Turtle Lake

Saturday afternoon, November 13, 2004 (continued). Next stop was supposed to be home but instead we visited Turtle Lake, one of three lakes in Tbilisi (the others are the Tbilisi sea and Lisi lake). Turtle Lake sits above and to the East of Tbilisi. This is the lake to which the gondola/cable car runs.

“Mendelism is a theory of particulate inheritance, not particulate embryology.” p. 116, Dawkins, 1999.

Saturday evening, November 13, 2004. Saturday evening was spent, at first, working on these summaries while trying to motivate Talia to do her homework. Eventually we came to a compromise that involved Talia working on her own summary of the trip. She really struggles through these, on the one hand highly motivated to say as much as possible but on the other hand not really certain of what she wants to talk about, nor even all that sure of what she has been doing on the trip. Still, it is interesting to see the trip also from her perspective. Eventually we retired to kitchen where a small party was taking place, which we joined. Before going to bed I wrote the following:

Our first night here we experienced “chacha” which is a fermented and then distilled beverage made, if I remember this correctly, from what is left over after one prepares the grapes for making wine. Tonight we partook, uh, of slightly more chacha than the one shot that first night/morning. The preamble to the story is two fold. First, I am writing this less than a half hour after the bottle of chacha sadly became empty. Second, it is has been at least 25 years since the last time that I consumed distilled beverages to gross excess, and that was in high school (it was not a very pleasant experience, as I recall—gin, yuck!). (I suppose that we can add an entertaining third caveat and that is that I have a nine year old incessantly bugging me as I write this, at 2:00 AM, supposedly a consequence of her drinking Coca Cola at lunch nearly 12 hours ago: think caffeine.) At any rate, the important thing that I want to record before I retire is that I am almost shocked at the difference between drinking wine or beer to consuming this chacha. Regardless of the reality of the situation (which I imagine is somewhat different from my perception), I actually don’t feel drunk at all. By contrast, from a single beer I have a sense of significant loss of control, from a few glasses of wine clearly I have the same experience (and have sufficient recent experience to vouch for the effect). But with this chacha I literally don’t feel much at all [though certainly not bad, not by any means J]. Perhaps this is because, in fact, I did not drink nearly as much as I might think (perhaps six or seven smallish shots) or perhaps this is because I’ve had a full stomach most of the latter half of the day or perhaps there really is something different about wine or beer (something intoxicating) that is lost upon distillation. Who knows. I won’t dwell upon it further but instead will order this Coke-wired nine year old to bed and then call it an evening.

So, how to I feel this morning, the morning after? Just fine, thank you. I was asleep by 2:30 and then up by 7:30. Pretty good stuff, eh? Don’t forget that the trick, as always, is to just make sure you stay hydrated. OK, now on to trying to figure out just where the KLM office might be and just what is the status of our bags.

“Genes do indeed blend, as far as their effects on developing phenotypes are concerned. But, as I have already emphasized sufficiently, they do not blend as they replicate and recombine down the generations. It is this that matters for the geneticist, and it is also this that matters for the students of units of selection.” p. 117, Dawkins, 1999.

7:30 AM Tbilisi time, Monday, November 15, 2004. As I have for the past four or so days, once again I’m awake before 7:30. This I think is a combination of otherwise sleeping well through the night, the light of the morning, and sounds of the city, with cars making up the bulk of the latter. There is such a contrast between the sounds of the very early morning, when cars are all but absent and the city is mostly silent, and the sounds of the day when cars dominate everything out of doors. Cars are the number one reason that I don’t have much of an appreciation for cities. Or, to put it differently, I’ve found as I’ve gotten older that I have come to appreciate cities more and more, except that I really can’t stand the sounds and smell of traffic, nor the danger of braving it when one needs to cross a street. Still, despite the dangers involved, crossing the street does at least provide one with some challenge. A few days back I decided to see if street crossing Boston style would work. That involves simple getting in front of moving vehicles, far enough ahead so they can slow if they see you, and then demanding that they slow down. The demanding part involves both being physically in front of the cars and staring down drivers. Key to this technique is distinguishing between cars that are likely to slow for you and those that are not, but done well the technique is very effective. We also had a brief discussion about Tbilisi drivers, a subset of which are quite insane (I’m thinking of one SUV in particular that in swerving around and otherwise passing slower-moving vehicles nearly rolled himself off of a cliff). As in Boston, drivers are insanely fast and aggressive, but they also are fairly good drivers in the sense that very consistently they get away with their craziness. That is, by and large they are good drivers, though not necessarily defensive/cautious drivers.

The plan today is to go back into the Institute to talk to people and perhaps get a better sense of how phage therapy is supported there. On the down side, my digital camera is nearly out of batteries. I (stupidly, as it turns out) packed my battery charger in my checked-on baggage and we still have not received our baggage, though we are hopeful (hope does spring eternal) that they will show up today. A conversation yesterday with KLM had them telling us, or so I infer, that the bags are due to arrive today. In fact, since the flight gets in at 2:00 AM, they should already be in town, though the fact that their office doesn’t open until 9:00, that I have minimal access to a phone, and am unsure that I will be able to understand anybody who answers the phone keeps me from confirming their arrival. Though it seems like a long time since we’ve arrived (that being last Wednesday, which was five days ago) in fact there have been only two additional KLM flights into Tbilisi during that time, one on Friday and one early this morning. It is hard to imagine that the bag was so lost as to not be able to make it by the Friday flight. Where did it go? Even assuming various lags in communication, it still seems odd that the bags wouldn’t have of their own accord (i.e., by the label affixed to them) made their way to Amsterdam in time to make the flight that arrived Friday morning. I have two theories, though. One is that a label was never reattached to the bag when we transferred out of Dulles resulting in a truly orphaned bag that needed to be found by hand rather than be machine. The second, less plausible, is that our takeoff was delayed in Minneapolis as a bag belonging to a no show was removed from the plane. Could we inadvertently have been that no show (singular since we only had one checked-on bag between us)? I, of course, have no idea.

Yesterday, Sunday, after getting past the bag question, and after yet another lazy morning mostly spent working on these summaries of the trip (which I’m still way behind in entering, a consequence of not having access to the computer until Saturday), we were picked up by another set of Georgians and once again treated to a meal and some site seeing. This time we returned to the very place that we had explored the evening before, which is Turtle Lake, a smallish lake found high on a hill ~1000 feet(?) above Tbilisi. There we took a walk around the lake, to Talia’s delight, and then walked down the road, to Talia’s complaining. We originally were brought up by taxi and now were on our way to what is known as the Museum of Old Houses. I’m hesitant to say that this museum is unique, but it certainly is different and interesting. It consists of houses built in styles that are typical for different parts of Georgia. The houses, apparently, were moved (presumably first taken part and then reassembled) from different regions of Georgia to here. Some of these houses were very elaborate. There even is the ruins of a stone church that we speculated dates from the fifth century (very cool) plus the equivalent of a stone age shelter/storage bin (complete with giant stone “cork”) and even a graveyard, or at least a series of grave markers. All of this is found outside on the side of a hill, on a number of acres of a lightly wooded lot. There even are cattle and other animals that go along with traditional fencing (not necessarily containing the cattle, though) and traditional corn cribs. It was all very amazing.

The trip through the museum began, for us, at the top (i.e., coming in through the entrance found farther up on the road to Turtle Lake) where we had yet another delicious Georgian meal at a restaurant also seemingly built in an old style. As with previous Georgian meals, this one was absolutely wonderful. We dined first on various pickles and bread. The center dish was some sort of mushroom “stew” (for want of a better word) that was fresh and scrumptious. On the side was a bean bread and also a cheese bread, plus red wine and two bottles of local sodas, one lemon flavored and the other tarragon flavored. I had everything either as bread or in combination with bread. The pickled hot peppers, which appear to be ubiquitous here, were satisfyingly spicy. And, so far as I can tell, all of this came to a total of less than $10 (for the four of us). Amazing! Once again I am delighted that food can taste so good. Oh what we have lost, in America, to the twin evils of productivity and convenience.

“The doctrine of extended phenotype is that the phenotypic effects of a gene (genetic replicator) is best seen as an effect upon the world at large, and only incidentally upon the individual organism—or any other vehicle—in which it happens to sit.” p. 117, Dawkins, 1999.