This one is a kiss-off piece of mine for the time being, but it will be continued in the next issue of GJ. Not enough room in one article! I would love to remind those who are from various foreign countries, either visiting or working in Georgia in certain missions or browsing the Internet in pursuit of some information about Georgia, that we Georgians have many funny habits which they need to take into consideration while they have to do with this nation. Some of those habits are so nasty that I am starting hating myself when I imagine them being part of my manners and character. By the way, these tongue-in-cheek, but seriously intended hints and tips need to be heeded by my wonderful compatriots too. So, heads up, my friends!
1. We love making noise in public places, singing and speaking loudly, often yelling for no special reason as if the world is exclusively ours and nobody else’s.
2. The picnic habits we have are awful, leaving trash after a party anywhere we go. You can see garbage in any place of recreation – and not only – no matter how civilized our picnickers think they are. There are no cultured picnickers here!
3. Our parks, especially the space in front of benches are strewn with sunflower husk. I wish people could eat the sunflower with husks no matter how hard it is for chewing and digestion. In a word, you can carpet this country with the remains of the consumed quantity of sunflower.
4. Arbitrary dumping of stubbed-out cigarettes or even burning butts is part of our publicly expressed freedom to treat this land as we wish. Just go ahead and mistreat it – punishment will not ensue!
5. Aggressive driving is a must in this country – you better beware of those aggressors of both sexes at the wheel in our streets and roads. If not, you are in trouble – run over guaranteed! Actually, very handy for planned suicide!
6. Wedding party goers find it their obligation to hoot and drive like crazy as if this is their unalienable right, guaranteed by the constitution. Those wedding speeds and cacophony could be made a subject of psychological research – there definitely goes something wrong in their heads at that moment of matrimonial exaltation.
7. Weird parking is simply our hobby – people driving those sophisticated cars of any make cannot learn the ways of correct parking in a big city. I don’t know if there is any way at all to reach our unbridled and terribly unsophisticated drivers to teach those elementary rules of parking. You can see a parked car right in the middle of the road or in a drive way just in front of a gate or an arch through which vehicles come and go at any second of the day.
8. Cheating in schools is so egregiously rampant and so flagrantly regular that the habit makes the kids peep into the neighbor’s note-book automatically as if this is the most natural and rightful academic habit. They cheat even if they do not need the outside help, their eyes slanting towards the neighbor’s territory in a mechanical movement. Our kids have this habit in blood. Should be something strongly persisting since time immemorial.
9. Running water taps is the disease we will never get rid of, especially in the yards that are not privately owned by one particular owner. Taps which belong to public are in round-a-clock usage and usually out of order. Who is paying for the wasted water, I wonder.
10. People are using public water for washing their cars and for anything else they might have a need of doing. Drinking water is used for an industrial purpose as if there is no limit of it in the country. Shall we ever understand that each drop of the drinking water costs money and tons of it cost more? Why is it so difficult to control water consumption?
Look for more in the next issue