Welcome to week two of my January of Nothing. Don't get me wrong-- it's just enough Nothing that I can still enjoy it. School starts on Monday, and I don't remotely have the feeling I did in middle school Augusts, when the break seemed sufficiently long and boring by that point. What helps me carry on is the delightful fact that I have three trainings in a row in Tbilisi the week after school starts, so 5 days of school and then another week off. Well, "off." But "off" is better than on.
Three unrelated observations:
1) I was in Kutaisi on Saturday (for British Night with some other volunteers and an expat), which also happened to be Old New Year-- Dzvelit Akhali Tseli-- here in Georgia. The confusion, which I can't quite explain, comes from the fact that Saturday was New Year on the Orthodox calendar. I seem to remember someone explaining to me that this is because practicing Orthodox church members fast before and after Orthodox Christmas (January 7, as you know) and Old New Year was the first time of the calendar year when they could break loose and, I don't know, eat meat like it's 1999. Anyway, since I missed regular New Year in Georgia, this was a good enough substitute-- at midnight, we looked across the skyline from the expat's 5th-floor apartment to see fireworks EVERYWHERE. It was clearly not a coordinated effort, and I can only imagine that the city avoids burnination every year because it's entirely made of concrete, but for a gross violation of fire safety codes, it was beautiful.
2) Just as I was despairfully writing "nothing yet" all over my Peace Corps trimester report for most of the community-based assistance goals, a secondary project gold mine fell into my lap. Turns out this woman at an English/Computer-teaching office down the street-- whom my counterpart teacher forebade me to visit because she thought the woman wanted to kidnap me and hold me for Embassy ransom money-- has started an NGO called Georgia New Generation, aimed at helping the community youth and specifically Abkhazian refugees***, of which she is one herself. She acknowledges to us that a more grammatically-correct name for her NGO would be New Generation of Georgia, but she likes the symmetry of GNG. Anyway, she was enthusiastic about mine and my sitemate's requests to hold community-development club meetings there (specifically, a girls' leadership club from me and an environmental club from him, both with national networks started by Peace Corps volunteers; I'm impressed with my predecessors, personally) and she wants our help in getting grants and things like that so she can help people. Actually, when we left today, she said, "Good bye! I'll see you soon, and we can start helping the community." It may sound trite to you, but it was refreshing as Gatorade to us, who had despaired of finding a motivated, young Georgian in our site who was interested in community development. Score!!
3) Due to everyone and their deda asking me if I'm going to marry a Georgian man while I'm here, I've had a lot of time to think about marriage (by the way, the answer is no) and I've developed a new, untested, simplistic key to marriage for myself. What does this have to do with Peace Corps, and why is it in my Peace Corps journal? Very little, and I don't know. But here it is: I think the problem a lot of people come across is that they get married because they think they've found the best person in the world for themselves, like the best possible match. The new Oversimplified Key to Everything that I've thought of is that you can't possibly find the best match for yourself. It's like when Kim and I were violinists in St. Mary's County, and no matter how good we got, there was always someone better (and then when I went to New York, there were a million people who were better, but that's not the point). So people think that no one else can be better for them than their spouse, and then when they meet someone else during their marriage who they think might be better, they question their choice and decide they've made a mistake. I think that when you marry someone, you're telling them and yourself that you've found someone who's amazing and wonderful, and that you love them enough to abstain from going after the better person when they come along. And how would you even know the other person was better anyway, until you'd been married for such-and-such a time and found yourself in the same position with another opportunity? It might not be romantic or modern to suggest that you stick with someone the whole time even if there might be better alternatives-- and by no means am I saying that a sudden downturn in the quality of your original choice should be tolerated for the sake of a low divorce rate, i.e. abuse or emotional detachment-- but divorce sucks too. How do I know? I don't, not remotely. But with my hours and hours on Georgian and Turkish public transportation, that's what I've come up with. Think you'll just get divorced if someone better comes along? Then cut out all the "to death to us part" stuff from your wedding vows. Voila.
*** How familiar are you with the Abkhazian situation? Here's a short explanation, made as apolitically as possible. Abkhazia is a breakaway province in Georgia; its people have their own language, though their land falls within Georgian borders, and shortly after Georgia's independence, Abkhazia fought a war with Georgia for its own independence. The results of this war are many: 1) Abkhazia exists in a state of semi-independence, still held to by Georgia (who lists reigning in its breakaway provinces as a political priority) but supported and almost recognized as a state by Russia, whose citizens largely populate Abkhazia now. Both sides are still rarin' to go, if the other offers up a provocation. The United States insists that a peaceful resolution be found. 2) Ethnic Georgians fled the war-torn region in the early 1990s, creating a huge refugee problem in the areas around Abkhazia, including places as far away as my town. Many live long-term in hotels, while others enlist the help of a smattering of NGOs designed to ease the housing problem for refugees. That expat in Kutaisi works for one. 3) Just so you know, Peace Corps volunteers are not placed in Abkhazia or close to Abkhazia and cannot visit Abkhazia.
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Monday, January 08, 2007
Turkey Time
Gilotsav shobas da akhal tsels! I just got back from Turkey (or I could be a travel snob and write “Türkiye”) yesterday, and the following is a series of journal excerpts, since I was kind enough to think of you all and my own self-aggrandizement while traveling. I’m gonna try to link the entries to pictures if I can figure that out, elsewise things with relevant pictures are in bold and can be found at http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2125584&l=a1c24&id=813973 . If you get bored, just read the last entry (January 6) for some good old-fashioned schadenfreude.
December 27—
We’re in Trabzon, Turkey! Some things were a pain today—snowstorm, taxi fishtailing into a snowdrift, hostel not actually being a hostel during the winter but rather a dormitory. Some things may be a pain tomorrow—all the flights to Istanbul and Izmir were canceled this evening, but ideally they won’t be tomorrow. However, some things have been surprisingly exciting that would have seemed mundane in the first place—rectangular pillows, Doritos, safely walking through the streets at night, Latin alphabet usage, smoothly-paved roads, things like that.
December 29—
Now we’re in Selçuk, which has been delightful! I don’t know how well I fit into international backpack culture, but we win every hardship contest by mentioning that we’re Peace Corps volunteers. The hostel is quite cozy (my first hostel!), though they’ve been a little hardcore with the tour guide offers, and they charged Paige and Ryan extra for heating (us four down in the dorms don’t have the option).
We strolled over to Ephesus today, a city of ancient Greek ruins (my first Greek ruins!) which was impressive—much more so than the Temple of Artemis, a wonder of the ancient world that has been reduced to a single pillar in the middle of a field. We all sat in a 1000-year-old amphitheater and waited for the tourists to leave (there’s an inordinate amount of Koreans here, by the way).
December 30—
This one’s getting written in what could be called my first genuine hostel experience… after 10 hours of bus rides, we found our way to the Orient Hostel, a land of like a 3’x5’ bedroom, a stained towel that two of us shared for 3 lira, and not to mention 5,000 other G6 Peace Corps volunteers. In fact, when we came home from our delicious Mexican dinner at El Torito (?), we went upstairs to the Orient Hostel bar to use the internet and were greeted by the “HEEEEYYYY!!” of PCVs who’d clearly been drinking for a while. Nicholas and I turned heels and fled downstairs to take showers (also a failure of sanitation, involving hopefully-unidentifiable empty plastic wrappers).
By the way, Turkish buses are amazing—we stopped every 2 hours to stretch our legs, we were guided along at our connection in Izmir, and (here’s the kicker) there’s a bus attendant who serves drinks and snacks. Bit of an improvement over Greyhound.
January 1—
Thus far in Istanbul, we’ve visited the Blue Mosque (complete with headscarves) and the Hagia Sofia, explored the shops of Taksim and drank Starbucks therein, climbed this really old tower just in time to hear tens of calls to prayer simultaneously from mosques all over the city, and of course seen fireworks for New Year at Taksim Square followed by dancing til 3. Not bad for two days, though this pace may contribute to our current condition of napping until we meet up at 5:30.
The general consensus of our group is that Istanbul represents an optimal level of development—you can get most things that you want, but there’s not a McDonald’s inside the Blue Mosque. It was too much of a consensus, though, so I had to be a pain and play devil’s advocate, pointing out that there’s less political freedom here than in America. We’re still waiting for a verdict on gender equality… only today have we seen many Turkish women out in public at all, though this could be because the holiday (Eid al-Adha, or Kurban Bayramı in Turkish) started yesterday and there’s some household duties of ritual animal slaughter that needed to be looked after.
January 2—
Man, I was in the worst mood ever today. We went on a cruise of the Bosphorus and we had a seafood prix fixe for lunch… all this cool stuff, but I just wanted to tie a sock gag around the heads of everyone in my vicinity. Perhaps it’s fatigue from traveling, perhaps it’s my psychotic brain chemistry, perhaps that’s what happens after holidays in developing nations. Regardless, it sucked, and I can’t say for certain that I won’t feel the same way tomorrow, though I’d better not because it’s boot-buying day and making purchases warms the cockles of my capitalist heart.
January 6—
Various disasters led to our trip being an extra day long. I suppose I should explain… The last couple days were lovely but uneventful. We made all the airport arrangements to catch our flight at 10 AM on the 4th only to find out when we got there that the flight was at 7 AM, a fact none of us bothered to check although we’d been hanging out next to an open computer with internet the night before. I still think it’s my fault, being Planny McPlannerson and all, but that’s not the point; the point is that we were late enough to be ineligible for any refund or transfer, so poo on that $72.
We decided to try for an IstanbulTbilisi bus, and—just our luck!—there was one leaving the second we got to the station, and they offered to take us to Tbilisi for $50 each. Fine, cha-ching, let’s go. A few hours later, we noticed that the route was drifting south, rather than following the Black Sea coast to enter Georgia at Batumi. We also noticed that no one on the bus spoke English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Georgian, Vietnamese or Japanese, so we couldn’t ask questions about our mystery destination, which upon re-inspection of our tickets we discovered was “Ardahan.” We looked around the bus. Was Ardahan in Azerbaijan and all these people Azeri? Or was Ardahan in another border country (Turkey borders Syria, Iran, and Iraq) and we were on our way to Tehran?? We tearfully pointed at maps and made caveman-like gestures until the bus driver reassured us that “Tiflis okay” (re: “This bus is going to Tbilisi.”)
In the meanwhile, the Turkish countryside rolled by—27 hours of it—which I sometimes think was worth the whole ordeal. We saw houses with mud roofs, snow-covered mountains, and even the desert under moonlight, all of which we’d missed in our tourist ventures.
Around 12 the next day, we rolled into Ardahan. Once again, nobody spoke any of our languages, though one man did manage to convey that he’d take us to a border town we’d never heard of for $20. Ha! Whether it was the bus company’s fault or not, we’d been told that we were going to Tbilisi on $50, and that was what we were sticking to. Finally, we found a German speaker, and he and Heidi worked everything out. We thought.
After a harrowing mini-bus ride on snow-blown cliffs and switchback roads with 200-foot plummets instead of shoulders, we rolled into Posof. Again, the plan hadn’t quite been communicated correctly, so they tried to charge us $120 to go to Tbilisi. DECLINED. Much arguing ensued, and in the end they agreed to take us across the border to Akhaltsikhe for the 60 lira the bus company had provided the driver in Ardahan to take us to Tbilisi. Fine. We got on the completely-empty bus and rode to an empty border crossing that we didn’t know existed. As soon as we’d gotten through (and been searched by Georgian customs officials), we decided to try to bribe them to take us the rest of the way to Tbilisi on the rest of the Turkish lira we had left (about 40 lira). It turns out that one of the men on the bus (of about 3 total, since we noticed the bus would only pick up Turks who tried to flag it down and not Georgians) spoke Russian, so I was nominated to negotiate. Unfortunately, his broken Russian plus my broken Russian led to no understanding—on the plus side, I think his Russian was more broken than mine because we called a fluent Russian speaker to talk to him, and that still didn’t work. Anyway, using the work “Tiflis” and rubbing our fingers together, we got it through and all was well. We made it to Tbilisi, at some khinkali, and slept after 33 hours of bus rides.
I think that’s the end of the travel catastrophes that were interesting. By myself the next day, I had fresh torture trying to get back to site that involved a sold-out train, a series of out-of-order ATMs, switched bus signs, and being cornered by a snarling dog, but there’s no need to turn that into a melodrama. The fact remains that I’m home now, and part of me is still glad that I got to spend extra time in Turkey, despite the circumstances.
Now, for concluding observations:
1) Turkish coffee is much better in Georgia than in Turkey, though Turkey has better roads.
2) My stupid banana-feet are too big for Turkish shoe sizes, so I still need boots.
3) It’s hard to see in Western Turkey that it used to be a Peace Corps country, but the status of developing nation is a bit more apparent in the East. Still farther along than Georgia, but Turkey had a head start.
4) Döner kebaps are delicious.
5) This vacation is more perfect than usual because I have two more weeks off to recover from it.
P.S. I've been lately informed that we were riding along through Kurdistan in the bus, which explains all the tanks and military checkpoints. Yay!
December 27—
We’re in Trabzon, Turkey! Some things were a pain today—snowstorm, taxi fishtailing into a snowdrift, hostel not actually being a hostel during the winter but rather a dormitory. Some things may be a pain tomorrow—all the flights to Istanbul and Izmir were canceled this evening, but ideally they won’t be tomorrow. However, some things have been surprisingly exciting that would have seemed mundane in the first place—rectangular pillows, Doritos, safely walking through the streets at night, Latin alphabet usage, smoothly-paved roads, things like that.
December 29—
Now we’re in Selçuk, which has been delightful! I don’t know how well I fit into international backpack culture, but we win every hardship contest by mentioning that we’re Peace Corps volunteers. The hostel is quite cozy (my first hostel!), though they’ve been a little hardcore with the tour guide offers, and they charged Paige and Ryan extra for heating (us four down in the dorms don’t have the option).
We strolled over to Ephesus today, a city of ancient Greek ruins (my first Greek ruins!) which was impressive—much more so than the Temple of Artemis, a wonder of the ancient world that has been reduced to a single pillar in the middle of a field. We all sat in a 1000-year-old amphitheater and waited for the tourists to leave (there’s an inordinate amount of Koreans here, by the way).
December 30—
This one’s getting written in what could be called my first genuine hostel experience… after 10 hours of bus rides, we found our way to the Orient Hostel, a land of like a 3’x5’ bedroom, a stained towel that two of us shared for 3 lira, and not to mention 5,000 other G6 Peace Corps volunteers. In fact, when we came home from our delicious Mexican dinner at El Torito (?), we went upstairs to the Orient Hostel bar to use the internet and were greeted by the “HEEEEYYYY!!” of PCVs who’d clearly been drinking for a while. Nicholas and I turned heels and fled downstairs to take showers (also a failure of sanitation, involving hopefully-unidentifiable empty plastic wrappers).
By the way, Turkish buses are amazing—we stopped every 2 hours to stretch our legs, we were guided along at our connection in Izmir, and (here’s the kicker) there’s a bus attendant who serves drinks and snacks. Bit of an improvement over Greyhound.
January 1—
Thus far in Istanbul, we’ve visited the Blue Mosque (complete with headscarves) and the Hagia Sofia, explored the shops of Taksim and drank Starbucks therein, climbed this really old tower just in time to hear tens of calls to prayer simultaneously from mosques all over the city, and of course seen fireworks for New Year at Taksim Square followed by dancing til 3. Not bad for two days, though this pace may contribute to our current condition of napping until we meet up at 5:30.
The general consensus of our group is that Istanbul represents an optimal level of development—you can get most things that you want, but there’s not a McDonald’s inside the Blue Mosque. It was too much of a consensus, though, so I had to be a pain and play devil’s advocate, pointing out that there’s less political freedom here than in America. We’re still waiting for a verdict on gender equality… only today have we seen many Turkish women out in public at all, though this could be because the holiday (Eid al-Adha, or Kurban Bayramı in Turkish) started yesterday and there’s some household duties of ritual animal slaughter that needed to be looked after.
January 2—
Man, I was in the worst mood ever today. We went on a cruise of the Bosphorus and we had a seafood prix fixe for lunch… all this cool stuff, but I just wanted to tie a sock gag around the heads of everyone in my vicinity. Perhaps it’s fatigue from traveling, perhaps it’s my psychotic brain chemistry, perhaps that’s what happens after holidays in developing nations. Regardless, it sucked, and I can’t say for certain that I won’t feel the same way tomorrow, though I’d better not because it’s boot-buying day and making purchases warms the cockles of my capitalist heart.
January 6—
Various disasters led to our trip being an extra day long. I suppose I should explain… The last couple days were lovely but uneventful. We made all the airport arrangements to catch our flight at 10 AM on the 4th only to find out when we got there that the flight was at 7 AM, a fact none of us bothered to check although we’d been hanging out next to an open computer with internet the night before. I still think it’s my fault, being Planny McPlannerson and all, but that’s not the point; the point is that we were late enough to be ineligible for any refund or transfer, so poo on that $72.
We decided to try for an IstanbulTbilisi bus, and—just our luck!—there was one leaving the second we got to the station, and they offered to take us to Tbilisi for $50 each. Fine, cha-ching, let’s go. A few hours later, we noticed that the route was drifting south, rather than following the Black Sea coast to enter Georgia at Batumi. We also noticed that no one on the bus spoke English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Georgian, Vietnamese or Japanese, so we couldn’t ask questions about our mystery destination, which upon re-inspection of our tickets we discovered was “Ardahan.” We looked around the bus. Was Ardahan in Azerbaijan and all these people Azeri? Or was Ardahan in another border country (Turkey borders Syria, Iran, and Iraq) and we were on our way to Tehran?? We tearfully pointed at maps and made caveman-like gestures until the bus driver reassured us that “Tiflis okay” (re: “This bus is going to Tbilisi.”)
In the meanwhile, the Turkish countryside rolled by—27 hours of it—which I sometimes think was worth the whole ordeal. We saw houses with mud roofs, snow-covered mountains, and even the desert under moonlight, all of which we’d missed in our tourist ventures.
Around 12 the next day, we rolled into Ardahan. Once again, nobody spoke any of our languages, though one man did manage to convey that he’d take us to a border town we’d never heard of for $20. Ha! Whether it was the bus company’s fault or not, we’d been told that we were going to Tbilisi on $50, and that was what we were sticking to. Finally, we found a German speaker, and he and Heidi worked everything out. We thought.
After a harrowing mini-bus ride on snow-blown cliffs and switchback roads with 200-foot plummets instead of shoulders, we rolled into Posof. Again, the plan hadn’t quite been communicated correctly, so they tried to charge us $120 to go to Tbilisi. DECLINED. Much arguing ensued, and in the end they agreed to take us across the border to Akhaltsikhe for the 60 lira the bus company had provided the driver in Ardahan to take us to Tbilisi. Fine. We got on the completely-empty bus and rode to an empty border crossing that we didn’t know existed. As soon as we’d gotten through (and been searched by Georgian customs officials), we decided to try to bribe them to take us the rest of the way to Tbilisi on the rest of the Turkish lira we had left (about 40 lira). It turns out that one of the men on the bus (of about 3 total, since we noticed the bus would only pick up Turks who tried to flag it down and not Georgians) spoke Russian, so I was nominated to negotiate. Unfortunately, his broken Russian plus my broken Russian led to no understanding—on the plus side, I think his Russian was more broken than mine because we called a fluent Russian speaker to talk to him, and that still didn’t work. Anyway, using the work “Tiflis” and rubbing our fingers together, we got it through and all was well. We made it to Tbilisi, at some khinkali, and slept after 33 hours of bus rides.
I think that’s the end of the travel catastrophes that were interesting. By myself the next day, I had fresh torture trying to get back to site that involved a sold-out train, a series of out-of-order ATMs, switched bus signs, and being cornered by a snarling dog, but there’s no need to turn that into a melodrama. The fact remains that I’m home now, and part of me is still glad that I got to spend extra time in Turkey, despite the circumstances.
Now, for concluding observations:
1) Turkish coffee is much better in Georgia than in Turkey, though Turkey has better roads.
2) My stupid banana-feet are too big for Turkish shoe sizes, so I still need boots.
3) It’s hard to see in Western Turkey that it used to be a Peace Corps country, but the status of developing nation is a bit more apparent in the East. Still farther along than Georgia, but Turkey had a head start.
4) Döner kebaps are delicious.
5) This vacation is more perfect than usual because I have two more weeks off to recover from it.
P.S. I've been lately informed that we were riding along through Kurdistan in the bus, which explains all the tanks and military checkpoints. Yay!
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