Pretty Rocks

A common pasttime of Western Georgia PCVs is to head to the seaside. It's also a common pasttime of Georgians, as is manifest by the 30,000 times I've heard the answer, "In summer, we go to seaside or village," as a response for homework, classwork, busywork, etc. Apparently, this exodus doesn't occur til August, as I was informed by my friend Paige's host sister today.

Let's take a hopefully-brief look at a typical day at the beach, except replace typical with "short and rainy with the kind of waves you've seen on Tropical Storm reports." Hmm, mental side note: I miss the Weather Channel. Local Forecast, on the 8's of every hour! I mean, they do national weather here at 9:10 PM, but it's hardly the same; I'll admit that it would have behooved me to watch the weather at 9:10 the night before we went to the beach.


The three favorite seaside sites (not including breakaway-republic superstar Sokhumi) are Ureki, Kobuleti and Batumi. While Ureki has black, magnetic sand with healing powers, and while Batumi has a newly-renovated airport that offers flights to Istanbul for $80, we decided to go with Kobuleti because it has pretty rocks. I'm sure Batumi has pretty rocks too, but everytime I wear my swimsuit to Batumi, people suddenly develop a case of work ethic and leave to go have meetings instead of swimming. I think I'll start to be offended by this soon.

So me, Paige, Irina (my host sister, if you'll recall), Paige's host sister, and special guest star Host Mom Rusico-- who felt compelled to come because Irina is not yet old enough to travel 45 minutes away; it's not wrong or right, it's just different-- hop aboard a nearly-empty marshrutka toward Kobuleti. It is, of course, empty due to the menacing storm clouds that develop into a downpour and generally bode well for a day at the beach. I have resigned myself to visiting the US with pasty white legs (August 11th, baby!).




A quick inspection of the beach reveals it to be just as empty. Since it was raining already, though, we saw no harm in plunging into the menacing yet pleasantly warm waters. As Paige demonstrates in these three pictures, we quickly established that perhaps the waves that seemed entertaining at first (figure 1) may have been bigger than we'd estimated (figure 2), a theory which was confirmed when they started throwing us around (figure 3, if you can find her).


We took cues from our hosts sisters, who had planted their butts on the rocky shore where the waves could slap at them with foam but probably not drown anything. Here we had much gravel driven into our bathing suits. As an additional bonus, the foam was sometimes carrier of rocks that the Sea Gods used to stone us for our death-defying impudence. I would occasionally look down the beach to where my host mother stood alone, drenched in rain and sea spray, trying to unfold her umbrella that had been blown inside-out by the wind. I expressed some trite words of sympathy to my host sister, who assured me that her mom was fine and wouldn't mind staying for a few more hours.

After a grand two hours of swimming and sitting, we gave in and packed to leave. There was a pit stop for coffee and pizza (without mayonnaise!) at a cafe before we plopped into an east-bound marshrutka to leave stupid rainy Kobuleti behind. See how succinct that was? And I have no meandering cultural commentary to make either, other than to say that I drank all my water on the way home and since I couldn't get to my filter that evening, I've just drank about 250 mL of unfiltered water. I place this on the record so I can refer to it in the likely event of future parasites.


UNRELATED SIDE NOTE!!! If you're in the US, make sure you're watching VH1 at 9/8 Central on Tuesday (the 10th) if you want to see my nerdiest friends geeking out on the VH1 World Series of Pop Culture, season 2. Go Twisted Misters!!! I apologize to anyone reading this blog out of genuine interest in Georgia or Peace Corps; this kind of groupie-esque plug for a pop culture quiz show team is completely out of place and unwarranted, and in fact brings down the integrity of this blog in its entirety. Well, you know what? Your face. That's what.