I had bought a jar of pickles, and I devoured one after the other: And then it dawned on me, how in English there were two words for one and the same thing, just in different states like water and ice: cucumber and pickle. One is a fresh vegetable, the other one has been stored […]
I woke up at five thirty in a hotel room, looked out of the window, saw that it was raining in the dark, and went back to sleep. When I started walking it was already nine thirty, the rain had stopped, and the road was very quiet: There was a dead dog in a puddle […]
When I started walking in Gori I turned to the north, towards the white mountains in the distance: And when I had left the city behind me, I continued walking in that direction for another half hour or so: It was then that I realized that I wasn’t going to find him. Stalin. He had […]
Gori is so small that you really can’t walk around without passing Stalin every once in a while: So today I walked past him, and I went through a few back alleys with some weird graffiti: And then I reached the fortress: It was on a hill in the center of the town, and when […]
Both my pairs of long pants were in the laundry, so I went out in my shorts with a pair of long johns underneath: It looked ridiculous, and children would point at me in the street, but at least I didn’t have to go far – the Stalin Museum was only a few blocks away: […]
The good news: My big fat winter sleeping bag was with me, so the night hadn’t been too cold for me. The bad news: everything was wet. The tent, the sleeping bags, the therma-rest – it was all covered in dew: I decided to start the day with some sightseeing. So I bought a ticket […]
For some odd reason, this had been a formidable night. I felt refreshed and happy when I got up and went to the kitchen to boil some water for my tea: Nino and Nugsari, the owners of the guesthouse, showed me a place with pictures of their son Ramazi, who had been hit by a […]
The world was still wet, but at least it had stopped raining. So I said goodbye to one of my favorite churches ever and got on the road: It was quiet. There was hardly any traffic. There were hardly any people. Even the villages seemed empty: Once I saw a cross by the roadside: And […]
The rain had never really stopped. And it was devious, too. Sometimes it would pause for a few minutes, just enough for the puddles to become still and for the people and the dogs to come outside again: But then it would start all over again – drip-drip-drippity-drop as if there was never going to […]