SHUQI MOVIDA! Tatuli Chubabria
Erekle Antadze
My very first conversation with Janne went like this: -Hello, what’s your name? I’m Janne, the editress. -Hey I’m Erekle, what’s up? -Well, I’ve learned some Georgian! -Cool, what did you learn? She looks at the writings on her hand and says: -Shuqi Movida! (“the lights came back” – lack of a better translation) In the meantime, this phrase has been used a lot of times throughout the session, surprisingly not just as a joke, but rather when it was actually due. Lights went out three times in the Academy, twice at the hotel, once at the restaurant - making it 6 times OUT of 7 incidents in the past 5 days. And thus our lovely editress and foreign delegates learned the new phrase “Shuqi Tsavida” (the lights went out). When having a conversation of an hour with a Georgian person you always get a coverage of the “sweet” 90s when the country was going through a terrible economic crisis and turbulences. The narrative is always followed by stories about the Rose Revolution and all the benefits it brought with it – “Shuqi” 24/7, good roads, pretty fountains and new buildings. And that is what the tour in the House of Justice made clear as well. Students who missed the fieldtrip have also not seen a video which was documenting 90s in it (with imaes from the years of “Shuqi Tsavida”). The video was also portraying how good things are in present and will be even better in the future. It’s probably hard to convince people that lights are not a problem in Georgia considering the fact that they witnessed “Shuqi Tsavida” countless times, the thing is: we are starting to doubt the above mentioned fact as well. A fun fact on the other hand: in any given country in the world, Shuqi Tsavida and Shuqi Movida naturally happen every 12 or so hours, the sun goes down, the sun rises up… Though even in the depth of darkness, one type of light never fades away, and that is the light in our hearts – though that’s a petty excuse for having light problems in Batumi.
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