Meet the Parents

Imagine that you went to New York University for four years, living in a university housing apartment with your friends, paying your own bills, making your own food, and generally living a semi-independent existence supplemented by pity bank-deposits from your parents when they find out you've been eating canned corn for dinner. Imagine that you are then placed with a host family in not-Tbilisi Georgia, where girls are not considered women until they're married, where married couples tend to live with their parents, and where even younger boys are free to boss around their sisters and mothers. Sounds like hell? Well, it's not. While I've found that all of the above are true statements, I've also found that there are ways to live a peaceful co-existence with my host family. It helps that my host-family is a little unorthodox...


To be sure, they demonstrate the stereotypical Georgian characteristics, like yelling a lot and being quick-tempered, though they take pride in these, as it gives them a feeling of kindred brotherhood with the Italians. Or so they tell me.


For those of you who knew me in the US, you know I wasn't prone to talking much around people I didn't know well. My host sister, Irina, is perfectly content to practice her English during that vacuum of silence, or just to sit awkwardly and wait for me to say something. I appreciate that infinitely. She also takes my side during cultural battles, such as when I say I don't want anymore eggplant, and her mother-- being a good Georgian hostess-- tells me to eat more eggplant again, and Irina yells something like, "Aren't you listening?! She doesn't want anymore eggplant, woman!!" Irina loves Bruce Willis, Will Smith, Monica Bellucci, and Jennifer Lopez, and she's understandably the best English student in her class.


Irakli lives in his own apartment in Tbilisi, but he sometimes/rarely comes to visit. In this picture, he's mowing the lawn like a good man-of-the-house. Lucky boy, he's leaving in two months to go study English in London for a year, so he can add to his existing array of scattered English, such as "because," "boy," "not at all," and an assortment of anatomically-based swear words. I'm under the impression that certain of his habits-- ordering his female family members around, driving like a lunatic, smoking 3 packs of cigarettes a day-- will either cease in London or force him to return. I'm hoping for the former. Irakli likes Russian music, driving, and Tbilisi night life.


My host mother Rusico (on the left) takes care of these two old children, with the occasional assistance and visitation from her sister and neighbor, Darejan (on the right). Rusico spends much of the day taking care of the house, shopping in the bazaar, and chatting with her friends over coffee. She also has an insatiable love for "serialis," the Latin American soap operas which I believe I described in the last blog entry. Serialis run from about 6 PM to 11 PM, and then they rerun the next morning so you can see them with fewer commercials. Her favorite seriali is "Meore Sitsotskle," or "El Cuerpo del Deseo" in Spanish.


My host father Alexander lives and works in Russia as a businessman. He's made the occasional cameo, namely once in July when I was first visiting Samtredia, and once in February. He's a typical Georgian "mamakatsi" (man's man), and he loves to bring back presents for his kids. He's also tried to teach Irina how to swim and how to drive, though the latter resulted in a 400-lari ticket, as we happen to live down the street from a police station, which was probably not the best place to put a 15-year-old behind the wheel. I don't know what Alexander likes, but Russian music is probably a safe bet, as is vodka. That's not a jab at Russians (or is it?)-- I recall excessive vodka presence in the house during the month of February.


So how do I fit in here? Well, first I had to establish a niche for myself as a strange member of the family who eats their food but isn't subject to their rules (hey, they get reimbursed for it). This is not to say that I flounce around the house in booty shorts and get home every night at 3 AM, just that I don't ask permission before I go places... though I do inform them, which is something I won't miss when I get home. Furthermore, I also transformed myself into the most docile person on the planet. For example, I like to be in the same room as everybody-- that's the family, and also the 10,000 neighbors who come over every day-- but I don't like seriali, so I read while they watch them. This led to my host sister labeling me with her new vocabulary word "bookworm," and to her mother saying that she'd let her daughter be as free as I am if she knew her daughter was going to read all the time like I do. I smiled at the mental picture of myself in New York reading from 8-10PM and then heading off to bed, but I didn't protest.

That's another thing to get used to. You know on a conscious level that there's different common opinions and practices in Georgia than in the US, but there's still a visceral reaction to things that seem unjust to you. For example, when we're watching Lost and the character Michael is identified by a word that vaguely translates into "negro." Instinctively, I want to write everyone in the room off as bigots. Logically, I know that they're not saying it out of hate, but rather that in a mostly-homogenous culture like Georgia's (or one that purports itself to be), identifying people by their differences is to be expected. It's not a mark of backwardness, either, since Korea does it too. And I know the reason they identify the characters Sun and Jin as Chinese rather than Korean is because there's an influx of Chinese people and stores here, and they're more familiar with what Chinese people look like than Korean-- though if her cousins ask about the Chinese person on Lost, Irina starts smacking them and pointing at me, hissing "KOREAN!" My defender.


That's about it for my family for now. As a last note, I've included this picture of my host cousin Gia, who asked me to put his picture on the internet because he's looking for an American wife. So, ladies... this is Gia. He has a master's degree in economics, and A JOB in Kutaisi (don't underestimate the value of that; there's 80% unemployment here). He's 26 years old, and he's said repeatedly that he's willing to do 50% of the housework, since that's what I told him it would take. Gia has a good sense of humor, and he can somewhat play the piano. He's looking for a lovely American wife to take on moonlit walks along the Black Sea. Leave a comment if interested!

It's Samtredia!

Wondering where I live? That's only natural. Since everyone has already spilled the beans on their own blogs, I may as well tell you: I live in Samtredia.

That's right, THE Samtredia. Its name, as you know, means "three pigeons."


Samtredia is the transportation hub of the west; all main roads and railways converge at her paved feet, and passengers and drivers alike duly pause to admire/ignore our town before they continue their commute east to Tbilisi or west to Batumi. Despite what the tourist pamphlet that I have says-- and, by the way, the tourist pamphlet is complete with a map, which would be handy if the roads were labeled-- there's not a whole lot of reasons for a visiting foreigner to stop in Samtredia, which makes it a greater mystery that I've seen German tourists with backpacks being led into our town bazaar. Why would you come from Germany to Samtredia? If in Samtredia, why would you visit the bazaar?


The one problem I had with Samtredia when I got here was the organized...ness. The organizedness. Check out this picture to the left, and you might see something that you won't see in other people's Georgia blogs: gridded streets. That's right, after starting out as a mere speck next to two intersecting rail lines, Samtredia was planned into existence, something few of Samtredia's neighboring cities can claim (as the others average in age around 1500 years, so perhaps we can give them a break). Some houses actually have numbers, like my sitemate's. Some houses, like mine, have "numbers" which are unknown to all except those who live there, since they're not written anywhere on the house or on the gate, of course.


In addition to the grid, Samtredia also features other marvels of city planning (okay, Soviets, you did this one right, but that makes the score like 1-45278938), such as rectangular parks and a definable city center. There's Momavlis Parki ("Future Park") and another park that my sitemate and I creatively call "Screen Park," which boasts a large projection screen on which Russian music videos are broadcast during summer nights from the back of a Lada (watch for a future post on Ladas, the car of the proletariat). There's a 4-story city hall, a library, quite a few internet cafes, some restaurants, 1394 pharmacies, and a hundred zillion little grocery stores. The guy on the right, who was ignorant of my presence until the flash went off, is a local store owner, diligently packing a roll of Russian toilet paper (by some PCV accounts, made of gravel).


This qualifies as the ugliest hotel in existence, I think. Did you just look at it and agree, laughing to yourself about the squalor that some people call sufficient for overnight stays? WELL, shame on you! It's technically a hotel (it says "sastumro" across the top, a.k.a. "a place for guests") but its tenants are mostly permanent ones, and since there's not actually a shortage of quality housing here, most of those tenants are refugees from Abkhazia. I apologize for setting you up to laugh at refugees; I take back the shame on you and place it on myself.


To get back to the point, though, my initial impressions of Samtredia were skewed, as many initial impressions tend to be. Although it felt when I got here like I Wasn't really in the Peace Corps, rather that I was living in an American suburb but without the precious Wal-Mart, there's some aspects of Georgian culture that have risen to take the place of the cultural immersion I experienced during training, when I lived in the village (and I requested to be placed in a village, for the record). For example, I still get to dry my clothes outside, and there's still a rooster in my yard, though this one has half the IQ and one-eighth the time perception of the roosters in the village.

Rooster: 3 AM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Rooster: 7:59 AM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!
Rooster: 4:30 PM! Cock-a-doodle-doo!


The sense of neighborly camraderie among Georgians is alive and well here, too. Despite having lived in California, MD for 15 years of my life (put away your maps, random internet stalkers, we moved away right after I left for Peace Corps), I couldn't tell you the first name of the residents of 4 of the 5 houses within the immediate vicinity of my house. Here in Georgia, the neighbors come over every single day to watch Latin American soap operas-- the big one right now is El Cuerpo del Deseo since Montecristo just ended, though La Viuda de Blanco might be an up-and-coming hit-- and in fact, one of the neighbors is my host aunt. There was a wedding down the street (note: Georgian weddings last 2 days, and if I ever get to go to one, you bet there'll be a blog post rife with semi-witty commentary) and whereas I had never met said neighbor, we still went to their place to assist with the creation of enough food to feed an army with and then with which to bury the army up to their necks. This picture is of some of my host relatives and neighbors, caught red-handed (ha) butchering chickens. And then my host sister decided it might be nice to hold a turkey up to her face.


So that's your official introduction to Samtredia, almost 11 months after I got here. No, I didn't write anything about school, thanks for pointing that out... perhaps another entry is due. And then perhaps a show-offy entry about the successful completion of the Writing Olympics project, if it ever gets successfully completed. Maybe then a trite entry about the life-changing miracle of Peace Corps developmental work, or a 10-paragraph discussion of local weather patterns. The future is wide open!

Duchess, 1994-2007

To any current or future PCVs reading this, feel free to skip this entry as it has nothing to do with Peace Corps or Georgia. For lighter fare, check out the essay from earlier this week, a tour through the Pioneer Palace.

Still reading?


This entry is dedicated to the memory of Ms. Duchess McFann, a.k.a. "Miss Fluffy," "Geefren," "Badeena," "Lardbutt," "Duchess Roo," "Snaggletooth," "Porkchop," etc. She was a lousy guard dog, snarling at friends who'd given her treats the last 50000 times they'd seen her, while allowing strange men into the house unpestered if none of her masters were home to protect. She wasn't very obedient; she never learned any tricks beyond "sit," and even this was a display she would only deign to perform if there were treats involved. Every time she was left alone in the house, she would knock over the garbage can, communicating in her own irritating way that she missed her family.

But she was adorable.

Duchess and her brother Duke lived together with a family who pampered them until the age of 5, at which point they were given up for adoption. In 1999, a woman and her two daughters came to Duchess's foster home, where her appearance elicited many squeals of delight and adoration, and she was adopted immediately. Initially, Duchess was shy; she never barked, nor did she wag her tail. She didn't know how to play (and in fact, never really learned very well) and spent most of her time laying around (that didn't really change).


As the weeks passed, however, she grew to become a full-fledged member of the family. She discovered that this role, while it led to many treats and too much petting, also demanded of her that she engage in the following tasks, which she did with a minimum of protest:


- dress as a farmer for Halloween, and in fact wear whatever ridiculous bows or handkerchiefs her family happened upon
- ride a jetski at full speed
- ride on the bow of a kayak and be tipped into the water
- go sledding down a hill on an air tube
- accompany family members on errands around town
- have hundreds of pictures taken of her


Et cetera. Duchess faced a crisis in her life in 2006, when-- after one member of her family left for the Peace Corps and another left for college-- the third family member also had to leave for grad school and could no longer house Duchess. Duchess was heart-breakingly and reluctantly returned to the sheltie foster system from which she'd been adopted. But all was not lost: a month later, the grad student's landlady's cat died, and Duchess was offered a place in her home. Aside from the uninformed chidings of a third party who'd intended to adopt Duchess and who accused her family of neglect, the process went through swiftly, and Duchess took a plane ride to Minnesota, where she lived the remainder of her life with her one family member.


Duchess was 13 years old on Monday, when she suffered a stroke and was put down. While her owner in the Peace Corps wishes nothing more than that she could have seen Duchess one more time, she's secure in the knowledge that Duchess had a full, unique life, and that very few shelties can claim to have gone jetskiing. And despite what the Bible Club faculty sponsor told me in 9th grade, I think Duchess knows that I miss her and that I didn't abandon her when I came to Georgia.



*pours wine onto a piece of bread*
Duchess kargi dzaghli iko, da dzalian momenatreba is. Ksona ikos.

O Young Pioneer!

Let's take a quick trip to the Pioneer's Palace in Chiatura (and maybe after five or ten entries about Chiatura, I'll introduce you to where I live).



First, you get into the cable cars and ride up to the side of a mountain. The cables in the picture are actually from another set of cable cars that are in place for the convenience of the manganese miners and offer an infinitely more harrowing experience-- though Heidi assures us they've never fallen. I will take that at face value because any evidence to the contrary would induce me to foreswear the most quirky public transportation system in Georgia. That, and the miners' cable cars are free.

At the top of a hill, from which you can see the former majesty of all the proletariat attractions I described in the last Chiatura entry, there stands mud. The mud has kept me from gaining entry to the Pioneer's Palace the previous two times I'd tried, but not yesterday. Yesterday we discovered that a kind soul had placed crude stepping stones so that one could tiptoe onto former Soviet grounds with a minimum of mud engulfing one's shoes.

Oh, time out-- do we all know what the Pioneers are? For those of you in America who haven't had the notion to look it up, the Pioneers were like Soviet boy scouts, except for both genders participated, of course-- equality for the workers! There's a former Pioneer meeting house in many towns, including the one where I live, and they offered the usual stuff... cultural education, clubs, excursions, patriotism, indoctrination, etc (just like Boy Scouts, right?).


Now we come to the purpose of the Pioneer Palace, which was like a giant meeting place for good little pioneers on good little pioneer excursions. You can sort of picture it in its days of glory, a vast marble structure with columns and arches and stairs, overlooking the socialist perfection of Chiatura. You can almost hear the little Russian voices ("Yes, Russian, stop clinging to your former Georgian identity; you're Soviet now!") lifting the tune of L'Internationale and heaving it over the cliffside where it would warm the cockles of party members everywhere, even reaching as far as the all-marble KBG building. A portrait of Lenin crowns the landscape, framed by trees against a background of Chiaturan socialist harmony.

Let's take it forward about twenty years, to yesterday when Stalin cried in his grave as four Americans stomped their way across Pioneer Palace grounds, taking pictures to send to their bourgeois families. No one from Chiatura really visits the palace, for understandable reasons of bad memories most likely, but we still think that even in its current condition, it'd make an excellent tourist attraction, as would the entire town. Soviet Disney! To boot, the aforementioned KGB building was blown up in 1989 by Georgians encouraged (communists prefer "confused") by democracy protests in Tbilisi, who then used the marble rubble to rebuild a monastery the Soviets had torn down.


So as you can see from this picture, the condition of the building is somewhat... unkempt. Even as the three Americans look bravely toward the future-- with rocks in hand to throw at the hostile feral dogs which call the palace home-- the palace behind falls apart, wishing for the past. No more little internationalist hymns singing down from the music rooms, no more excited groups of Soviet children trickling in and out of the doors.


Could we have in fact trickled into the door (it's locked), we most likely would have fallen through the floor. The walls are all sorts of lovely, tacky colors, which have only become tackier as the layers of paint peels away and one can see what lovely, tacky colors were plastered on before. Like history through layers of sandstone or tree rings, except with more lead.


The majestic cliffside view is still as majestic, if you're not bothered by things like rows upon rows of empty apartment buildings and half-finished hotels, but Ilya Ilyich's bald head no longer guards the palace. Its absence is marked by five holes on the monument that held the picture, though without the picture there, it's more apparent that this monument is weird. What shape is that? And what color, for that matter? As in the case of many Chiaturan post-Soviet modifications, we think it would have been cool if they left it the way it was; of course, our country wasn't left helpless in 1991 with an unduly complicated and shoddy infrastructure and an unsustainable economy, so perhaps our dreams of kitsch are somewhat outweighed in importance.

I hereby promise not to devote any more posts to Chiatura until I write one about my site-- which, you may have noticed, I haven't once mentioned by name in this blog. I was under the impression that to do so would be frowned upon by safety & security staff, but all the cool kids are doing it, so stay tuned for that.

Jesus is Risen, gately

Welcome to a wrap-up of this year's Georgian Easter ("Aghdgoma," or "the rising"). I've never tried to post pictures to this blog before, but we're gonna give it a shot.



In the first place, you have an Easter supra in the morning. This is just like Easter brunch in America, except for it's in a graveyard with your dead relatives. I realized belatedly that there are tables all over the place in Georgian cemetaries for this purpose (and also for Tslis Tavis, if you remember from a previous post). My host family and I took a marshrutka to the town of Vani-- also famous for being the home of the Golden Fleece, yes THE Golden Fleece-- where my host mother's parents and cousins and grandparents et cetera are buried. There we ate some khachapuri and boiled chicken, made some toasts with 2.50-lari (~$1.47) bottles of wine, and poured some wine on the graves so they could imbibe too.



The dead are the life of the Easter party. In addition to getting their own day, which is the day after Easter, they also get special treatment on Easter. You'll note in this picture that there's little cakes near the headstones. These are called "paska," and they're special Easter cakes. Every dead person gets a paska and some candles-- no candles at this grave, unfortunately, but I think that's because the whole family died (check out the dates... that guy died when he was 29). Well, that's depressing. But don't you think the graves are a lot more personal with the portraits etched on them? Maybe that's why it's easier for Georgians to frequent their cemetaries than it is for Americans; all we see is names and dates.



Georgians dye hard-boiled eggs red a couple days before Easter-- only red, since that's the holy color here. Every dead person gets an egg on their grave as part of their party favors, and then children eat the rest. There's a game that goes along with eating an egg: two people each hold an egg in their hand, and then they hit them together. Whosever egg breaks is the loser (see picture for example of losing egg, i.e. mine). This happens approximately ten million times and never loses its appeal. My host sister from the village told me that some little cheaters make wooden eggs and paint them red so they win every time. Now at first blush, this seems like a lot of effort to win a game that is, to say the least, simple... but then you think about our exciting Easter game in America: FIND THE EGGS! Not much better on the excitement scale, but still suitable for children with low attention spans.

One more thing: there's a traditional Easter greeting, which when translated goes as "Christ is risen," with the response, "Indeed." In Georgian-- "Kriste azdga," "Cheshmaritad." That latter word-- cheshmaritad-- is the more important for volunteers to learn, since usually we end up responding to greetings from strangers rather than initiating them. The big problem for me was that "cheshmaritad" sounds like other, more familiar words that I already knew, like "ishviatad" ("rarely").

Georgian person: Christ is risen.
Me: Rarely.

I also kept coming up with "chishkari" (gate) and then turning it into an adverb. "Chishkaritad."

Georgian person: Christ is risen.
Me: Gate-ly.

Hopefully that didn't happen too often. To conclude, I'll point out that not only is the day after Easter a holiday for the dead in its own right, but this day also happens to fall on April 9th this year, which is a holiday to commemorate the people who were killed by the Soviet army in a democracy demonstration in Georgia in 1989. When I came downstairs at 9:30 this morning, there was a glass of wine waiting for me so we could do all the necessary toasts for both holidays. Other than that, though, the rest of today looks to be normal, minus the fact that everything's closed so I can't get any work done.

And of course, you didn't forget that today's my birthday, right?

A Lesson in Georgian

And you thought it took hours and weeks and months of studying to understand even the easiest phrases. Now, in just ten minutes, learn the key words that will unlock the gates of Sakartvelo and behind which happiness and cultural awareness reign supreme!

Meti khachapuri aghar minda.
I don’t want any more cheesebread.

Tarebas sad istzavle?
Where did you learn to drive?

Sheni shvili martla kargi bitchia, maints gatkhoveba ar minda akhla.
Your son really is a lovely boy, but I don’t want to get married now.

Es romeli sadghregrdzeloa?
Which toast is this?

Ara, seriozulad, bevr khachapurs ukve vchame.
No, seriously, I already ate a lot of cheesebread.

Bolo nishnebs chven unda davtzerot mat sakontrolo tzeris nishnebis datzeris shemdeg.
We need to wait until after we’ve graded their tests to write their final grades.

Ar makvs khelpasi. Martla.
I don’t have a salary. Really.

Ar vitsi rusuli. Ktovt, dabrundi shens samshoblo enas.
I don’t know Russian. Please return to your native language.

Meti khachapuri rom shevcham, momklavs.
If I eat any more cheesebread, it will kill me.

Dabana ar mtchirdeba; ukve davibane gasul kviras.
I don’t need to bathe; I just took a bath last week.

Tavi damanebet—saelchoshi vmushaob.
Leave me alone—I work at the embassy.

Vitsi rom politikaze ver vlaparakob, magram ase mgonia, rom saakashvili gasukda.
I know I can’t talk about politics, but I agree, President Saakashvili has gotten fat.

Ati lari taksit, khumrob?! Aseti puli arts unda tvitmprinavit tzasvla!
Ten lari by taxi, are you kidding?! It doesn’t take that much to go by plane!

Tzukhel “dakargulebis” ukurebdi?
Did you watch “Lost” last night?

Kargi ra, mashin kidev mometsi erti tsali khachapuri.
Enough already, just give me another piece of cheesebread.

Rotsa davalebas aghar dagtchirdeba, mere imisit isargeble tvaletis kaghaldad.
When you don’t need your homework anymore, use it as toilet paper.

Congratulations! Assuming that your quick readthrough of the above sentences led to permanent memorization, you are now certified to spend at least one week in Georgia! Stay tuned later in 2007 for further installments, and someday you too could have the vocabulary training to spend 26 months in the Republic of Georgia!

Chiatura Is My Pride

This week, I teach alone for the first time. It’s not some step in the natural order of things—I’m not supposed to teach alone ever—but rather my counterpart has the flu (not bird flu). Things went fine on Monday, despite my certainty that the school day would end in disaster, and barring any problems with my inability to communicate with the 5th graders tomorrow, I foresee a middling performance on my part, which I shall label success.

All of the following facts that couldn’t be ascertained from first-hand looks are courtesy of Senora Heidi, a sonorous laugher, Texan, and proponent of Stalinesque classroom discipline.

I spent the weekend in Chiatura, a former Soviet model city of 50,000 which now boasts 10,000 occupants and about 30 artistic renditions of Stalin. It would have been 31 if his likeness hadn’t been removed from the Hollywood-esque “Chiatura—My Pride” sign on the side of the gorge, where the only remnant is empty scaffolding. Unfortunately for all, the mood Lenin head that glowed red, blue, and green according to the time of day has also been disposed of, as has the oversized clock that told good proletariat citizens when it was time to start working.

That’s pretty much the essence of Chiatura… it’s surreal in that you feel like this was the alternate universe that angels would have shown Trotsky in It’s a Wonderful Life when he was about to jump into the river (“This is the USSR without you!”). Many of the Soviet signs and buildings are still up, but one and all are decrepit. The Georgians are rebuilding in the center of town, and it’s turning out pretty well, but the town itself has a lot of falling apart to do before it can reidentify itself as Georgian. Being in Chiatura is the closest I’ve ever come (and probably will ever come) to existing behind the Iron Curtain during Soviet times. You find yourself imagining this gorge town filled with people who all believed that they were living in an ideal future society, and with the giant clocks and the Lenin head in place, I can see how it would be difficult to see otherwise.

What other gems are there? Well, being a gorge, Chiatura has developed a lovely little system of cable cars—sabagiroebi—that will cart you up and down the hillsides for a fee of twenty tetri ($.12). If you’re too manly to take the quality-implied sabagiroebi, you can roll on over to the mining cable cars. Since Chiatura is famous for its manganese deposits, mining is a big industry. In fact, it’s the only remaining big industry—just ask the manganese-filled black river! Delicious! Anyway, those mining cars will take you up up up at a cool 80 degree angle, and just when you’ve reached the top despite all odds that you’d crash into the cliff, you look at the slope of the rope your car will have to ride down and you wonder if there’s a walking path instead, or perhaps you decide that returning is overrated.

I love Chiatura for all the above reasons. It’s one of the most fascinating places I’ve been to here, and when Heidi gets her own apartment (4 rooms for $45 a month… that’s what happens when 10000 people live in a city formerly housing 50000) I will make it my second home, regardless of her consent. I won’t hold it against the city that the nuns kicked me out of the cool cave monastery for wearing a headscarf tucked into my pants in lieu of a skirt. And if you don’t mind (but you will), I’d like to reappropriate the slogan of a quaint little town I know in America.

Chiatura is Gorges.

Grave-Robbing

I can't decide if this is a good idea or not: I want to take the metal detector (which has mysteriously been sitting on top of my wardrobe since I got here) to the outskirts of my site where all the buildings are crumbled piles of bricks with perhaps a stray cement foundation pillar or two still standing, and I want to search for old Soviet crap and perhaps metal detritus from the war with Abkhazia. Pro: old Soviet stuff and metal detritus from the war with Abkhazia would be incredibly interesting to find, and they have it out the wazoo here. Con: The war with Abkhazia was just under 15 years ago, and I wonder if that's too short an elapsed time for me to go poking around a former war zone. I'm not actually sure that the buildings crumbled as a result of the war... buildings usually crumble here because of their high-quality Soviet contruction. Maybe that's it, though I have the same feeling in my stomach now that I had when I realized my friend was really offended that I'd told him he smelled like a marshrutka (turns out it was onions in the kitchen), so perhaps it's a horrid idea and I should be ashamed at contemplating such grave robbery.

Mom wants me to skedaddle back to America for her graduation in August. While I am obviously in favor of this-- especially since the fake itinerary I've drawn up puts me in Maryland for Dad's annual pig roast-- I am also obviously broke. And why shouldn't I be? I'm the one who chose to volunteer for almost 2 1/2 years when I could have been making minimum-wage CA$H in the US. To my precious friends and family: do any of you have any frequent flier miles that are about to expire? Do frequent flier miles even work that way? In any case, I'm checking out whatever options I can along that front and am open to ideas that don't involve embezzlement of development grant money.

Speaking of grant money, Writing Olympics got funded! Huzzah! Sitemate Ian and I set the contest dates for our town, so now all that's left is to pester the rest of the volunteers until the March 30th deadline (if you're a volunteer reading this, are YOU doing Writing Olympics? Why or why not?). There's some pretty sweet prizes involved for the winners... framed certificates, English books, pens, notebooks, a backpack for the Best of the Caucuses winner. And we're gonna have the winners' essays compiled into a little book again, though there's one wrench in that gear: the tension between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Last year, they had to make two versions of the book since the host country nationals didn't want the children's essays from Azerbaijan to touch the Armenian essays and vice versa. Maybe we'll just make the one version this year, where the essays are separated by country rather than by grade (the latter being the sensible format).

Another thing I can't decide: whether I'm being culturally insensitive by finding the publication problems maddening. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, IT'S A BOOK OF ESSAYS WRITTEN BY CHILDREN!!! Then again, it's easy for me as an American-- citizen of a heterogenous state with no historical nationality-- to see conflicts of ethnic nationalism as petty. Can I picture myself as a citizen of a smaller country, fighting violently against a neighboring country that'd just as soon wipe my country from existence, and then some ignorant, arrogant chick from the world's hegemon waltzes over and rolls her eyes at hundreds of years of history? Sorry, despite trying my best to write that second POV from the perspective of an Armenian or Azeri, it's still not convincing. Even to me.

Maybe this distaste for the mechanisms behind ethnic conflict is what leads me to disagree so vehemently with crackpot writer Gary Kah. Check out his theories on how Satan is using New Agers and Freemasons in a global conspiracy to create a One-World Government at http://www.garykah.org (he knows! he was in Who's Who in the Midwest!).

Welcome to the Neighborhood

I’ve found the definition of masochism: a Peace Corps volunteer who’s had a carrot for breakfast, sitting down between classes to reformat an Applebee’s menu she downloaded from the internet. Naturally, it’s for class usage and thus serves some purpose, but never have I ever in my entire life wished that there were more Applebee’s in the world. Until today.

Warning: the next section should not be read by other volunteers.

Since I’ve got the menu right here, how about a sampling of the prime offenders? Mmm… sampler…

Nachos Nuevos Crispy red, blue & yellow corn chips topped with spicy ground beef, black beans & melted cheese. Topped with sour cream, fresh tomato & jalapeсo 11.49

Fried Chicken Salad Bite size chicken fingers atop mixed greens with cheddar, diced tomatoes & eggs. Served with honey mustard dressing & toasted garlic bread 11.29

Honey Grilled Salmon Flame grilled Atlantic salmon glazed with Applebee's honey pepper sauce & served with almond rice pilaf, seasonal vegetables & garlic toast. Served grilled as well - without the honey sauce 17.49

Bacon Cheese Chicken Grill Sandwich An 8 oz. boneless marinated chicken breast grilled with bacon & cheddar cheese. Served on a toasted sesame seed bun 11.49

So that’s my hell for today. The funny thing is that I considered Applebee’s to be quite the mediocre establishment before I left. Maybe it’s because they were everywhere, or because despite their claims to be part of the neighborhood, they all looked the same inside, save for different local school colors. Is that really what I miss about America? Consumerism? Assembly-line production? Pandering, middle-of-the-road options disguised as innovation?

YES.

Borat vs. Georgia

First, this was going to be a comparative essay on Borat versus the reality of living in central Asia. In the process of writing that, the introduction became a rant against a certain humorless, ill-tempered placement officer who made my early Peace Corps experience a nightmare and who should be fired or at least have his/her house egged. Neither of those would likely garner the favor of my dear employer, the US government, so nix and nix. Actually, though, I can write a little bit about Borat anyway since I’m such a rebel.

Borat vs. Georgia

Being a –stan country:
Kazakhstan, obviously one of the –stans that many people have trouble placing on the map. I’ll admit, although they’re just a quick hop across the Caspian Sea, I probably still couldn’t tell you where most of them are. BUT did you know that the word for Georgia in Turkish is Gürjistan? So there you go, welcome to a –stan.

Technologique:
Borat seems rather pleased with his VCR and his radio alarm clock. You may notice in Georgia, however, that while there are many households with black-and-white televisions and tape players, the cell phones outstrip what most people have in the US. Why? I don’t know. Nor am I in favor of my 10th-form students’ possession of phones that can play the latest in Russian pop before, during, and after class. Just don’t be surprised if your host sister hands you her phone and asks you to type “Bruce Willis” into the Google search window she’s browsing.

Driving you crazy:
As another volunteer pointed out, some of Borat’s driving antics in the movie go unnoticed by PC Georgia viewers. He’s straddling two lanes? Oh, I didn’t notice. The speed limit has no bearing on how fast/slow he’s going? Well, why would it? There’s an 8-year-old chauffeur at the beginning of the movie? How else can he learn to drive without practice? I’ve seen two or three sources from travelers more experienced than I (read: everybody) who cite Georgian drivers as the worst in the world. I’ll readily believe that. When you spend most of the drive in the passing lane on a two-way road, diving back between correct-lane cars to hide from oncoming traffic, creating a third middle lane with the oodles of space left between the cars going in opposite directions, hitting the gas when idiot pedestrians think the road is for walking on… let’s move on.

Smoochy smoo, kissy-wissy:
Borat’s traditional Kazakh greeting elicits a stream of four-letter words from his fellow New York City straphangers, while most Americans engage in a battle between cultural sensitivity and instinct, slightly leaning away from him as he places a kiss on each cheek (and sometimes on the mouth). Good news for those of you with strict personal bubbles: Georgians only kiss one cheek! They don’t save it just for the same sex, either—host nationals will kiss everyone they meet. It’s a part of being tbili khalkhi (warm people). Some Georgians will—for the novelty of it—offer you a handshake, wearing the same smile of delight in cultural awareness as you will the first time you give a supra toast that’s more than two words long. Remember: while it’s not your fault that the Soviets told everyone in their sphere that Americans are cold people, you can go a long way to debunk that stereotype by getting used to the nice-to-see-you smooch.

Chicken tonight:
When the chicken got loose from Borat’s bag and started fluttering all over the subway, were you thinking of bird flu? Because I was. First off, yes, people carry chickens in bags… but how else can you get a chicken from the bazaar to your house? It might be a bit disconcerting to see some legs sticking out of a plastic bag and then to hear the bag clucking, but it does save you the sight of chickens getting slaughtered in the shops, rather than at home. Back to bird flu, though—there hasn’t actually been any bird flu here this year (and I don’t know if there was last year), but it is sitting there in the back of people’s minds, especially those people whose livelihoods depend on chickens. Glad to have sucked the humor out of that scene.

“I Do” optional:
You may have seen it coming from the time Borat described his cloth creation as a “marriage sack,” foreshadowing the part where he stuffs the sack over Pamela Anderson’s head and throws her over his shoulder to be his wife. Here comes another humor-killer: while it’s relatively rare compared to earlier times, bridenapping is still a problem in some parts of rural Georgia. Foreigners (and volunteers therein) aren’t really targeted, since a successful bridenapping depends on the eventual consent of the bride, who either tires of being holed up in a mountain shack or concludes that her family will not accept her back since they assume she’s being doing… things… with her bridenapper while sequestered. Terribly unfair? Of course. But there are some bright signs—firstly, the Georgian government prosecutes bridenappers as harshly as regular kidnappers these days. Secondly, there’s the changing attitude of young Georgians like my training host sister: “I would never say yes if I were bridenapped. I would break a window and run away.” Good for you, Lela. Good for you.

Ambiguity:
Borat’s mixed signals to the men he met in Washington led to some incidents he couldn’t quite explain to Alan Keyes. Let’s start it off this way: Georgian men are not a bunch of Borats, wearing short-shorts and walking around in the nude while so staunchly heterosexual that they’re shocked that other options exist. I will say this, though: it’s not abnormal here for men to hug and hold hands and walk with their arms slung over each other’s shoulders. In fact, it’s pretty normal.

Other countries have inferior potassium:
That was probably the best national anthem I’ve ever heard. For the Georgian equivalent of a proud mineral export, check out manganese (Mn), that neglected square on the periodic table that’s usually confused with magnesium (Mg). Proud little Chiatura in northern Georgia, formerly a Soviet model town, boasts a large concentration of manganese mines, as well as a manganese-filled black river, though when the Soviets fled, many of the mines and processing factories closed down. And they took down the glowing Lenin head from the cliff.

Your war of terror:
Borat supports our “war of terror,” he says, while wearing an American flag cowboy shirt. You know who else does? Georgia. This may be a completely inaccurate statistic, but I’ve been told that per capita, Georgia has the largest amount of troops in Iraq as part of the Iraqi Enduring Freedom Democracy Liberty Forever mission. American troops are stationed in parts of Georgia, too, to train the Georgian soldiers and to give them cool US uniforms to wear, and also to misbehave at expat bars.

Running of the Jew:
“Kazakhstan has some problems—economic, social, and Jew.” Oh Borat, you anti-Semite. You won’t find such a celebration of Jew-hating in Georgia (probably not either, I’d wager, in Kazakhstan). Did you know that before Israel existed, a large Jewish population used to live in Georgia, waiting around in the Caucasus for a space to open up in the Holy Land? You can still hear a synthesizer version of “Hava Nagela” played at many a Georgian supra. The last time I was at a supra where “Hava Nagela” was played, everyone formed a conga line, grabbing the shoulders of the person in front of them and jumping as a chain throughout the small apartment screaming “Hava Nagela” at the top of their lungs. It was one of those surreal moments that I keep meaning to write a blog post about.

Too much booty in the pants:
Remember when Borat is leaving for America and he starts dancing with his fellow villagers? That’s about the same. Minus the Running Man. Actually, Georgian dance is pretty cool-looking, and most of the culturally-educated Georgians know how to do it and will beg to teach you and/or laugh at your failed attempts. Side note: While Borat throws dice for fun, Georgian men tend toward backgammon. Hours and hours of backgammon.

Onward Christian soldiers:
Borat explains that their town has dropped the Running of the Jew due to its cruelty. “We’re Christians now,” he explains, walking by a group of villagers poking at a man on a cross with a pitchfork (best joke of the movie, IMO). But are they a bunch of Saint Johnny-come-latelies? Georgia was only the second nation to name Christianity as its official religion. They’re mostly Georgian Orthodox here, which leads to many holidays that you may not be familiar with. I don’t know if I’ll ever understand why we make bean pastries on St. Barbara’s day, or why we celebrate Old New Year two weeks after Regular New Year, but I’m not sure my host family knows either, so give me a break.

So that’s it, your guide to the differences and similarities between the world of Borat and the Republic of Georgia. I hope I’ve made it culturally sensitive and positive enough that it can stay online long enough for all 10 people who read my blog to see, and all ya’ll best be good and enlightened now after all that typing.

P.S. Borat looks more like an East European than a Central Asian, FYI.

A Tbilisi State of Mind

How come every time you come around, my London London bridge wanna go down like London, London, London...

I have an inkling that those lyrics mean something inappropriate, but just because Fergie wants to go around making up dirty idioms doesn't mean I'm going to treat them like official Webster's phrases. Why the lyrics? Heidi and I stayed at an expat's house last weekend for 3 nights and there was a computer with Limewire in the bedroom. This led to the following display that my taste in music has not only worsened but has died:

"Buttons" Pussycat Dolls
"Lithium" Evanescence
"Irreplaceable" Beyonce
"Wind It Up" Gwen Stefani
"Maneater" Nelly Furtado

As a side note though, I bet ya'll in America can't make anything of some of the other new additions to my music list. I'm just as in love with these songs. And some of them are just as bad (Russian pop... vai meh).

"Chori, Chori" Aneela & Arash
"Rette Mich" Tokio Hotel
"Tsvietok i Nozh" Via Gra (yes, really)

You know what's exciting? The next group of Georgia volunteers are getting their invitations over the next few months. I can see now how naive it was to gaze intently at the G5s as they made their "expert" presentations last year during training... if there's one word I'm not going to use to describe myself, it's "expert." Especially not about Georgia, but perhaps about Weird Al. I feel like this means I should be putting some more specific Georgia information in here (also knowing that most family/friends reading this blog didn't choose to do so for the purpose of getting foreign language music suggestions). Here's some, then:

1) We met Giorgi Targamadze this weekend! Of course you know already that he's the most famous journalist in Georgia, but did you also know that he shops in the Euromart on Rustaveli in Tbilisi? He gave us (me) his phone number and email address, so perhaps a story related to Peace Corps is in the works. Nicholas plans to tell him about BLOC, the boys' leadership camp, which is actually more newsworthy than any of the projects I was thinking of. Maybe I could preempt him by pointing Giorgi in the direction of GLOW*, the girls' leadership camp. Maybe the story could be on both. Maybe the story could be on me and how I have long hair.

2) This past week was also supposed to be our language and counterpart conference. However, on the first day of our language conference-- and just when we were getting to pester our instructor for that special genre of words she refused to teach us during training (gaajvi is one, ha ha ha!)-- we were evacuated from the hotel because apparently some gun-wielding relative of the hotel owners was on the run from the police and had been pursued into the basement of our hotel. Tsavidet (let's go)! All the volunteers were fine and nobody got hurt, thanks to the valiant efforts of Peace Corps staff (special shoutout to Teo, the language and homestar coordinator who got knocked over by a cop). That night, I stayed in an infinitely better hotel; the next night, a step down; the next 3 nights, back to the traditional Peace Corps hostel, the Nika. Oh well.

More noteworthy was the fact that when I brokenly imparted this story to my host family, they looked bored. My host sister looked up long enough to say "Gasagebia" ("It's clear") and then returned to watching Montecristo, the most popular Latin American soap opera this season. My host mom continued to chew her fingernails, and the neighbor kid continued to kick the armchair with his heels.

3) Good to know: giving someone your phone number is giving them carte blanche to text and call you to their heart's content, regardless of reciprocation or usage of new word genres. Better to know: this is apparently how many Georgian men meet their wives-- by texting and calling and calling and calling and texting until they cave. You might be weak like me and unable to think of another way to get someone to go away other than by giving them your phone number (especially since they'll call you while they're still standing there so you can have their phone number too, a prize you've coveted since time eternal). You might expect that there's no danger in harassment if the person asking for your phone number is a police officer. Well just tell that to Talier (Taliet? Jalier?), the cop who has called me three times a day since Friday. I think he tried to switch phones and call me, so I've begun indiscriminately hanging up on everybody and labeling their numbers in my phone as "Suspicious Number". If there's one thing I can impart to G7, that's it. Also-- bring a freaking backpack to Georgia. Wheelie bags + Georgian roads = disaster. And of course, you'll want to fit in with all the other backpacking hippies, too.

I could go on about how being at the expat's houses this weekend and witnessing their dinner parties and taste in wine has cemented my desire to become an expat myself someday, working for the embassy and living in an embassy house in a developing nation, hosting lowly Peace Corps volunteers and wowing them with food they haven't seen in their entire life, much less in the last 7 months (Friday: Italian pasta and veal soup with shredded parmesan, followed with blueberries flambe over vanilla ice cream with chocolate pound cake. Sunday: salmon rolls to start, then pot roast with carrots and potatoes, broccoli salad THERE'S NO BROCCOLI HERE I CAN'T TELL YOU HOW GREAT THAT WAS and then strawberry NONE OF THOSE EITHER shortcake. Add ever-flowing, handpicked wine-- as overheard between expats: "Try this wine. No? Well dump that in the sink, and come on down to the cellar. I've got a nice Saperavi around here somewhere." In my training village, we had wine that had an aftertaste of fish.) And apparently I did just go on about that. But come on! Broccoli!! Strawberries!!

*GLOW, Girls Leading Our World, is the project I'm most impressed by. It was started by Peace Corps volunteers as a national camp a couple years ago, and this year they've turned it into an NGO. There's also GLOW clubs now. Girls from all over the country go to camps to hear powerful female speakers and to learn leadership skills and self esteem, healthy eating, all that. It's done in Georgian so that it can involve more girls, and it's free of cost to them. They stay for like a week in a hotel together and all their food is paid for. In a country like this, where women are expected to get married, have babies, and sit in the house for the rest of their lives, this project is amazing. I can't say I really would have cared too much about it in the US, other than maybe a "That's nice," but when you get here and your host father tells you to call your male sitemate to escort you to the grocery store, or comes and gets you from the internet cafe just because he doesn't want his daughter to be outside the house... well, let's hope GLOW can make a difference. It's slowly being transfered into Georgian hands, and hopefully that'll keep it going long after we're COSed.

Which is in 18 months, by the way. But who's counting?

7 Months in Georgia

Welcome to week two of my January of Nothing. Don't get me wrong-- it's just enough Nothing that I can still enjoy it. School starts on Monday, and I don't remotely have the feeling I did in middle school Augusts, when the break seemed sufficiently long and boring by that point. What helps me carry on is the delightful fact that I have three trainings in a row in Tbilisi the week after school starts, so 5 days of school and then another week off. Well, "off." But "off" is better than on.

Three unrelated observations:

1) I was in Kutaisi on Saturday (for British Night with some other volunteers and an expat), which also happened to be Old New Year-- Dzvelit Akhali Tseli-- here in Georgia. The confusion, which I can't quite explain, comes from the fact that Saturday was New Year on the Orthodox calendar. I seem to remember someone explaining to me that this is because practicing Orthodox church members fast before and after Orthodox Christmas (January 7, as you know) and Old New Year was the first time of the calendar year when they could break loose and, I don't know, eat meat like it's 1999. Anyway, since I missed regular New Year in Georgia, this was a good enough substitute-- at midnight, we looked across the skyline from the expat's 5th-floor apartment to see fireworks EVERYWHERE. It was clearly not a coordinated effort, and I can only imagine that the city avoids burnination every year because it's entirely made of concrete, but for a gross violation of fire safety codes, it was beautiful.

2) Just as I was despairfully writing "nothing yet" all over my Peace Corps trimester report for most of the community-based assistance goals, a secondary project gold mine fell into my lap. Turns out this woman at an English/Computer-teaching office down the street-- whom my counterpart teacher forebade me to visit because she thought the woman wanted to kidnap me and hold me for Embassy ransom money-- has started an NGO called Georgia New Generation, aimed at helping the community youth and specifically Abkhazian refugees***, of which she is one herself. She acknowledges to us that a more grammatically-correct name for her NGO would be New Generation of Georgia, but she likes the symmetry of GNG. Anyway, she was enthusiastic about mine and my sitemate's requests to hold community-development club meetings there (specifically, a girls' leadership club from me and an environmental club from him, both with national networks started by Peace Corps volunteers; I'm impressed with my predecessors, personally) and she wants our help in getting grants and things like that so she can help people. Actually, when we left today, she said, "Good bye! I'll see you soon, and we can start helping the community." It may sound trite to you, but it was refreshing as Gatorade to us, who had despaired of finding a motivated, young Georgian in our site who was interested in community development. Score!!

3) Due to everyone and their deda asking me if I'm going to marry a Georgian man while I'm here, I've had a lot of time to think about marriage (by the way, the answer is no) and I've developed a new, untested, simplistic key to marriage for myself. What does this have to do with Peace Corps, and why is it in my Peace Corps journal? Very little, and I don't know. But here it is: I think the problem a lot of people come across is that they get married because they think they've found the best person in the world for themselves, like the best possible match. The new Oversimplified Key to Everything that I've thought of is that you can't possibly find the best match for yourself. It's like when Kim and I were violinists in St. Mary's County, and no matter how good we got, there was always someone better (and then when I went to New York, there were a million people who were better, but that's not the point). So people think that no one else can be better for them than their spouse, and then when they meet someone else during their marriage who they think might be better, they question their choice and decide they've made a mistake. I think that when you marry someone, you're telling them and yourself that you've found someone who's amazing and wonderful, and that you love them enough to abstain from going after the better person when they come along. And how would you even know the other person was better anyway, until you'd been married for such-and-such a time and found yourself in the same position with another opportunity? It might not be romantic or modern to suggest that you stick with someone the whole time even if there might be better alternatives-- and by no means am I saying that a sudden downturn in the quality of your original choice should be tolerated for the sake of a low divorce rate, i.e. abuse or emotional detachment-- but divorce sucks too. How do I know? I don't, not remotely. But with my hours and hours on Georgian and Turkish public transportation, that's what I've come up with. Think you'll just get divorced if someone better comes along? Then cut out all the "to death to us part" stuff from your wedding vows. Voila.





*** How familiar are you with the Abkhazian situation? Here's a short explanation, made as apolitically as possible. Abkhazia is a breakaway province in Georgia; its people have their own language, though their land falls within Georgian borders, and shortly after Georgia's independence, Abkhazia fought a war with Georgia for its own independence. The results of this war are many: 1) Abkhazia exists in a state of semi-independence, still held to by Georgia (who lists reigning in its breakaway provinces as a political priority) but supported and almost recognized as a state by Russia, whose citizens largely populate Abkhazia now. Both sides are still rarin' to go, if the other offers up a provocation. The United States insists that a peaceful resolution be found. 2) Ethnic Georgians fled the war-torn region in the early 1990s, creating a huge refugee problem in the areas around Abkhazia, including places as far away as my town. Many live long-term in hotels, while others enlist the help of a smattering of NGOs designed to ease the housing problem for refugees. That expat in Kutaisi works for one. 3) Just so you know, Peace Corps volunteers are not placed in Abkhazia or close to Abkhazia and cannot visit Abkhazia.

Turkey Time

Gilotsav shobas da akhal tsels! I just got back from Turkey (or I could be a travel snob and write “Türkiye”) yesterday, and the following is a series of journal excerpts, since I was kind enough to think of you all and my own self-aggrandizement while traveling. I’m gonna try to link the entries to pictures if I can figure that out, elsewise things with relevant pictures are in bold and can be found at http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2125584&l=a1c24&id=813973 . If you get bored, just read the last entry (January 6) for some good old-fashioned schadenfreude.

December 27—
We’re in Trabzon, Turkey! Some things were a pain today—snowstorm, taxi fishtailing into a snowdrift, hostel not actually being a hostel during the winter but rather a dormitory. Some things may be a pain tomorrow—all the flights to Istanbul and Izmir were canceled this evening, but ideally they won’t be tomorrow. However, some things have been surprisingly exciting that would have seemed mundane in the first place—rectangular pillows, Doritos, safely walking through the streets at night, Latin alphabet usage, smoothly-paved roads, things like that.

December 29—
Now we’re in Selçuk, which has been delightful! I don’t know how well I fit into international backpack culture, but we win every hardship contest by mentioning that we’re Peace Corps volunteers. The hostel is quite cozy (my first hostel!), though they’ve been a little hardcore with the tour guide offers, and they charged Paige and Ryan extra for heating (us four down in the dorms don’t have the option).

We strolled over to Ephesus today, a city of ancient Greek ruins (my first Greek ruins!) which was impressive—much more so than the Temple of Artemis, a wonder of the ancient world that has been reduced to a single pillar in the middle of a field. We all sat in a 1000-year-old amphitheater and waited for the tourists to leave (there’s an inordinate amount of Koreans here, by the way).

December 30—
This one’s getting written in what could be called my first genuine hostel experience… after 10 hours of bus rides, we found our way to the Orient Hostel, a land of like a 3’x5’ bedroom, a stained towel that two of us shared for 3 lira, and not to mention 5,000 other G6 Peace Corps volunteers. In fact, when we came home from our delicious Mexican dinner at El Torito (?), we went upstairs to the Orient Hostel bar to use the internet and were greeted by the “HEEEEYYYY!!” of PCVs who’d clearly been drinking for a while. Nicholas and I turned heels and fled downstairs to take showers (also a failure of sanitation, involving hopefully-unidentifiable empty plastic wrappers).

By the way, Turkish buses are amazing—we stopped every 2 hours to stretch our legs, we were guided along at our connection in Izmir, and (here’s the kicker) there’s a bus attendant who serves drinks and snacks. Bit of an improvement over Greyhound.

January 1—
Thus far in Istanbul, we’ve visited the Blue Mosque (complete with headscarves) and the Hagia Sofia, explored the shops of Taksim and drank Starbucks therein, climbed this really old tower just in time to hear tens of calls to prayer simultaneously from mosques all over the city, and of course seen fireworks for New Year at Taksim Square followed by dancing til 3. Not bad for two days, though this pace may contribute to our current condition of napping until we meet up at 5:30.

The general consensus of our group is that Istanbul represents an optimal level of development—you can get most things that you want, but there’s not a McDonald’s inside the Blue Mosque. It was too much of a consensus, though, so I had to be a pain and play devil’s advocate, pointing out that there’s less political freedom here than in America. We’re still waiting for a verdict on gender equality… only today have we seen many Turkish women out in public at all, though this could be because the holiday (Eid al-Adha, or Kurban Bayramı in Turkish) started yesterday and there’s some household duties of ritual animal slaughter that needed to be looked after.

January 2—
Man, I was in the worst mood ever today. We went on a cruise of the Bosphorus and we had a seafood prix fixe for lunch… all this cool stuff, but I just wanted to tie a sock gag around the heads of everyone in my vicinity. Perhaps it’s fatigue from traveling, perhaps it’s my psychotic brain chemistry, perhaps that’s what happens after holidays in developing nations. Regardless, it sucked, and I can’t say for certain that I won’t feel the same way tomorrow, though I’d better not because it’s boot-buying day and making purchases warms the cockles of my capitalist heart.

January 6—
Various disasters led to our trip being an extra day long. I suppose I should explain… The last couple days were lovely but uneventful. We made all the airport arrangements to catch our flight at 10 AM on the 4th only to find out when we got there that the flight was at 7 AM, a fact none of us bothered to check although we’d been hanging out next to an open computer with internet the night before. I still think it’s my fault, being Planny McPlannerson and all, but that’s not the point; the point is that we were late enough to be ineligible for any refund or transfer, so poo on that $72.

We decided to try for an IstanbulTbilisi bus, and—just our luck!—there was one leaving the second we got to the station, and they offered to take us to Tbilisi for $50 each. Fine, cha-ching, let’s go. A few hours later, we noticed that the route was drifting south, rather than following the Black Sea coast to enter Georgia at Batumi. We also noticed that no one on the bus spoke English, French, Spanish, Russian, German, Georgian, Vietnamese or Japanese, so we couldn’t ask questions about our mystery destination, which upon re-inspection of our tickets we discovered was “Ardahan.” We looked around the bus. Was Ardahan in Azerbaijan and all these people Azeri? Or was Ardahan in another border country (Turkey borders Syria, Iran, and Iraq) and we were on our way to Tehran?? We tearfully pointed at maps and made caveman-like gestures until the bus driver reassured us that “Tiflis okay” (re: “This bus is going to Tbilisi.”)

In the meanwhile, the Turkish countryside rolled by—27 hours of it—which I sometimes think was worth the whole ordeal. We saw houses with mud roofs, snow-covered mountains, and even the desert under moonlight, all of which we’d missed in our tourist ventures.
Around 12 the next day, we rolled into Ardahan. Once again, nobody spoke any of our languages, though one man did manage to convey that he’d take us to a border town we’d never heard of for $20. Ha! Whether it was the bus company’s fault or not, we’d been told that we were going to Tbilisi on $50, and that was what we were sticking to. Finally, we found a German speaker, and he and Heidi worked everything out. We thought.

After a harrowing mini-bus ride on snow-blown cliffs and switchback roads with 200-foot plummets instead of shoulders, we rolled into Posof. Again, the plan hadn’t quite been communicated correctly, so they tried to charge us $120 to go to Tbilisi. DECLINED. Much arguing ensued, and in the end they agreed to take us across the border to Akhaltsikhe for the 60 lira the bus company had provided the driver in Ardahan to take us to Tbilisi. Fine. We got on the completely-empty bus and rode to an empty border crossing that we didn’t know existed. As soon as we’d gotten through (and been searched by Georgian customs officials), we decided to try to bribe them to take us the rest of the way to Tbilisi on the rest of the Turkish lira we had left (about 40 lira). It turns out that one of the men on the bus (of about 3 total, since we noticed the bus would only pick up Turks who tried to flag it down and not Georgians) spoke Russian, so I was nominated to negotiate. Unfortunately, his broken Russian plus my broken Russian led to no understanding—on the plus side, I think his Russian was more broken than mine because we called a fluent Russian speaker to talk to him, and that still didn’t work. Anyway, using the work “Tiflis” and rubbing our fingers together, we got it through and all was well. We made it to Tbilisi, at some khinkali, and slept after 33 hours of bus rides.

I think that’s the end of the travel catastrophes that were interesting. By myself the next day, I had fresh torture trying to get back to site that involved a sold-out train, a series of out-of-order ATMs, switched bus signs, and being cornered by a snarling dog, but there’s no need to turn that into a melodrama. The fact remains that I’m home now, and part of me is still glad that I got to spend extra time in Turkey, despite the circumstances.

Now, for concluding observations:

1) Turkish coffee is much better in Georgia than in Turkey, though Turkey has better roads.
2) My stupid banana-feet are too big for Turkish shoe sizes, so I still need boots.
3) It’s hard to see in Western Turkey that it used to be a Peace Corps country, but the status of developing nation is a bit more apparent in the East. Still farther along than Georgia, but Turkey had a head start.
4) Döner kebaps are delicious.
5) This vacation is more perfect than usual because I have two more weeks off to recover from it.

P.S. I've been lately informed that we were riding along through Kurdistan in the bus, which explains all the tanks and military checkpoints. Yay!

Christmas for Me

Christmas for Georgia is January 7th (can't say that too many times), but 8 of us volunteers got together at an expat's house to have a Christmas party in a land of bacon cheeseburgers and wireless internet-- those Americans who live here and get paid have a much different standard of living than the rest of us-- and so I'm usurping my sitemate's laptop to take ten seconds and say Merry Christmas! I didn't end up spending it in my room alone listening to Christmas carols... rather, we had hot cocoa, played Scattergories, and watched It's a Wonderful Life. And it's snowing! Rather perfect, minus the whole 8000 miles away from friends and family thing.

But nay! A Christmas blog posting is not the time for whining. It is the time for being thankful that I'm still in the Peace Corps, that I got a cushy assignment that makes it more likely that I'll be here for the whole two years, that I'm in the 21st century Peace Corps and can actually communicate with people I miss, that my Georgian language acquisition is coming along, that that the other people in Peace Corps are not the pot-smoking non-bathing hippies I thought they'd be, and that I'm not dead. You can't be too thankful for not being dead.

Merry Christmas!

A lesson in awkward

I figured that maybe I could stay away from the internet cafe today because I was attending a student's birthday supra, but apparently that plan failed. Anyway, why a student's birthday supra is awkward:

1) All supras are awkward. For birthday's especially, when it's a 30-person eatfest with sporadic, embarrassing (for me, they're really good at it) dancing, and generally sitting around socializing in a language that I barely know for 5 hours or so. Just when you think it's wrapping up, more food comes out. And let's add to the awkardness: you have to make a toast to drink your wine every time, so unless you want your glass to sit there full the entire time, you've gotta get the table's attention and toast something. In Georgian. Usually peace, friendship, the dead, parents, children, siblings, God, sweet memories, something like that.

2) Any supra is awkward when you are 15 years old, all your friends are 15 years old, and you invite your teacher. Isn't that a universal truth?

I guess that's it, but that's enough. In better news, there's three days of school left for me before I leave for Turkey! Our PC director gave us Monday off for Christmas even though Georgian Christmas isn't for a couple weeks, and I really appreciate that because other I would have been teaching on December 25th, a Monday no less.

A lonely little Christmas

I've decided that it was better when my host family was unaware that Western Christmas is coming up on Monday. I'd rather they have ignored it and waited til January 7th to involve me in their Christmas than what the current situation is, where they feel bad that I'm not with my family for Christmas and they're buying me presents and a Christmas tree. It just feels more lame when it's a regular Monday for everyone else, and there I am with a 3-foot fake Christmas tree up in my bedroom, pretending to be moved by the Yuletide spirit.

The moral of this post: treasure your gaudy decorations! Your 24 hour Christmas radio! Your reruns of classic Christmas movies! Your stressed last-minute run to Wal-Mart because you forgot to buy presents!

Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got til it's gone...

Actually, I can't end with that. I despise that song. Let's try a different one.

Fergilicious definicious, make them boys go crazy.

Adventures in food

There's probably a few things I could write under this category, and I feel like I've thought of more things than I'll list here and then forgotten them, thus cementing this blog as irrelevant. Good for me.

1) Sunday was Barbroba, the festival of St. Barbara, during which it's customary to make lobiani, a delicious bread-and-beans triangle thingie, kind of like the bread-and-cheese khachapuri but stuffed with beans instead of cheese. Protein!

2) I accidentally made 20 pounds of fried rice for a 20-person Christmas party on Saturday. Apparently, that's too much.

3) In a more generalized observation, I recently wrote for the benefit of the G7s (incoming volunteers) that they should be prepared for a low variety of food. It's not really because Georgian food isn't varied-- how much American food can you actually list?-- but the thing is that every day, you eat Georgian food. They ask me what we eat in America, and I can't even begin to list it because we eat Italian food and Mexican food and Chinese food and Japanese food and Indian food et cetera, to the extent that we get sick of any of the above if we have them too many times in one week. Here, if you make borscht on Tuesday, you will eat it three times a day until it's gone, which can be half a week later. I can't really put my finger on it, but it doesn't bother the Georgians any, so they must have a completely different outlook on food than Americans do.

This is also manifested in the offerings at local restaurants, namely that every restaurant serves the exact same thing with little variation except in quality. I didn't really realize how strange I found that until I saw an ad in an American newspaper that one of the other volunteers had, and it was for a restaurant that featured crab and Gouda cheese soup. "Mmm," I thought, "that might be good." And it occurred to me that despite the plethora of available ingredients, there's almost no food experimentation going on in the restaurants or at home. There was a cooking show on TV that showed a woman putting cheese in eggs, and my host mother was fascinated. I was thinking, "Eggs and cheese have been around as long as Georgians have. You never thought of that?" Maybe the thinking is that if the food was good enough for ancient Georgians, why mess with it? Maybe the thinking is completely different and is outside my scope of understanding because I'm from a different cultural background. Politically correct response: What a fascinating display of cultural variance. Instinctive response: Why are they so resistant to change???

Don't quote me on that.

10 extra minutes online

So I can write a blog entry! Or I can begin a blog entry and then watch as my time ends before I can post it. Either way.

What to update about? Well, I've posted 5000 pictures to Facebook, so that's mildly interesting. There's only 2 weeks left of school til I leave for Turkey, which is even more interesting. I'm making fried rice for a Christmas party this weekend, that's sort of interesting.

Actually, I changed my mind. There's not much interesting going on today. I'm sure I'll think of something after I post this...

Thoughts of Train

All in all, quite the irritating weekend continues. First, to explain the title: I was on the dear, sweet, nonthreatening (unlike certain other modes of transportation) train and then it failed me. It took us 4 hours to go 50 miles, and at that point I realized that I was going to miss the birthday party I was heading in for, so I got off at a random stop and took various other public transports back to site. Boo!

The second irritating thing is going on as I write this. Since I had plenty of spare time last night to resize digital pictures so I could upload them, I thought I'd do that today. This connection is so slow that it times out trying to load a tiny little 40KB picture. And it's entirely because the guy running the place (oh, and there's no one else here other than him to share the bandwidth with) is playing some high-bandwidth video game. Now let's see, who should get the bandwidth, that guy who's being paid to be here, or the person who's paying to be here? Hmm, hmm, what a conundrum. I've been wishing for his computer to be unplugged for the last hour. I foresee a total 2 hour progress of uploading about five pictures. Yay for me. They're here http://nyu.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2113319&l=50f48&id=813973 , if you're interested.

I'll be in Tbilisi next weekend for some meetings, maybe I'll upload a gazillion pictures then.

I'm a big fan of borscht

We had it for the first time a couple weeks ago, and I've decided that it's unequivocally delicious, as long as you don't let them put mayonnaise on it. Is there any nutrition in cabbage? I hope so... that's about the only vegetable around these days, other than carrots. And beets, I guess.

We're getting toward the end of the semester here, time for completely subjective and abstract grading (which I'm leaving for my counterpart, because I think it would drive me insane... of course, the end of the semester means more tests coming up which means more cheating, so that'll drive me insane anyway). Did I already mention my anti-cheating policy? It's something along the lines of writing multiple versions of tests, and taking tests from students who cheat-- that's considered harsh here, so I have to tread lightly... though I could write a quiz and then take those away, there's no one who will let me take their tests away, since parents would storm the school in indignation, so my intent is to tell the students that I'll take their tests away like I took their quizzes away and then see if they believe me.

Oh, and BBC suddenly ended up on my house's TV lineup! I don't know how or why it happened, but I watched 20 minutes of sheer joy yesterday in the form of a special documentary on malaria in Malawi. The joy being from the English of course.

We listened to "Jingle Bell Rock" about 30 times in the 10th grade classes the other day. While the effect wore off after the first 15, for the first few times I heard it, I began to really miss Christmas. Other than the fact that Christmas here is on January 7th rather than December 25th, there's some other key differences: firstly, I have heard nary a note of Christmas music, and I'm more accustomed to 24 hour Christmas radio by now, or even Mom's Kenny G, Garth Brooks, Celine Dion, and Mariah Carey Christmas CDs. No red and green decorations, no wild commercialism (YES, I MISS THAT TOO), no Santa except in textbooks... at least there's an ex-pat Christmas party to go to next weekend, complete with Turkey... and then I'll be in Turkey! I can't tell you how amused my host sister was when she found out turkey and Turkey (indauri and turketi, in Georgian) are the same word in English.

Despite the extra half hour I tacked on to my internet time, I'm out already. I keep saying that some time I'll post something significant, but maybe this blog will gain its significance from being the most trivial, not-moving journal in the history of Peace Corps. I'll take any distinction, no matter how dubious.

Sunday school

We had school today. While I resent that, it was mitigated by the fact that almost no one showed up and we got to leave 2 hours early. I can't say that if I were in the US, I would have gone to school, so I don't hold it against the students. I'll state publicly that I do hold it against the teachers who didn't go, since I had to race back home after a funeral in my training village to be able to make it to school yesterday, while most teachers live within 20 minutes' walking distance. Perhaps this is irrational of me, especially since everyone knew in advance that nobody would be there. I stick by my irrationality.

Finally, I have work to do! Other than cranking up the communicative activities in class (which about doubles the planning time), we had an all-volunteer meeting last weekend in Tbilisi where all the secondary projects were handed down to G6s, so now I have responsiblities! Yay! My favorite responsiblity is as Director of the Writing Olympics in Georgia, which doesn't entail as much stress and work as director of GLOW or Eco Camp, I don't think, but seeing as my school wants the English department to put on Fiddler on the Roof next spring, and they want to see me take Georgian dance lessons, and I'm on the application committee for GLOW, and I'll be contributing content to the Alternative Handbook, and running a couple sessions for Teacher Training... I think I'm set for now.

I saw two death events in Georgia recently: a funeral and a tslis tavi ("year's beginning"). The funeral is pretty self-explanatory, though there's one difference that shows up at both events: Georgians mourn loudly, wailing and yelling at their dead relatives. It's very painful to hear, but it's a little easier when you see some hints that it's partially out of ritual that they do this; the grief is genuine, of course, but it seems to be part of your duty to the other attendees to say as much as you can as a family member of the dead. Overheard as said by mourners:

"You lied to me! You said you'd throw me a party on my birthday!" (her father died the day before her birthday)
"Why did you leave me, little brother?!"
"This is your fault! The doctor told you!"

On a lighter note, the tslis tavi begins at the grave with this kind of mourning, but it marks the end of the mourning period for the family, so by the end, everyone moves on to a supra with cakes, just like the family should move on. Seeing as I spend much of my time in a rich town drinking Coca-Cola and watching Russian MTV, I was fascinated to see something so genuinely cultural... though let's rephrase that. All the travel books say that too many travelers think of culture as the ancient ritual and customs of a society which is being ruined or erased by Westernization or modernization, when actually those are just parts of a changing culture. So watching "Sexy Back" by Justin Timberlake is a part of Georgian culture. Or so they say.

I'm going to Turkey for New Year's! The hostel reservations are still a headache, but we know that we (me, Heidi, Nicholas, Van) will be flying to Izmir and then later going to Istanbul. Sounds like awesome. I may write something about it here; I may forget for weeks and then write a sentence of summary later.

How's that for a post? I'd do this more often if school were cut short every day...

Midterms!

Not for you, of course. If you're at the age where you take midterms, you're probably done. My younguns took their midterms last week, and it was the worst day I've had in Georgia, mostly due to rampant cheatery. I could have done without that. The following should be read in a deeply menacing tone: It won't happen again.

It's cold again. I kinda expected that would happen, as it seems to every year, but it was really warm last week and then all of a sudden this afternoon I had to bust out my next level of coat. Gotta save the big poofy down coat for whiteout conditions.

In other news, I'm out of clothes. Here's the timeline--

12 days ago: Requested to wash clothes by hand; rejected because following day, washing machine was to be installed

9 days ago: Washing machine installed

7 days ago: Family realizes that they have lost the English instructions and cannot read the Russian ones very well. This would not be a problem if this were a normal washing machine, but it is not. It has about 10,000 buttons and is side-loading, though I have the feeling that it's a simple matter of putting it on one setting and leaving it there for the rest of its existence.

2 days ago: I ran out of clothes. Fortunately, it was pouring rain on my way home from a supra, and the outfit I was wearing was cleaned that way. Wore my host sister's clothes as mine dried.

Today: Am attempting to find English instructions on a German web page.

We'll see how it goes.

I'm a teacher!

I guess I've been a teacher for a month, so that's long enough that I can start calling myself a teacher and not some poser who sits and watches the classes. I like to think that I've gotten into the swing of lesson planning and all that... though I will say, teaching is really hard. I may go find all my ex-teachers when I get back to the US and express this sentiment of shared frustration with them.

I'd like to discuss the tension with Russia, but it's kind of a political thing that I'd rather not express public opinions for all of posterity to read... but if you'd like to hear it from me, call me! You got my number.

Oh, that too

I neglected to mention in my last post, due to a Weird Al-induced haze, that I met Georgia's president Mikhail "Misha Dawg" Saakashvili on Friday. I had two other friends there, and we got let into this stadium opening early, and then Misha showed up with an entourage of reporters and such. At first, he noticed us and looked like he wanted to say hi, but he was swept away to the next photo op by reporters. Not to be outdone, me and my fellow political groupies stood in his path again for when he came back, and that time he saw us and shook our hands and said "Nice to meet you" in English (he studied at Columbia U in NYC for a bunch of years). I was euphoric. In hindsight, perhaps we should have used his title when shouting for his attention instead of shouting "Hello Saakashvili!" Can you picture someone shouting "Hello Bush!" Kind of rude. But I guess it got the job done. AWESOME.

The most excellent update ever

So I suppose I could say something about school or about the 5K walk/run for breast cancer this weekend, but I'd rather post this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UmGckhyPapc

because I feel it best represents my life, and because I feel that will seal my place as nerdiest PCV in G6.