“It will be a fun team building experience” they said, but little did we know what we were in for. We’ve booked a guided tour with a company called “Brutal Tours” which specializes in showing unseen parts of Tbilisi. Sort of like an off-the-beaten-path theme. It’s our contingent meeting where all the Swedish colleagues in the Mission come together for a weekend of fun and learning. Our Sunday afternoon tour takes us to old monuments and building structures, ending at some Soviet housing blocks constructed on a hillside and connected together by a dodgy (love that word!) suspended foot bridge (or sky bridge if you’re in an optimistic mood).
The buildings look quite impressive from the ground but they’re extremely dilapidated and I feel absolutely no jealousy towards the people living there. Signs of life are indicated by laundry hanging out of the windows. The apartment blocks used to house factory workers, and they never get the prime real estate, much less during the Soviet era. It's clear that no maintenance has been done since. This could be a great place to film a horror movie, or a zombie-apocalypse-all-hell-breaks-lose kind of movie. And here we are – oh yippie!
Our guide tells us that we’re gonna take the only elevator to the 14th floor and stroll across the bridge. He tells us that the elevator toll attendant (yes you have to pay to use the elevator) is a women who used to be a sniper during the Abkhazian war in the 1990s. She was so good that there was a 50,000usd prize on hear head we're told. So after her career change she now operates the elevator with similar precision from her control room, wearing slippers.
She herds the first batch of five of us into the elevator and we make it to the 14th floor, feeling a big queasy when looking down from the foot bridge swaying rather aggressively in the wind. We wait for our colleagues to come up in two following batches. And we wait! A resident lady, dressed in high heels, huffs when she gives up waiting for the elevator, “It’s stuck again!?” and reverts to using the stairs. What's worse than having to take the stairs? Getting stuck in the elevator!! Five colleagues have drawn the ultimate prize and are trapped, in a Soviet hell-hole-elevator (including the colleague who has a personal policy to not get into Georgian elevators but he succumbed to our peer pressure)!!
The rest of us on the outside kick into crisis management mode and we call the emergency service. The sniper-come-elevator-lady reverts to trying to unjam the elevator by pushing and kicking the doors, petrifying those trapped inside. “Please tell her to stop - she's rocking the elevator!” The building has become even more eerie, as if that were possible. It’s like some Soviet ghost lurking in the shadows decided to teach the trespassing Swedes a lesson.
The emergency service finally shows up armed with a wire hangar (wtf!?) and they struggle to figure out how to extract our friends. They smell of strong liquor (very comforting) but assure us not to worry. They finally get ahold of “the elevator master” who guides them over the phone and finally, after 45 minutes, the doors open and our five trapped Swedes emerge. I don’t think we’ve hugged this much ever. If this was meant to be a team building exercise it’s a total success. Thank you Brutal Tours, but your methods might just be a bit too brutal.
Hi Jessica. Finally had time to check this out. I can say, as a 'participant' in the brutal tour, that you totally nailed the elevator adventure. Kudos and keep on truckin' :-)