1. Regarding food: When in doubt, just fry it.
2. Regarding hygiene: Whether or not you brush your teeth/shower/wash your hands with any regularity is up to you, but for God's sake, don't pet the stray dogs, they're dirty!
3. Regarding sexuality: "Here's hoping everyone at this table IS gay!" is not an acceptable toast to make at an all-Georgian feast.
I learned this last one (the hard way) recently at a 6-year-old's birthday supra, my feathers properly ruffled when some old codger raised his glass and offered this toast: May everyone at the table be straight. And with just the right amount of cognac in my system to silence the voice that would normally tell me, "Nadya, pick your battles, it's not worth it," I shouted a countertoast, if I may invent a new word. It fell on a mostly non-English speaking audience but definitely was not well received by those who did understand it.
With laser-like focus, Georgia's president, Mikheil Saakashvili, is intently pursuing entrance into NATO and, more importantly, the EU. Despite his insistences that this is a bustling, cosmopolitan, modern country--look, here's Donald Trump himself, preparing to build a Trump Towers Hotel in Tbilisi!--Georgia is truly a country of villagers, steadfast in their traditions and less concerned with the bright-lights-big-city dreams of their President than they are with tending to their homes, their farms, their families. They are fiercely protective of their own kind, but "different" is dangerous here, and has no place in the tightknit village communities. They are Georgians, dammit, proud of their heritage and rightly so, but often to the detriment of anyone who does not fit the national idea of what a Georgian is supposed to be.
I have found Georgians to be some of the warmest, most helpful, and most welcoming people I have ever met--which made the bluntly intolerant toast all the more disheartening. By no means do I want to paint their culture as inherently racist, sexist, or homophobic; rather, the country is simply insulated, resistant to change, decidedly inward-looking and perhaps too ethnocentric (and I realize that coming from an American, a Texan at that, "ethnocentric" is a bit of a hypocritical observation). Even my friend, a kind, bright, intelligent girl, has very straight-forwardly explained to me that while she has "no problem with the gays," she would not want them as her neighbors, and that Indians, Turks, and Africans smell bad. Georgia is still a place where English-speakers use the word "n****r," unaware, I guess, of its history and context, and refer to gay people as "the gays," as if they are a family that lives down the street ("Oh, look, the Gays bought a new car"), or an awesomely named garage band. More than anything, I think Georgia is just a place that "doesn't get out enough," but so desperately needs to.
So, perhaps the old "tamada," or toast-maker, at the supra wasn't too far off the mark; maybe I even agree with him a little bit. I wouldn't wish for anyone to be gay here either. One of my students, bless his little Madonna-lovin' heart, is almost certainly "the gay," and I wonder about his future, about what growing up in a tiny village with no Bravo TV will be like for him. I hope ten or so years down the line, Georgia will have opened its tightly shut eyes to the reality that its neat little definition of Georgian will have to bend and blur and accept "different" into the national identity.
Because you never know, your neighbors could very well be the Gays.
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