A Tbilisi State of Mind

How come every time you come around, my London London bridge wanna go down like London, London, London...

I have an inkling that those lyrics mean something inappropriate, but just because Fergie wants to go around making up dirty idioms doesn't mean I'm going to treat them like official Webster's phrases. Why the lyrics? Heidi and I stayed at an expat's house last weekend for 3 nights and there was a computer with Limewire in the bedroom. This led to the following display that my taste in music has not only worsened but has died:

"Buttons" Pussycat Dolls
"Lithium" Evanescence
"Irreplaceable" Beyonce
"Wind It Up" Gwen Stefani
"Maneater" Nelly Furtado

As a side note though, I bet ya'll in America can't make anything of some of the other new additions to my music list. I'm just as in love with these songs. And some of them are just as bad (Russian pop... vai meh).

"Chori, Chori" Aneela & Arash
"Rette Mich" Tokio Hotel
"Tsvietok i Nozh" Via Gra (yes, really)

You know what's exciting? The next group of Georgia volunteers are getting their invitations over the next few months. I can see now how naive it was to gaze intently at the G5s as they made their "expert" presentations last year during training... if there's one word I'm not going to use to describe myself, it's "expert." Especially not about Georgia, but perhaps about Weird Al. I feel like this means I should be putting some more specific Georgia information in here (also knowing that most family/friends reading this blog didn't choose to do so for the purpose of getting foreign language music suggestions). Here's some, then:

1) We met Giorgi Targamadze this weekend! Of course you know already that he's the most famous journalist in Georgia, but did you also know that he shops in the Euromart on Rustaveli in Tbilisi? He gave us (me) his phone number and email address, so perhaps a story related to Peace Corps is in the works. Nicholas plans to tell him about BLOC, the boys' leadership camp, which is actually more newsworthy than any of the projects I was thinking of. Maybe I could preempt him by pointing Giorgi in the direction of GLOW*, the girls' leadership camp. Maybe the story could be on both. Maybe the story could be on me and how I have long hair.

2) This past week was also supposed to be our language and counterpart conference. However, on the first day of our language conference-- and just when we were getting to pester our instructor for that special genre of words she refused to teach us during training (gaajvi is one, ha ha ha!)-- we were evacuated from the hotel because apparently some gun-wielding relative of the hotel owners was on the run from the police and had been pursued into the basement of our hotel. Tsavidet (let's go)! All the volunteers were fine and nobody got hurt, thanks to the valiant efforts of Peace Corps staff (special shoutout to Teo, the language and homestar coordinator who got knocked over by a cop). That night, I stayed in an infinitely better hotel; the next night, a step down; the next 3 nights, back to the traditional Peace Corps hostel, the Nika. Oh well.

More noteworthy was the fact that when I brokenly imparted this story to my host family, they looked bored. My host sister looked up long enough to say "Gasagebia" ("It's clear") and then returned to watching Montecristo, the most popular Latin American soap opera this season. My host mom continued to chew her fingernails, and the neighbor kid continued to kick the armchair with his heels.

3) Good to know: giving someone your phone number is giving them carte blanche to text and call you to their heart's content, regardless of reciprocation or usage of new word genres. Better to know: this is apparently how many Georgian men meet their wives-- by texting and calling and calling and calling and texting until they cave. You might be weak like me and unable to think of another way to get someone to go away other than by giving them your phone number (especially since they'll call you while they're still standing there so you can have their phone number too, a prize you've coveted since time eternal). You might expect that there's no danger in harassment if the person asking for your phone number is a police officer. Well just tell that to Talier (Taliet? Jalier?), the cop who has called me three times a day since Friday. I think he tried to switch phones and call me, so I've begun indiscriminately hanging up on everybody and labeling their numbers in my phone as "Suspicious Number". If there's one thing I can impart to G7, that's it. Also-- bring a freaking backpack to Georgia. Wheelie bags + Georgian roads = disaster. And of course, you'll want to fit in with all the other backpacking hippies, too.

I could go on about how being at the expat's houses this weekend and witnessing their dinner parties and taste in wine has cemented my desire to become an expat myself someday, working for the embassy and living in an embassy house in a developing nation, hosting lowly Peace Corps volunteers and wowing them with food they haven't seen in their entire life, much less in the last 7 months (Friday: Italian pasta and veal soup with shredded parmesan, followed with blueberries flambe over vanilla ice cream with chocolate pound cake. Sunday: salmon rolls to start, then pot roast with carrots and potatoes, broccoli salad THERE'S NO BROCCOLI HERE I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW GREAT THAT WAS and then strawberry NONE OF THOSE EITHER shortcake. Add ever-flowing, handpicked wine-- as overheard between expats: "Try this wine. No? Well dump that in the sink, and come on down to the cellar. I've got a nice Saperavi around here somewhere." In my training village, we had wine that had an aftertaste of fish.) And apparently I did just go on about that. But come on! Broccoli!! Strawberries!!

*GLOW, Girls Leading Our World, is the project I'm most impressed by. It was started by Peace Corps volunteers as a national camp a couple years ago, and this year they've turned it into an NGO. There's also GLOW clubs now. Girls from all over the country go to camps to hear powerful female speakers and to learn leadership skills and self esteem, healthy eating, all that. It's done in Georgian so that it can involve more girls, and it's free of cost to them. They stay for like a week in a hotel together and all their food is paid for. In a country like this, where women are expected to get married, have babies, and sit in the house for the rest of their lives, this project is amazing. I can't say I really would have cared too much about it in the US, other than maybe a "That's nice," but when you get here and your host father tells you to call your male sitemate to escort you to the grocery store, or comes and gets you from the internet cafe just because he doesn't want his daughter to be outside the house... well, let's hope GLOW can make a difference. It's slowly being transfered into Georgian hands, and hopefully that'll keep it going long after we're COSed.

Which is in 18 months, by the way. But who's counting?