Stuart Gelzer first visited Georgia in the Cold War 1970s and has been back repeatedly over a span of more than thirty-five years. Much of SIX REASONS covers the period when he was living and studying language and music intensively in Georgia in the 1990s, the critical decade in which Georgians saw their lives uprooted as they staggered into the post-Soviet world. Gelzer was far from an anonymous reporter gliding unobserved through modern Georgian life. As a member of Trio Kavkasia—quasi-celebrities in a country that takes its traditional music very seriously—he played a part in the early popularization of Georgian folk music abroad. Rather than a work of reportage, therefore, SIX REASONS TO TRAVEL is the highly subjective, often irreverent, unexpectedly comical account of what happened to him along the way.