Goblin kings of Alsace

Ribeauville

There seems to be no shortage of beautiful villages in the world and that’s certainly true for the Alsatian region of France. Snuggled between the Rhine River and the Vosges Mountains, Alsace is replete with vineyards and flecked with fairy-tale villages that are sure to leave your mind blown and send you to a time filled with knights, princesses, goblin kings, and dancing magic babies.

The Vosges themselves are a series of low lying mountains that are something of a spur off of the Alps, offering Southern France something of a defense line against Germany. They're lined with villages, vinyards, and castles and are one of the leading rivals in the most-romantic-places in the world category. They were of huge strategic importance, with France always pushing to the Rhine for its border control and Germany always pushing to the mountains, making the region a beautiful and unique mix of German and French culture, with Colmar and Strasbourg as the two main regional capitals.

Outside Riquewihr

Every bit of land in the hillsides are filled with vineyards as far as the eye can see. For any wine lover, this place is a kind of heaven, the home of some of the best Rieslings, Muscats, and Gewurztraminers the world over. If you like your wine white and sweet, and your villages plucked from Disney tales and medieval chansons, then the Rhine is for you. There are many ways to see Alsace. The best and most highly recommended would be by foot – this would give you the best and most satisfactory effect seeing the villages and walking through the timeless series of grape plantations. We wanted still another half-day to see Strasbourg, so driving was our method – for the short on time, this is the only real way to see all those places.

Ribeauville

For those who have a full day to spare though, I’d start with the earliest train to Colmar and first a trek to Ribeauville, the furthest one to the north (about a 3-hour hike, according to Google). Then to Riquewihr, Kaysersberg, Eguisheim, and back up to Colmar. This whole trek would be 9 hours long, but mostly level, as you’d follow the base of the range. I would even suggest an overnight in one or two of the villages (depending on how much you like your wine), to be fully experienced as a medieval wandering bard. However, as I said, we didn’t get the magic of walking, but followed relatively the same route via car. Ribeauville

Colorful buildings lined the street

First on our plate was Ribeauville. We started out pulling the short end of the stick regarding weather. It was cold, with overcast clouds hanging low, threatening to break apart into showers all day long. It left the mountains mostly in a miserable, grey mist and affected us the most at Ribeauville, where, due to time and weather, we opted not to see the castle overlooking the village. The town comes from before the 8th century, when overseeing it passed from the Bishops of Basel to a local noble family, the Rappolsteins. The Lord Rappolstein was the King of the Minstrels of Alsace and received protection money from the wandering bards - a kind of musical mafia for the winelands. The village serves as the perfect gateway into Alsatian culture. It has a touristic street, but one gets the feel that the town doesn’t singularly exist for the touristic draw. Which is true, as it’s got both a healthy trade from viticulture and also from a nearby Sony manufacturing plant. Which means, people are actually living in those amazing little Goldilocks houses! In the immediate vicinity, and seen everywhere from the village, is the Chateau de Saint-Ulrich, sitting up on top of the closest hill. This was the main fortification of the regional lord was even used by the Holy Roman Emperor, Henry V, as he sought to flex his might on the other domains. On another nearby hill, there’s the Chateau du Giersberg, which is said to be an arrow shot away. Riquewihr

This village can’t be missed and is the true jewel of Alsace. It has the most consistent historical architecture of all the towns in the area, as it was also the least damaged from World War II. A high wall surrounds it and the interior – both the touristic and residential areas – is crammed full of beautiful half-timbered houses. With the most limited time for a hike, one could easily do a Colmar-Riquewihr loop, as it’s also one of the closest villages.

the main street of Riquewihr

The tourist train seemed to have landed when we were at Riquewihr. Though Ribeauville had been pretty sleepy and most shops closed even at 10 am, Riquewihr was already alive and buzzing by around 11. It seems their primary focus is on tourism, so they’re quite the readiest to handle the crowds.

Riquewihr town walls

Eguisheim Then we rolled into Eguisheim, which was as empty as a ghost town – all the shops were closed and seemed even to be boarded up. What horrible mishap did this town have to seem to have fallen off the tourist trek, even while being perhaps the most beautiful of the three?

Eguisheim town square

Like Riquewihr, it was incredibly well-preserved – a true circular wall wrapped all the way around the town, and instead of the focus being on just one main street, all the streets were beautiful, winding and carving in random directions like a labyrinth or spider web, all ending in the main town square with an old fountain that, at the time we were there, was silent and not running, and a castle tied into a medieval knot with a church. We really wanted to stay longer here, but everything was literally closed at noon! And being that it was too cold to linger around the main square and perhaps just buy a bottle of wine and do some street drinking, the chill got the better of us and sent us on our way.

A side street in Eguisheim

Our drive ended in Colmar, the queen city of Alsace, which I'll leave for next week as it's plenty rich in sites and wonder for its own blog.

#touristicsites

How I Met Her

Playing years ago at Amarcord

This week I was a bit late in posting up the usual blog, but I've a reason. This week today marks the 4th year of knowing the love of my life, and in that honor, here's an updated version of a blog I posted a long time ago about the way we met. My life has been better ever since.

We met four years ago in a smoky bar. To be honest, all bars in Tbilisi were smoky back then, but this was a special smoky bar, since it served as my third place, my home away from home, and it was also run by the now coming-to-fame artist Gagosh, who had his scrawlings all over the walls. Antique dining and sitting chairs, all on the verge of collapse, lined Soviet sewing tables, which were artfully painted and had famous quotes written all over them, filling up the small two rooms of the place.

On the wall were any number of movie posters or paintings by the owner of the place--the style of the paintings looked like they were drawn by a 12 year-old using substantial amounts of LSD--they were scrawlings with possibly clever meanings, or paintings with meanings too abstract for the non-acid fried mind. There was an old Soviet bed in one room, where when you sat you sank nearly to the floor, as the springs held up like a hammock.

My favorite thing about the place was the toilet. The lid of the toilet tank had been removed, revealing three rubber duckies making their rounds up and down. On the walls there were cut out pictures of different movie scenes that featured toilets, and of course, this one:

The place was, in a word, eclectic, and even the concept was eclectic. Gagosh was never able to figure out what he wanted to do with it. Did he want it to be a cafe? A coffee shop? A bar? He kept transitioning through these ideas like a wind transitioning through mountainous landscapes. It would be the eventual death knell of the place--that and the underground layer becoming ridiculously hot and stuffy during the summer months. Now, mostly because of the rising rent demanded by the landlord, it stands empty, even years later, with only the remnants of the bar that was.

I used to play accordion there, nearly every week. I had started there on Thursday nights, but then moved to Friday or Saturday nights. I didn't play for money, just for beer and whiskey, the two things I'd be spending most of my money on on weekends anyway. It was great. Some people would regularly come to see me and occasionally there were some new faces, but as the place was small I rarely had over ten people in there. It was intimate, casual, and it didn't matter that I wasn't really good at playing accordion or singing--I could fine tune my skills and get used to playing in front of people. And at least, for one night out of the week, I could feel special, I could leave behind my sorrows, my thoughts of what I really was--a wannabe writer, an English teacher, a traveling vagabond, that is, anything but a success. But one night a week, one night every two, I could abandon that wreck of a being which I had become and pretend to be something else. I could pretend to be this cool underground artist, that only the lucky few knew about, playing and singing like Dionysius, and for cheap, able to extend my alcohol infused trip into the unknown states of mind in this far off land.

At Amarcord

Back when I was in Peace Corps, I had met this girl named Salome, who I later became friends with. She found me out from my rantings on this very blog and learned that I was trying to get Internet access set up at the youth center, so the local youth could have a free place to go and use the Internet--I never told her that, instead of using it for educational purposes, they mainly just sat there flipping through pictures on odnoklassniki, which was like a Russian Facebook, but since everyone was doing that there, I assumed she knew--she helped me get some funding to set it all up, and a couple of months of cash to keep the service going through a while. The only other Internet access in the village was at an Internet cafe on the other side, or from USB dongles that only the wealthy could afford. Salome and I maintained contact through the years, and she became a somewhat regular at my shows.

Then one show, Salome was quite late, and none of my other usual crowd were there on-time, and that's when I saw a girl I had never seen before. She was wearing a flowery scarf--April always has unexpected weather here anyway, so that was nothing strange--and her majestic cheekbones stood like the Temple of Artemis--those cheekbones were the first details of her face I fell in love with, even before I spoke to her.

Together

At first she was in the back room, and I only gave her a few glances, always newly shy around beautiful women I didn't know. I looked at her from the corner of my eye each time I went up to get a beer, and when she moved to the main room after I started to perform, I asked her her name. "Teo," she said. She even had a name that meant "goddess"! And then I found out she was a friend of Salome's, waiting for the latecomer, though usually Salome was a punctual person. But it was good that she was late this time, since I got to talk to Teo.

As the night progressed, after Salome and others arrived, I took all my breaks at their table, attempting to learn a little more and a little more about her with each rest. Indeed, being near her was a relief--a relief from everything, from the great energy it takes playing accordion, from that ever growing darkness of the reality of my existence. Yes, she was a goddess all right, with the power of only her voice, her whisper, to soothe my aching soul and set my heart flying to the stars.

The night ended with my usual habit of drinking too much free booze and talking in drunken rants about Dostoevsky and existentialism--habits that typically work pretty fast in scaring off the exceptionally beautiful girls.

But not this one.

She sat at my side all night, as we traversed Tbilisi, and as I kept on about the darkness, about the decadence of modern society, about people preferring to buy iPhones rather than toilets, and Mercedes rather than beds. It wasn't just her love for Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen that immediately drew me, but also her profession of an equally undying love for the ramblings of Dostoevsky.

After that night, and forever after, I was hers. We've had our troubles, of course, like any couple, but I never have real focus or light except when I'm near her.

One year and some later. And so it goes.

a Georgian violence of vogue in Prague

the show begins

Georgia is on their way to ushering in a new era for her citizens as they are—as I post this—entering into a new visa-free regime program with the European Union. But they’ve already been coming in in all sorts of different spheres, like in fashion.

A month doesn’t go by where I don't see another article about Georgian fashion designers breaking into the market, whether it's in Vogue magazine, W, or People. Not that I read any of those, I write this only because that’s what I see on Facebook and in fashion, I casually let Facebook memes control my reality. But those articles are out there, nearly all of them titled “Georgia On My Fashion Mind” or some other derivation of the song-title-that-will-never-die. There’s Demna Gvasalia, who recently won a CFDA award, and Avtandil, who apart from being the local oligarchs’ fashion weapon of choice, also has clothing lines on sale across the globe.

baggy is big

Being in such a position as I am, I found my way to a runway walk in the Prague Fashion Week, which featured Irakli Rusadze’s work. Rusadze got a young start making clothes at 13 and debuted at the Georgian Fashion Week in 2010. Since then, he's found his own brand Situationist, which caught some fame when Bella Hadid wore one of his outfits.

Most of his pieces seemed to revolve around baggy coats that were admittedly pretty sharp. A huge step up from the usual Tbilisi fair of puffy ski jackets passed on as prima donna wear anyway. The models wore nothing but the clothes, so I wondered if that’s how Rusadze envisioned women wearing his designs.

red until the start

I didn’t know quite what to expect from the show. We were escorted up an elevator by a skinny fashionista wearing all black, with a black faux-fur cape, and a headset like Madonna might wear at a concert. He brought us up to the third floor of the Kotva building in downtown Prague, which had been re-purposed for this fashion extravaganza, with floors of white light, white walls, and a glowing white desk where they were taking people’s tickets. We had a VIP pass though, so our caped crusader brought us right out to the runway and to our seats. Everything in the actual event space was glowing red, waiting for the event to start.

Hunger is the title of my upcoming book

The runways wove around like a freshly done spaghetti noodle, which is to say, fittingly like a letter in the Georgian alphabet. A single row of stools were on either side, where sat buyers, reporters, and other randomly invited guests like yours truly. We sat down on our stools and I got to have a look at what was happening around me.

people waiting, people walking

People fell into a couple of categories. There were a lot of pretty normal looking people just milling about. I guessed those were mostly journalists or random guests. Then there were people with crazy hair and platform shoes, busy taking hundreds of selfies of themselves to post on their Instagram accounts. I’m going to assume those were bloggers. And then finally, the people in truly expensive clothes that had the sort of skeletal, drawn appearance of the late David Bowie, though with dead, disinterested eyes, eyes that had seen too many atrocities on the bodies of the ill-fitted. Those must have been the buyers.

useful gown for picnics

The red turned to white. The people took their seats. A droning thump of house began. “Relax,” I told myself. The show was about to begin.

I didn’t really know what to expect. Secretly I was hoping for a bunch of Irina Shayk lookalikes wearing only pants. But then what happened was incredible. Something entirely almost not noteworthy. There were moving, robotic mannequins wearing clothes, rolled on out one after the other. Each woman looked gaunt and starved, stomping across the floor as though their next morsel of food depended on it. Their lifeless eyes what becomes of one after years of starvation, drugs, and being stared at by numbers of people until everything becomes a numb sensation, until you become a numb sensation yourself.

They are used as a mannequin is used, it really made no difference if their skin was plastic or flesh.

hospital mode

Piece after piece came about, hanging loosely as any clothes must on such models. What was exceptionally striking was how almost all of the models looked as though they were cast from the same mold, curious clones of an original idea of womanhood.

And then my thought, of how at least I’m told this is the idealization of the woman’s body.

rethinking career choices

It was my first fashion show, so of course I would be shocked by this. But looking around, no one else was. These all were fashion show veterans. They’ve been to so many of these that no doubt they were completely desensitized by the affair. They knew these models weren’t human, they were just models. They didn’t need to sympathize with Bulimia Patient No. 3 or Anorexia Patient No. 12. To them it was all a normalized affair, as it would have been to an SS escorting their own models along for the end of line process. That is possibly an exaggeration, but the process if very much the same.

Eliminate the human standard at any point and we humans can do true wonders to each other. But then, situation normal. The lights dimmed, the music stopped, the cell phones were out and selfies renewed. The model humans and their rags were forgotten in the oncoming deluge of self-obsession, which too, was a normal thing.

#fashion #rantsandraves