Dancekillers (now with Hemingway censoring)

Many of the Americans had left back to their sites after Thanksgiving week. A few of us though stayed in Tbilisi, at this small hostel that's frequented by us Peace Corps folks. It's rather cushy insofar as hostels are concerned. There are only three people to a room, sometimes with bathrooms, and if you are staying as a couple then you can stay in one of the more private couple's rooms. This is contrary to every other hostel experience I've had, where usually there's about twenty smelly backpackers sleeping in the same room as you, and there's one toilet that's so stuffed with toilet paper it can't flush.

The first day, everyone mostly went on their own ways and we met up at the America Bar. That's not what it's actually called, but that's what I like to call it. Basically it's an Irish pub with a crap ton of American flags and Obama pictures everywhere. I think I might have spotted a few Bush pictures too. On weekends, there's a cover band playing U2 songs and there often can be found a couple of Marines at the bar who are about as pissed off as I am that it's impossible to get laid in this country. Probably they see Ukraine as some sort of Promised Land of milk and honey, by which I actually mean available breasts. Er, scratch that, I don't think we have any Marines in Ukraine, so maybe they were hoping for Dubai. I think it's just me that thinks that, so I just hunker down, even more pissed that the cheap Georgian beer is strategically sold out and I'm forced to drink expensive Heinekens.

Anyways, after a few of us got tired of hearing all those patriotic American songs and drinking American beer** and the American Bar (eff yeah!) we spilled back onto the streets. There had to be some place that didn't have a U2 cover band, which would have been something decidedly strange in Tbilisi. "Over there guys! There's a place called Jazz Club, it's got to have some other live music," I shouted, like someone who knew what he was talking about. We opened the doors to Jazz Club and went down some dark stairs. This had to be a cool place man, dark stairs are always the sign of a divey jazz club… or throbbing and nearly empty discotheque! We gathered over in the corner, drinking down some vodkas and the dancing commenced. When I got tired of dancing, I retired back in the corner and looked about the room. Mainly there were just Georgian men staring into the nothingness, something which Georgian men seem to excel at when they're bored. Then there was the waitress, and there was a girl dancing, who was doing all these crazy and amazing moves on a random stripper's pole that was in the center of the room and probably was not a "kargi gogo" (good girl)… my type of girl, but damnit, she was there being all "tsudi gogo" (bad girl) with her boyfriend. By bad girl I mean maybe they kissed once while we were there. That is something only bad people do in this country. Kissing in public is downright shameful! I might add at this point that she wasn't stripping on the stripper's pole.

PC peeps at the disco

Eventually I got bored with all that. There were two things for me to do: drink more vodka, write things in my notebook and stare at the cute waitress and the dancer. When I'm drunk, I usually pull out the notebook, after which it becomes something of a sport for me to decipher what it was I wrote. A couple of my friends back home like to engage in this sport as well. I like to think that I'm writing little pearls of wisdom, but usually I'm just writing things like "Girls might be annoying, but they feel good" and "Profanely I'm drunk, what the profanity am I doing here anyway?" Sometimes I write poems:

"Flashing lights
capture moments
on dance floors.
in truth, feelings flow;
in desire, the beat.
what moves the motion
of some, silences
the motion of others.
and what brings
paradise to some
brings hell to others."

Me toasting to kargi gogos.

Of course, my mind boggling powers of looking like a loner and getting people to leave me alone kept the waitress at bay, and of course, the language barrier would have kept us from talking anyway. This didn't preclude my mind from imagining some strange exotic moment, where we had an instant connection and suddenly I was sharing a bed with her in Rio during Carnival. Of course, I wasn't precisely sure what I was going to do had I been able to speak to her. So I just tried the English, which I'm a master of. "Hi, do you want to have lunch and maybe in three years we can hold hands? But I'm only going to be here for two years and by then maybe I'll have a better understanding of your language and go ahead and shut me up right now and walk off and bring me another bottle of vodka profanely." Back to the journal. Back to another cryptic comment of "Why the profanity am I hear?" Complete with the wrong "here".

We knew the DJ was signaling us to quit dancing and let those five creepy Georgian guys come onto the dance floor when he switched off the four on the floor beats and started mixing up some classic Georgian folk tunes like "Here we will face the Persians again" and "Profanity on these profane Turks already!" They are moving pieces that make you want to kick butt and imagine crazy names like that. Their actual titles are usually like "Yobeni Turkulebi arian yobeni sigije!" and "Ar vitsi magram me var bati buti".** Actually, I don't know any of the titles of Georgian songs. I just *gasp* made them up. But they are really awesome, just in a discotheque they tend to be dance killers. Except for Georgians. It would be like if a DJ in a thriving dance club suddenly dropped a Dashboard Confessionals song like it was hot. Imagine then how empty the dance floor would be. But also imagine that the two creepy emo kids in the corner love to dance to that, so they'd all get up and dance.*** It's kind of the same thing. Except Dashboard Confessionals is crap and Georgian National Music is actually kind of cool.



* Yes, I'm aware U2 is not American, neither is Heineken, so don't press the comment button just yet.
** A joke in three languages.
*** I am aware that emo kids would never be caught dancing!