Hippity Hoppity

Last weekend was Easter here in Sakartvelo (and in a couple other orthodox places too). Rather than re-describe the traditions of Georgian Easter, I'll just offer you a link to this magnum opus from 2007 and then go on to write a picture-filled post about my weekend in the village.

1) Chicken Factory


This was the first I'd seen/heard of this kind of building, where you take a bunch of eggs, drop them off, and come back three weeks later to pick up your nicely-incubated chickens. The facility itself used to be a Soviet collective, so naturally it consisted of rows and rows of empty buildings that still somehow smelled like chicken poo.


The nice lady, who has probably been working here since Khrushchev, opened the incubator doors and showed us what kind of chick harvest they had sprouting. I found the uncracked eggs surrounded by baby chicks to be depressing for some reason. You usually don't think of eggs as alive, but those were definitely some dead eggs. It's the same effect that made me afraid to hold the container of eggs on the way in, since dropping the container would be like performing 50 little chicken abortions. I guess it's different when you know they're destined to be birds rather than omelets.


And as an added highlight, a picture of Stalin prominently placed. Uncle Joe lives on.

2) Frolicking in the Garden


First thing's first, my village host family's garden is massive. It's how they make their living, so I guess that makes sense, but I wasn't expecting the billion fruit trees we ran into, each of which they say yields 1-1.5 metric tons of apples. Dag, yo.

Inspired by the wavy grass and blue sky and all such spring shenanigans, we proceeded to take a thousand family photos. There's not much I could say about these without sounding like I'm giving a slideshow at a reunion ("And here's us next to the tree... And here's us in the tree..."), so I'll just stick a couple of them here as silent examples.




3) Pets


Their family has a cat and a dog. That's no big deal. The unusual part is that they adore both of them and feed them people food all the time. Here, an even rarer site: a mamakatsi (man's man) host father petting a cat.


And then there's Simba, who is at least part-German Shepherd, I think. Simba is one year old and enjoys nuzzling people with her entire head, soup, and barking. She has something most Georgian dogs don't-- a collar.






4) Jeni is Fat

An inordinate amount of time was spent this weekend in noticing that Jeni has gained weight since the time when she lived there during training. Fortunately, they were preoccupied with showing their neighbors pictures that show how their daughter (who is studying in Texas) has gained weight, but any mention of the daughter's newfound fattiness is inevitably followed by the descriptor, "She's probably the same size as Jeni now!" It's not rude, it's cultural. It's not rude, it's cultural. It's not rude, it's cultural...