About eight months ago (dear god!), I wrote about my first trip to Gori, Stalin’s birthplace. On that trip, I was probably the coldest I’d ever been in my life, not because the temperature had dipped all that far below freezing, but because the wind sliced through my jacket and there was no heat in any building in town. Besso and I had wandered in and out of the Stalin museum, a café, and the Intourist hotel, but had not received refuge from the cold. We were wandering in an out of shells of places.
The Peace Corps chose Gori’s Intourist hotel as this year’s location for its Halloween party. I thought that Gori would be a fitting place to have a Halloween party, so I decided to go along with friends.
The colossal hotel building sits on the main square of town along with the WWII memorial, the eternal flame (which goes out when gas is cut) and the Stalin museum (which loyally houses Stalin’s death mask). Lone bulbs cradled in elaborate chandeliers illuminated our entrance. My camera flash exposed frescoed ceilings and walls. We climb to the first floor where rooms on the main hallway have been refurbished. Other halls branching off of the main corridor, which used to house guests, have been sealed off, as part of the “renovation.” Guests can also stay upstairs in unrenovated rooms for a lower price. In these rooms, there are six or seven beds in a room and no sheets on the ancient, stained mattresses. A few people were successful in obtaining bedding and pillows.
Another reason I wanted to go was I thought that only other Americans would get my costume: Gary from Team America Dressed as a Terrorist. I forgot that some of these people have been living the last year or two in forgotten villages in roadless regions of Georgia. I also forgot that such people living in such circumstances are a bit intolerable when they finally return to civilization: they drink until they’re sick… and then they drink some more; they have lots of sex with whomever… without any consideration of whom else might be in the room, or if there are sheets on the rusty bed or dusty floor; and when any conflicts arise, they just cry and cry. All in all, quite tedious.
It was so very, very cold, perhaps the coldest I’d been since the last time I was in Gori. For a large portion of the evening, I put off changing into my Gary costume and instead told people I was Nanouk of the North, complete with white puffy jacket with fake fur trim and a cold nose rub.
The service in the hotel was charmingly old-fashioned, in a Soviet kind of way. A few weeks earlier, management had promised to rent out every room to the Peace Corps and accept no other guests for that evening, and then bitterly argued for us to turn off the music at midnight – because they were other guests in the hotel. An old woman came into my room, the first on the hall, shortly after midnight to turn off the water heater (no more hot water for you!) and proceeded to scold me for having filled the trash can up with water from the tub. First of all, this is just standard operating procedure in a place where the water and electricity can be shut off at any time. Second of all, WHO THE HELL ARE YOU, LADY, and do you have any idea of what ghoulish sights await you in the next rooms?
