Katja Botchkareva, CC 2016

Noon caught us swerving around Freedom Square in Giorgi’s car, on our way to the President’s Palace. We clung to each other for our lives as he navigated a city with very few traffic lights and a lot of aggressive drivers. By the time we got to smaller, quieter streets, Giorgi was decisively lost and we were stopping every few blocks to get directions. The further away from the center we got, and the further up the sloping streets we went, the smaller, older, and more decrepit the houses were. Little structures were piled chaotically onto each other, built and added on to older buildings rather than having the previous layers restored. Despite the obvious desire to improve and regenerate, the neighborhood had fallen into decay. Some buildings were entirely hollowed out; windows stood gaping, stripped of their very sills, let alone of anything of value on the interior of their houses.

We wound our way until we reached the top of a street that suddenly opened up onto the Presidential Palace. Built by Saakashvili to welcome foreign guests and house the executive authority of the country, this is a magnificent structure that overlooks the entire city from its strategic position on the hillside. The body of the building is vaguely reminiscent of the White House with its long rectangular shape and Doric pillars. It’s topped off by a gleaming dome of glass. Transparency is everything for the Georgian government.

Stripped of our cellphones and cameras, we are let in. We get to see the many presents Saakashvili received from other important figures, ranging from an ancient, jewel-covered crown of pure gold from the president of South Korea, to a pair of jogging shoes from George Bush. We also get to tour the glass dome. A spiral staircase takes us to the top, and as we walk along the left half there’s a view of the neighborhood we drove through to get here. The empty houses with no windows at all stare back through the glass. Talk bout transparency. As we keep walking around to the other side though, the rest of Tbilisi comes into view. The sight is beautiful as the city lies extended, sprawling in its valley amid the mountains, sprinkled with churches and ancient ruins amid the generally low buildings, and punctuated with a few glaring pieces of modern architecture. Right at the foot of the President’s palace begin two immense glass tubes that will house a theater once they are done. Further down is the Bridge of Peace, like a huge glass fish with open mouths on both ends, ready to devour its crossers. To the left is the Public Service Hall, also made of glass of course, shielded from the sun by massive white mushrooms of steel. Directly on the opposite hillside, so as to make his love of transparency equally as clear as Saakashvili’s, Ivanishvili’s house lies like a huge shard of glass dropped onto the idyllic woods that cover that side of the mountain. Things don’t manage to blend in this landscape; they all stand out in contrast.

Our group doesn’t help the situation with our clearly foreign demeanor. When we take a walk after leaving the Palace, we stand out so much that people poke their heads out of houses to stare, and an old grandmother comes up to me to ask me where we come from. She asks in Russian, because she can tell right away that wherever we’re from, we definitely aren’t Georgians.

Some of the houses in this area are so impoverished that if you look into the windows you see the sky where the ceiling should be. And from this sight we come again upon a spectacular monument. This time it’s the Sameba cathedral. I knew it looked a little bit too new, and the fact that there was construction going on in the surrounding gardens should have tipped me off, but the church is built in such persuasive traditional style that I thought it was restored from at least as far back as the thirteenth century. Turns out it was only started in 1993 and finished in 2004! Once again I wonder what the administration was thinking when it embarked on this lavish project.

But the day goes on, next stop—the American Embassy to meet with the American ambassador to Georgia. Once again we are stripped of almost all our possessions before we are let in. Here we meet Ambassador Norland. He directs his intense blue gaze down at his fiddling hands, but it is obvious that he listens intently even without eye contact, and when responding he speaks very openly about even very sensitive political issues. As should have been expected, from the inside things are not actually as black in white as they had been simplified to seem from the outside. Politicians are not the demons or angels they’re made out to be. Nor is America’s role as straightforward. Nevertheless, despite all the insights and objectiveness, I got the sense that maybe some underlying political interests were discretely glossed over.

After the meeting it’s back to Georgian culture. And how to experience the culture better than by finding out what Georgians do for fun? So we go go-karting. Once again Giorgi’s sense of direction only eventually brings us to the towering palace, the temple of go-karting; huge, plastic and nearly empty inside. Having never gone go-karting before, I am completely thrilled and so full of adrenaline from the first run that I nearly sign up for seconds. But as the Russian saying goes, “horoshevo po nimnozhku” (don’t be excessive with good things), and instead we all watch as the two Georgians and Ned (but mostly the two Georgians) race to the death on the course a second time.

From abjection to palaces, from ancient churches to state of the art architecture, from ambassadors to go-karting, it has been a fantastic day full of both ends of many spectra.