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!
Sunday, December 24, 2006
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
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.
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.
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
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.
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.
Monday, December 18, 2006
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.
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.
Wednesday, December 13, 2006
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...
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...
Sunday, December 03, 2006
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.
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.
Friday, December 01, 2006
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.
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.
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