It's Samtredia!

Wondering where I live? That's only natural. Since everyone has already spilled the beans on their own blogs, I may as well tell you: I live in Samtredia.

That's right, THE Samtredia. Its name, as you know, means "three pigeons."


Samtredia is the transportation hub of the west; all main roads and railways converge at her paved feet, and passengers and drivers alike duly pause to admire/ignore our town before they continue their commute east to Tbilisi or west to Batumi. Despite what the tourist pamphlet that I have says-- and, by the way, the tourist pamphlet is complete with a map, which would be handy if the roads were labeled-- there's not a whole lot of reasons for a visiting foreigner to stop in Samtredia, which makes it a greater mystery that I've seen German tourists with backpacks being led into our town bazaar. Why would you come from Germany to Samtredia? If in Samtredia, why would you visit the bazaar?


The one problem I had with Samtredia when I got here was the organized...ness. The organizedness. Check out this picture to the left, and you might see something that you won't see in other people's Georgia blogs: gridded streets. That's right, after starting out as a mere speck next to two intersecting rail lines, Samtredia was planned into existence, something few of Samtredia's neighboring cities can claim (as the others average in age around 1500 years, so perhaps we can give them a break). Some houses actually have numbers, like my sitemate's. Some houses, like mine, have "numbers" which are unknown to all except those who live there, since they're not written anywhere on the house or on the gate, of course.


In addition to the grid, Samtredia also features other marvels of city planning (okay, Soviets, you did this one right, but that makes the score like 1-45278938), such as rectangular parks and a definable city center. There's Momavlis Parki ("Future Park") and another park that my sitemate and I creatively call "Screen Park," which boasts a large projection screen on which Russian music videos are broadcast during summer nights from the back of a Lada (watch for a future post on Ladas, the car of the proletariat). There's a 4-story city hall, a library, quite a few internet cafes, some restaurants, 1394 pharmacies, and a hundred zillion little grocery stores. The guy on the right, who was ignorant of my presence until the flash went off, is a local store owner, diligently packing a roll of Russian toilet paper (by some PCV accounts, made of gravel).


This qualifies as the ugliest hotel in existence, I think. Did you just look at it and agree, laughing to yourself about the squalor that some people call sufficient for overnight stays? WELL, shame on you! It's technically a hotel (it says "sastumro" across the top, a.k.a. "a place for guests") but its tenants are mostly permanent ones, and since there's not actually a shortage of quality housing here, most of those tenants are refugees from Abkhazia. I apologize for setting you up to laugh at refugees; I take back the shame on you and place it on myself.


To get back to the point, though, my initial impressions of Samtredia were skewed, as many initial impressions tend to be. Although it felt when I got here like I Wasn't really in the Peace Corps, rather that I was living in an American suburb but without the precious Wal-Mart, there's some aspects of Georgian culture that have risen to take the place of the cultural immersion I experienced during training, when I lived in the village (and I requested to be placed in a village, for the record). For example, I still get to dry my clothes outside, and there's still a rooster in my yard, though this one has half the IQ and one-eighth the time perception of the roosters in the village.

Rooster: 3 AM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Rooster: 7:59 AM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Rooster: 4:30 PM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!


The sense of neighborly camraderie among Georgians is alive and well here, too. Despite having lived in California, MD for 15 years of my life (put away your maps, random internet stalkers, we moved away right after I left for Peace Corps), I couldn't tell you the first name of the residents of 4 of the 5 houses within the immediate vicinity of my house. Here in Georgia, the neighbors come over every single day to watch Latin American soap operas-- the big one right now is El Cuerpo del Deseo since Montecristo just ended, though La Viuda de Blanco might be an up-and-coming hit-- and in fact, one of the neighbors is my host aunt. There was a wedding down the street (note: Georgian weddings last 2 days, and if I ever get to go to one, you bet there'll be a blog post rife with semi-witty commentary) and whereas I had never met said neighbor, we still went to their place to assist with the creation of enough food to feed an army with and then with which to bury the army up to their necks. This picture is of some of my host relatives and neighbors, caught red-handed (ha) butchering chickens. And then my host sister decided it might be nice to hold a turkey up to her face.


So that's your official introduction to Samtredia, almost 11 months after I got here. No, I didn't write anything about school, thanks for pointing that out... perhaps another entry is due. And then perhaps a show-offy entry about the successful completion of the Writing Olympics project, if it ever gets successfully completed. Maybe then a trite entry about the life-changing miracle of Peace Corps developmental work, or a 10-paragraph discussion of local weather patterns. The future is wide open!