She has already said to me that the children learning English is her highest priority when I had offered to teach her English.  There had been a powercut the previous night and we sat in the kitchen with candles for a while.  Martin found the lyrics to “Yesterday” by the Beatles and we were teaching the girls this song.  When the power returned we carried on playing music from the laptop and looking at stuff on Youtube and it was a bit of a laugh.  We thought we had now found a way to interact with the family more but it didn’t prove to be enough in the end.