Life in a picture book

I have read too many farm picture books in recent years. Pages full of happy wandering chickens, kittens under tractors, and smacking sheep. Even during the hours of reading and browsing in the squeaky colorful idylls, the discrepancy to YouTube videos like 'mass animal farming and its consequences' or 'calves being brutally separated from their mothers, click here' accompanied me as a stale aftertaste.

I believe, if you were to take a trip with kindergarten children to a normal fattening farm somewhere in Europe, you would probably have many little vegetarians afterwards. Of course, there are the small farms, the organic farmers, the chickens in the yard. But even there, the reality does not correspond to the standard of the picture books: more technology, more animals, more monoculture.

Georgia

is a single

picture book.

Our children trace the animal figures with their fingers and then look out the window - and see no difference. There are so many self-sufficient people here who keep cows, chickens, and pigs in their gardens. Cats roam around the entrances to houses, dogs guard the property. It's fun to discover all the animals. It makes many car rides easier. You could think that time stood still here in the 50s.

Unfortunately, not the entire backdrop corresponds to our farm book. I have never seen an alcoholic in a children's book. But here, yes. We are told that over 50 percent of men are addicted to booze. You can also just go to the village square and count the red noses, then you will also come to the percentage. Apparently, women do not drink excessively for cultural reasons. Or they do it secretly. At least that has one advantage for the female sex, this division of roles.

In a picture book idyll, financial concerns also have no place. Migration, suppression of minorities, and anyway - everyone smiles and is satisfied with their place in the world. That is not the case here. We still don't understand Georgian at all, we don't know the culture - but sometimes you can feel dissatisfaction and injustice like dust in the nose.

There are many stray dogs on the street. Our oldest calls them the 'free dogs'. We have been here for a few days now and already know the individual dogs in the village, know where they usually lie and with whom they have disputes. Sometimes one or the other follows us up to the front door in the hope of alms. However, if they are fed by tourists, they argue loudly among themselves for the loot, and as a human, you would not want to stand in the middle of it. Otherwise, they have been harmless so far and act as if they don't care about humans and cars.

And so we enjoy a bit of idyll - kittens in the basement, surrounded by smacking cows and free dogs, and we are glad that we don't have to get up early in the morning to milk them.

And while we consciously live in this strange world, others try to escape it. The two teenage boys who came from the big city to spend their summer vacation with their grandmother in the countryside are obviously not interested in farm idyll. When we need to use the toilet, we pass by a constantly flickering screen on which shooting is happening, American teenagers are betting, and Minecraft characters are negotiating. They want to escape the unreal idyll and hide in a virtual world - which is just as deceptive as the real one.