Dacha Crashing

Now on to a recent weekend in July, when I was invited to a dacha outside Tbilisi for the night, even though I had to be back at the office at 8 the next morning. It was near Tbilisi Sea, which I had no idea existed, and which looked more like a lake to me, but the dominating feature of that landscape was the rows of Soviet apartment blocs rising in the background as Tbilisi fell behind us. It may be the one angle I've seen that makes Soviet apartment blocs seem picturesque.

It was getting dark already, and my host brother was driving his friend Keti and me. I was admiring the view when I caught her telling him that they should probably wait for the SUV carrying the rest of her family, since it wasn't a good idea to drive alone on this stretch of road. I found this implication discomforting. A little bell rang in the back of my mind that there were places near Tbilisi that were restricted to volunteers, but I couldn't remember quite where, or whether it was okay to go such places with your host family. To cement the fact, my host brother decided to tell me how this road was 10 years ago, when Shevardnadze was president.

"In Shevardnadze's time, on this road-- BRACHHH!!" (punctuated by mime of execution)

To add to this, a truck drove by slowly while we were waiting alone on the empty road with the car turned off, and Keti noted that our situation was somewhat like the movie Jeepers Creepers. For the uninitiated, there's a truck in Jeepers Creepers that stalks the protagonists as they drive across the state, ramming them occasionally and then bloodily ending their lives. After texting noted Jeepers Creepers fan Laura Griffith, I sat back to wait for the truck to return and kill us.

Instead, Keti's family's SUV appeared, and we rolled on up to the dacha in the village. It'd be great if I remembered the village name, but it sounded Russian, so I couldn't. In fact, Keti's whole family-- down to the small children-- were more fluent in Russian than in Georgian and were jumping back and forth between the two languages all evening, to the effect that I understood even less than usual. At least most of them knew some English, too... Keti, especially, but also her little nieces, Mari and Ana, who dragged me around the house by the hand and explained things to me in English that I think outpaced my Georgian. Trilingual children make me insecure in my intellect. Ana, who's 7 years old, picked up on this and remarked to her mother Natia that I understood Georgian, but very very little. Mari asked me if I liked billiards, and she scolded herself for forgetting the verb "to rock," as in chairs. I think Mari's 8 or 9. Neither of these girls are yet old enough to study English in Samtredia's schools (we start in 5th grade).

That was pretty much it. We ate expensive sausages (9 lari!) and wheat bread, and the house caretaker busted out a bottle of Gomi vodka (adjectives do not exist to describe the awfulness of this beverage, but "keroseneian" will have to do), with which we toasted to my host brother's imminent departure for London (who, btw, I won't see again during my service, since his visa in London outlasts mine in Georgia). I mentioned in my toast that he might not like London sometimes, since it's difficult to immerse yourself in another culture, and he looked surprised. We'll see how that goes.

We finished our sausage around 1AM, and after apologizing for taking me to a place that only has an outdoor toilet, the Tbilisians and I headed off to bed. They didn't know that their immaculately-clean sit-down toilet that happened to be outside was far removed from my definition of roughing it after training in the village, which was cute. I suppose talking about toilets is an awkward way to end this post, but sometimes Jen is awkward.

*Clearly if you're reading this blog, you know that Tbilisi is the capital of Georgia. If you don't, I encourage you to keep returning to this blog and upping the hits on my map counter, and I've provided this little asterisk explanation so you can pretend you knew where Tbilisi was. Don't feel bad about it-- before I came here, I thought Georgia was a region in Russia. Turns out that's insanely wrong and offensive. Oops.