Sunday May 3 - Tbilisi

Sunday, May 3. We have an early train to Tbilisi to catch. Karafet from the Academy of Sciences library appears as agreed with a taxi to take us to the train station. The taxi driver, apparently assuming that all the rest Yerevan is still asleep at 7 am drives through 7 stop lights enroute (without slowing down).

Unfortunately there was no need for the rush--the train will be four hours late, having arrived late from Moscow (it must traverse rather dangerous areas in Georgia north of Tbilisi, where we will get off, and is often delayed. Several days after we return to Moscow, a bridge is blown up, so we are lucky that we traveled earlier than our original plan.) Since Karafet lives several blocks from the station, we are invited over for breakfast, which his mother prepares. The food is delicious-more Armenian lavash, "greens," rice "plov" and some sampling of vodka made from nuts (a bit early in the day, but tasty nevertheless). One pleasant aspect of both Armenia and Georgia is that all the vegetables I eat are absolutely fresh and actually have flavor, unlike American vegetables which have lost any they may have had in transit. We spend time watching Karafet's favorite American movie, The Blues Brothers (with voiceover in Russian). Karafet's home is also quite amazing. Because it is older, it has very thick walls (more than a foot), which keep it cool in summer and warm in winter. It also has a substantial back yard, where grapes are grown.

Eventually we catch the train, which meanders slowly towards Tbilisi. We pass through Spitak, the Armenian town that was the epicenter of the earthquake three years ago. It has yet to be completely rebuilt, and there is plenty of (presumably) temporary housing, such as yurts and shipping containers with windows and doors added. At the border, an Armenian enters (in civilian clothes) and announces that he is Armenian customs--he looks in the empty space above the door (where someone could hide), then leaves. There is no Georgian equivalent. We arrive in Tbilisi after the "komandantskii chas" (curfew). Oddly an intourist representative has waited at the station to tell us this, insisting that we are now stuck for the night at the train station. The train station seems an unfriendly place, however, with its "politsiia" patrolling with Kalashnikov machine guns. Therefore Levner strikes a deal with a car and driver and fifteen minutes after arrival at the train station we are at the hotel Iveria.

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I didn't think much about some of the odd aspects of this trip at the time. Why, for example, did the Intourist representative wait several hours at the train station for us so that he was then, in his view, stuck there overnight? I suppose he had nothing better to do, and we were apparently pretty unusual international travelers at this point, arriving in that way from Yerevan. I remember we talked to the heavily armed police patrolling the train station. It is hard to believe, but I think we were the only two people to get off the train upon arrival. Naturally the police wanted to talk to us and inspect our "documents" (passports) - we identified ourselves as librarians from Washington and Moscow. They laughed and suggested we come up with a more believable story. We ended up giving the Intourist representative a ride to the hotel - at that point, the hotel put him up for the rest of the night. He seemed to take the curfew quite seriously.