Christmas for Me

Christmas for Georgia is January 7th (can't say that too many times), but 8 of us volunteers got together at an expat's house to have a Christmas party in a land of bacon cheeseburgers and wireless internet-- those Americans who live here and get paid have a much different standard of living than the rest of us-- and so I'm usurping my sitemate's laptop to take ten seconds and say Merry Christmas! I didn't end up spending it in my room alone listening to Christmas carols... rather, we had hot cocoa, played Scattergories, and watched It's a Wonderful Life. And it's snowing! Rather perfect, minus the whole 8000 miles away from friends and family thing.

But nay! A Christmas blog posting is not the time for whining. It is the time for being thankful that I'm still in the Peace Corps, that I got a cushy assignment that makes it more likely that I'll be here for the whole two years, that I'm in the 21st century Peace Corps and can actually communicate with people I miss, that my Georgian language acquisition is coming along, that that the other people in Peace Corps are not the pot-smoking non-bathing hippies I thought they'd be, and that I'm not dead. You can't be too thankful for not being dead.

Merry Christmas!

A lesson in awkward

I figured that maybe I could stay away from the internet cafe today because I was attending a student's birthday supra, but apparently that plan failed. Anyway, why a student's birthday supra is awkward:

1) All supras are awkward. For birthday's especially, when it's a 30-person eatfest with sporadic, embarrassing (for me, they're really good at it) dancing, and generally sitting around socializing in a language that I barely know for 5 hours or so. Just when you think it's wrapping up, more food comes out. And let's add to the awkardness: you have to make a toast to drink your wine every time, so unless you want your glass to sit there full the entire time, you've gotta get the table's attention and toast something. In Georgian. Usually peace, friendship, the dead, parents, children, siblings, God, sweet memories, something like that.

2) Any supra is awkward when you are 15 years old, all your friends are 15 years old, and you invite your teacher. Isn't that a universal truth?

I guess that's it, but that's enough. In better news, there's three days of school left for me before I leave for Turkey! Our PC director gave us Monday off for Christmas even though Georgian Christmas isn't for a couple weeks, and I really appreciate that because other I would have been teaching on December 25th, a Monday no less.

A lonely little Christmas

I've decided that it was better when my host family was unaware that Western Christmas is coming up on Monday. I'd rather they have ignored it and waited til January 7th to involve me in their Christmas than what the current situation is, where they feel bad that I'm not with my family for Christmas and they're buying me presents and a Christmas tree. It just feels more lame when it's a regular Monday for everyone else, and there I am with a 3-foot fake Christmas tree up in my bedroom, pretending to be moved by the Yuletide spirit.

The moral of this post: treasure your gaudy decorations! Your 24 hour Christmas radio! Your reruns of classic Christmas movies! Your stressed last-minute run to Wal-Mart because you forgot to buy presents!

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone...

Actually, I can't end with that. I despise that song. Let's try a different one.

Fergilicious definicious, make them boys go crazy.

Adventures in food

There's probably a few things I could write under this category, and I feel like I've thought of more things than I'll list here and then forgotten them, thus cementing this blog as irrelevant. Good for me.

1) Sunday was Barbroba, the festival of St. Barbara, during which it's customary to make lobiani, a delicious bread-and-beans triangle thingie, kind of like the bread-and-cheese khachapuri but stuffed with beans instead of cheese. Protein!

2) I accidentally made 20 pounds of fried rice for a 20-person Christmas party on Saturday. Apparently, that's too much.

3) In a more generalized observation, I recently wrote for the benefit of the G7s (incoming volunteers) that they should be prepared for a low variety of food. It's not really because Georgian food isn't varied-- how much American food can you actually list?-- but the thing is that every day, you eat Georgian food. They ask me what we eat in America, and I can't even begin to list it because we eat Italian food and Mexican food and Chinese food and Japanese food and Indian food et cetera, to the extent that we get sick of any of the above if we have them too many times in one week. Here, if you make borscht on Tuesday, you will eat it three times a day until it's gone, which can be half a week later. I can't really put my finger on it, but it doesn't bother the Georgians any, so they must have a completely different outlook on food than Americans do.

This is also manifested in the offerings at local restaurants, namely that every restaurant serves the exact same thing with little variation except in quality. I didn't really realize how strange I found that until I saw an ad in an American newspaper that one of the other volunteers had, and it was for a restaurant that featured crab and Gouda cheese soup. "Mmm," I thought, "that might be good." And it occurred to me that despite the plethora of available ingredients, there's almost no food experimentation going on in the restaurants or at home. There was a cooking show on TV that showed a woman putting cheese in eggs, and my host mother was fascinated. I was thinking, "Eggs and cheese have been around as long as Georgians have. You never thought of that?" Maybe the thinking is that if the food was good enough for ancient Georgians, why mess with it? Maybe the thinking is completely different and is outside my scope of understanding because I'm from a different cultural background. Politically correct response: What a fascinating display of cultural variance. Instinctive response: Why are they so resistant to change???

Don't quote me on that.

10 extra minutes online

So I can write a blog entry! Or I can begin a blog entry and then watch as my time ends before I can post it. Either way.

What to update about? Well, I've posted 5000 pictures to Facebook, so that's mildly interesting. There's only 2 weeks left of school til I leave for Turkey, which is even more interesting. I'm making fried rice for a Christmas party this weekend, that's sort of interesting.

Actually, I changed my mind. There's not much interesting going on today. I'm sure I'll think of something after I post this...

Thoughts of Train

All in all, quite the irritating weekend continues. First, to explain the title: I was on the dear, sweet, nonthreatening (unlike certain other modes of transportation) train and then it failed me. It took us 4 hours to go 50 miles, and at that point I realized that I was going to miss the birthday party I was heading in for, so I got off at a random stop and took various other public transports back to site. Boo!

The second irritating thing is going on as I write this. Since I had plenty of spare time last night to resize digital pictures so I could upload them, I thought I'd do that today. This connection is so slow that it times out trying to load a tiny little 40KB picture. And it's entirely because the guy running the place (oh, and there's no one else here other than him to share the bandwidth with) is playing some high-bandwidth video game. Now let's see, who should get the bandwidth, that guy who's being paid to be here, or the person who's paying to be here? Hmm, hmm, what a conundrum. I've been wishing for his computer to be unplugged for the last hour. I foresee a total 2 hour progress of uploading about five pictures. Yay for me. They're here http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113319&l=50f48&id=813973 , if you're interested.

I'll be in Tbilisi next weekend for some meetings, maybe I'll upload a gazillion pictures then.

I'm a big fan of borscht

We had it for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I've decided that it's unequivocally delicious, as long as you don't let them put mayonnaise on it. Is there any nutrition in cabbage? I hope so... that's about the only vegetable around these days, other than carrots. And beets, I guess.

We're getting toward the end of the semester here, time for completely subjective and abstract grading (which I'm leaving for my counterpart, because I think it would drive me insane... of course, the end of the semester means more tests coming up which means more cheating, so that'll drive me insane anyway). Did I already mention my anti-cheating policy? It's something along the lines of writing multiple versions of tests, and taking tests from students who cheat-- that's considered harsh here, so I have to tread lightly... though I could write a quiz and then take those away, there's no one who will let me take their tests away, since parents would storm the school in indignation, so my intent is to tell the students that I'll take their tests away like I took their quizzes away and then see if they believe me.

Oh, and BBC suddenly ended up on my house's TV lineup! I don't know how or why it happened, but I watched 20 minutes of sheer joy yesterday in the form of a special documentary on malaria in Malawi. The joy being from the English of course.

We listened to "Jingle Bell Rock" about 30 times in the 10th grade classes the other day. While the effect wore off after the first 15, for the first few times I heard it, I began to really miss Christmas. Other than the fact that Christmas here is on January 7th rather than December 25th, there's some other key differences: firstly, I have heard nary a note of Christmas music, and I'm more accustomed to 24 hour Christmas radio by now, or even Mom's Kenny G, Garth Brooks, Celine Dion, and Mariah Carey Christmas CDs. No red and green decorations, no wild commercialism (YES, I MISS THAT TOO), no Santa except in textbooks... at least there's an ex-pat Christmas party to go to next weekend, complete with Turkey... and then I'll be in Turkey! I can't tell you how amused my host sister was when she found out turkey and Turkey (indauri and turketi, in Georgian) are the same word in English.

Despite the extra half hour I tacked on to my internet time, I'm out already. I keep saying that some time I'll post something significant, but maybe this blog will gain its significance from being the most trivial, not-moving journal in the history of Peace Corps. I'll take any distinction, no matter how dubious.

Sunday school

We had school today. While I resent that, it was mitigated by the fact that almost no one showed up and we got to leave 2 hours early. I can't say that if I were in the US, I would have gone to school, so I don't hold it against the students. I'll state publicly that I do hold it against the teachers who didn't go, since I had to race back home after a funeral in my training village to be able to make it to school yesterday, while most teachers live within 20 minutes' walking distance. Perhaps this is irrational of me, especially since everyone knew in advance that nobody would be there. I stick by my irrationality.

Finally, I have work to do! Other than cranking up the communicative activities in class (which about doubles the planning time), we had an all-volunteer meeting last weekend in Tbilisi where all the secondary projects were handed down to G6s, so now I have responsiblities! Yay! My favorite responsiblity is as Director of the Writing Olympics in Georgia, which doesn't entail as much stress and work as director of GLOW or Eco Camp, I don't think, but seeing as my school wants the English department to put on Fiddler on the Roof next spring, and they want to see me take Georgian dance lessons, and I'm on the application committee for GLOW, and I'll be contributing content to the Alternative Handbook, and running a couple sessions for Teacher Training... I think I'm set for now.

I saw two death events in Georgia recently: a funeral and a tslis tavi ("year's beginning"). The funeral is pretty self-explanatory, though there's one difference that shows up at both events: Georgians mourn loudly, wailing and yelling at their dead relatives. It's very painful to hear, but it's a little easier when you see some hints that it's partially out of ritual that they do this; the grief is genuine, of course, but it seems to be part of your duty to the other attendees to say as much as you can as a family member of the dead. Overheard as said by mourners:

"You lied to me! You said you'd throw me a party on my birthday!" (her father died the day before her birthday)
"Why did you leave me, little brother?!"
"This is your fault! The doctor told you!"

On a lighter note, the tslis tavi begins at the grave with this kind of mourning, but it marks the end of the mourning period for the family, so by the end, everyone moves on to a supra with cakes, just like the family should move on. Seeing as I spend much of my time in a rich town drinking Coca-Cola and watching Russian MTV, I was fascinated to see something so genuinely cultural... though let's rephrase that. All the travel books say that too many travelers think of culture as the ancient ritual and customs of a society which is being ruined or erased by Westernization or modernization, when actually those are just parts of a changing culture. So watching "Sexy Back" by Justin Timberlake is a part of Georgian culture. Or so they say.

I'm going to Turkey for New Year's! The hostel reservations are still a headache, but we know that we (me, Heidi, Nicholas, Van) will be flying to Izmir and then later going to Istanbul. Sounds like awesome. I may write something about it here; I may forget for weeks and then write a sentence of summary later.

How's that for a post? I'd do this more often if school were cut short every day...

Midterms!

Not for you, of course. If you're at the age where you take midterms, you're probably done. My younguns took their midterms last week, and it was the worst day I've had in Georgia, mostly due to rampant cheatery. I could have done without that. The following should be read in a deeply menacing tone: It won't happen again.

It's cold again. I kinda expected that would happen, as it seems to every year, but it was really warm last week and then all of a sudden this afternoon I had to bust out my next level of coat. Gotta save the big poofy down coat for whiteout conditions.

In other news, I'm out of clothes. Here's the timeline--

12 days ago: Requested to wash clothes by hand; rejected because following day, washing machine was to be installed

9 days ago: Washing machine installed

7 days ago: Family realizes that they have lost the English instructions and cannot read the Russian ones very well. This would not be a problem if this were a normal washing machine, but it is not. It has about 10,000 buttons and is side-loading, though I have the feeling that it's a simple matter of putting it on one setting and leaving it there for the rest of its existence.

2 days ago: I ran out of clothes. Fortunately, it was pouring rain on my way home from a supra, and the outfit I was wearing was cleaned that way. Wore my host sister's clothes as mine dried.

Today: Am attempting to find English instructions on a German web page.

We'll see how it goes.

I'm a teacher!

I guess I've been a teacher for a month, so that's long enough that I can start calling myself a teacher and not some poser who sits and watches the classes. I like to think that I've gotten into the swing of lesson planning and all that... though I will say, teaching is really hard. I may go find all my ex-teachers when I get back to the US and express this sentiment of shared frustration with them.

I'd like to discuss the tension with Russia, but it's kind of a political thing that I'd rather not express public opinions for all of posterity to read... but if you'd like to hear it from me, call me! You got my number.

Oh, that too

I neglected to mention in my last post, due to a Weird Al-induced haze, that I met Georgia's president Mikhail "Misha Dawg" Saakashvili on Friday. I had two other friends there, and we got let into this stadium opening early, and then Misha showed up with an entourage of reporters and such. At first, he noticed us and looked like he wanted to say hi, but he was swept away to the next photo op by reporters. Not to be outdone, me and my fellow political groupies stood in his path again for when he came back, and that time he saw us and shook our hands and said "Nice to meet you" in English (he studied at Columbia U in NYC for a bunch of years). I was euphoric. In hindsight, perhaps we should have used his title when shouting for his attention instead of shouting "Hello Saakashvili!" Can you picture someone shouting "Hello Bush!" Kind of rude. But I guess it got the job done. AWESOME.

The most excellent update ever

So I suppose I could say something about school or about the 5K walk/run for breast cancer this weekend, but I'd rather post this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmGckhyPapc

because I feel it best represents my life, and because I feel that will seal my place as nerdiest PCV in G6.

AAAAAAAA!!!

So, school started.

1st day: Not bad. I gave a speech, there was a big party/celebration/opener thing with dancing and singing and poems. Because of schedule distribution and general chaos, I only got to watch one class, which was my host sister's 10th form class. There's only 8 of them, and they were pretty well behaved as a result. No text books yet, so my counterpart had to sort of wing a lesson about summer vacations.

2nd day: I could have died. My counterpart had to take her granddaughter to the hospital, and apparently the school knew but didn't tell me. This = problem because 1) I'm not trained to teach by myself, and 2) I'm not supposed to be teaching the first week anyway, just watching. So the first class comes in, the 10th form with my host sister again, and I made a half-attempt to get them to play the name game. To their credit, they were very patient. THEN... 7th form. If you've ever seen on tv when there's an unruly class with a substitute, that was it to a tee. They were screaming and beating eachother with notebooks and throwing pens and OH MY GOSH and they didn't speak enough English to even know what I was saying long enough for me to tell them to BE QUIET FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, but eventually that class ended, as all classes do. As the 11th form class filed in, I called my program manager, who called the principal and within 10 minutes, I had been replaced by an actual teacher. In later situations, I'll be informed when my counterpart will be absent, and on those days told not to come in.

Perhaps on the third day, all will be right with the world. I note here that I only have to teach 15 hours, and my counterpart has 22 hours which includes 4 hours of that 7th form class... perhaps that's where some hour-cutting could take place on my part...

Other than that, things are great. Honestly, having been a waitress off and on for 6 years, I've been way more stressed out in other work situations than I was today. I do look forward to when the students and I have gotten used to each other and when I'm able to make my teaching chops. Until then, I'm hoping my counterpart will be able to come in tomorrow.

By the way... is there anyone who can send Halloween candy for my students? Yes, if it gets here late, I will eat it. And if there's more than I need, I will eat it. The thing is that they don't have a lot of American candy here in bite-sized form, and I'd like to do something fun for Halloween. Mom sent a lot of little presents, so there's no need for those. But seriously. And it could be like one bag in a box, so shipping wouldn't be that much... we have here Snickers and M&Ms and Twix, but not much else. I was thinking like Starburst, Jolly Ranchers, Hershey kisses, Reese's cups, things that are individually wrapped. Let me know! No pressure, just because I'm a lonely volunteer, 8,000 miles away in a foreign country, with little money and no family...

Still not doing anything

But school starts tomorrow! I'll be watching classes for a week (and giving a speech on Monday... eep), and then I'll pick up my role as Ms. Jennifer, teacher extraordinaire. Actually, I'd accept a role as Ms. Jennifer, teacher adequate if it comes down to it. No sense in burning out early.

Fyi, the house is still said to be getting internet soon, but in the meanwhile, they're installing a shower with radio and building a new bathroom for the jacuzzi. Yes, jacuzzi; why wouldn't my Peace Corps home have a jacuzzi? Satellite tv won't be here till November, so it's just Georgian and Russian tv on the flatscreen till then. You know how it is.

If I think of anything else surreal, I'll post it. I guess since I'll be working soon, I'll actually be able to start writing about the volunteering and effort and improvement stuff, so that'll shine this blog up a bit.

I'm still here

Welcome to my life in Georgia, waiting for school to start. I believe the last post also had something to do with school not starting yet, but at least I had the summer camp to run and make something of myself with. For the next 11 days, I have approximately zero to do. Don't get me wrong, I've been signing up for future things like crazy, but NOTHING is going on right now.

Among the future things: FLEX program (which sends 50 Georgian kids for a yearlong study abroad in the US), a run/walk for cancer awareness in Kutaisi, Georgian lessons for myself, the search for viable book donors for our school library... that's about it, I guess, but it'll equal out to a relatively full plate later. I hope.

In the meanwhile, I guess I'll have to reconcile myself to the fact that getting an internet connection in our house tomorrow will be an effort liberally appreciated through the winter...

Settling in, hunkering down

Hey all who still check, I'm in my permanent site and am an official volunteer now! Hurray! Now I settle in to do NOTHING for a month. School starts the 18th, and my sitemate and I are running a summer camp during the mornings this week, but other than that, there's been lots of reading. And visiting internet cafes (hey-- I might get DSL in my house, and then I'd have enough spare time online to start putting esoteric Georgian anecdotes here instead of perfunctory updates!). On that note, I recommend the book "1776," which I read in its entirety yesterday.

My town seems quite wealthy, which to me suggests that Peace Corps has no faith in my abilities to withstand the village life of gardens and fresh fruit and squat toilets and bucket baths that I had strangely grown attached to. On the other hand, other volunteers seem to think I'm not going to quit, an opinion which I share (though we have lost 9 or 10 by now, 4 of those to un-Georgia-related medical reasons). I had my first parasite a couple weeks ago, but aside from losing all the carbohydrate-based weight I gained from being here, I came out of it okay.

In the meantime, I'll get back to reading...

The occasional update

Hello all,

So this whole blog thing is starting pretty slowly but brace yourselves... at my permanent site, there's a slight chance that I'll have internet in my house! Yay! And there's a high chance that my newly-renovated, English-cabinet-having, computer-having, internet-ready school in my well-developed, culturally-evolved town will leave me time for ample blogging while I'm contemplating what I could possibly contribute to the community. Oh, and my counterpart teacher has worked with a volunteer in the past, so she's all up on the communicative teaching methods we're supposedly "teaching" the teachers. Guess I'll start a Rotary Club or something.

But all in all, things are still great, and training is over in less than two weeks. I'm pretty bummed that I'll have to leave the people in my training village, especially my family and the other 4 Americans, both groups of which I'm really close to. We'll see how it goes, and hopefully someday I'll update again.

Miss everybody!

Not the greatest blogger

In my defense, I would update a lot more often if it weren't so difficult to get access to my blog in this internet cafe... there's some shenanigans going on with the security that makes it so only one person in the whole room can sign into a Blogger account at a time. What a fine choice in blog hosts I have made.

What's going on? Well, we have language and TEFL training almost every day (except Sunday, hence why I am here), we have a 4th of July picnic coming up on Tuesday, in what will be our one and only day off of classes, and then August 18th, we get sworn in as Peace Corps volunteers and then get sent off to our permanent assignments. Ideally, I'll be able to update before then, but just in case, that's how it is.

You know what I'm noticing? It's a lot easier to avoid homesickness here *because* of the fact that we're so disconnected from the rest of our US friends and family (although we get free incoming phone calls, so they can call us all they want...) and the fact that we'll be here for so long. It's like our life back in the US is on pause, and we'll resume missing it only at certain times, like those winter months that Peace Corps says are big for homesickness or during the weeks leading up to a visit home (I'm still gearing toward July 2007). Of course, this could lead to issues when we get back to the US and find that our friends and family have not been on pause and that lots of things have changed, but until then, I'm happy to avoid homesickness. Not that I don't miss everybody, which I definitely do, but the Georgians are definitely hospitable and kind enough that the homesickness isn't an impairment. I could only be so lucky as to get another great host family for my permanent placement... that's really my primary concern right now.

So yeah. I'll post when I can, but if you really wanna know something, just shoot me an e-mail, and at least until permanent placement, I should be able to respond within a week, which is sweet and much better than what Peace Corps volunteers in some countries have access to...

Another airport!

I know these frquent updates must be less than interesting, but I#ll miss the internet at some point,# I#msure. We#re in vienna, about to leav e for Tbilisi (apparently pronounced 'Bilisi') and this keyboard is terrible, so I#ll go now.

At the airport

Well that sounds like the beginning of an exciting post, doesn't it? Kinda like today... how we checked out at 8 AM, sat around for two hours, rode a bus for three hours (why do staging at Philly if we're flying out of JFK? Maybe it's better... NYC staging would have consisted of me hanging out with existing New York friends instead of all this networking stuff), and now have sat around the airport for 4 hours. At 6:15, we will sit on a plane for 10 hours, have a layover in Vienna for 14 hours, sit in another plane for like 4 hours, and then hopefully Tbilisi will bring an end to the waiting. Training doesn't technically start till like Tuesday, but there's gotta be something we'll be doing... like learning the language perhaps...

On another note, I'm happy to point out that I'm way less miserable than I was when I first left for Philadelphia, and I'm actually excited to be going now. Maybe I like waiting...

Training commences

So we don't leave till tomorrow morning, but I'm thinking the whole traumatic part about leaving friends and family is over, soon to be replaced with chronic homesickness, which is hopefully more manageable. Maybe.

As a surprising turn of events, I seem to like most of the people here, which is always a plus. Everybody seems nervous, but even the general Peace Corps-based training without specific information on Georgia makes us feel a bit better. We're actually supposed to be taking a lunch break now, but it's the only time I feel like there's gonna be nobody trying to use the one computer in this giant hotel.

I don't know when I'll be able to send any more e-mails or make any calls or post on this or anything, but as default, just assume I'm okay.

Bienvenue, bienvenidos, wilkommen, etc.

You'll notice not one of the title "welcome"s is in Georgian; that could be because I can't distinguish between letters of the Georgian alphabet yet, much less speak the language. This blog's here for the benefit of you who wish to casually follow my Georgian Peace Corps adventures while you're bored at work, with the benefit of avoiding spam-my, impersonal e-mails with few relevant updates ("I still don't speak Georgian. Today it was cold.").

I hope this blog will capture your mild interest, and I promise here and now not to turn it into a publishable Peace Corps memoir when I get back.* There seems to be a market glut of those, and I think I'd only publish one if I had the notion to sell even fewer copies than Laveidem did.

I don't know how often I'll be able to update, nor where I'll be, nor much else... but I would appreciate comments on posts. Or letters. Or Swedish Fish. Or consistent access to electricity.

*Note: if something really cool happens that makes a memoir unavoidable, like me coaching the Georgian taekwondo team to world championship or becoming a star on Georgian reality TV, then this promise is null and void. I'm just saying that the likelihood of a book about "personal growth" and such is fairly minimal.