It is 1 o’clock in the morning and the smartest, fastest and toughest hockey players from Russia walk into Igor Larionov’s suite in the Toronto’s King Edward Hotel. They have played two exhibition games earlier in the day as a part of Larionov’s induction into the Hockey Hall of Fame this November 10th weekend. They are looking to kick back, relax and crack open a bottle…of Canadian Icewine.
Igor Larionov autographs his new Triple Overtime Icewine
One would expect a glasses of vodka, cans of beer, or even a large jugs of water, but Igor is also in town to announce the launch of his newest wine, “Centre Ice” and Larionov, also known as “The Professor” pours perfect Icewine portions and hands them to his friends. Since retiring from the NHL in 2004 Larionov has been working with long time friend Mike Davis in his IL Triple Overtime Wine Company and selling wines to Russia. On the day before Larionov had launched his first Canadian Icewine under the IL Triple Overtime brand, crafted by Pillitteri Estate Winery in Niagara.
They sip appreciatively and then Viacheslav (Slava) Fetisov’s booming voice rings out, “Now we talk only Russian!” The Icewine is clearly a hit and after congratulations to Igor on his lesser triumph of the weekend, the launch of his wine company’s first Icewine, the conversation turns to other things.
Larinov is about to be inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame. He carries his modesty with a quiet triumph, with confidence and a quiet voice that makes one want to lean in and catch every word. Fetisov is enjoying the Icewine, holding it up properly, by the stem, but incongruously calling in one of the few English words to me, the guy by the bar, “Hey, big guy, more please!”
Alexander Medvedev also holds his glass out for a refill. As the head of the new KHL, Russia’s newest major hockey league, he is in town to celebrate Larionov’s career highlight, but has drawn some attention over some of the bushfires that have arisen between the NHL and KHL over talent acquisition. Alexander Radulov leads the controversy as high profile NHL players who have jumped to the KHL. As one of the first Russian players to jump to the NHL, Larionov is familiar with the issues, and he blazed a trail for Slava Fetisov and others to come to North America after the breakup of the Soviet Union.
Larionov, who was welcomed to the KHL as a member of the Board of the KHL is a public voice for player development inside Russia, working with the NHL to make the game recognized globally and to extend the reach of hockey around the world.
The whole issue may have been solved among them in the discussion over Icewine, but they are only speaking Russian and the Big Guy only speaks English, so he is just happy that they liked the Icewine.
The relaxed chatter in Russian is broken again by the booming voice of Fetisov in English. “Big Guy, you should fill the Stanley Cup with Icewine.” Valeri Kamensky smiles but the Big Guy doesn’t back down. “Slava, get some guys together and bring me the Stanley Cup in June and I’ll fill it with Icewine for you”.
I was looking at the table wine grapes being harvested now in Niagara and wondered whether to hazard a guess at what the Icewine harvest might be like when January, or February comes. Then I thought about how wrong we would all have been to take early guesses at the Niagara table wine harvest.
Niagara had a lot of rain this summer, and then 25 days of straight sunshine in September, which were almost perfect conditions for a wonderful grape harvest. But then it started to rain. It rained through October. Then it got cold last week. The farmers had taken a lot of the white grapes off, but with a lot of the reds still hanging on the vine, an early frost hit overnight. A crop that promised lots of quality and quantity still has the quantity. However, the stellar quality is now less than stellar, but certainly not as bad as ‘bad’.
However, it has the local media in an uproar reporting a massive (in Niagara, 12,000 tonnes is ‘massive’) surplus of grapes that will make farmers go bankrupt, and so on. News media makes their money on bad news.
I asked a couple of my suppliers if they were affected by this glut of less than ideal quality grapes. They didn’t seem concerned because they had commitments for all of their grapes.
One said, “Sure, the guys who are trying to grow 10 tonnes per acre have too much crop and the brix and flavour just isn’t going to be as concentrated as it should be so of course it will be hard to sell. I grow two to three tonnes per acre and they are all sold.”
Farmers can control how large a harvest will be by pruning the fruit in early season. By pruning back many of the grapes early, the remaining grapes will have better quality because the vine will focus on feeding less fruit with more goodness. This is as much art as science. Farmers who don’t prune or prune very little are making far more grapes, but they will be of a lesser brix or flavour and the crop, while bigger, will be less valuable, and harder to sell.
“What about the frost damage?” I asked another family winemaker who grows his own grapes. When the frost kills the leaves, development of the grape ceases. If a farmer doesn’t have wind machines to protect his vineyards from frost, his crop runs the risk of fungus, rot, and damage, and the grapes will have ceased to develop normally.
“Some farmers will be claiming crop insurance. I’m happy that the frost has killed off the canopy. The grapes are finished growing, and now I’m going to let them desiccate on the vine a little bit, concentrate the sugars, and then pick them. It’s kind of a mini-amarone thing happening right on the vine.”
I like this kind of innovation. In an industry where one doesn’t expect so much innovation, a little frost allowed this grower to make use of weather that couldn’t be expected to improve some of his grapes, and he had a plan that he had thought forward through fermentation and probably right to his shop shelves.
Innovation is good. Almost 200 years ago German farmers had their grapes frozen by an early winter and invented Eiswine, which was adapted to become Icewine, Niagara’s, and Canada’s signature wine.
Another farmer will be grafting Malbec buds onto 30 year old roots and protecting them against the frost. He’ll have something close to an old vines Malbec crop to take off next year and since as a winemaker, he lives and breaths his reds, I can’t wait to see what Malbec comes out of that winery. Malbec is a rare variety in Niagara.
At Pillitteri, they have just released another sparkling Icewine. This time it is a sparkling Cabernet Franc. Pillitteri is the leader in bringing different varieties to market. They are still celebrating that they have been able to keep the sangiovese vines alive through the winter so we may see another vintage of Icewines reminiscent of Chianti. Pillitteri is also plotting to make a ripasso style wine, but beyond that, those in the know won’t share the secrets until it is in the bottle. They already make a winning sur lies Chardonnay, so Pillitteri is not afraid of a little innovation with secondary fermentation
Over at Reif Winery, Klaus Reif was walking around his tasting room offering customers samples of his first batch of raisins. He’s adopted an as yet, still secret technology from another branch of agriculture and dried out a few tonnes of Coronation table grapes, virtually inventing a new foodstuff, the Niagara raisin.
The Niagara Region is developing culinary and innovative local ingredients like Klaus’s help make the experience truly local. If a Niagara raisin is on the menu next time I’m out dining, I’m ordering it!
My friend Tim lives in Moscow and in his career he has been a school teacher in Sukhumi, a wine executive for a Georgian winery, a land developer in Moscow, and probably many other things I’ve yet to discover.
Tim’s English is excellent which is fortunate for me. My Russian language has already been demonstrated in previous articles to be enough to avoid a shotgun wedding at the Russian border and to convince hockey players to drink wine. Beyond that, I’m lost with the Russian language.
We were working on a bulk wine deal between Russia and South America and trying to ensure that we were on the same page about how a particular transaction might go. Tim told me this allegory which clears up a question about how serious a buyer or a seller is.
Tim’s story goes:
Two men sat down to talk business.
One said, “I will sell you one liter of honey for one dollar and twenty five cents”
The other said, “I will buy the liter of honey for eighty cents.”
They negotiated for a long time and eventually agreed on one dollar for the liter of honey.
Then both men got up from the table.
One man went to go find honey. The other man went to go find money.
I wasn’t there to take in war stories. The 16 year old bullet holes in the apartment buildings were grotesque to me, but people lived in them, and children grew up under the pocked walls that remind everyone that 16 years ago this was a war zone and almost was again in August 2008, and could be again.
On the way into Sukhumi Max pointed out the bridge over the Gumista river up ahead. “That is where we stopped them in ‘92”. “Then we went around the mountains and circled Sukhumi and they had to evacuate.”
In the 1992 war, a battalion of Chechnyan mercenaries were the sharp edge of Abkhazia’s defense and counter attack, and they were arranged by the Russians, and supplemented by the tiny Abkhazian army and militia. Abkhazia had declared independence, and Georgia disagreed and sent troops in to re-take the territory.
In the encirclement, they almost caught Eduard Shevardnadze who was then Georgia’s president in Sukhumi. He escaped by the skin of his teeth.
The geography of low tech war was simple. The mountains were impassable. The sea was controlled by the Georgian navy and air force. This left a slim flat area that land armies could fight over. Flat streams that poured out of the Caucasus Mountains provided tactical obstructions every few miles.
The rocky flats of the Gumista River had been heavily mined to stop the Georgian advance. In just 2 years, Abkhazia became one of the most heavily mined areas in the world. It took 16 years of HALO to finally clear up most of the mines.
As we crossed the bridge, he pointed down to some woods on the north shore of the Gumista river. “That’s where I was”, he said.
“But Max, you were 15 years old!” I blurted out. I was looking at this man sitting beside me, trying to make a link between him and the scared 15 year old clutching an AK-47 and looking through the darkness at another army. I could no more do this than I could reach my own young self at Trafalgar Square a few weeks before.
He nodded and we drove into Sukhumi, his home town.
I met Fred Weir at the Canadian Embassy Icewine tasting in Moscow in June. Fred is a fellow Canadian who writes about Russia for Indian, Chinese, British and American newspapers, including the Christian Science Monitor. We had just enough time for a friendly chat and connect before I stood up and served enough Icewine to Moscow’s wine elite to drop a diabetic elephant into a deep coma.
Seaside Cafe on the Black Sea
A couple of weeks later, I was walking the quiet and calm waterfronts of Sukhumi. Max enjoys pop culture. Over glasses of Abkhazian wine, lavash and great cheeses we talked about his country until the conversation drifted away, and then we shifted to talk of Hunter Thompson and Ralph Steadman or other Rolling Stone issues. Max has an advantage in that while his country is isolated by the world, his work takes him abroad. This and his American education give him a perspective that most Abkhazians would not see. When I left, I gave Max a bottle of Dan Aykroyd Icewine.
Dan Aykroyd’s contribution to pop culture leaves an interesting patchwork. In the Soviet Union, he is well known, but when I mentioned Dan Aykoryd, some would light up and say, “Ghostbusters!” and others would light up and say “Blues Brothers”. This didn’t have so much to do with the age of the person I was talking to and I never did understand what made a Russian remember Ghostbusters over Blues Brothers or the other way around and not both.
I was thrilled about the Dan Aykroyd Icewine. When I shipped the samples to Moscow, it was a great tasting celebrity wine. When I got there three weeks later, it had won Ontario’s “Wine of the Year”. The medal and the recognition didn’t change the wine inside, but it was great to show that the home of Icewine was heaping honours on an Ontario boy and his wines.
A week later the prelude to August war between Abkhazia and their Russian protectors and Georgia started up in the form of car bombs, shootings and kidnappings. A bomb went off in the market where I had so enjoyed looking for local foods to pair with the Icewines. Another blast killed four people at a birthday party near the southern border. Reporters were sent into Abkhazia to cover the war.
“They always want to cover the war,” I recall Max saying about the reporters, “but there is so much more going on here.” But Max’s job was to meet with each of the media and he has presence so they all met him, usually followed by a pleasant but briefer and more formal meeting with Sergey Shamba, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Max’s boss.
For me, a delightful punch line came in an email from Fred shortly after he visited Abkhazia. Here it is in Fred’s own words,
“Yes, it’s a small world. I met at least two people down in Abkhazia who mentioned you. One of them was Max Gunjia, who started talking about ice wine in the midst of a political interview, then your name came up … Interesting place, Abkhazia;”
Part 1 left off with Max, Teddy, the Macedonian and I having dinner in a seaside cafe in Sukhumi.
During the dinner, Teddy invited me to visit the UNOMIG compound. I grew up as an army brat and lived on army bases all my life but I knew that this, I knew was going to be a visit of a different kind.
As I passed through the guardhouse at the gates the guards searched my laptop computer bag carefully, and an escort took me to Teddy’s office about 4pm.
Somehow we ended up at the base bar. The UNOMIG team is multinational. For example, their operating rules state that a four man observation team will take two trucks and that each of the four must be from different countries. I recognized the some of the country flags on their shoulders but Teddy made the introductions and ensured that I sat with beer in front of me and got to know his mates. Of course as a Canadian Icewine salesman, I was the oddity and I sensed that oddities are better than television for these guys.
The American chided the Zimbabwean beside me for the fact that the Zimbabwe election results were mired in problems with counting ballots. I leaned over and asked the American where he was from. “Florida”, he said. What irony! With rampant inflation the price of a bottle of Icewine in Zimbabwe currency was 1,174,000 dollars in July, 2008. The Zimbabwean took the brunt of the good natured jabs that day until the Australian, a larger than life caricature of an Australian, arrived to dish it out happily to everybody.
They were intensely curious about Icewine. I passed around one 200ml bottle of Pillitteri Shiraz Icewine that would retail in Moscow for about $400. They cradled it in reverence and when it had made it around the bar I asked if they would like to try some Icewine. The thought of a $400 quarter bottle of wine had them intrigued and the talk evolved into arranging an Icewine tasting for the UNOMIG guys the following night. I’m not sure whose idea it was, but I recall that Teddy kept a full beer in front of me the rest of the night.
Icewine, like all wines, is better paired with complementary food, good company and circumstance. I had the wines that I had carried over three borders in my suitcase left over from Moscow wine tastings. The company would be superb. However, this wine tasting at the end of the world, in a place that sounded like a Harry Potter destination needed some food pairing.
The next day, Lana offered to show me around the Sukhumi market to pick up fruits and cheeses.
Lana is the head of the International Department in Akbhazia’s foreign affairs department. Like many well educated Abkhazians, she took a degree in a Moscow university and worked in Moscow for many years before “downshifting”. I understood her word exactly. She was teaching English at the university in Sukhumi and helping Max and the Minister try to perform feats of foreign affairs in a country that no other country recognized.
But now the challenge I had was to find local foods at the market that would pair well with Icewines. They couldn’t be cooked and so had to be raw or pre-cooked and assembled shortly before the tasting. I’m used to working with a chef for such things but today all the presentation and preparation would be done by the common denominator, me.
Abkhazia uses no pesticides, herbicides or unnatural fertilizers. The entire country is organic. The country has been cut off from the world since 1992 so Abkhazia has been spared from genetic engineering of its produce. The water that comes down from the mountains is the purest in the world. The local vegetables and fruits that I found in the market are the freshest and tastiest I have ever encountered. But they weren’t what I was used to! What an adventure!
kanasta on flickr captured a moment in the Sukhumi market.
All afternoon I and my new friend trotted around the Sukhumi market. I was literally a kid in a candy story tasting cheeses, breads, fruits, and some unknown concoctions that I was so happy to find. She introduced me to her mother’s friends who tended the market stands. She patiently answered all my naive questions, and in the end we had a couple of bags of fabulous foods to try with Icewines.
On the Eastern shores of the Black Sea, Lavash is a wonderful white bread that rises a bit into a fabulous loaf. Closer to Arabia, it would be a completely flat bread that does not rise, but in these parts, it rises just enough to make it a bread, not crackers, and to have the ability to hold taste and smell in the bread. Khachipuri is a cheese bread. If we were making cheese bread in North America, we might fold feta and ricotta into bread dough and bake. All over the Causasus Mountains the recipe for Khachipuri changes based on what is available locally.
Suluguni cheese is a wonderful smoked cheese. I had a brief translation problem when I asked what another kind of cheese was. My friend stopped and tried hard to describe the animal it came with. It had long horns. The animal’s hair was long and grey. It was a big animal. Could it be that I was pairing Icewine with yak cheese? It was heavy and salty and perfectly paired with Riesling.
Lana arranged in Russian with the taxi driver to stop at a bakery on the way to UNOMIG. As I walked into the bakery, they were pulling the Lavash out of the oven and handed it to me. I know I have never in my life ridden in such a lovely smelling taxi.
As I passed through the guardhouse at the gates the guards looked at me. I held my bags up and said, “I’m taking booze to Teddy”. They passed me through immediately.
Winetastings are winetastings. The staid ones begin with a brief history of why the Niagara Peninsula creates a perfect microclimate for Icewine. We talk about the harvest happening in the dead of night in the bitter cold and why that is important for making great Icewines. Then we begin to sample, and talk about colour, nose, taste and finish like all wines, interspersing the pours with anecdotes and tidbits about the wineries represented there.
The Dan Aykroyd Icewine was appreciated, proving that Dan is a Canadian known pretty well around the world. There was a moment of silent reverence when the cork on the $400 bottle of Pillitteri Shiraz was eased out and carefully poured around. I got to retell the story of Allan and Brian Schmidt taking their The Vineland Estates Icewine to the magnetic north pole.
As I poured the Reif Icewine, the Australian fellow asked, “Did you stomp these grapes with your own feet?” Now Icewine tastings are usually formal, staid events where one tries to present the wine in a structured and studied manner. His question, and my response, “Yes I did, but after a while I got tired and sat down on them” signaled the end of any formality and the event evolved into a casual cocktail party.
I’m pretty proud of being Canadian. We have a great country. I was pretty proud and pleasantly surprised to meet the Canadian representative in UNOMIG at the end of the wine tasting. I didn’t know that this fellow was the Canadian as he wasn’t wearing a uniform flag patch. Teddy had to introduce us. He was a tall, very black man with a distinct Ethiopian ethnic background. He had immigrated to Canada, and then went back out into the world as Canada’s representative. On many levels, I was proud to meet him. What does a Canadian look like?
Yesterday, July 15, 2009 the UNOMIG mission left Abkahzia. Russia had vetoed an extension and has moved troops into Akbhazia at the invitation of the Akbhazian leaders. This includes an air base, upgrades to road, sea and rail infrastructure and a permanent presence of Russian troops to face the presence of Georgian troops on the southern border, supported by American troops. The USS New York was recently in Poti, Georgia. The New York is one of America’s newest warships. It is packed to the gunnels with electronics and her mission is electronic information gathering. The cold war is not over.
The good news is that Abkhazia needs the infrastructure, the jobs, and the hard currency that will be spent, and perhaps a different bunch of guys with guns on the border will bring a stronger version of peace. The bad news is that there are still guns pointed at guns, and this area will be a political football between east and west for some time to come.
Max is taking me for a tour of the main Sukhumi waterfront. For me this means a stroll along a closed road with a tropical park on the one side and a curious collection of buildings on the other.
The Former Casino on Sukhumi’s waterfront
The buildings go from the fresh and shiny Ritsa hotel to the burned out shell of the Hotel Abkhazia which stands in glorious ruins as a reminder of the bloody 1992 war that gave the Abkhazians freedom from Georgia on one hand and the armed peace that created this gilded cage which trapped the Abkhazians in and the rest of the world out.
It is ironic that the Hotel Akbhazia is a ruinous symbol of the war but I was told it actually burned down a couple of years before the war.
There are a few restaurants in the few blocks that we stroll. I get the impression that a strange face here would be noticed among the locals pretty quickly. Elderly men play chess and backgammon near the large blue pavilion where I had gotten a superb cup of coffee earlier in the day.
The shadows of the palm trees grow longer over the road and reach towards the buildings. Out on the water, the massive piers that just into the Black Sea begin to turn orange. One has small black figures moving about the restaurant perched over Sukhumi Bay. The other is deserted except for a lone fisherman hopefully perched like a shadow puppet over his potential dinner.
As we pass an outdoor patio, Max stops to talk to two people who were clearly from the outside world. After weeks of being submerged in
Hotel Akbhazia
Russian language that was just now becoming a melodic sound, it was a plunge in cold water to hear Teddy’s friendly booming Irish lilt, and his friend, when he made a less garrulous introduction, spoke in a Macedonian accent. Something is up!
Max introduced us. Teddy and his friend were part of the United Nations Observer Mission in Georgia (UNOMIG) whose mission as unarmed observers was to represent the United Nations in maintaining the peace between Georgia and Abkhazia. They were a part of a multinational team that took long walks in the woods which had once been described as one of the most heavily mined area in the world looking for signs of aggression. This was Teddy’s realm, hospitality. In the Caucasus, one of the most hospitable bunches of people in the world, the Irishman was able to come out large and more hospitable. I was no longer in Abkhazia when I accepted his invitation to sit down at the table. I was now in Teddy’s world.
For the next couple of hours, we talked all over the world, and I got to eat some amazing cheeses, fabulous fish, and some passable wines that were made superb by the company, the conversation, and the setting sun in this gilded cage called Abkhazia.
In 1954 James Bond ordered the first ‘ultra cool martini’ by uttering these words:
“A dry martini,” he said. “One. In a deep champagne goblet.”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Just a moment. Three measure of Gordon’s, one of vodka, half a measure of Kina Lillet. Shake it very well until it’s ice-cold, then add a large, thin slice of lemon peel. Got it?”
“Certainly, monsieur.”
The barman seemed pleased with the idea.
Gosh, that’s certainly a drink,” said Leiter.
Bond laughed. “When I’m..er..concentrating,” he explained, “I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made. I hate small portions of anything, particularly when they taste bad. This drink’s my own invention. I’m going to patent it when I can think of a good name.”
Every one of us remembers Bond and his Martinis and almost all of us at one time or another wish we could have pulled off something that cool.
With whimsy, I suggest that if you have the nerve to walk into a fine establishment anywhere in the world and say to the waiter…
“I’ll have a Vidal Icewine, chilled, with two spicy Thai shrimp on the side…
“and my friend will have a Riesling Icewine, also chilled, with two Malpeque Oysters on the half shell and a thin twist of lemon zest.
“Serve it first, and then we’ll order.”
..no sommelier in the world will mess with you.
You will have just pulled off that thing James Bond did with the Martini in 1954.
***************************
I was writing this passage in my Icewine book, (which you can download free at www.vinocanada.com) and was struggling to explain that after reading the book the reader would be one of the most knowledgeable people in the world about Icewine.
So I started doing some math. 6 billion people. There are probably 6,000 people who know something about Icewine, including (and I love you all dearly) many sommeliers who would claim to know, but don’t quite. So then I did some math and I had to use a calculator to make sure I got the decimal point in the right place. 6000 out of 6 billion is 0.000001. If you read the Essential Icewine Companion, you’ll know more than 99.999999% of the people on this earth do.
Here’s a bonus: If you catch me making a mistake with the decimal place, you’ll prove you know more than me about statistics!
I wrote this for one of the chapters in my Icewine book. The Essential Icewine Companion is guaranteed to give you the tools to be cooler than Bond!!
Abkhazia is a difficult place to write about, but I have to describe Abkhazia before I can write about some of the adventures and people I met down there and how it connects to Icewine. Context is so much more important.
Abkhazia
Abkhazia is a land sandwiched between Russia and Georgia on the north and south, and the Black Sea and the Caucasus Mountains to the east and west.
My innocuous description of where Abkhazia is located is enough to start a fight in many parts of Russia and Georgia. I used the word ‘land’. It would cause dispute to call Abkhazia a country, or in some circles to not call it a country.
As of today, only four countries recognize Abkhazia as a country so that term is in dispute. The Georgian interests claim that Abkhazia is a part of Georgia that broke away in a bloody conflict in 1991 and is held by rebels. Only the 3000 or so Russian peacekeeping troops standing on the southern border for the last 18 years have kept Georgia from physically reclaiming the territory. Georgians would argue that Abkhazia is not bordered by Georgia in the south, but is rather a province in northern Georgia. Similar arguments are made around South Ossetia, where the bulk of the 2008 Georgian-Russian war was fought.
After the 1991 war over 200,000 ethnic Georgians fled Abkhazia, leaving approximately 80,000 ethnic Abkhazians in control. Since then, Abkhazia has been blockaded by politics, economics, and geography. Abkhazia’s only significant trading partners are Russia which maintained a leaky border on the north, and Turkey, who has some mining interests and can ship across the Black Sea.
There are many gorillas in the room but the biggest one seems to be about the displaced Georgians. How does a democratic country of perhaps 80,000 people repatriate 200,000 people and not lose effective control of their country? How do they address the repatriation of the assets that the Georgians lost when they were forced to flee? What is ‘right’?
It is not an uncommon problem. The Soviet Union and Imperial Russia has had a long tradition of relocating large numbers of people, often in the middle of the night and usually at gunpoint, and there have been many such relocations in the region.
The news media distorts our North American view of Abkhazia. America sides with Georgia which sets up little Abkhazia and South Ossetia smack in the middle of the supposedly dead cold war. Over the last few years, various American news agencies have described Akbhazia as a muslim hotbed of terrorism. In fact, over 80% of the people in Akbhazia are Orthodox Christians. I am sure that distortions happen on the Russian side as well, but I don’t read Russian so I can’t point at it.
Ultimately, I believe that who is ‘right’ depends on how far you want to go back to establish those rights, which effectively means that to outsiders like me, there is no ‘right’. There sure have been a lot of wrongs!
So what remains are shadows of the past: Dark memories and confusions and impossible loyalties to lands where one grew up but cannot live and loyalties to lands where one lives under constant threat. The world only knows the simplest of these stories as told in media headlines and sound bites.
The first thing you notice when you meet people from the Caucasus is that they are incredibly hospitable. They may be Circassian, Abkhazian, or Georgian or a hundred other ethnicities in the area and perhaps not get along so well, but once they recognize you as a guest, you can relax and enjoy discovering your hosts and delight in the history, culture and friendship.
I wanted to describe Abkhazia in fairly objective terms. It will form a framework for all of the anecdotes and tales that come from my visits in and around Abkhazia.
I loved the land and the people, both in Akbhazia and those I met who were displaced. If you can look beyond the bullet holes in the walls, or peer back through time to see the glorious parks and architecture or stroll around and meet people, it makes it easier to ignore the ‘gorillas in the corner’ that over time will have to be addressed or once more fought over.
The food is the freshest I have ever enjoyed. The water runs pure from the mountains. If ever a land deserved peace and reconciliation, Abkhazia does.
The confusion continues. Little things like two golden arches under “Макдоналдс” give me an anchor that lets me know that not every symbol is foreign. I can’t help thinking that this might be how a stroke victim would feel if they lost their ability to read and hear cognitively, but kept all of their other faculties. I suppose that the difference is that I am sure that I could regain my connection with this Earth with study, practice and time, but a stroke victim would not be sure that is the case. If my analogy is correct, I have so much more empathy for stroke victims now.
For some reason my brain has shut down on some of my math functions. While I have no trouble doing math with a pencil and paper, or doing other math exercises that I know that I can do, I am absolutely baffled by the ruble-dollar conversion formula. I have a few thousand rubles, and everything is significant has gone onto a credit card, so I’ve had to deal with local currency in local currency. Try as I may, under the waiting watchful eye of the shopkeepers and with a line of impatient Russians behind me, this Canadian simply shuts down when it comes to understanding how much whatever I am buying is costing in Canadian dollars. I dutifully hand over the amount of rubles. It is a lot easier to hand over bills with big numbers on both sides than it is to count out change, so I have a growing pocket full of Russian coins. I also am stoic. It costs what it costs and if I want it, I pay it. I don’t have the language to negotiate and the stuff that I am buying is really non-negotiable. But it still irks me not to be able to do a simple calculation.
Moscow is a city of contrasts and contradictions. The contrasts are sometimes with each other and sometimes with my North American frame of reference. Mostly these contrasts are simply interesting, but however interesting, these contrasts add to the cacophony. I finally figure out the exchange formula. It is rather easy. 23.6 rubles is one US dollar. In seconds you will figure out a fast way to do the conversion in your head, but it has taken me three days. Call it 25 rubles per dollar. Then assume 100 rubles is 4 dollars. Go from there. It did me no good to do it more correctly or by the easiest method because I either went backwards or put the decimal in the wrong place. Again, frames of reference are confounding me. A coffee is 150 rubles, or about 6 dollars. An 11% beer, which is excellent and served from the coca cola and other street meat stands, is just 40 rubles, or what, a buck and a half for a half liter? Gasoline is about $1.00 per liter and a pack of cigarettes are over $10. The first night here, I spent 300 rubles on two coffees and felt bad that I had spent $16 on a couple of coffees. My friend didn’t understand what I meant but now I realize that the coffees were only $12 dollars, close enough to the Starbucks price points to apply the standard reasoning “This is Moscow” to put things in perspective. Besides, it doesn’t really matter. The price is what it is.
While my friend from Russia immigrated to Canada and in about a year or so learned English from North American television shows like Friends and Seinfeld, I am only here in Moscow for a short while and therefore surf endlessly through the sixteen channels looking for some signs of familiarity. Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts are now discovering plots within plots in a dubbed version of the movie Conspiracy. If I listen really carefully, I can hear the subdued English dialog and it helps. Yesterday I chanced on a show that seemed to be based on the Quebec show ‘Surprise Surprise’. It consisted of skits where stunningly attractive women would ambush men with sudden nudity and the hilarity ensued in front of a hidden camera. It contained no dialogue and may not have been a Russian show, but I saw it here first and was confounded by the inanity of it. But showed wonderful breasts, and was a half hour of distraction.
I celebrate the coffee houses that put pictures on their menus. That is what I choose. I point to it and hold up a single finger and smile and say please. I could say spacebo but I feel that would be just too fraudulent and so I smile and point. This morning I pointed to a quiche-like picture and was asked, thank God, if I wanted a chicken or fish. I don’t think I could face a Russian fish quiche with coffee first thing in the morning.
Street Meat, oh the choices!
The street meat is varied and excellent. The stands are large semi-permanent wagons with a small window about 15 by 30 centimeters through which one talks and exchanges food for money. The fronts of the stands are Plexiglas and display the wares in a chaos of packaged food, fresh food, and beverage labels. There is a starch wagon (stuffed potatoes, corn and panini-type sandwiches), a pastry wagon, and a Chinese food wagon, all in a row, and all with the intense security of the tiny window which protects their goods like Fort Knox. Colourful signs tell me what they sell, and I can see pastry shrouds with meat like substances peeking out of the ends, in some cases. Overhead the panini store shows pictures of panini sandwiches laden with rich fillings. I realize I could cause serious damage to the shopgirl’s neck by pointing and asking for ‘one of those up there, please’ so I wait in line. With nobody behind me to watch my clumsiness, I point to what the last guy has ordered and say, “same please”. It works. For about three dollars, I get a big beer and a double baked potato with Russian ‘stuffings’. It is among the best street meals I’ve ever had. For all the security of the wagons, the beer is kept in coolers with large unsecured doors beside the wagons and people pay, and then serve themselves under a watchful honour system. Another contradiction, I think.
On the way back, I stop at the pastry hut and point to two of the meat filled pastries. One ends up being a sausage affair wrapped in a tortilla like dough wrapper, and the other is chicken in a bun, but done oddly. “It is what it is and This Is Moscow”, I think as I cart my treasures back to the room to write notes and channel surf for precocious and daring practical jokers with lovely breasts. The Russian morning TV shows contain two things I understand: the exchange rate to US dollars, and the little weather symbols; sun, rain, clouds, and such that let me know whether the umbrella I carry always will be useful.
Almost six months ago my son left the umbrella in my car and when I mentioned it over the phone, he just said, “that’s all right dad, I’ll get it later.” I wonder if he’ll appreciate that his umbrella went to London where it was never rained on, back to Canada, then over to Amsterdam and on to Russia, where it was a most welcome shield against the metaphoric and wet rain on Moscow.
