Extreme Day

06-20-05
Extreme Day


The foreigner’s choir, Okros Stumrebi (Golden Guest), traveled to western Georgia to take part in a music festival. Actually Josh Dankoff has been here for a week visiting, so we went early with Luarsab who had to do some research in a museum.

Highlights: we swam in the Black Sea at sunset, the gentle waves carrying us in a gentle sweep down the beach. As we started to swim back in, we were freaked out when we touched an underwater net.

We attended a 400 person supra where the Tamada shouted into the microphone toasts in Russian and Georgian. Six or more choirs were present and performed continuously.

On Saturday we sang chants in a 7th century monastery with our nun friends.

We met the French-Georgian heirs of the local noble family. The man was dressed in a traditional Georgian military outfit (chokha), but was hilariously complaining about how scared he was to open his car for fear that the alarm would not turn off (his beeper battery was dead). We made fun of his french accent for the rest of the trip.

We swam in a river, the current so strong that it threatened to pull us downstream when only waist deep. Drunk policemen watched us from the embankment, and applauded us when we sang a threepart song in the middle of the river. Later, we took pictures.

The Big Concert: a monstrosity as usual. 41 performers, we were to be 35th. Half of the performances were imported Russian stars, the other half groups of chocka’d men singing Soviet era folksongs. One dance troup, that was cool. But otherwise the sound systems were at ear-plugging volume, and the mix of music was so bad that the only way to sit through hours and hours of it was to get drunk on beers. So we did that. And we stuffed wadded napkins in our ears.

The three acts before the foreigner’s choir were Russian pop stars with arm-waving teenagers going crazy in the audience. When we got to the stage, the spotlights were so strong, and the acoustics so bad that we couldn’t see or hear anything. Our vibe was completely different as we sang folksongs in our foreign accents, the only group of mixed singers to perform the whole evening.



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Then the Extreme Day:

At the final Saturday night supra after the Big Concert, I found the Svanetian choir guys, and sang with them. It was a great musical experience but disastrous for my sobriety as we drank glass after glass.... that night we returned to our hosts at 4:30am. In the morning it took five tries to get out of bed at 9am, as it turned out that we were chanting in church and they were holding the service for our arrival. I didn’t find this out until we got into the car to leave.

At the service, I was the only bass and instead of a normal chantbook they only had a miniature version, the Georgian script barely decipherable from the musical notes.

After service we swam in a dirty river where a boiling hot springs deposited mineralized water into a cool river. Interesting mix.

Back at our hosts house, I took a shower, then we had a supra with three nuns, the three of us, our host family, and one other man. I was tamada, the first time in Georgian.

Then we jumped in the car, and drove five hours to Tbilisi over the central mountains. Five hours in Georgia is a long haul because of all the potholes, herds of cows, slow trucks to pass, and mountain switchbacks. I drove the whole way this time, Josh keeping me awake while Luarsab dozed in the back. Half way, we saw a group of young guys playing soccer. Pulling over to watch for a minute, Josh and I decided to play. I was looking ridiculous in white socks, dress shoes, soccer shorts, and nothing else, but I scored a goal. The sun set for the second half of our drive.

In Tbilisi by 11pm, we went straight to the baths, where we sauna’d, hot-cold tub’d, and got scrub massages from a young guy with a fresh knife wound on his lower back.

The day should have been over for me, but we went home, packed Josh’s stuff, and took him to the airport at 3:30am. I drove home and went to bed by 5am, ready to leave the world behind.