I'm not good at dealing with repetitive schedules, eventually I find myself growing a bit bored of the familiarity of things, and this doesn't take a lot of time to manifest itself into a bigger problem that really discourages me from things. I haven't felt this way in a long time though, which I have been really happy about as I've adventured around various locations. But I noticed that there are some things already here that are starting to slowly make me lose my sanity, one of which happens to be music in places. This isn't anything specific to Tbilisi, of course. This is a worldwide annoyance. There's a large mall near my apartment here in Tbilisi, and underground it's home to a wide range of beauty product stands and shops, as well as one very large grocery store. This has been the best grocery store I have stumbled across in the country so far, and with it being so close to home it makes perfect sense that it serves as the main place in which I buy my day-to-day essentials. Now, you my be wondering what these two things have in relation with each other? I have found myself frequently going to this mall in search of things, from new shoes to clothes, but mostly for food. And every single time, this Goodwill grocery store is playing the same three songs. Beyond driving me utterly insane hearing the same three songs every day almost, I'm frequently with the question of why and how we managed to reach this weird point in time where we feel we can't even go and buy fruit without some music booming into our heads?
I think for a lot of people at this point they're blocking this stuff out, I don't think most people really pay any attention to the music that is played within shops and cafes. But there's often the problem of them being so stupidly loud, that in a place where music simply is not needed at all, it tends to be the overwhelming noise in the space, which is awful when some of these spaces are designed for a social atmosphere. Should you be raising your voice over music in a cafe in order to talk to the person next to you? Even more strange when music is the forefront of something as simple as buying some bread.
In terms of locations I feel that this level of repetition doesn't bother me so much. Streets can have their mundane moments to them in which there's nothing interesting and passing through them frequently leads to wanting some more fun sights, but I don't really feel that here in Tbilisi. I certainly felt it more in Georgia, where it felt as if so few people ever really went outside and you'd be reduced to roaming through old, dusty roads with no path. Where the roads themselves are riddled with holes. Stray dogs running through for their next meals. Even Yerevan as a city had most of its space left untouched. Shops would have no street traffic whatsoever due to the disinterest people had in walking beyond the most central street of Northern Avenue. To roam down those streets was to see economic decay where really there shouldn't be any. A lonesome feeling would be felt walking through Yerevan often enough, simply due to the fact that it felt so empty. Tbilisi seems to be teeming with life in the right ways for the most part. Perhaps it's just the summer months giving more life to it, perhaps it's the universities nearby or the mall which brings people nearby. It could also just be that I'm now living in a more central space in which things don't truly quieten down even in the earlier hours of the morning.
I'm not one to enjoy constant motion and noise though, I do like my peace and quiet. To be left alone and given a space that is my own, void of the presence of others. I think there is a good balance of that here. And I think I see it more with a bad sleeping pattern, waking up at night and being awake throughout the morning, watching the sun come up and seeing how life begins in the day here. To watch it gives me some motivation in a way, some excitement to again get out and roam the streets, the same streets I've already roamed, and just see how people interact with this space.
I have been spending a lot of time looking on Google Maps these last few days, just researching places in and around the city to check out, not even in the sense of finding buildings to enter. Things like bookshops or cafes or museums. Just searching through the landscapes and seeing what the various districts are like. I find it interesting to see how each one looks, the ways in which time have impacted them. Either being the older districts near Old Tbilisi, or the heavily industrial cities an hour out of Tbilisi that were birthed by Stalin and in a weird state of stagnation, only really surviving based on the industry that somehow never did really collapse there. That area fascinates me a lot at the moment due to how stuck in time it looks, I found myself looking at videos of it online and seeing how different it was, reminding me a little of Armenia in some ways: the heavy industrialism, the decay, but somehow still going. With the time inside, I've been looking at how I want to capture these spaces here, what I want to do with all. Asking myself: is there something in particular I want to say? Documentary filmmaking is something I've wanted to do for a long time, and I think there's a lot of fun to be had running through these new and old streets in search of story. Going beyond the road and pathways and looking into the history of the buildings that stand by the side.
I don't think I did enough of this in Armenia. But perhaps much of this was due to how much of it did feel that emptiness. Though I still enjoyed roaming through the older apartment buildings, seeing the changes in the Armenian and Soviet architecture and how much of it remained. Rustic and with a few problems, but very much beautiful still. I like this side of things, showing places that are more lived-in, as opposed to overly tidy to the point where areas don't feel real.
I have been looking at these various environments in a different manner as of late as I've been shooting things with the drone more, and I should probably start taking more stills with it to post here on Hive given how much I talk about the drone in comparison to the regular cameras. I have a lot of videos I want to start sharing, at least.