One part of this rest house was set aside for single men, another for single women, and a third part for whole families, who had apartments for their vacations. There was a restaurant where everyone ate, and there were game rooms, and reading-rooms, and music rooms. In one game room people were playing chess and checkers; in another a fast ping-pong game was going on. The tennis courts were crowded with players and spectators, and the stairs were lined with people climbing up from the beach or going down to swim. The hotel had its own boats and fishing equipment. Many of the people simply sat in chairs and looked off toward the sea. There were recuperating illnesses here, and there were the results of industrial accidents, sent down to get well in the warm air of the Black Sea. The average vacation was twenty-eight days, but in cases of illness the stay might be protracted for as long as the factory committee wished.

We were told that very many of the unions maintain rest houses on the sea for their members. This rest house could take about three hundred people at a time.

We drove a few miles down the coast to a sanatorium, a place that again looked like a giant hotel. And this was a state sanatorium for tuberculars and people troubled with other pulmonary difficulties. It was part hospital and part rest house. It was a very pleasant sunny place. The bed-ridden patients had their beds pulled out on balconies overlooking the gardens and the sea, and the ambulatory cases wandered about, listening to music and playing the inevitable chess, which is a game second only to soccer in importance.

The patients in this house were designated by the medical boards of their districts. This was a place of rest. When we came to it it seemed to be almost deserted, for all of the patients were in their beds. But while we were there a bell rang, and gradually they emerged to stroll about.

We were told that there were many hundreds of such sanatoriums on the edges of the sea, and driving along the coast road we could see a great many of them among the trees on the hillside slopes.

While we were driving, a heavy tropical rain began, and we went back to our hotel and finally got a couple of hours sleep. We were awakened by an unusual kind of music. There would be a passage of clarinet marmalade, played in unmistakable Benny Goodman style. Then the passage would stop, and a second clarinet would take up the same passage, but not in unmistakable Benny Goodman style. In a half doze it took us some time to realize what was happening in one of the rooms near us. Someone was listening to a passage of a Benny Goodman record, and then trying to imitate it, with only a modest amount of success. It went on and on, one passage repeated again and again and again. It is only when one sees the mess that is made of American swing music by most Europeans that one is able to realize how definite, how expert, and how unique American music is. Perhaps our musicians would have the same difficulty with the intricate rhythms and melodies of Georgian music. Certainly the Russians have plenty of trouble with ours, but they bring great enthusiasm to bear. We had not heard much American swing music in Tiflis, but in Batum there was a good deal. The hotels were filled with it, for many of the visitors had come down from Moscow where it is played more often.