I am walking across the planet. For more than two years, I have hopscotched over searing lava fields. I have crabbed sideways through alleys in vast migrant slums. Learn More. I have traversed sun-hammered deserts and scaled peaks in blinding snow.
I have swaggered down fashionable boulevards. What has all this plodding taught me? It has taught me one thing: Georgians are the most inept pedestrians in the world. Georgians are wonderful people. A Georgian would charm the aliens. A Georgian would make the two-headed little green men laugh with us, dance with us, drink Kakhetian wine with us, love us.
Unlessβof courseβour Georgian ambassador ventured to take the extraterrestrials for a stroll in his earthbound capital, Tbilisi. Then Homo sapiens would go extinct. We would be exterminated. Our enraged cosmic guests would vaporize us. In a few months, my 21,mile trek in the wake of the first humans who walked out of Africa will resume. Meanwhile, I have swapped continental horizons for micro-migrations: for short foot commutes.
To museums. To embassies. To cafes. Naturally, I bump into Georgians every day. Occasionally, they knock me down. At rush hour, when commuters pour from the subways and clog the narrow sidewalks, people insist on walking four or five abreast, forming impassable human chains. Other walkers meander, rudderlessly, while texting or daydreaming or perhaps while actually still asleep.
Men smoke in maddening gaggles, carelessly blocking strategic bottlenecks. No one budges a micron to accommodate old ladies or the lame or even Orthodox high clergy. It is chaos. It is anarchy. Georgians walk the way atoms vibrate in a vacuumβrandomly, without volition, in a manner that physicists describe as Brownian Movement: a form of walking nihilism.
