Meet the Expats

After staying in last night and doing work, I felt so good about myself that somehow today I was able to devote a lot of my time to socializing and, hence, did very little productive. In an attempt to blend in with the locals, I arrived at work slightly later, although at 9:30 the office was still eerily quiet.

I had a late lunch with three of the interns: Alex, Melissa (a senior from University of Michigan) and Shannon (a second year MA student at Pepperdine), and in the process got to know them a bit. We ended up walking quite a lot to a pedestrian street in the old center of Tbilisi, and had Mexican food, out of all things. I was not expecting much of it, which was good because I was pleasantly surprised by the “stuffed tacos”, which basically consisted of juicy chunks of meat (probably pork) with sauce and a leaf of lettuce wrapped in a tortilla. Alex and I had beer and chatted about different kinds of ale. It turns out that the waitress spoke German, so again I ended up pretending I spoke a language I don’t really speak (Claudia saw first hand my skill at pretending I speak said language) and ended up being asked if I am from Germany. Prost! (which, for Romanian speakers, means “cheers” in Germany, as opposed to “stupid”).

Afternoon in the office was dull, and filled with complaints about the internet being down. Fortunately I had printed a thick stack of articles, but still my productivity levels were at an all time low.

I left early to catch a talk at one of the local think tanks (Caucasus Research and Resource Center, for those of you who know or care). In the process of traveling to the lecture location, I got the chance to practice some more “Georgian”, which by now increasingly includes pantomime, some two or three Georgian words as well as some supposedly Russian, featuring prominently resolute “DA’s”. In the end, I was able to somehow navigate the taxi through the various universities of Tbilisi (apparently there were no less than 250 of them in Georgia in 1989) and found the one named after Mr. Chavchavadze, which boasted a huge bas-relief of a fellow called Ioseb Besarionis Dze Jughashvili (better known in the west by the name of Stalin).

The talk itself was called something like “Looking at the Caucasus: the Role of Data,” and therefore promised to be excruciatingly boring. Vivid memories of Monday mornings of research training ran through my head, causing anxiety and distress. To my surprise, however, the lecture turned out to be a very interesting compilation of data presented as a sequence of graphs and looking at social, economic and political views in the South Caucasus. I do not intend to bore anyone with the details. However, it is probably worth mentioning a couple of facts that struck me as particularly relevant or interesting. First, Georgians obviously started off with sky high expectations from Saakashvili when he came to power. Continuing poverty and hardship created a significant gap between high expectations and everyday realities of slow economic recovery. As a result, Georgians have the most negative perception regarding their current economic situation. Fair enough. Now, what I find strange and, to a certain extent, hard to explain on top of my head, is that they also seem to be the most optimistic regarding their future (out of the three South Caucasus countries). How do you reconcile frustrated expectations in the present with continued optimism for the future? I guess it is true what they say, that hope is the last to die.

Second, it seems that Armenians have a very positive self-perception regarding their current wealth levels. By contrast, they are by far more pessimistic than Georgians about the future. The expectations gap is particularly interesting for me at this point, since high expectations can lead to instability and political turnover. In the context whereby Saakashvili seems to have the tendency to amass more and more power, instability may not bode such good things.

Back to the title of this post. After the lecture I met some of the expat crowd, many of which were students coming here for the summer to do research or internships, including several medical students. Other than that, a couple of World Bank folk, and a few other NGO workers. I was able to get introduced to the lecturer, who is also the CRRC director for Georgia, who enquired about my project and recommended some data sources. I am increasingly considering using surveys in my work, although I will of course have to rely on ready-made ones for that purpose (not least because I simply cannot remember all those damned sampling techniques!).

I think this easily qualifies as the dullest post so far. I am sorry about that. I guess my work might surface here and there throughout different posts. Just scroll.

As a proper follow-up to the lecture, I joined Anthony (who happened to be there as well) and walked home through Vake Park. After a while he suggested buying two beers for the road. Haven’t done that in a long time. It still works.

Getting home, I meet Nino (Anthony’s wife) and their 2 and a half month-old daughter Lizzie, who is absolutely adorable, has beautiful eyes and seems utterly unfazed by the attention shown by three adults, watching us with unabashed boredom. I guess we, grown-ups, tend to be rather boring people. That’s why I always wanted to stay a child. But then people told me I was immature.