You call those apples?

My host mother goes to the bazaar every day. This could be because we don't keep our refrigerator turned on and thus all food must be replenished each day, but I think most Georgians make daily trips to the bazaar anyway. Some of the fruits and vegetables can also be found in the grocery stores, but it's always the little bruised ones, and the price is always jacked up. Sixty cents for a kilo of apples? No thanks.

I venture into the bazaar significantly less often. It's not because I get lost, which I do-- though now I know my way out if I can find the fish market-- rather, it's because I rarely get the opportunity to test out my new cooking-from-scratch techniques, and thus I don't really need to buy a kilo of carrots for no reason. I used to use carrots as meal substitutes during the long bread-and-cheese winter, but that's hardly the same. Sometimes I like to pop on over and pick up a kilo or two of fruit, but then due to Georgian customs of communal ownership, my host family ends up eating most of it as I frown at them from the living room, longing for my homeland and the Western traditions of self-reliance/selfishness.

The best part about the bazaar is the surprises within-- will I find what I'm looking for, or has it gone out of season in the two weeks since I was last here? Did they sell out of it already? Is the bazaar even open? You never know. One week you're noting to yourself how there's thick black cherries for sale on every corner, the next you're digging through the lost cobwebby corners of the bazaar in search of the last pile of withered, gooey cherries. For example, check out the variety in the following picture. Can you label the apples, pears, oranges, bananas, mandarins, lemons, kiwis, pomegranates, grapes and persimmons? A sticker for all ten correct.



And of course, there's the haggling. Personally, I feel a great sense of capitalist guilt when haggling with bazaar ladies who are just trying to earn enough tetri to buy cheese for their families that day, so unless they're charging me a dollar per grape, I'll usually pay it. This, of course, is not including GREAT MOMENTS IN BAZAAR HISTORY #1: The day when I haggled the price of bananas down from 70 tetri a piece to 35. I made banana bread; it was delicious except for where I hadn't mixed it properly and there were chunks of baking soda.



Another problem is that, strangely, all the wares are labeled in Georgian, and by "labeled" I mean that the saleswoman tells me what they're called in Georgian. I usually just stare stupidly at a row of spice bags until someone asks me what I'm looking for, to which I tell them in Georgian that I don't know the word, but that it goes on chicken. It's good practice for improvisational cooking.



Sometimes you don't even have to go into the bazaar to find your fruit and veggies. There's usually a trail of fruit vendors outside the market, selling produce at an even lower fare, which seems impossible given that you can get two kilos of mandarins for one lari ($.70) even inside the bazaar. This probably has something to do with the presence of Ladas filled with mandarins. Mandarin-filled Ladas drive back and forth across the western side of Georgia, pouring forth their wares for whatever change you can fish out of your pocket. Since Russia doesn't buy Georgian mandarins anymore, there's quite the mandarin surplus; last year they had to dump a few tons into the Black Sea. Thus, mandarin-mobiles in the west, occasionally stopping by to trade with apple-mobiles from the east.



A final side note: this is a quince. The alphabet poster in our classroom has "Q is for Quince" written on it, and for 19 months I've wondered what the crap kind of made-up word that was. Now, I know: it's a grainy, tart fruit. And knowing is half the battle.

G.I. Joe!

It makes a village

It's still freezing. The record low Jen's Room Temperature I mentioned a couple posts ago was broken the next day by a delightful morning of 32.8 degrees Farenheit, or 0.5 degrees Celsius. I was overjoyed.

The frozen water pipes have turned the tables on all my cushy bourgeois advantages that come from living in a town. Yesterday, I took a bucket bath for the first time in over a year. Just now, I've been told that we're to use the oft-forgotten squat toilet out back, rather than the two renovated Western bathrooms, one of which is right outside my bedroom, that have sheltered me from the squat for 17 months.

The irony is that I visited my friend in a Gurian village yesterday, and her shower and toilet are fully functional. Woe to my hubris. Now the only advantages left are 1) the giant TV, and 2) internet. As I've come to despise the giant TV for playing mostly Latin American soap operas and fake Russian concerts (don't you people ever sing live?!), that leaves internet. Perhaps by writing this, I've cast a jinx on Samtredia that will cause our internet to go down-- it happens-- but if that occurs, I guess you won't find out about it until it's over.

However, enough of that; let's remember things to be thankful about. Thank God I usually have internet. Thank God the sun is staying out later each day. Thank God Misha's inauguration went off peacefully. Thank God I'll be really busy this week with grant proposals.

Thank God I'll be on a beach in Croatia in six months. I'll leave you with the pictures that occupy my mind these days



This one's nice.



This is good too.



And then there's here...

Making Bazhe!

You asked for it, now you're gonna get it... it's the recipe for five-minute Georgian walnut sauce, or bazhe! Despite reviewer Casey McFann's verbal parry that it "looks like crap," it's my favorite food in Georgia. Plus, the video's only like a minute long, so you may as well.

Um, Brrr

I believe the current cold snap in Georgia is worth a short post. It's been absolutely frigid since I got back from Armenia, so maybe this is like The Neverending Story and it won't go away until I name my enemy-- it's the cold front in Fantasia, Bastian!

- To mark the occasion, the temperature in my bedroom reached a record low of 33.8 degrees Farenheit. I'm sure Peace Corps volunteers in Mongolia wish for such an unseasonably warm day, but as for us in the temperate rainforests of Samtredia, that's too cold.

- The major water pipes are mostly frozen, so I poured buckets of water from the sink into our family's washing machine at intervals that seemed to resemble its usual cycles. Rather than hang the clean laundry on the clothesline to freeze, I hung it throughout the kitchen, where the gas burner on the stove is constantly running. While it would be nicer if my host family trusted me to run the woodstove in their absence, the open flame did turn out to be an efficient clothes dryer. Only a couple of burn marks.

- The start of school in Tbilisi was postponed due to the cold. My theory is that if the Tbilisi schools with their heaters and furnaces had to postpone, perhaps Samtredia with its nothing* will follow suit. If you're wondering why school has yet to start, by the way, then you must be reminded that Monday the 14th is Old New Year on the Orthodox calendar, and one cannot attend school before Old New Year. Happy Old New Year!



* There's no heating devices of any kind, except for in two classrooms, one of which is the English room. We have a small woodstove, which-- I may have mentioned when it happened-- melted its own smokepipe last year and keeled over, belching flames from the blazing inferno of its centerpiece. Fortunately, the 7th graders were there to carry the firy, rusty container outside.

Hi-ya, Hayastan!

Now that Georgia has chosen its new president, I've returned from my self-imposed exile in Armenia. My friend Heidi and I were forced to stay another day there due to the political situation, or perhaps due to the icy roads, but I'm pleased to say we overcame the hardships of being stuck in a warm hostel next to a Mexican restaurant for an extra day with nary a complaint.

Being a newly-designated travel snob, I'm reluctant to say that we discovered anything about Armenian culture by staying in the capital for six days, and with only token interaction with Armenian citizens... who don't, as it turns out, speak Georgian. Nonetheless, we did manage to pick up on some things:



1) In this video clip, Heidi describes the biggest cultural difficulty we had in Armenia (not the snow). This was a colossal error in planning on my part, and if not for the extra forced day in Yerevan, we wouldn't even have seen the Ararat cognac factory. But we did, and now I can pretentiously swirl a glass around with the best of them. To pass the time, we made friends at the hostel; highlights include a UN vs. Peace Corps game of Trivial Pursuit. There's a joke in there somewhere.


2) The Armenian diaspora is a force to be reckoned with. Outward manifestations of this include the powerful Armenian lobby in the US and the considerable Armenian enclaves outside San Francisco, but you really get a sense of it in Yerevan, especially if you've lived in Georgia for 18 months. For example, the stores are well-stocked with unlocal favorites, like broccoli and Corona. Sure, there are places in Georgia to find both, but in Armenia they're inexpensive and labeled in Armenian because there's an actual market other than for aid workers. They also have the EuroNews channel in Armenian-- the Georgians have to watch in Russian-- and the channel CNN Armenia. Needless to say, there is no CNN Georgia.


3) Armenian churches are more laid back than Georgian churches. We waltzed in to a few on Christmas Day, wearing jeans and no headscarves and generally prepared to be turned away at the door, but the Armenians were wearing more of the same. My host sister tells me this is because Georgians are orthodox and Armenians are Gregorian; I'll leave that there as a fact, but attribute it to her if you decide to complain to the New York Times about my chronic inaccuracy. This relaxed church atmosphere does not apply to the confused reception we received at a small chapel in Echmiadzin as we barged in on a private wedding. Awkward.


4) Wikitravel.org said that Republic Square in Yerevan boasts one of the two greatest examples of Soviet architecture in the world, after Tashkent, Uzbekistan. To me, Soviet architecture meant concrete apartment blocks, but it turns out that they were referring to the blocky, modernist look as shown in the museum in the picture. The most unusual thing about the Soviet architecture was that, unlike in Tbilisi, the Yerevan planners seem to be using the city's Soviet architectural history as a central theme for development. We saw new buildings, with cranes and scaffolding, whose facades resembled those modernist ones of the town square, right down to the orange and red stones. There's something to be said for planned design; it might restrict architectural innovation, but it also prevents the construction of glass-domed presidential palaces that look like reflective pickles. Ahem, Misha.


5) Being unable to read or recognize the characters of the Armenian language was like arriving in Georgia for the first time again. To me, all the Armenian letters look the same. To the Armenian Peace Corps volunteers, the Georgian letters look like squiggle. It's been said that the same man, Saint Mashtots, created both languages. I'm unable to verify this with Encarta, but if it's true, this guy is on my hit list. Why-- oh why-- would you create two esoteric alphabets for two geographically and linguistically isolated languages, unless you really disliked the Caucasus? Thanks, man.

Two last unrelated comments:

- Ararat's brandy tastes best to me when aged by 10 years.

- If you lose a contest, you can't concede defeat to a candidate that didn't win. If you really wanted that other candidate to win, you would have voted for him instead of campaigning for your ego and racking up your own coalition-splintering 1% of the vote.

That is all.

New Year, New Video Clip

Georgian New Year is best summed up with pictures of food and videos of fireworks. Thus, I'll give you a quick timeline and then jump right into the multimedia to appease those of you with American-level attention spans.

January 31st
9:00 AM - 10:00 PM: Host mother makes food, host sister buys fireworks
10:30 PM: Neighbors head home, for once. When the clock strikes 12, you gotta be in your own house with your own family.
11:45 PM: Commencement of fireworks. These are not 4th of July fireworks in a large field with a fire engine on standby, by the way. These are large, explosive fireworks being shot from every single yard in every single neighborhood in town. What it lacks in brilliant display and color coordination it makes up for in being life-threatening.
12:00 AM: The president appears on TV and wishes everyone a happy, protest-less New Year.
12:05 AM: We visit our neighbors, though after cooking all day it's clear that my host mom is trying to make it a speed tour of the neighborhood so we can return home. Her sister informs her that it's customary to stay for an hour. My host mom laughs and tells her we'll be waiting for her at our house.
12:10 AM - 2:30 AM: We drink champagne and watch the band Chico and the Gypsies play Spanish guitar music live from Tbilisi. Host sister repeatedly expresses her wish that she could be at the concert, or in Spain.

And now for the pictures...


My host aunt is grinding walnuts for bazhe, which is a delectable walnut sauce that I would put on everything every day if it weren't so expensive to make. This New Year's, the bazhe was destined to top boiled chicken, which is like putting caviar on Wonder bread.


I assisted my host sister in making vinagretti, which is a salad of pickles, carrots, potatoes, onions, "greens," and MAYONNAISE. I successfully cut a few carrots, which is an accomplishment if we realize that I have been chastised by my host family in the past for poor carrot-cutting.


Did I mention that vinagretti contains mayonnaise?


This huge cake might suffice for most three-person families, but we made four of them. It wouldn't be normal to be the only family on the block with one kind of cake on the table, like we were a bunch of hobos.


So this is what the final table looked like, more or less. Please direct your eyes to the obligatory khachapuri, the plates of cake, and the Bagrationi champagne. The delicious vinagretti is in front of the champagne bottle on the left.


In a heart-warming show of New Year's spirit, the children tie up their fireworks for maximum explosive effect.

Speaking of fireworks, the fireworks were probably the coolest part of the evening. I've included a bit of masterfully-edited fireworks footage here, but since it was recorded using a sub-professional five-year-old camera, this will be more of an auditory experience. I tried to capture the Black Hawk Down-ness of being surrounded on all sides by explosions, and you might notice the part at the end where my host sister pulls me out of the tiny-firecracker danger zone. I think Georgian tradition states that this means she'll save my life at some point this year. This implies that my life will need saved, which I don't like.



And there we have it. Reread this post for the next week or so, as I will be in Armenia. If problems happen in the Georgian elections on the 5th, reread this post a few more times because I will be stuck in Armenia.