Made in Japan

Major breakthrough yesterday: figured out how to use the first washing machine I've encountered that is older than I am.

It's a little tiny thing - smaller than the suitcase that I brought with me to Tbilisi. It has two grocery-bag-sized compartments. One you fill with water, soap, and clothes (you have to to monitor the water - no automatic shut off or anything), and then turn a switch, which causes the compartment to jiggle and swirl the clothes. The switch is basically just a timer, and when the time is up, and your clothes seem sufficiently agitated, you have to manually drain the gray, dirty water our of the jiggle compartment.

There's a skinny duct-tape-patched hose from the bottom of the machine that leads to... nowhere. There's a drain in the floor that we opened and stuck the hose in to drain off the laundry drizzle, but we can as easily put the hose in the toilet, bathtub, or the Dread Open Sewer Pipe (the smells coming from the DOSP aren't worth it, though).

After all the gray water is gone, you repeat the process, only without soap, as many times as is necessary to make you feel as though your clothing has been rinsed.

The second, small compartment contains the spinner. Barely larger than a salad spinner, this little dooder spins at such a high velocity that clothes are practically dry when you take them out. I mean, if you didn't mind momentary claminess, you could put them on right away, and skip the balcony-based air-drying portion of the laundry cycle.

The efficacy of the machine was a nice surprise, given that most things from the Soviet era (with the possible exception for the Lada Niva) work poorly, when they work at all. Of course, when I finally read the fine print on the face of this tiny but powerful gadget, I could retreat back to my original opinion of Soviet goods. My little laundromatic was made in Japan.

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Yesterday, the VH brochure gobbled up most of my day. At around three, tired and grumpy from sitting all day at my computer, I stepped out onto to buy some street food (oily fried bread with fillin' - "hotdogi" for C, "soqo" (mushroom) for me) and a tomato for lunch.

Every time I've gone out and bought single vegetables, storekeepers have laughed (kindly, I think) at me. I assumed they were responding to my over-punctuated requests ("HELLO! ONE TOMATOES! IF IT IS POSSIBLE!") but Revi, a new Georgian friend, explained that *no one* buys food this way. You are supposed to ask for things by weight - half kilo, whole kilo, etc.

Other things I know now, after a few hours drinking at "Didi" (Big) John's birthday party across the table from Revi:

• The funicular is broken. Has been since a crowd of Japanese tourists tried to ride it up Mtatsminda a few years ago.
• At the bazroba, never accept the first asking price that people quote you. Say 'tsvili a... gaukeli! (or was it gaukedi?).' ("It's expensive... make it less!"). It's not necessary to quote an alternate price, though - and C and my way of halving the price and proposing that as our preferred payment is, apparently, ludicrous.