Ten

Ten days before I leave. There is now a whole separate page with my Georgia/Armenia travel journal, in case anyone was curious. It's still incomplete, but one has to start somewhere.

In the context of my impending project, I've been thinking a lot about the big bad guy I used to inhabit, also known as mother Russia, or "the old country". I realize that I am going to places that were tyrannized, partnered with or heavily influenced by that entity for quite a while, and looking at them twenty years after the whole thing went kaput, but from a weird perspective: I am a briefly-baptized-but-in-denial-about-it Russian [ethnic] Jew (even if I hardly practice the religion, my birth certificate says "Jew" under nationality... what sense it makes, I do not know, but it certainly makes it hard to assume a new national identity) who only encountered four years of the old regime (on its way out, at that), witnessed two currency reforms, watched the feeble attempts at privatization and erm, democracy come, nearly bloom, and quickly wilt, and got the hell out before darling Putin really "tsared" himself up, only to end up in another hegemonic landscape, which is just as heavily despised. And here I am now. Visiting the periphery. Watching places like Georgia slowly but surely take Russian out of practice. I can't blame them (even it makes it harder for me to get around). I just wish, sometimes, that I didn't come from a despot-land.