Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
~ T. S. Eliot

I have many friends who would be philosophers, and most of them are of a decidedly pre-modern bent. Philosophy has often been at odds with the idea of ‘knowledge,’ of hard empirical facts, as it were.  Many western philosophers once claimed that knowledge of reality was secondary to the overarching structures of philosophy, which could only be arrived at by pure reason and/or the special revelation of the Creator, while many eastern philosophers claimed that everything we see as “reality” is only an illusion over the surface of the ineffable Real behind it.

This question is often confused by the fact that the terms ‘knowledge’ and ‘wisdom’ are often vague at best. Today, dear readers, I’m going to try to clarify them.

I’m going to approach the issue from a purely pragmatic standpoint. My reasons for adopting pragmatism as a philosophy are not the subject of this essay; I’ll clarify them in a later post. I will, however, say a little more about what I mean by the term. In my view, reality is a dynamic system constructed of an almost infinite number of parts, each of which can be broken down into a further system in itself. Every part influences every other part, and the workings of the tiniest details influence the system as a whole in the same way the rules of the overall system control the workings of its smallest component.

However, at the human level of experience, that system is not chaotic; while it is a pretty idea to think that a drunkard flapping his lips in China might start a vast political storm in the United States, this is rarely the case. And, if it is, a line of cause and effect is present and (theoretically, at least) knowable. So, actions can be taken with effects that follow. Give a starving poor man a loaf of bread and he’ll survive a bit longer; shoot a well-fattened rich man through the heart and he will die regardless of the caloric bounty available to him.

Though there are many useful ways to think about the human mind, the most valuable one to the present question is the model proposed by Richard Dawkins and since expanded on by other thinkers in the fields of neurology and philosophy alike. That is, the human mind functions as a simulator in order to aid our survival–in other words, we have the ability to predict the effect of our actions, and the actions of others, on the world. The effects of this range from the simple–a mother telling a child not to play near the street, because her mind-simulator can forecast possible outcomes of that action, to the profound–Albert Einstein having a radical shift in his perspective towards space-time and gravitational acceleration and forming, seemingly ex nihilo to we mortals, his theory of relativity: a case of mental simulation on an unprecedented scale.

So, how does this concept of the mind as simulator tie in with the philosopher’s ideas of wisdom and knowledge?

Inaccurate mental simulation is at best useless and at worst lethal. Timothy Treadwell, a would-be conservationist who made the news a few years back, provides an example of the effects of inaccurate simulation. His experiences with well-fed and unthreatened grizzly bears in the wild led him to believe that all grizzlies were harmless if treated right. All it took was one bear with a differing characteristic (hunger, or temperament) to fail his simulation. The result, as might be expected, was not pretty.

Mental simulation works by constructing a model of reality inside the mind and then ‘running’ possible actions or environmental changes through it in order to predict results. Note that the model is certainly not to scale–indeed, it is almost absurdly lopsided, focusing the great majority of its resources on our own personal surroundings, environment, and social interactions. We are by our nature extremely egotistical, for if our mental simulations were more “fair,” we would have died out as a species a long time ago while wondering how the mastodons felt about our eating them.

Wisdom is the ability to use these simulations not only to choose those actions which best lead to our long term goals, but also to measure the effects of those goals themselves. Wisdom, in that sense, is power: the power to run an accurate simulation well into the future, in those fields which are central to our lives. “Central” is an important modifier here, because accurate simulation in non-central areas is not generally considered wisdom. An engineer designing the effect of airflow over a wing is not demonstrating wisdom; an elder determining how to preserve a family’s peaceful coherence is. Both are demonstrating sophisticated simulation through complex models of reality, but the life of the family to the elder is central to his immediate community’s life, while the effect of the air on the wing to the engineer is not.

Many reading this will have picked up on the name “Dawkins” several paragraphs ago and have already dismissed the mind-simulation concept as a strictly secular interpretation. This isn’t necessarily so: whether it evolved or was designed, simulation and prediction are inarguably key aspects of the human mind and central to the process of interacting with the world. Wisdom without interaction is nothing, for it has no effect outside the mind of its possessor (apologies to my Taoist friends).

So if wisdom is the ability to accurately predict the outcomes of given causes in meaningful contexts (almost always social), what is knowledge?

This is where the division happens. When we think of knowledge, we think of facts, of floating bits of unconnected detritus that accumulate in the mind and serve primarily to impress people at cocktail parties. Note the similarity to the common conception of history as merely the studies of dates and names.

Eliot’s quote at the beginning of this essay refers to that fragmented type of knowledge, or “information.” This is the same reason many philosophical theorists sneer at statistics, for indeed, what meaning can there be in a list of numbers?

In itself, there can be none. A single packet of information without connection or context is, by definition, trivia. It is like learning one phrase in a foreign language and is often used by the same types of people in the same ways: to convince others that they possess the language as a whole. While it may be impressive to rattle off the date of Constantine’s emigration to the Anatolian peninsula, or a fluent-sounding bit of French, it is useless without the key to wisdom: integration.

Think again of the mind as simulation through model of reality. In order to work accurately, that model has to be constructed on propositions that more or less match aspects of the real world. Those propositions are knowledge after integration. Integration is the process of taking a new fact and connecting it into the mental model so that it can be used. This is like learning the meanings and usages of a word in a foreign language. It is the conversion of a context-less piece of information and converting it to a structural node in a working model of the universe.

Knowledge, then, is necessary for wisdom, but only through the process of integration. This is the difference between a hobbyist and a scientist, and, some might argue, between a bad psychologist and a wise human being. In both cases the first has access to a plethora of information–speed of light, gravitational equations, mental disorders, insecurities–but, without connection, that knowledge is static. In the second cases, the scientist and the wise one have access to the same facts but have integrated them into working reality models, and can then use them to accurately predict and control reality, and to further expand the reaches of their mental models. This is what Arthur Conan Doyle referred to through the mouth of his great fictional detective, Sherlock Homes: there is a difference between seeing and observing. Seeing is merely recording, while observing is putting a thing into its context and connecting it.

Surely this isn’t always so, some will say, I’ve known many people wo were very wise but lacked knowledge. Again, this is due to a misconception as to the nature of knowledge. Remember that we only tend to call wise those simulations which apply to the central, meaningful areas of our life. As it happens, those areas are precisely the ones where knowledge is gained by observation of other human beings and oneself–no formal education required. Indeed, it is often the greatest hardships that produce the most useful observances of “meaningful” knowledge (which lead to wisdom if integrated), while the relative ease and detachment of higher education just as often removes those hardships, robbing the “educated” of what might have been data necessary for what we think of as wisdom.

So, as is so often the case, both sides of a would-be duality are necessary to a successful life. Wisdom is impossible without knowledge, and knowledge is useless without wisdom. The lessons I can see from this are two: first, never dismiss a thing as “mere information,” and second, never assume that possessing that information will be valuable in itself.

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The Devil goes by many names. Lucifer, Shaitan, the Evil One: these are a few of his Christian and Judaic names. He is called Adversary, the Liar, Old Scratch, the man downstairs. He is called Antichrist, Blasphemer, Heretic. He answers to Illumaniti, Knights Templar, Papism, the Bourgeoisie, the Communist Threat, Anti-Patriotism; in the east he goes by West, and in the west, East. He is called America, he is called Arabia, he is called China, he is called Russia. He is, to put it simply, Evil.

We humans are programmed by millennia upon millennia of scrabbling for survival to think in twos, to make split-second decisions on abstractions of available data. When there is an immediate threat, that response keeps us alive: fight or flight, eat or spit out, kill or capture, attack or negotiate.

The problem is that our species is moving into deeper and murkier waters. These days, thanks to the wonders of civilization, that split-second judgment is only rarely necessary.

And yet we make it anyway. Guilty or innocent, right or wrong, good or evil, for us or against us. Men and women claiming to be leaders shout from pulpits and election stands that there are no shades of gray, and that we will never compromise: as if the only possible response two being faced with two choices is something in the middle and less, and not a third choice and more.

Satan, of course, is behind it all. He’s been behind it from the beginning; can’t you smell the sulfur? The evil in the world is Satan’s doing, and the good is God’s, and us, well, we’re just here for the ride. The only choice we have, the shouters say, is black or white: we will follow God’s plan, or Satan’s.

As you may have guessed from the introduction, Satan isn’t just the Adversary of the Christian church. Satan, or what passes for him, shows his ugly face as the “Enemy” most of our species’ great movements fought against. In any war, he is behind the actions of the opposing force, just as surely as God is behind ours. In any religion, he is behind every belief that is contrary to ours. In any political or philosophical revolution, he is behind the old order of things, while God (or ‘Right’) is behind the new.

The Adversary’s role is to make our decision simple. We are either for him, or against him. Black and white. Pick a side, and remain loyal to it to the end. Obedience without complaint; faith without question; sacrifice without hesitation. It was Satan in the German armies advancing across Poland, whispering in soldier’s ear that maybe the Fuhrer wasn’t as right as he claimed. It was Satan in Luther’s study, arguing that the Catholic church didn’t have a monopoly on truth. It was Satan on Mount Moriah, telling Abraham: forget God, and let your son Isaac live.

This simple interpretation of reality is incredibly attractive. The idea that powers far greater than any of us are warring along clearly drawn lines removes us of any responsibility or need for deliberation. We follow orders, and write off our failings as personal inability to obey. It’s the same idea that draws us to works of fantasy like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings; the villains are evil, the heros are good, and there is no mistaking the difference. It allows us to simply align our beliefs according to a preset pattern, where every statement can be declared simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and every action placed into boxes of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’

But perhaps most importantly, it gives us a peace otherwise impossible to find. When an earthquake strikes and hundreds die, we can rest in the knowledge that it’s somehow part of the Plan, or perhaps the work of the Adversary; either way, it’s a strategem in a war far above us, and therefore is not our responsibility. We can even sooth our guilt at our inaction through prayer, or whatever passes for prayer in the atheistic manifestations of the War.

The Devil has many names, but he also has a secret. He, like the Power on our side, has no power beyond our belief in him. He exists simply as a thing to blame for all that is not good in the world. The Devil has many names, and the oldest is Scapegoat.

There is no grand master plan. There is no War. We are not pawns. We are not even pieces. We are tiny, fragile creatures in a vast and strange universe, who, incredibly, have begun to think. We are afraid of the darkness of ignorance, so, like children, we squeeze our eyes shut and pretend we have the light of knowledge. We look at the complex intertwinings of pain and love and hate and joy and sorrow that is our world, and, because we cannot imagine how to navigate it, we shut our eyes and pretend that from any given point there are only two paths. We invent demons that cause pain because real pain is much harder to kill. We invent angels that heal, because all too often healing is out of our grasp, and we are creatures that thrive on hope. We invent Gods and Satans because wars are much easier to wage when you’re Right.

We do these things not because we are evil, or because we are sheep, or because we are ‘fallen’ from some past greatness. We do them because we are in the infancy of our sentience, and we are terrified of what the future will bring. So: will we live in peace with our eyes closed and our decisions simple, or will we face our fears with our eyes open and seeking wisdom? Real moral choices do have value–nihilism never gave the world much–but they are never simple questions of black and white. They aren’t even gray. In real life, there are no villains, and very few saints. There are no ten-step-paths, rituals, purifications, payments, or incantations to cosmic success. There is no Right side and no Wrong side; there are no sides at all.

There is no us and them. There is only us.

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In all my life, there have only been two places where I really feel at home. The first is the great American wilderness areas out west, in the desert or the mountains, miles and miles from the nearest human habitation. The other, paradoxically enough, is on the streets of New York City.

After my return from Istanbul, I settled again into my life in northern Virginia, working and reading and planning future adventures. It wasn’t long, though, before my feet started itching again, and I began to think of other things to see in closer range of my restricted budget. I was in touch with Marc and Kate, friends I’d met in Paris, and found that Kate had moved to New York and Marc would be visiting. So, I planned a trip.

That turned into two trips two weeks apart with the development of Marc’s business plans. So, on a Friday afternoon in a balmy DC heat, I boarded the DC2NY bus from Dupont Circle in Washington and settled in for the five hour trip to Penn Station, Manhattan. I arrived an hour before midnight and met Kate on the corner of 33rd and 7th, and we headed back to her apartment in Brooklyn.

On my previous visit to New York, I’d divided my time between fellow students of my then college and a second group–a dancer I’d known during my childhood in Montana and her four Kuwaiti foreign exchange student friends. I’d stayed in the lower East Side over Thanksgiving, and visited some of the little French bars and big tourist sights of Manhattan. This time was rather different. Spring was in the air, and my first day in the city was a balmy, perfectly clear day with a warm sun and a cool breeze. I was in Brooklyn, and immediately liked the quieter atmosphere of the borough. Manhattan, with all of its rush and noise and excitement, is wonderful to visit, but it’s nice to return in the evening to a slower, easier place.

The people, too, were different. Kate, my Australian friend, is working as a photographer’s agent. She has two roommates, Bethany and Courtney; Bethany (”Bettaaaanya,” according to Kate) is a photographer, and Courtney works in a local preschool. Kate was in the midst of a rush of redecorating, fixing up and customizing the room she was moving into; Bethany is herself a rush, constantly acquiring new furniture pieces and odds and ends to assimilate into the apartment or to use in her studio. She is a goddess of Craig’s List (by Kate’s and my judgment), and a wonderful photographer. While I was there the second time, she even managed to find a free piano; more on that later.

First, New York, and why I love it. There’s a certain energy here I have yet to find anywhere else in the world. I think it’s no mistake that so many of America’s great creative minds have come through New York at some point in their lives, and found themselves inspired there. The city exists in a state of constant evolution, with districts forming and reforming every few years, buildings being built, demolished, redesigned, and co-opted for every possible human activity. A walk through its streets will mean hearing a different language on every street corner, smelling the echoed scents of a hundred cultures in front of every restaurant, and still somehow sensing the overarching community that unites it all. Turn a block, and you’re in Little Italy, complete with street sellers peddling gelato, sidewalk cafes, pizzerias, and Italian music; in the center is restaurant offering “authentic Malaysian cuisine.” Another three blocks and you’re in Chinatown, with every sign written in Chinese and English, and a wizened old man plays a two-stringed erhu fiddle in the subway.

Look up, and you’ll find that the people of New York are dwarfed by their own creations. A constant stream of pedestrians trickles across the Brooklyn Bridge as cars and trucks hurdle by beneath them and the old bridge’s double stone towers loom impassive above it all. To navigate in the city is to think in three dimensions; down into the subway, west under the river, up onto the street, north through the park, up into the building. Movement is constant, and whether the time is four in the afternoon or four in the morning, somewhere in town things are just getting started.

To someone like me, who trades in stories, New York is a confluence of tales. Spend a day talking to a dozen people and you’ll find a dozen stories; the Japanese-American boy born and raised on Staten Island, the grinning Jewish mechanic from Albania, the talkative Pakistani taxi driver with family in Dubai, the Brazilian-American journalist who divides her time between Brooklyn and the northeast coast of Brazil.

A few scenes from my own visit:

Kate and I attended an art showing in Manhattan. It took me a few minutes to realize that the art-watchers were far more interesting than most of the “art” on display; hipster guys and hippy chicks gazing at stick-figure fish stitched in black thread on blue velvet and asking each other what it means. Modern art appreciation, it seems, is a developed skill, a learned vocabulary. You may not feel the awe you might if you looked at a Rembrant or Van Gogh or Monet, but if you can coin a good polysyllabic interpretation of a clay sculpture of a sneaker, you’ve got what it takes to become a sophisticated New York art connoisseur. The free wine helps the ex nihilo art criticism to flow smoothly.

The High Line Trail. Built in the thirties and abandoned in the eighties, the High Line was an old elevated railroad track around the middle of the city. After falling into disuse, it quickly became an example of the impermanence of the urban world. It filled in with soil and then grass, and by the late nineties, trees were growing where freight trains once rolled, a sort of accidental park in the middle of west Manhattan. These days it’s official; the city is in the process of building long walkways and benches down the old rail line. Kate and I spent a sunny afternoon exploring it.

Kate’s birthday was on the last day of my first visit, and I had the pleasure of meeting several of Kate’s friends. We went out for the night to the Dove Parlor, an establishment designed to “democratize decadence” by mimicking one of the luxurious parlors of the 1920s at a reasonable rate. These were, for the most part, interesting people; and people, of course, is what New York is all about.

The reunion dinner with Kate and Marc. All three of us met for the first time at a restaurant called the General Greene, and enjoyed a good evening of conversation and food. Afterwards, Marc and I went to his friend Bill’s restaurant in Brooklyn. Bill works as a sommelier, and is fortunate enough to divide his time between Paris and New York. The wine at his establishment (on the house) was some of the best I’ve ever had, and made me want to learn more about wine so that I could talk about it and sound all sophisticated.

Visiting Bethany’s photography studio. On the day Bethany found her free piano and had it delivered to her studio (not free), she brought me down to see it and to see the rest of the art collective where she worked. The entire establishment was built in an old warehouse in one of the eastern industrial districts of the city, and from the outside looks to be little different from the various factories and warehouses around it. Inside, though, is a different story. The entire bottom floor is set up as a community art and crafting studio, with a full woodshop, photography studio, and various other amenities. By paying a monthly fee, artists and craftsmen can use the facility for their own projects.

Upstairs are the studios, housing carpenters, musicians, artists, and photographers like Bethany. Terrance, “the man with the van,” showed up with the piano and we moved it up to the studio in an old freight elevator. A few other people stopped in, including Rebekah, an artist whose current project is conducting interviews with other artists, and David, the head of the downstairs wood shop, who talked about his work and an amazing unpublished manuscript he has his hands on–the story of a black con man, criminal, and victim of the system who on his deathbed asked that his story be told. Any of you journalists out there, if you want to tell an amazing story from a new angle, send me an email and I’ll put you in touch.

As always, it was over too quickly. Yesterday morning I boarded the bus in downtown Manhattan and slept much of the way back to Washington.

And here I am, in northern Virginia, though not for long. This weekend I’m driving back to Montana for a few weeks. I’ll be moving back there for good (ie at least five or six months) this summer.

As for the future? Well, dear readers, fear not: there is more travel on the horizon. Starting sometime in 2011 I’m going to begin a new voyage–around the world, without ever taking a plane. It’s going to take a while, maybe even two or three years. Whenever it happens, wherever it leads, and however long it takes, I hope you’ll enjoy reading about it.

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My last day in Tbilisi was spent walking around and meeting up for one last time with Nino, Nino and Marine for coffee and food at their apartment. It was a good last day, and I was sad to go, but the dark fell soon enough. My bus was at 8pm, so Nino R. (Razha’s sister) accompanied me to the bus station and saw me off, and soon enough I was rolling again back toward Turkey.

The central land border with Turkey was either closed or not used by the bus system, so I ended up heading back west through Kutaisi and Batumi and showed up once again, at about two in the morning, at the Black Sea coastal border at Sarp. Customs was a simple process, taking no more than half an hour for the entire bus to get through, and tried to sleep a bit for the few hours left to Trabzon.

We rolled in to the Trabzon Otogar at about six in the morning, and I walked around to look for a bus to Kars. I quickly found that, because I’d gone back to Trabzon instead of directly south from Tbilisi, all busses to Kars ran through Erzurum, and it wouldn’t be possible to get to Kars until late that night. I checked my calendar; I would have to be back in Istanbul in just a few days to catch my plane to Istanbul. So, I bought a ticket to Erzurum and ate breakfast while waiting for my bus. Kars and the ancient city of Ani would have to wait until my next visit.

I slept for most of the ride to Erzurum, but awoke as we were crossing a snow-covered pass. Erzurum is the highest large city in Turkey, and is surrounded by snow-covered mountains. It’s also reasonably wealthy; we passed several ski resorts the last hour or two before arriving. I stepped off the bus around noon to slate-gray skies, low clouds obscuring the mountains. After the impressive Georgian capital of Tbilisi, Erzurum was initially unimpressive, with the usual squat multicolored buildings of ten or twelve stories that make up most eastern Turkish cities. I did find a hotel for reasonably cheap, though, and dropped my pack to explore a bit further.

It was reasonably warm, but the streets were soaked in the slush of melting snow. Still, it was a nice enough city, especially once I moved into the older part of the city. After a couple weeks of Georgian churches, the mosques seemed to be everywhere–including one memorably large one with a grocery store, of all things, built into its base. Erzurum is built on one side of its valley, and slopes constantly up in one direction toward the mountains. The effect reminded me of a seaport like Trabzon, and I was constantly glancing down to orient myself by the sea, only to see the wide white plain stretching north toward the mountains.

Up the hill is the older part of the city, with several old fortresses and municipal buildings and one medieval double-minaret mosque, the symbol of the city. There were few cafes or restaurants as such, but I did manage to get a good meal at one of the city’s many cafeteria-style diners before heading back for the night. The next day was more exploring, but overshadowed by my fast-approaching return to the States. Whenever I travel, I wish I could travel longer; that I had no return ticket. But always, a few days before that return becomes necessary, I feel my interest in old buildings and sights waning, and I’m ready to pull up stakes and move, as far as possible, toward home.

So it was that the next day I packed my things and walked down to the Erzurum train station. I walked up to the ticket office and asked my carefully researched question: “Ne kadar bilet, yatakli vagon, Stamboul?” This meant, as near as I could tell, “how much for a ticket, sleeper car, to Istanbul?” Turkish-speaking readers, please forgive my mangling of the language.

The ticket agent understood me well enough, however, and after offering me a student rate (when traveling, it often pays to be a student, even when you’re not) sold me a ticket in a sleeper car, all the way to Istanbul, for 75 lira–about $50. It was a long journey, about 36 hours, but covered two nights. So, for $50, I had the equivalent of two nights lodging and transportation across Turkey.

It turned out to be a good move. I waited at the station until 8pm and picked up my pack as the Dogu Express pulled into the station en route from Kars (on Turkey’s eastern border) to Istanbul. I boarded, found my way to my compartment, and found myself the recipient of rather a good deal. Though not particularly large, the Turkish sleeper compartments do have a table, two expansive seats, two fold-down beds, a sink, power outlet, and even a small refrigerator. I packed the food I’d bought for the trip under the table, hung up my coat, and settled back into my seat.

What followed was one of the more relaxing days of my trip. I read into the evening and folded down my bed to sleep. It was just barely long enough; anyone taller than 5′10″ or so might have found it a bit cramped. Nonetheless, it was comfortable, and I slept well. I awoke the next morning to light rain and the Turkish steppe rolling past my window. I spent the day working and writing. Periodically we’d move out of a storm for an hour or so and the sun would shine out across the plains, passing the occasional craggy tree, small village, or low-lying marsh patrolled by low-flying herons. Then we’d pass under another storm and it’d rain for a few hours until we came out the other side.

The evening coincided with clear skies, and I was treated to one of the best sunsets of the trip, with wide-open steppe and green hills spreading wide out on either side of us as we rumbled west. We passed Ankara a few hours after dark, picking up a number of passengers bound on the much more popular shorter trip from Ankara to Istanbul. Then on, into the night, flashing past the brighter, larger western Turkish cities in ever quicker succession as we neared Istanbul. I drifted off sometime after midnight.

I awoke early the next morning as the conductor knocked on my door and told me we were pulling into Istanbul. The city was already spreading out all around us, though we were still a good twenty minutes from the Haydarpasha terminal on the Bosphorus shore. I packed my things, ran the usual check–passport, wallet, pen, camera, laptop–and left my compartment as we finally pulled into Istanbul at Haydarpasha, the western terminus of the Turkish Asian railroad.

I stepped out to a glorious day, with seagulls wheeling around the ferries pulling up to dock behind the train station, and the fleets of small fishing boats heading out onto the Bosphorous in the bright morning sun to check set lines and pull up glittering chains of small fish that had been hooked during the night. I sat for a while just to enjoy the morning sun, then boarded a ferry to cross the Bosphorus to the European side of the city.

And here I am, for my last day in Istanbul, with little to do but wait for my flight tomorrow morning. My day’s itinerary is nothing more than cafes and book shops; but, on the last day of a trip, sometimes that’s all you want.

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I awoke on my last morning in Akhaltsikhe to snow on the ground and a bitterly cold wind. Nonetheless, I packed my things and headed down to the bus station, where I caught a marshrutka to Gori. I arrived to yet another hilltop fortress towering over the town. The freezing wind still hadn’t abated, and I walked around a bit before finally finding a taxi to get me to a hotel. The first one I found that was in my budget ($15 or so) was a deceptively grandiose-looking structure several stories tall and occupying most of a city block–the hotel Intourist, a holdover from the days when Georgia was part of the Soviet Union and a major destination for Russian tourists. I was shown to my room, and stepped into a cavernous space nearly with nearly the square footage of my entire apartment back in Virginia, fifteen foot ceilings, and peeling wallpaper that spoke of far better days. The room had obviously been luxurious once, and I could envision it richly furnaced and full of Russian voices. Now, though, the wide space was occupied by an old table, a tiny gas heater, and a few small pallet beds that seemed lost in a room far too large for them. I quickly discovered that these weren’t the only things that had gone south in the last twenty years. Only one light bulb worked, casting shadows from a rusting chandelier, and most of the power outlets had been ripped out. There was no hot water, but the shower didn’t work anyway, and the sink ran barely a trickle of something closer to ice than any normal liquid. Nonetheless, it was cheap, and somewhat interesting, so I dropped my bags and headed out to look around before it got dark.

Gori was the birthplace of Stalin, the only event which Gori can make as a claim to fame (or, in most of the world, infamy). Despite Russia’s rather bad reputation in the rest of the country, Stalin is rather revered here. One of the grandest, well-kept buildings in town is the Stalin Museum, which contains many of Stalin’s personal effects, his carriage, a number of letters, and a golden death-mask, displayed alone in the center of an eerily shrine-like room surrounded by pillars. On the main street (Stalin Avenue, of course) stands a towering statue of the man, one of the few (perhaps the only one) that remains in good repair in Georgia. During the invasion of 2008-2009, many Russian soldiers made a pilgrimage to Gori and could be seen taking pictures of themselves in front of the statue, acts which no doubt rankled with the surrounding Georgians.

Other than these two sights, there was little to see in Gori other than a few shops and cafes, and, two days later, I continued on to Tbilisi. As my marshrutka entered the Georgian capital, we passed a high statue of King David the Builder, one of the most important figures of Georgian history and a Georgian Orthodox saint. Responsible for repelling the Selcuk Turks from Georgian territory and uniting the various pagan feudal chieftans of the Caucausus under a single Christian empire in the early fourth century A.D., David IV was for all appearances quite a cunning, wise, and even benevolent ruler; attributes rarely combined, if seen at all, in most of history’s political figures. He believed himself to be a descendent (and spiritual reincarnation of) the King David of the Old Testament, and styled himself accordingly, from military victory to devotion to his faith to even the writing of several Georgian hymns which are still praised for their beauty, rhythm and style today. He was buried beneath the gateway of the Gelati Monastery near Kutaisi, with the wish that forever afterwards pilgrims would walk over him in their path towards God; an impressive gesture, at the very least.

Tbilisi was a thriving modern city, and quite a beautiful one, with the usual hilltop castles and churches around the city, rocky cliffs leading down to the river, and a wide main thoroughfare (Rustaveli Ave.) to match any of those in Europe. Unfortunately for me, the hotel prices also matched the European standard; the first one I checked was over a hundred euro a night, and, as far as I could tell, the hostel culture hadn’t yet reached it. Fortunately, however, while I was in Aspindze Razha had recommended that I meet his sister, Nino, when I reached the city; she recommended me to a cheaper district of the city, where I was able to get a hotel room for a reasonable price. And, with a heater, hot water, and clean beds, it was a welcome relief from the cavernous cold of Gori’s Intourist.

On my first day in Tbilisi, I met with Nino and she brought me to the Sameba Cathedral, the largest church in the south Caucausus and an impressive sight, looming over the city from it’s perch at Tbilisi’s highest point. In contrast to most other Georgian churches, it’s also very new, completed only a few years ago in celebration of two thousand years of Christianity. It is, however, constructed in the classic Georgian style, and even now artists are designing a full range of frescoes to decorate the cathedral’s currently plain interior.

We then met up with two of Nino’s cousins, Marine and Nino (St. Nino was credited to bringing Christianity to Georgia; as such, it’s quite a popular girl’s name) for coffee, food, and talk. Both girls were majoring in English at the university and all three of them speak it very well, much to my advantage. We traded stories, opinions, and language; I picked up some new Georgian grammar rules as well as some valuable slang vocabulary. Then we parted ways and Nino and I took some more time to explore the dinner and get a bite to eat. This was the first day of Lent for followers of the Orthodox faith, so none of my hosts could eat meat, dairy products, or a few other things. Georgian cuisine, always quick to supply an alternative, furnished us with Lobiani–a bread stuffed with a spiced bean filling that was, as usual, quite good.

The next day Nino and I met up with her cousins again and we headed out to the town Mtsketa after visiting Nino’s university. Mtsketa houses a few old churches, convents, and monasteries, and I was fortunate to have three English-speaking guides who knew not only the histories behind each place but also the meaning and stories behind various Orthodox icons. I learned of St. Nino, who was given a vision of bringing Christ to the Caucausus and fulfilled the task, armed with a grapevine cross bound with strands of her own hair; St. George, a relative of hers, of dragon-slaying fame, for whom Georgia is named; Queen Tamar, defender against both the Mongols from the north and the Islamic Turks from the south; Vakhtang “Gorgasali” (wolf’s head), defender against the Persians and traditionally believed to be the founder of Tbilisi; even an unnamed monk who, as the story goes, was given great physical beauty by God and who, to avoid giving temptation to women, asked God to replace his own head with that of a wolf’s. According to tradition, God complied, and an icon of him stands in Svetitskhoveli church in Mtsketa. We also visited the Samtavro church, where St. Nino once meditated upon scripture, and received leaves from the grove she once sat in.

Then back to Tbilisi to have dinner before parting ways. We talked about the differences between Georgian and western culture, especially as regards to the family. In the Georgian language there is a separate word for a number of relationships; one’s father’s father, one’s mother’s father, one’s father’s sister’s daughter, etc., all have a different term used to refer to them. This linguistic focus on the family is also mirrored in the culture; Georgian families are generally very close-knit and widespread. A grown Georgian daughter such as either Nino or Marine thinks nothing of dropping in on a parent or other relative for a few days, and is surprised at our western accounts of giving advance notice and making sure our relative has time to see us; in Georgia, family is before all.

We did finally part ways, though, and I wandered around the city a bit before heading back to my hotel for my last night in Georgia. Tomorrow evening I’ll board a bus back to Trabzon, from there to continue on to Kars, Erzurum, and finally Istanbul and home. I’ve enjoyed my first visit to Georgia. Already I know that it won’t be my last.

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I left Batumi on the morning of the 7th, walking the kilometer or so to the bus station and checking for a marshrutka (Georgia’s minibus answer to Turkey’s dolmus) to the town of Akhaltsikhe in southern Georgia, a city with what looked to be some interesting sights in and about it. As it turned out, there was no marshrutka to Akhaltsikhe, so instead I headed to the only nearby city I had heard of: Kutaisi.

I arrived a few hours later and was immediately picked up by a taxi driver who spoke a little Russian and promised to take me to a hotel. When we headed out of the city into the rusting decay of Soviet-era industrial sprawl, I tried to ask if there was a hotel closer to the city, but he waved off my objections and dropped me beside a dilapidated two-story building with “Sastumro” (hotel) painted across the front in fading Georgian characters. Behind it was an empty factory and a broken bus, and beside it stood two buildings that looked for all the world like prisons, with high walls and metal guard towers, now empty of whatever guards once patrolled there. However, I wasn’t in the mood to make my way back into the city, and I booked a night with the intent to try to find someplace closer for the next night.

Fortunately, an inner-city marshrutka ran for half a lari (around thirty cents) all the way from the hotel into the town center. My first impression of Kutaisi had been the old apartment buildings and abandoned factories of the outskirts, and so I was quite pleasantly surprised when these fell behind me and the marshrutka pulled to a stop in a clean, bustling city center built around a curve of the river, with cafes facing the water, statues scattered among the city parks, and, on a hill overlooking the city, an old cathedral undergoing renovations.

I had also, without knowing it, jumped forward two time zones in the few hours between Batumi and Kutaisi, so what I thought was mid-afternoon was actually early evening. So as dark fell a little early, I headed back to my hotel and, content with the marshrutka commute, booked a second night.

The next day was cloudy, but dry and reasonably warm, and I headed into town early to begin more in-depth explorations. My first destination was the cathedral on the hill which, according to some preliminary research, was considered an excellent specimen of medieval Georgian architecture. A closer inspection showed why–towering stonework with intricate carvings, in the combination of rounded shapes and straight edges peculiar to Georgian churches. I was a bit disappointed to find it half-sheathed in latticework and cloth, and swarming with construction workers, but it was an impressive sight nonetheless–and the view out across the city with the high white peaks of the mountains rising behind it was something to see indeed.

I made my way back in town and found a waiting taxi, prepared to bargain down some exorbitant rate to get to my second destination, the mountain monastery of Gelati. The driver told me the price, in Russian, and I had to ask again–desyat? Ten lari? Six dollars; done and done. We drove out of the city up into the mountains. This direction, almost opposite from the way to my hotel, was significantly more attractive, with the city center’s stately buildings giving way to houses and farms rather than factories and run-down apartment buildings. The road was also full of people, walking and hitchhiking up and down the road, catching rides with strangers for only a few kilometers to a market in town or back out to a home in the country–a type of behavior I’ve found everywhere in Georgia so far. I suppose the American ghost/axe murderer/bank robber brand of hitchhiker movie hasn’t reached a wide enough audience here yet.

The taxi dropped me off in a crowded dirt parking lot adjacent to the monastery, lined with booths selling icons, crucifixes, and wax prayer candles, the entrance itself lined with beggars looking for handouts from the faithful. Having come from Sunday Christian America, through Friday Muslim Turkey, it was striking to arrive in a place where religion (in this case, Eastern Orthodoxy) clearly played so important a role in daily life. These weren’t just the swarms of tourists you might see in a cathedral in Paris or New York. Visiting Georgians would pose for a cell phone picture in front of the gates, then cross themselves three times as the entered it; they might talk and joke on the steps outside the church, but, upon entry, bow to the floor and kiss the base of an icon, and ask the blessing of the priests. The ceiling of the church was painted with frescoes from window to window, depicting scenes of religious importance, and the church was imbued with an extra sense of the sacred by the clear faith of its visitors. One priest, exceedingly portly in his black robes and sporting a long black beard and a large wooden cross swinging from a necklace, blessed his visiting, transient flock and laughed with them on the steps outside after he had completed his priestly duties.

After taking some time to soak in the place, I headed back to the parking lot to try to find a ride down. I approached what I thought was a marshrutka and asked in Russian if it went back to Kutaisi. There was a moment of some coldness at the use of the language, thanks to a few centuries of occupation and a recent attempt by Russia to reestablish the tradition, while they considered me. Then one of them asked me where I was from and, when I told them, grins and an invitation to sit down.

My impression that this was a marshrutka ended when I found myself sitting among a large group (possibly a family) of Georgians sharing a lunch. As soon as I sat down, I was offered some–a sort of cold meat sandwich between flat pieces of bread–and interrogated as to my knowledge of the recent Russian invasion. When I answered that yes, it was on the news all over America, they nodded. The apparent head of the group, a middle-aged man with graying hair, clasped his hands together. “American and Georgia–like this.” I agreed, and was poured a plastic cup of clear liquid. “To Georgia!” my host said, pouring one for himself, and I down the contents–which had a faintly grape-like flavor and burned like fire. “Chacha!” he said, grinning. “Good?” I nodded as heartily as possible. I found out later that chacha is essentially the Georgian version of moonshine–a homemade, grape-flavored, indecently strong sort of vodka.

We were soon underway, stopping halfway back for a side trip to a second mountaintop monastery, smaller and with far fewer people, where I was introduced to another portly priest and had my picture taken with him. In Georgia, it’s customary for members of a congregation or visitors to a monastery to bring a large bundle of food for the resident priests–and, with the heavy butter, cheese, bread, eggs and meat that form the basis for most Georgian dishes, it’s no wonder so many of the priests tend toward the large end of the spectrum.

The family dropped me off with a chorus of goodbyes an hour later in the center of Kutaisi and, happy with the day’s explorations, I had a meal of mtsvadi (pork roasted over vine leaves) and headed back for the night.

I headed out the next day for the bus station to continue my trip and managed to navigate the city’s marshrutka system until I found it. No easy feat, since my grasp of the Georgian alphabet still isn’t strong enough to read a word without laboriously sounding it out in my head, impossible to do when a marshrutka drives by with its route placard in the window. Nonetheless, I found it and asked around until I found a long-distance marshrutka to Akhaltsikhe. When the inevitable question of where I was from came up, one of my fellow passengers turned and, in English, said hello.

His name was Rajha, and he was studying engineering at the university in Kutaisi. He was heading home for a visit to his parents in Aspindza (a village near Akhaltsikhe) and, before the ride was half over, he had invited me to visit. I accepted gladly and, after switching marshrutkas in Akhaltsikhe, we arrived in Aspindza in the late afternoon. After a short walk up some dirt side roads so rutted it was a wonder cars without four-wheel drive could navigate them, we arrived at his home, a quite nice two-story house with a wide yard and several fruit trees. It also had no indoor plumbing or central heating, and as Rajha started a fire in the stove and pointed the way to the outhouse, he shrugged and grinned. “This is a village.”

His parents, both economists, got back from work an hour or so later, and I was introduced. Soon after, Rajha’s mother disappeared into the kitchen and some delicious aromas began to waft out. I had heard rumors of Georgian hospitality, and those rumors were soon met, and then surpassed. The table was set with half a dozen different dishes: pork with eggs, khachpuri (bread with cheese inside), large pickles, potatoes marinated in a sweet sauce, bread, and–Rajha’s favorite–khingali, a sort of spiced meat dumpling. There were also pitchers of homemade wine, both white and red, and Rajha was appointed the meal’s “tamada,” a particularly Georgian role which has it’s closest equivalent in the English toast-master. It is the tamada’s duty to regularly propose toasts, quite long and involved ones at that, and keep the conversation going. I ate, and drank wine (excellent), and ate … and ate … and ate. Whenever my plate was nearing anything approaching an empty state, Rajha’s mother would burst into a stream of Georgian, and Rajha would translate: “You must eat everything! Eat! Eat!”

After this quite excellent treatment, we retired to the seats and sofas around the wood stove and Rajha’s father, upon learning that I had studied history in university, began testing me on the subject: when did Napoleon’s armies first enter Africa? Who are the main five historical conquerors of Europe? and of course: for how long did the Russian federation occupy Georgia? Rajha’s father spoke fluent Russian, and with my limited knowledge of the language and Rajha’s English, we managed to have a good conversation.

The next day, I was invited to stay for a second night. During the day, Rajha and I drove up the canyons south of Aspindze to the cave city and monastery of Vardzia. The drive was spectacular enough, and when we came into sight of the exposed caves, stone walkways, and precariously perched church high up on the cliff walls, I was once again glad for the chance encounters of traveling. It was winter, and so we had the place to ourselves, but we picked up a hitchhiker (one of perhaps six over the drive there and back) along the way who turned out to be a tour guide and told me that, should I return in the summer, he could take me anywhere I liked.

In Georgia, all of these inaccessible monasteries are, unlike those of Turkey, still occupied. Rajha had brought along a large bag of apples to give to the priests who lived in the ancient caves, and we took our time exploring the cave houses and pathways of the place, Rajha pointing out interesting things here and there–the caves where the monks used to study, the winepresses the monks had used to make their own wine up here, and the entrance to the now-closed secret tunnel that ran all they way down beneath the canyon’s walls to the river’s edge far below, used to retrieve water when the city was under siege. Indeed, the cliff walls up and down the river are catacombed with cave dwellings and the remnants of once-underground cities, all built in preparation for the onslaught of the Mongols some eight hundred years ago. Vardzia itself was once thirteen levels high, with thousands of dwellings safe behind the rocky cliffs; Rajha pointed out where a miles-long tunnel had once run from Vardzia to another cave city further up the canyon. Unfortunately, much of the city is exposed now thanks to the freezing and thawing of the seasons and one particularly nasty earthquake; it is quite a sight nonetheless.

That night, Rajha informed me that it was his uncle’s birthday, and invited me to come. Rajha’s family and I walked through the village to his uncle’s house, perhaps a third of a mile away, which was already alive with activity. I found I’d underestimated the Georgian concept of a “party”–the whole extended family was there, from Rajha’s wizened grandparents to various cousins ranging from Rajha’s age (twenty) down to toddlers, as well as various friends, former classmates, and peripheral relatives. The wine, also homemade, was flowing even more freely than the previous night, and in a much more ritualized fashion. Every new guest to arrive was required to down a horn (a “kanci”) of the type we in the west tend to see only in pictures of medieval europe, and the horns were brought out frequently thereafter for the more elaborate toasts. There were also the usual glasses, as well as a narrow-necked clay vessel called a “dokhi” which served as a way to, in effect, prove one’s place at the table–all were required to down it without stopping, a feat I only barely managed, not so much because of the volume (the dokhi was little larger than a good-sized wineglass) but because the narrow neck made it impossible to simply drink from. There were toasts to friendship, to brotherhood, to the wives and women present, to children, to friends’ children, to Georgia, to the Georgian president, to life, to happiness, and, in one unusually somber moment, a toast to (as Rajha translated it) “the brothers who died fighting against the Russian invasion”. Fortunately for me, the wine didn’t seem particularly strong, as etiquette required everyone present to drink quite a lot of it. The Georgian method for dealing with the quantity was to eat (”if you are to drink wine, you must eat!”) a feast in the process. After my relatively ascetic died of one solid meal a day while traveling alone, this onslaught of food was overwhelming, and I had more trouble consuming the quantity of food continually placed on my plate than I did handling the wine.

With handshakes and promises to bring stories of Georgian hospitality back to America (fully my intention), we finally parted ways and headed back to Rajha’s house for coffee and a good night’s sleep. I fell asleep happy with the knowledge that I had just had one of the best experiences of my travels so far.

This morning I was up in time to catch the marshrutka back to Akhaltsikhe, but not before Rajha’s mother loaded me down with gifts of homemade bread (two enormous loaves) and a sort of semi-sweet skin made from the grapes left after winemaking, both in sheets and as churchkhela, wrapped around a walnut mixture like a (rather healthier) candy bar. With this, I think, I could survive all the way to the Turkish border.

After the generosity of Rajha and his family and the stark beauty of the mountains around Aspindze, arriving here in Akhaltsikhe felt like a sort of lull. A low, thin fog hung over the city, and the city center was small, though attractive and clean enough. There is, of course, the requisite ancient fortress and old church on hills overlooking the city, a sight so common in Georgia that already I find myself almost becoming used to them. Georgians certainly seemed, in times past, to have enjoyed building massive structures on the most inaccessible, picturesque, and rocky crags available. It’s a trait I’m glad to benefit from.

Tomorrow I continue on to Gori, the birthplace of Stalin, and then Tbilisi. My trip is already more than half over, and in less than two weeks I’ll be back in Virginia. It’s hard to believe; now, looking out of an upper story window at the wood-slat town of Akhaltsikhe and the fortress on one of the hills rising among the houses, with Georgian hospitality still fresh in my memory, Virginia seems a very long way away.

I suppose I’m content to leave it that way for at least a few days yet. Nakhvamdis!

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I found a bus company with a route into Georgia in the morning of the 4th and bought a ticket. The only available bus was a direct from Trabzon to Tbilisi, meant to arrive in the Georgian capital the next morning. That meant that the dropoff in Batumi would happen half an hour or so after midnight–which only added to my nervousness. Entering a new country where you don’t speak the language alone is always a bit nerve-wracking; arriving in the middle of the night is even more so.

Nonetheless, I spent the day working in a cafe in Trabzon before heading to the bus station to await my ride. It was there that I had my first introduction to the Georgian people. Two young men, very large, an older woman, and a middle-aged woman were engaged in active conversation. I could tell immediately that they weren’t Turks by the way they acted with each other; in Turkey, virtually the only time you ever see a man and women talking is when they are a couple, and then in low, inaudible lover’s tones. These four were all talking actively, including the older lady, with the casual touches and expressions common enough in the west, but almost unseen in Turkey. The language, too, was different, with undertones of Slavic pronunciation and perhaps even a hint of Greek’s melody and rhythm, but in the end unlike either. I would find shortly that Georgian is part of the Caucasian language group, of which most dialects are now only locally spoken. As such, it has little or no relation to either the Indo-European language groups or the Slavic ones, and was almost entirely new in vocabulary, grammar, and alphabet–the written script is full of curls and loops, and bears none of the relation to the Latin alphabet that either Greek or Russian does.

Fortunately for me, most of the older people in Georgia speak Russian, a language I speak, if only just. The bus left Trabzon at exactly eight o’clock and headed east and north along the Black Sea highway. It was dark as we approached the border, and storming. High white-capped waves rolled in out of the fog to break into surf at the cliff edge of the road, and when we stopped for food just before the border, half of the power in the place was out, causing a line of passengers to blunder into the toilets with cell phones and lighters held aloft for illumination.

I’d just read a story about this exact border crossing in which the travelers had resorted to bribes and sweet-talking to get across, so I was a bit apprehensive. I was relieved to find that even in the last few years the situation has improved immensely, and my American passport was greeted with raised eyebrows, grins, and heavily accented welcomes. The rain was coming down in sheets as we waited on the other side of the crossing for our bus to come through.

It was only twenty or so kilometers to Batumi from the border, and we finally arrived in the city a little after one in the morning. I had my face pressed to the window, already looking for hotels, as the rain still poured. We finally pulled to a stop on Tbilisi Moedani, a main square in a run-down part of the city, and, at this time of night, none too friendly looking. A kind fellow passenger took me by the arm to a nearby taxi and explained my situation to the driver, who drove me to a nearby hotel–and only charged me five lari (about three dollars) for the trip, an act which immediately endeared me to the Georgian people, after my experiences with taxis in Syria and eastern Turkey. The hotel room was small and cold, but cheap and very clean, with wood paneling and even a small desk, and I went to bed that night quite happy.

It was raining the next morning, but nonetheless I was determined to see the city, and so booked two more nights at the front desk. Then it was out to see the sights, my coat pulled tight around me, my camera under my coat to keep it out of the rain. My first impression of Batumi was of the run-down post-communist sort I’d seen in Bosnia and Serbia, with cracked sidewalks and roads so broken and full of water it would take a four-wheel drive vehicle to navigate them (indeed, I saw a disproportionate number of humvees, SUVs, and trucks on the city’s streets). But as I drew nearer to the seafront, this decay gave way to high, grand buildings and wide boulevards and, against the seafront, an expansive park full of fountains, groves of bamboo, and little cafes that had been closed for the winter. I reached the seafront and stepped out onto a wide black pebble beach that stretched in both directions; I understand Batumi is a prime destination during the summer for Georgians and Turks looking for sea and surf.

That day the rain didn’t let up, so I headed back into town and stopped in at a small restaurant for dinner. I ordered khachapuri, as it was the only Georgian dish I’d heard of, and received an enormous bread bowl full of cheese, a half-cooked egg, and two slabs of butter. I don’t mean slabs in the American sense of half an inch off the end of a butter stick–i mean two-by-three inch thick chunks of homemade, freshly churned butter, melting into the bread as I ate. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, and still I wasn’t able to finish the meal. I walked out satisfied and with a bit more understanding of the girth of the first two Georgian men I’d met back int the bus station in Trabzon.

It was raining when I woke up the next morning, so I spent a few hours reading. When I looked outside again, the clouds were breaking, and for the first time since the Sumela monastery, bright blue skies were showing through. I lost no time in collecting my camera and notebooks and heading out into the city. Sunlight always improves a place immensely, in my opinion, and Batumi was no exception. With the driving rain gone, I could see that what I had mistaken for simple decay on the roads and sidewalks away from the seafront were in many cases construction. While much of the city still had that haggard, half-vacant post-Soviet look to it, most of the city was in a state of rapid reconstruction; for the first time in a good long while, Georgia is again a stable, independent state, and is doing its best to rework it’s image. I suspect we’ll be hearing much more from this country both as a tourist destination and a player on the global stage over the next few decades. It has been in the past, as well–this city in particularly was the home of fabled King Medea, from whom Jason and the Argonauts stole the golden fleece. In the central square of the city there is a statue of Jason and the fleece, set high on a pedestal above the pedestrians far below.

I walked back down to the sea front and around the harbor district, taking pictures here and there, and, as it got dark, stopped in at another restaurant for another Georgian meal. Previously, my favorite cuisines were Syrian and Greek, but if what I’ve had so far is any indication, Georgian is moving head and shoulders ahead of the pack. This time it was bread with Georgian wine and a plate of badrejani, a grilled eggplant dish topped with a garlic and walnut crust and garnished with pomegranate seed. With my first bite, I realized that this was quite possibly one of the best dishes I had ever eaten–the smoky, spiced topping combined with the smoother taste of the eggplant, and accented perfectly with the sharp sweetness of the pomegranate. The wine, too, was excellent. Georgia is, if archaeology is accurate, the birthplace of winemaking, and has its own tradition stretching back over seven thousand years. This was a slightly sweet white wine, heartier than most European and American varieties, with less refinement, but more flavor; perhaps very much like Georgia itself.

I watched the sunset on the harbor. To the north, the high white peaks of the Caucasian mountains rose up from the sea, and on a nearer, lower peak, a centuries-old castle turned gold in the fading light. This, I think, is a country I can get used to.

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I must say, it’s good to be traveling again. A week ago today, I landed in Istanbul and headed to where I was staying, a few blocks away from Taksim square, where I unpacked my things and promptly fell asleep around 8:30 PM thanks to getting little sleep on my flight and having a rather disturbed sleep schedule to begin with.

For the next few days I explored Istanbul. In the winter, the feeling there was very different. The swarms of tourists that had inundated the city in the summer were gone, but the city was still incredibly active. Because I had already seen many of the tourist sights in Istanbul, this time most of my explorations took place in and around the Taksim district, with its abundance of cafes, live music, used bookstores, and street performers. This, I think, is the heart of modern Istanbul: Istaklal Cedesi, the main artery running from Taksim square to the Tunel, the funicular that transports passengers up and down the steep hill to the rest of the city. In the winter, the street is strung with lights and is pedestrian only, save for the old-fashioned tramline that runs down its center. And the street is packed, a solid mass of people from morning until well after midnight; a glittering array of stores, cinemas, and cafes, with dozens of narrow side streets branching off of it and full of sights all their own.

For most of my visit, the sky was overcast, and intermittent rains washed the streets. I took a bus one day up to the outlying village of Sariyer, a little town with cafes clustering the seafront among the fishing boats and decaying wooden structures from the Ottoman days and managed to take some photos before the rain started in earnest and I retired to a cafe for a warm glass of sahlep, a Turkish winter drink that deserves a presence in all the world’s coffeehouses that were themselves inspired by the Ottoman Turks. Sahlep is a sweet, creamy mixture infused with spices and capped with a liberal sprinkling of cinnamon–I’m going to have to find out how to make it when I get back to the States.

Tuesday morning dawned bright and clear for the first time in my stay–and that was the day I left. I took the city bus to Istanbul’s enormous, teeming otogar, and made my way through the long lineup of bus companies until I found one that would get me to Trabzon. After a moment’s misunderstanding (”Saat! Saat!”, the clerk pointing at the one on his watch) I found that the bus was leaving at one o’clock, a mere ten minutes after my arrival at the otogar. Taking my last breath of Istanbul air, I boarded the bus and found my seat.

As we left Istanbul, I realized again just how enormous a city it is. Istanbul is the fifth largest city in the world–the city proper is over 700 square miles, and the greater metropolitan area over 2,400. It took almost forty-five minutes before we left the city’s crowded suburbs and moved out into the forests and fields of the countryside around the highway to the Black Sea.

After a waystation stop for dinner at one of Turkey’s deluxe bus and truck stops, we rolled on into the night. I read a good deal before managing to fall asleep and woke the next morning half an hour before we arrived in Trabzon. It was a spectacular day with clear blue skies, already sixty degrees by seven thirty, and I was feeling rather good as I climbed the steep hill from the port to the city center, where I found a low-budget hotel and dumped my bags. With plenty of time still left in the day, I decided to see the place I’d missed on my first visit here: the sixteen-hundred-year-old Sumela Monastery in the mountains some 50km outside of the city. I found a ride and headed up into the mountains. The Black Sea coast where Trabzon is built is already very rocky, with deep valleys and high hills, and those hills turned into high mountains and, finally, towering cliffs as we moved further from the city.

When we reached the little cluster of cafes at the base of the trail to the monastery (all closed) I began the long climb, enjoying the clear air of the mountain and the smell of the pines. When I saw the monastery through the trees, I stopped in my tracks and stared.

Sumela is built directly into the side of the cliff, and not at the base of it. Seeing it, framed in trees, is to see a rocky cliff wall rising and then breaking into the continuous front of the monastery some sixty feet off the ground, which ascends for four or five stories before being capped by a heavy-timbered roof. Above that, the cliff continues far above, where a few pines peek over the edge against the sky.

Ten more minutes of walking brought me around the corner and up a steep set of stairs and switchbacks to the monastery’s external courtyard, where I payed the eight lira entrance fee to climb the final set of steps (these monks must have been healthy) to the gate in the thick stone wall. I had the place to myself, and explored the low rooms with their stone walls and low timber ceilings, all of it simple, all of it pleasing to the eye, all of it built to endure the centuries. This, combined with the view of snowcapped peaks rising across the valley, and the black cliffs towering above, proved beyond all doubt that these monks really knew how to pick a place to live.

I explored the old chapel, with its vaulted ceilings of colorful frescoes and many windows to let in the light. Some of the lower frescoes had been defaced by vandals carving initials. I suppose I can understand someone carving their name into a tree or a rock, but into a priceless, thousand-year-old piece of art? We humans aren’t a particularly intelligent or appreciative lot, it seems; things like this just go to prove the point.

After taking a drink of water (so cold it made my teeth ache) from the fountain built in the monastery wall, and sitting for a while to enjoy the beauty of the place, I headed back down and made the return trip to Trabzon. Before I started my explorations of the city, I stopped in at Ataturk Park, a wide stretch of cobblestone more or less in the center of the city, for a glass of tea, and was treated to a half hour conversation with a man who spoke no English, in which my rather pathetically limited grasp of Turkish gave me little help. As far as I can gather, it was about religion (”isa musa muhametan”–he was Muslim), which led to his quitting drinking (”hayir bira, hayir vodka …”). Through diagrams and the little Turkish I already knew, I gathered he was an either an engineer or some kind of visiting physician (”ev doctor”–building doctor). It also had something to do with his making less money than Europeans: “Hakan” (his name) 1000 euro, “Hans” 7000 euro. I also explained where I was from, in relation to Texas and Obama, and the name and profession of my father. The main word I learned from the encounter: “Anladin”–”you see?”

The rest of the day I explored the seafront and commercial districts of the city before returning to my hotel to work for the evening. This morning I headed out again, this time walking a good distance up into some of the hills the city sits on, including the one surrounded by the fortress walls of the old city: Trebizond, of Marco Polo fame. As one of the most important ports on the Black Sea as well as its location on the Silk Road, Trabzon has always been a thriving city and a center of international commerce–as well as the capital of a number of nation-states in times past. For 250 years, the city was the capital of the Empire of Trebizond, a Byzantine state set up in the aftermath of the fourth Crusade, which lasted until it was conquered by Sultan Mehmet II and added to the Ottoman Empire. An enormous bronze bust of the turbaned Sultan commemorates the occasion in one of the seaside parks, gazing sternly upon the pigeons, pedestrians, and besotted young Turkish couples occupying the benches opposite him.

Unfortunately, little is left of the fortified city other than the walls themselves, thanks to a large earthquake, and Trabzon is overall a modern city. The deep river valleys are full of the cheap block-style apartment complexes and a few incongruous farms pegged into those slopes too steep for construction, and the further one gets back from the seafront, the more run-down many of the older buildings are. One particularly dilapidated hovel was built directly into the ruins of the fortress wall, little more than a cluster of lean-tos of tin and plywood set up against the meter-thick stone walls–and capped off with three satellite dishes. Poverty it may be, but it’s poverty with cable.

Trabzon does have some of the seedy air common to port towns–the docks are fronted with rows of suspiciously cheap-looking “hotels” and, as Trabzon is one of the main ports of call for Russian ships, it is also home to a disproportionately large number of “natashas,” or Russian prostitutes. Despite this influence, however, the rest of the city is remarkably clean, with long cobbled streets fronted with cafes and, of course, the “bazaars”; here, little more than close-packed shops selling clothing and shoes (Turks do seem to love their shoes) and jewelry, and packed with people from morning til night. Shopping in Turkey, it seems, is a national hobby.

After a short visit to the wonderfully ornate Kostaki Mansion (now a museum), I made my way back and had a chai at a little cafe as night fell. Tomorrow, I’ll be heading on to new territory: Batumi, Georgia.

Should be interesting.

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A week ago, I was in Hamilton, Montana. By tomorrow evening, I’ll be in Istanbul. Total actual travel time: less than twenty hours. I move with my fellow international airport zombies, coffee-fueled and laden with carryon luggage. I stand in line, I show my passport, I sit in a soft seat and watch a few movies, and then, like magic, I am on the other side of the world.

A week ago, I was in Hamilton, Montana. Today, I am in Istanbul. Total actual travel time: less than twenty hours. I move with my fellow international airport zombies, coffee-fueled and laden with carryon luggage. I stand in line, I show my passport, I sit in a soft seat and watch a few movies, and then, like magic, I am on the other side of the world.

Surely this must be magic. Certainly this ease with which we move around our planet is unprecedented. A hundred years ago, the same journey would have taken months, or even longer. As I waited for my flight in the Missula airport, I imagined an alternate self, living in 1910, attempting to make the same journey.

In 2010, it was a cold and cloudy day when I drove up the Bitterroot valley to the nearest airport, in Missoula, some fifty miles away. I went through security and waited for around an hour before boarding my flight to Denver; two hours in the air and I was there, waiting for my connection to DC.

In 1910, Hamilton was a little town and seat of the county thanks to funding from a local copper baron by the name of Marcus Daly. It had dirt roads for its main streets, and a mile down river, a big lumber mill rumbled in operation. Four years before Henry Ford began production on the famous Model T, cars were still rare, especially in this part of the world, and most of the journey would have taken place by train. The Northern Pacific railroad had been in Missoula for three decades by then, and that would have been my first stop: then steaming west out of the Rocky mountains and across the still-empty great plains to St. Paul, Minnesota. Then on to Chicago, then alive and uproarious with the great surges of immigration, the meat-packing plants, and the corrupt underground organizations that would coalesce into Capone’s empire with the prohibition.

In 2010, I flew from Denver to Washington, D.C. in four or five hours, sleeping part of the way, and disembarked in Dulles to the light rain of a warm front coming off the Atlantic. I stayed at my apartment in northern Virginia for just under a week, packing my things and preparing for trip to Istanbul.

In 1910, I would have traveled by railroad from Chicago to New York City. The cities that had surrounded Manhattan island were well into the process of consolidation, and the city was awash with seemingly unlimited potential. It was also one of the most multicultural cities on Earth at the time, one of the main entry points for the United States’ “melting pot” approach to immigration–just under a million immigrants a year were being processed through Ellis Island, and to walk a few cities blocks from one immigrant community to another was like stepping into a whole new country.

Still two years before the famous sinking of the Titanic, this was the golden age of passenger liners across the Atlantic. One of the most famous of these, the Lusitania, was capable of making the crossing in under a week. The first class quarters and common areas aboard the Lusitania were luxurious to a point unimaginable just a few decades earlier, and, in comparison to other available sea berths at the time, even the second and third class areas were considered very comfortable. I would no doubt have made the crossing in second or third class, assuming I wasn’t able to work my way across on a freight or livestock ship.

In 2010, the second leg of my voyage began with a drive back to Dulles, twenty minutes going through security, and a coffee while waiting for my flight. My transatlantic crossing, from D.C. to Paris, took less than eight hours. I watched a film, read a bit, and slept.

In 1910, I would have arrived in Liverpool, in the east of England. Another major destination for European immigration, Liverpool had much of the same rough-and-tumble, multicultural feel I would have had in New York. The city also had a heavy Irish influence thanks to immigration a few decades earlier during the great potato famine, and as I walked its streets I would have seen a number of pubs on the Irish model, fiddle music drifting out through old wooden doors to the tapping of the patron’s feet.

The train would have taken me from Liverpool to London for a night or two–then the largest city on the Planet–and on to Dover, for a ferry crossing of the English Channel. At Calais I would have entered France and continued to Paris. Home to the Universal Expositions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Paris was then, even more than now, a world capital of technology, philosophy, sophistication, and culture. The Exposition of 1889 had resulted in an architectural “demonstration” that resulted in the tallest building–the Eiffel tower, a construction foreigners like myself would  (and still do) gawk at until our necks ached.

On the city walls around the train station, I would have seen posters with the names of strange places and the crescent and star of the Ottoman Turkish empire. And under these, two words: Orient Express.

In 2010, I disembarked at Charles de Gaul international airport and walked to the next terminal, where, only an hour later, I caught my final flight to Istanbul. The flight to Paris had been in a larger plane, full of passengers with western sensibilities who stayed seated and rarely talked, reading magazines or books or working on their computers. The flight from Paris to Istanbul was something else; it was full of Turks, and Turks are a much more sociable breed. As soon as the seatbelt lights were turned off, at least half of the passengers were unbuckling and walking up and down their aisles, leaning on seat backs and engaging in lively conversation, where they remained for the rest of the flight, while partaking liberally in the free beer and wine available courtesy of Air France.

in 1910, I would have boarded the Orient Express train in Paris that would have taken me flying across the French countryside and into Germany, through the cities of Strasbourg, Munich, and then to Vienna. After Vienna all of the cultures I would have been familiar with would have begun to fade as I entered eastern Europe, then tense with the just-beneath-the-surface conflicts that would in a few years spark the first world war. Budapest, Bucharest, and then the final curving line down along the western shores of the Black Sea until the land narrowed and, ahead in the darkness, the burning lights of Istanbul.

And this is where our two stories, of 1910 and 2010, converge: though means of transportation may change, I suspect that the feeling of wonder that comes upon you when you see a new place, especially a place with as much character, history, and sheer mass as Istanbul, is the same no matter what time you see it in. I left the airport by city bus and came into the city along the Bosphorus, the massive stonemasonry of the Byzantine sea-wall rising on my left, the glittering lights of the ships in the harbor on my right. Across the straits, the lights of Taksim rose into a low mist, Galata tower high above the rest, and along the expansive shores to the left, the spires of mosques towered into the night.

I was back.

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Sit down sometime, and watch a child playing. Assuming the child’s innate creativity hasn’t been burnt out of it by the drugs and television prescribed by our modern seers, you’ll notice something interesting. The child’s imaginary world is very different than the one he actually lives in. In the imaginary world, animals talk, kings and queens live in high castles, cars and trucks move at his command, and, of course, dinosaurs rule the Earth.

Adults do this too, though perhaps not so consciously. We, too old for playing with plastic dinosaurs (or so we think), enter the imaginary worlds of others: we are riding through an unspoiled and expansive Old West desert; we are normal-seeming citizens with great hidden powers; we are lone survivors struggling heroically against a dangerous and visceral world; we are kissing in the rain; we are Jack’s burning rage against the system. Why are the Harry Potter books so popular among adults if not to let us think that just on the other side of a mundane normalcy is a world full of magic, strange creatures, and life-and-death battles? What are our design mock-ups and finance reports, after all, when compared to War with Evil?

On a more practical level, those imaginary worlds also cause us to make changes in the real world. The imaginations of an ordinary mind, of a bigger paycheck or a new romance, might lead us to apply for a job or talk to a woman. The imaginations of a great mind can and do change the world.

But with that power of imagination comes a near-universal inability to accept the world we actually have. It can’t have always been this way, we think; even if the grass isn’t greener in our neighbor’s yard, surely it was in his grandfather’s. America, say the old, was better off sixty years ago when people still had morals and young people respected their elders. America, say the young, was better off six hundred years ago, when white people were still stuck in Europe and the Native American lived at one with nature, likely spontaneously bursting into song when confronted with fluffy woodland creatures.

And at the dawn of time, Eden. Perfection, or so the Christians tell us. Man without sin, without want, at peace and innocent. In that garden there was only one rule: to not eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Eve, being somewhat naive (not outright rebellious like her predecessor), believed Satan’s claim that the knowledge would make her like God, and ate. Adam, being a good husband, did what his wife told him too and ate likewise and, rather than becoming gods, the couple was cast out of Eden and cursed to mortality and the working of the ground.

Compare this to another creation myth: that of Prometheus and Pandora. In the Greek version, Prometheus gives humanity the gift of fire. Their eyes follow the smoke from the ground up toward the stars, and they become separate from the animals; they are mortal, but possess the fire of the gods. Zeus punishes Prometheus for his gift, and to punish the humans, he sends them Pandora: a woman, like Eve, who touches something she shouldn’t and thus brings evil, pain, and torment to the entire future of the human race.

At the beginning of both of these myths, humanity exists in a state of the innocence. Like the animals, they lack knowledge, and thus can only act according to their nature; the only sin they can commit is to seek to become like gods. In Eden, humans are immortal within the garden; in the Greek myths, humans are eternally cyclical, as there can be no names, stories, or remembrance of death.

But then the humans reach out and take something forbidden: the knowledge of the gods. With that knowledge, they become self-aware, symbolized in the Greek myth by looking at the stars, and in the Eden myth by the realization of nakedness. To be like the gods, though, is not free. In both cases, the knowledge grants to humans the ability to choose, a free will that can knowingly take a good path or an evil one. This awareness of self, perhaps brought on in actual history by the development of language, gave humans a concept of evil and good, and the awareness through experience that one day they would surely die.

With knowledge came the potential for evil. Sin enters into the Christian’s world, Pandora opens her box, and, (lament the storytellers) man is doomed to a life of work, a struggle towards an impossible perfection, and responsibility for his actions. An angel is set at the gates of Eden, and Prometheus is chained to a rock for the rest of eternity.

The Greek empire and its accompanying mythos are now long since gone, but the concept of Eden and the fall of man is still very present in the western world. We yearn for lost perfection, for peace, for security, for the assurance that we will never die. We are like infants newly born, bawling for the comfort of the womb.

But let us ask ourselves: is the fire of the gods worth the evils of Pandora’s box? It is interesting to note that the name “Pandora” in the Greek means “all-giving”, and that the forbidden fruit contained the knowledge of good as well as of evil. Prometheus and Eden are not stories of the birth of evil; they are stories of the birth of self-awareness and the responsibility that comes with it.

We cry out for Eden because we can’t see past the blisters on our hands and the gravestones at the end of our lives. Like little children with bruised knees, we run to the divine, crying for safety, for perfection, for a world where everything will be all right, where daddy will take care of everything.

Enough childishness. Bruised knees and blisters are part of growth. Sooner or later we have to dry our tears, grit our teeth, and shoulder the responsibility we have been given. And, as we sweat out our Earthly toil, we may begin to realize the gifts we have been given. There is no value in accomplishment without struggle, no value in possession without sacrifice, no value in love without loss, and no value in good without evil. Our metaphorical exile from Eden was no more a curse than the a young bird’s first push from its nest.

We have wept for far too long. It’s time to grow up.

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