An Unexpected Travel Lesson

“Well,” my husband said. “If Tbilisi is ever overrun by zombies, the man with the semi-automatic pistol will protect us.”

I looked at him blankly. What man? (The other question—what Tbilisi zombies?—seemed beside the point.)

My husband looked at me in disbelief. “You didn’t see him? He walked right past us!”

Apparently, a man bearing a gun and a large canvas sack of cash had just left Vulkani—one of Tbilisi’s numerous casinos—and passed us on the sidewalk. He had put the cash sack into an armored car—also on the sidewalk—and driven away. All this happened without my noticing, though I’d been a scant three feet away.

My husband and I have been living in Tbilisi, a city of approximately 1.5 million people (estimates vary, and no solid census seems to be available) in the Republic of Georgia for four months. This has been the longest period of time I’ve spent in a foreign country. And now, at the four-month mark, prompted by the gun-toting zombie-killer, I’m newly aware of an unfamiliar travel-hazard: ennui. Unlike the other challenges of living here (communication challenges, intestinal woes), this is not something that I can laugh about or regale friends with, and it threatens to drain my remaining time here of color.

The first few weeks of living in Georgia seemed saturated with interesting experiences, and my memories are accordingly vivid. I remember my hands rough and sticky, chapped and juice-stained from harvesting grapes in a muddy vineyard; a quiet hour of walking along a mountain valley road near the Chechen border, how the air smelled of autumn leaves baking in the sunshine, and how my walking companion produced a bar of dark chocolate that we ate atop a blue heap of shale while watching some skinny cows graze on a riverbank; the surreality of waking up one morning to discover a rain of sewage-soaked concrete pattering onto our kitchen countertop from the floor above.

Now I’m suddenly aware of how often I shrug at Tbilisi’s idiosyncrasies, of the stretches of time I spend staring into the middle-distance, at the cat in heat, at the dishes in the sink. I worry about not seeing the zombie-killer, and wonder what else have I missed because my eyes were tired of looking.

***

I like how traveling gives you a bigger sense of the world; how, wherever you head, you bring back a brain enlarged with landscapes, people, food, traditions, that weren’t part of your awareness before. Traveling beyond the perimeters of what you know—into a new country, culture, context—is in many ways a trip to perimeters of yourself. When the basic requirements of living—food, communication, shelter—require renegotiated in a foreign tongue and under different rules, your needs, limitations, and capabilities acquire an urgency and palpability that they don’t have when the living is easy—which is to say familiar.

But living in a foreign country is different than traveling. Where traveling in bursts contains its own kind of momentum—you have your itinerary, your return ticket, your list of sites to see, an end date for your experience—living abroad is less propulsive.

At first, your new environment is stimulating, it gives you something to brace yourself against, to lean on and lean into. There’s the intoxication of making your way through an exotic landscape. (This is how people shop/travel/eat/drink/dress here? My, my, my.)

But then you adjust; the difficulty of mere negotiation in a new world lessens. After a few months, your life has the same routine quality as it did in, say, Ohio, even if the routines are different. There is the corner store in old town where you buy rdze (milk), fresh matsone (yoghurt) and Pringles. There is the bus (number 71) that you ride to your Georgian lesson. There is the cup of coffee that you drink in the morning and the shit you take shortly thereafter. And you discover that it is possible to lose patience with the rhythms of life here: the way no one waits their turn (the melee in the subway car, the grocery checkout counter, the ATM); the chatty strangers who marvel at your inept Georgian (how well you speak!), their litany of questions – Are you Chinese? (No). Are you married? (Yes). To a Georgian man? (No.) Do you have children? (No); the stale smells of unwashed bodies on the bus and the heaviness of your hair from showering in hard water.

Eventually, time and experiences lose their urgency—spill over the edges of the horizon like loose papers on a desk – scattered, unsorted, careless. You wonder how you can possibly be bored with so much at your fingertips. You wonder how you can afford to let waste the luxury of boundless time in a foreign city. You are learning that here, as elsewhere, you need to figure out how to make today, and the next day, meaningful, and to relearn how to look at things as if they are interesting to make them so.

***

Before moving to the Republic of Georgia, I lived for two years in a sleepy small town in southwestern Ohio. I worked as a web-developer and a managing editor while my husband got his master’s degree. I moved to the Midwest unintentionally, and from the get-go didn’t get involved in anything that would challenge my assumption that there was nothing of interest for me there. I cultivated disinterest in my surroundings; a studied boredom that I now realize didn’t actually improve my quality of life at all. But after two years of this, a year in the Republic of Georgia glimmered on the horizon, promising oases of novel and challenging experiences that would make me worldly and well-traveled, and a culture that would continuously pique my interest: the antithesis of the previous two years.

At first, this was true—but less because of the quintessentially exotic character of the Georgian cultural landscape than because of how I initially viewed my time here. As long as I was actively noticing and seeking out experiences—trekking to the mountains or plunging into supras—my life here was, well, lively.

Allow yourself to stop being curious about your environment, and even Tbilisi becomes drab in no time. What makes the difference is not where you, but how. How difficult or character-building your life has less to do with where experiences occur, and more to do with how you live wherever you are.

It’s difficult, once routine has settled on your life, to remember how much you don’t know yet, how much should still startle and surprise. But I’m trying, now, to break the habit of being bored. It’s easier by far to shrug off the world than to look at it with active interest. This is one lesson I didn’t expect to learn through travel, but unlike the other, Tbilisi-specific skills I’ve acquired—how to order food at a restaurant, how to negotiate a good deal for mandarins at the bazaar—this is one that will help me make sense, and meaning, out of anywhere.

Published 1 Feb 07 at Lost Writers