Culture

My mom's friend Nani has appointed herself my Tbilisi tour guide. Unfortunately, I have been frustrating her in her attempts to entertain/educate me because 1. I'm busy and 2. I have an aversion to most of the cultural enrichment she suggests, including museums, churches and opera, which she keeps bringing up, perhaps in an attempt to get me to say I was just kidding, I actually love it. (Not gonna happen.)

I do enjoy dance, though, and hoped she would come up with ballet tickets, but she called last week to invite me to a puppet show.

Um, OK.

Prior evidence suggests that Nani believes I am 12 years old (ie, insisting that my host family meet me at the corner to walk me home), so I was a little worried we were headed to the Georgian version of Disney on Ice.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the world-famous Tbilisi Marionette Theatre's production of Autumn of my Springtime, which was touching, entertaining and apparently very funny to people who understood what they were talking about. (They had an English translation but it was rather...shall we say... artistic.)

The most surprising thing was the audience, made up almost entirely by Tbilisi hipster types. On Saturday night. At a puppet show.