A world of opportunity

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While in France, we were stuck (of course) with French TV. This is not so bad: they have game shows, and variety shows, and talk shows, and comedies, and dramas.

 

 

 

Since neither my nor Partner’s French is completely fluent, however, we pretty much stuck to CNN.

 

 

 

The news was – odd. They do a strange mélange overseas: American stories (GIANT EYEBALL FOUND ON FLORIDA BEACH!) to global-interest stories (the saxophone industry in Taiwan, for example).

 

 

 

(I’m not kidding. They did a story on the saxophone industry in Taiwan. We saw it at least six times, on six different days.)

 

 

 

All this is fine. But what really captured my attention were the commercials.

 

 

 

No more commercials for The Scooter Store or the Jitterbug! These were commercials for countries.

 

 

 

For example: every ten minutes (it seemed), CNN / France showed an edited version of this video, which portrays “the unforgettable energy of freedom” in the nation of Georgia. Behold!:

 

 

 

 

 

 

(I like the music, and the dancing. I was not, however, aware that there were Georgian Ninjas.)

 

 

 

Speaking of former USSR republics, here’s Azerbaijan:

 

 

 

 

 

Lots of factories and oil wells and fast cars, and a decent-looking restaurant. Okay! I will definitely build my saccharin factory there!

 

 

 

Many other countries were represented. There was a Taiwanese ad with a nice-looking man doing Chinese calligraphy with a mop. There was Kazakhstan (not so memorable). There was Morocco (all factories and factory workers, but with a nice Moroccan-music background). There was Montenegro (part tourism, part business).

 

 

 

But I will leave you with my very favorite, for eastern Poland.

 

 

 

And I ask you: why haven’t you invested in eastern Poland?

 

 

 

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Tbilisi

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In the summer of 1978, I flew Aeroflot from Leningrad to Tbilisi. (On my first Aeroflot journey, from Copenhagen to Leningrad, I'd turned on the air-conditioner vent above my head, and the air that came out was blue.)

En route, I glanced out the airplane window, and I saw the Caucasus Mountains from above.

They are the mountains of your dreams, craggy and snow-covered and imperious. They are the ideal mountains lurking in the subconscious of every person of European extraction, I think. They are our heritage.

Tbilisi is the capital of the Republic of Georgia. In 1978, it was still the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic, but it was very foreign, very un-Russian. I realized quickly why 19th-century ethnographers had decided that “Caucasian” was the ideal European type. The men are massive and swarthy and handsome; the women are dark-eyed and seductively beautiful. Everyone smoulders.

The culture is warm and welcoming and full of swagger. Waiting for a city bus one day, a huge handsome Georgian approached me. “Cuban?” he asked me. It turned out there'd been a Cuban foreign-exchange group in town recently, and he assumed I was part of it. (Not many foreigners came to the USSR in those days.) It was, children, the only time in my life I have ever been taken for a Cuban.

One radiant evening I was in a Tbilisi bakery, buying a fruit-and-goat-cheese pastry, when I saw a pale older woman clutching her parcel of bread and staring at me. Finally she approached me. “Bitte,” she said, “sprechen Sie Deutsch?”

“Ein bischen,” said I, lying bravely. “Ich bin Amerikaner. Sie sind Deutsch?”

She shook her head. “Nein. Polnisch.”

How in the hell did a Polish woman get to Tbilisi? “Meine Mutter ist halb polnisch,” I said, trying to be conversational and grammatical at the same time.

She shook her head, thinking I'd misunderstood. “Nein, nein,” she said. “Ich bin polnisch.”

Finally, after a few minutes, I got her story. Her husband had been a German soldier taken prisoner by the Soviets during World War II; after the war he resettled in the USSR, and he'd brought his wife to Tbilisi.

And then he'd died.

And she was left all alone, stranded, far away from her family.

The memory still haunts me a bit. I hope she managed to live to see her home – in Germany? in Poland? again.

But, from what I could see, there are worse places to live your life than Tbilisi.

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