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.
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