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I am now safe and sound back home in Burlington. I feel pretty lucky that that's the case, though, since my trip home was full of really close calls. First, I left my backpack on the bus from Zugdidi to Tbilisi. I was able to get it back only because Paata's neighbor happened to have the bus driver's phone number, and Nino was willing to get in a cab with me and track it down.

After a nice dinner and a brief nap at Nino's, I took a cab to the airport at 2:00 am, sailing down a deserted Rustaveli Avenue (the main street in the city center, with the Opera House and Parliament) decked out with Christmas lights. At the airport, however, I was informed that according to their system I wasn't scheduled to fly out until July. They put me on the plane to Munich anyway, and after that it didn't matter, since my scheduled flight to Newark was canceled due to the huge snowstorm. To make a long story short, I flew from Munich to Frankfurt, ran across the airport, and caught a flight to Boston. The storm was just starting to hit when I got there, and I got the last bus up to Lebanon, NH before they canceled the rest of the buses for the evening. There my parents picked me up, and we drove the rest of the way home.

It's been five days now, and I'm still appreciating how lucky we are here to have plentiful heat and hot water, among many other conveniences. I'm also slowly readjusting to East Coast time, waking up well before the sun and crashing around 6:00 in the evening. Hopefully I'll be able to stay up for First Night festivities tonight.

Happy New Year!

I Saw the Sea!

My final days in Georgia are flying by at an astonishing rate. It’s as if yesterday I had plenty of time left, and now I feel like I’m leaving in just a few minutes. This will most likely be my last post from Georgia. I’ll be heading to Tbilisi tomorrow afternoon, in order to be at the airport in time for a 5:00 am flight to Munich. From there I fly to Newark, then Dulles, and finally Burlington (that’s what happens when your flights are booked by a Georgian travel agency). Because of the time difference I will manage to do this in one very, very long day, after which all I’ll want to do is sleep, but probably won’t be able to because it will feel like the middle of the day. But I suppose that’s the fate of a world traveler!

At school, we’ve been in wrapping-up mode for a while now. On Wednesday we devoted the final third grade lesson to a Christmas play/party, complete with costumes (Santa Claus, Cinderella, and a number of fairies). In return for their Christmas presents from Santa, the kids sang all the songs and said all the rhymes they’d learned over the course of the semester. With the classroom was decorated with garlands and posters, and a handful of teachers and parents forming a small audience, the end result was pretty cute.

Meanwhile, the tenth and twelfth graders have finished their last textbook units, the younger grades have reviewed their vocabulary from the whole semester, and in the middle grades (where we left the textbooks aside), we’ve worked our way through my final outside materials. These are two one-page handouts I made, one about the story of Johnny Appleseed and one about winter holidays from different cultures. As I’ve said before, the kids seem to be more interested in the non-textbook stuff we do, probably owing mostly to its novelty. I also get particular satisfaction from discussing the winter holidays handout, since I feel like it’s my one small contribution to widening these kids’ cultural worldview.

Today was the last day of school, and so after an abbreviated class schedule, we had an all-school assembly. The younger grades had all prepared songs and poem recitals, which they performed to thunderous applause. In addition, students from English, German, Russian and Georgian classes made short presentations on how Christmas and New Year’s are celebrated in each country (for the English presentation the third graders reprised “Jingle Bells” from their Christmas play, and for the German one a girl sang “O Tannenbaum,” which I had taught to her).

Outside of school, I’ve been slowly going through the process of saying goodbye to Tsaishi and Zugdidi. This has included doing things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but somehow or other haven’t gotten around to. So, for instance, I baked banana bread last week, which was by far the most popular of the “American” foods I’ve made here (both Marika and Kravasha have asked me for details about the recipe). Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to try my hand at any Georgian dishes, but at least I got Marika to give me recipes for some of the most common ones. I also took advantage of the warm weather to go for a long walk on Sunday, all over the village (and well into the next one, I think). The highlight of this was getting up high enough on our local mountain (really a glorified hill, reminiscent of Mt. Philo, for you Vermonters out there) that I suddenly realized I could see a stripe of sea against the horizon. Seeing it reminded me of my first weekend here, when we went to the beach with our next-door neighbors. I haven’t been back there since, but I’ve gotten to know the neighbors much better, which I think is much more important.

There are lots of people to say goodbye to as well, but that’s not as easy as saying goodbye to places. I had dinner last Friday with a bunch of my fellow teaching volunteers, knowing that I would most likely never see any of them again. Saying goodbye to my Georgian friends and neighbors is even harder, especially since our actual conversations tend to be pretty limited, given my lack of Georgian. I had a nice evening last night, though, teaching rummy to Paata’s brother and a couple of neighbors (all in Georgian, too—Paata and Marika had taken Nikolozi to the circus). I wish I could tell all these people how much I’ve appreciated their warmth and their hospitality, but in most cases the language barrier makes this impossible. So instead I smile, and when they ask if I’m coming back, I say, “Yes. I don’t know when, but I will.”

On with the Show

After several bouts of uncertainty and postponement, our school play finally went up this Thursday, but not before it almost deprived me of my sanity. You will know, I assume, that I am not generally one to bellow, but by two o’clock on Thursday afternoon, my throat was definitely sore. I’ll spare you all the details, but I can’t resist one example of what I had to deal with. The singers insisted on having microphones, which I grudgingly consented to, only to learn that the man who would run sound wasn’t planning on coming to work with us until the morning of the show. I know how many potential problems there can be with mics and sound systems, but what could I say? Then, with the show scheduled for two, he didn’t show up until twelve. Thus, we found ourselves still sorting out the inevitable sound problems with ten minutes left before the scheduled curtain time. Fortunately, the show started about forty minutes late, since at that point I hadn’t even talked to the person who was going to run the lights.

After the time I’ve spent in this country, none of this should have come as a surprise to me, but in my experience, mounting a theatrical production is a case where organization and planning really do matter, and the absolute lack of them was maddening. Still, I really can’t complain too much, since in the end the show was a great success. We had a large audience of students, teachers, parents and guests, many of whom came up afterward (and in the following days) to tell me how much they enjoyed it. Most importantly, the kids in the show were all really proud of what they’d done.

After the performance, I would have loved nothing more than to go home and get in bed, but the day’s excitement was far from over. The powers that be had decided to celebrate the play’s success by having a relatively large (50 people) supra at our house, which Marika, Kravasha (Paata’s mother), and several neighbors and fellow teachers had been working hard to prepare for the past two days. This too had its obstacles to overcome, including a clogged woodstove, a dry well, and a table that broke about twenty minutes into the supra under the weight of all the food, but in the end it too was a success. I realized that despite the large number of people in attendance, I knew most of them at least a little, and that thought helped give me the energy to get through the evening. Among the guests were a couple of the singers from Polikarpe Hubilava’s ensemble, who had sung in the play, and so I got to sing a few songs with them, too.

Paata finally succumbed to the pressures of the week and didn’t feel well enough to go to school on Friday, which left me to cover the day’s classes, some with help from my other co-teachers and some alone. I wasn’t sure I was up to it after everything else I’d gone through, but I made it somehow, and was extremely happy to get home for the weekend.

Saturday I went into town and spent the day with other volunteer teachers, a perfect release from the stress of the week. We had a big birthday party for two of them, which involved roasting a pig and a chicken, as well as some really good pumpkin cake. I also finally found out about my flights home, and can now report that I am scheduled to arrive in Burlington at about 11:30 pm on the 26^th. Many of the other volunteers are leaving around the 20^th in order to be home for Christmas, but I’m glad that I’ll be staying for the end of classes, so I can have plenty of time to wrap things up and say goodbye.

Uncharted Waters

Paata and I discovered last week that we were far ahead of where we were scheduled to be in the textbooks in three of our classes. This was due to a number of factors, including, I’m sure, my dismissal of many of the textbook exercises as either stupid, irrelevant, unintelligible, or too advanced for the students (as you may be able to guess, I’m not a big fan of these particular books). The upshot of this situation, however, is that we decided to put the textbooks aside for the remainder of the semester in favor of a mixture of supplementary grammar exercises when Paata is in the class without me, and more creative activities whenever I’m there.

The prospect of planning new curriculum on the fly has been daunting, especially with the play also still on my plate (the date keeps getting pushed back—it looks pretty well settled for this coming Wednesday, but I’ve said that before…). For inspiration, I thought back to some of my favorite activities from my own days as a foreign language student, and after talking them over with Paata, we’ve started putting some of them into action. In the eighth and ninth grades, we’ve been learning the words for rooms and furniture, drawing floor plans for both our real houses and for our dream houses. This last allowed us to practice using the “unreal conditional” construction, “If I had the house of my dreams, I/it would be/have…” It also provided a stark reminder of the material conditions that these kids live in: several of them completed that conditional sentence with phrases like “I would have my own room,” or “I would have a soft bed.” After some encouragement I had them dreaming up Coke fountains and rooms full of candy, but it took a while to get there.

In the seventh grade, meanwhile, I took our last unit in the textbook, which dealt with physical descriptions of people and clothing, as a jumping off point to apply those descriptions to monsters (with the added helpful vocabulary of claws, horns, spines, fangs, and the like). From there we’ve moved on to talking about fall and winter holidays, starting with Halloween (another nice thematic transition, in my opinion). Today we even carved a jack o’lantern in class, something I never thought the textbook-centered school environment would ever be flexible enough to allow.

In other news, the main excitement in the past few days on the home front has come from Operation Wean Nikolozi. This has been nominally ongoing at least since I got here, but it went into high gear this week. The first night was pretty rocky for everyone in the household, but things have slowly but steadily been getting better since then. The presence of Paata’s mother is a big help, but even with her here I can tell it’s been an incredibly taxing week on all of them.

I’ll end for now by noting that it's at least 70˚F here again today, at least in the sun, which still hadn't gone down last night even by 6:00, since we’re not on Daylight Savings Time. Definitely doesn’t feel like December (although the flip side of not changing the clocks is that the sun doesn’t come up until after 8:00). I’m enjoying the warmth, but I’m also looking forward to some nice, cold, snowy New England winter when I get home.

Tbilisi & Sighnaghi

This Tuesday was a national holiday, St. George’s Day, and my school decided to cancel classes on Monday as well to make a four-day weekend, so I took advantage of the opportunity to go a-traveling (while I was away they decided to have classes on Monday after all, but I didn’t find out about that until I got back).

Heading out on a Friday morning marshutka (I decided, at Paata’s suggestion, to take Friday as well), I made my way first to Tbilisi. Five hours later I arrived at the train station, from whence I took the metro into the city center. The Tbilisi metro shares certain characteristics with those in several formerly Soviet cities, namely incredibly deep stations reached by means of almost dizzyingly long and steep escalators, and I was instantly reminded of my time in Moscow. I surfaced on Rustaveli Avenue, which runs through the heart of the city and is home to, among other notable sites, the Tbilisi Opera House, Rustaveli Theater, and the Parliament building. The Avenue comes to an end at Tavisuplebis Moedani (Freedom Square, dominated by a huge column topped by a gold statue of St. George slaying the dragon), from which point I ventured off into a maze of streets in one of the oldest parts of the city.

After some pleasurable wandering I made my way to the synagogue, following directions I had gotten from the local Chabad rabbi over the phone (yes, they really are everywhere). I arrived just in time for L’cha Dodi and the end of the Kabbalat Shabbat service, which was followed by Friday night Ma’ariv. Most of the service was chanted very quickly by the cantor, but I was able to follow along with friendly pointers from my neighbors in the pews. I was surprised at how many people were there—at least eighty, by my estimate—and I would have liked to learn more about this community, but people left pretty quickly after the service. The Chabad rabbi, Meir, had invited me to his house for dinner along with a couple of other Israeli guests, and so I spent the rest of the evening surrounded by people speaking Hebrew (a change from the usual Georgian and Megrelian, but no more understandable from my point of view). I wasn’t very hungry, having eaten a large helping of khach’apuri (cheese bread) not long before, but I have to say, I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy to see a bowl of matzo-ball soup. Indeed, one of the best aspects of the whole weekend was the opportunity to eat different foods from the ones we have all the time at home in my host family.

I was hosted for the night by Nino, the amazing woman who ran our orientation in Kutaisi, and who still looks out for all of us like a mother hen despite the fact that she no longer works for the program. The next day, after a wonderfully leisurely morning that included the best shower I’ve had since I left the US, I set out again to explore more of the city. This time my wanderings took me to Sameba, a huge and impressive new church across the river from the old part of the city, and then up to Narikala, a hilltop fortress with another beautiful, old church. After a quick cup of tea back at Nino’s, I then took an evening marshutka to Sighnaghi, about an hour and a half east of the capital. There I met up with Ilaria and Seraphim, friends through both Village Harmony and Wesleyan, who are living there for the year (Ilaria is teaching English like I am).

Sunday morning we went to mass at the local church where Ilaria, along with several members of Zedashe (a great choir based in Sighnaghi), provided the chanting for the service. This was followed by an American style brunch of scrambled eggs and bacon, thoroughly relished by all. In the afternoon we stopped in to see several friends and neighbors, then took a walk to the nearby Bodbe Monastery, where St. Nino is buried. We even found time to sing some Shape-Note songs, something I’ve been missing while I’ve been here. On Monday I went to one of Ilaria’s classes at school, and went for a nice, long walk in the afternoon. Then, having discovered that there were no less than four other English teaching volunteers also visiting Sighnaghi, I had dinner with them, catching up on how they’d been faring since I last saw them at the end of our orientation.

I went for yet another walk the next morning, before getting on a marshutka back to Tbilisi. There, after looking in at another old church, I made my way unhurriedly along the riverside quay to the train station, where I boarded a marshutka that took me home. My feet, as you may be able to guess, were tired, but my mind and my camera were full, and I had mixed feelings as I rode back westward. I enjoy living in Tsaishi most of the time, but this little foray into the outside world reminded me just how isolated I am here. I feel even more confident now that I made the right decision to leave at the end of the semester, which is rapidly approaching. That said, I think that having gotten away for a few days will allow me to be more at peace spending the next few weeks back here. I needed a reminder that things like warm bathrooms, water pressure, spring mattresses, and vegetables do actually exist, and will all be waiting for me when I’m done.

P.S. As if to illustrate what I wrote before, dinner last night (Friday) hit what may be an all-time low. The plan was to have the ubiquitous pasta “kashi” (porridge), pasta served in its own cooking water with milk and sugar mixed in. I had a hard time with this dish initially, but over time I’ve gotten used to it. Last night, however, we realized too late that we were out of sugar. I suggested draining the pasta, forgetting about the milky broth, and eating it with some combination of butter/salt/cheese/tomato sauce, all of which we had. This idea proved to be too foreign, however, and we sweetened the concoction with a cornel preserve, which I have tried and failed to acquire a taste for, and which was also, under the circumstances, the only enhancement available for both the bread and the tea that rounded out our meal. C’est la vie!

Gaacheret!

I’ve mentioned traveling by marshutka (minibus) a few times in previous posts, but I think it would be worthwhile to discuss the phenomenon in more detail, as a way of giving you a glimpse into one small but important part of life in Georgia.

My “village,” Tsaishi, is more like what in Vermont we would call a town in the rural sense, in that it is spread out and encompasses several smaller population centers. There are thus three different local marshutkas to choose from, plus the long-distance ones going to places like Kutaisi or Tbilisi, so choosing the right one can present a challenge. In addition, many of them run on no fixed schedule (they wait in town until they are full before leaving for the village), so you never know how long you may have to wait. Experienced locals can identify many of the individual vehicles that run the local routes from a distance, but I, the ignorant foreigner, have no recourse but to wait expectantly by the side of the road until I can read the small sign (in Georgian) propped against the windshield. By this time the marshutka is almost upon me, and I have to wave energetically as it goes by, then run up ahead to where it has stopped.

On board, people are often packed in so tightly that it is almost impossible to move, let alone see out the window to know when to get off. As far as I can tell, the locals have a remarkable ability to a) magically be at the front when it’s time for them to get off, and b) tell the driver to stop with a few mumbled words I can barely hear even sitting right next to them. Needless to say, these abilities are far beyond me, and I find myself drawing even more attention than usual as I call out “Gaacheret!” (Stop!) loudly from the back of the marshutka, then literally climb over the other passengers, bags of groceries in hand, to get to the door.

Paying presents another challenge. On trips to and from Zugdidi, the price is established at 70 tetri (cents), and when boarding in town, you actually buy a ticket. For shorter trips, however, there are no clear guidelines. Paata seems to decide how much to pay using an algorithm based on the distance traveled, how much money he has on him, what sort of mood he’s in, and whether he likes the driver. I generally limit myself to the first criteria. That said, often I don’t actually get as far as paying anything. Either the driver refuses to take my money, or one of my neighbors or fellow teachers pays for me. I drew the line the other day when one of my students tried to pay for me, even though this meant physically pushing her out of the way so I could hand the driver my money.

Despite these many challenges, I’ve only taken the wrong marshutka once, and I figured it out quickly enough to get off and catch another one without a problem. I’ve also gotten to know the woman who sells the tickets in town (to the extent possible given the language barrier), and she now asks me how I am when I see her. I’ve even started being able to recognize a few of the more distinctive marshutkas (the big, bright green one, for example), but I still double-check the sign in the window before getting on. Give me, oh, a few more years, and I might just have the system down.

And now, in other assorted news:

• I went with my host family to a wedding supra for one of Paata’s distant relatives on Tuesday. There were at least 200 people there in a huge tent, with an astounding amount of food on the tables. It was fun for a while, and I’m glad I had the experience, but I was ready to go by 11:00, and we didn’t end up leaving until after 2:00.
• Nikolozi, Paata and Marika’s toddler, has latched on to the idea of eating with a fork. Now, he doesn’t have enough fine motor skills to actually use the fork to put food in his mouth, but he’s not about to let that stop him. He’s perfectly content to bang it on the table, use it to mash around his food, or just hold it in his hand, while other people feed him, but he will often refuse to eat anything unless he has at least one fork in his possession.
• The maple syrup I brought from home is starting to grow mold around the lid (owing in part to the long periods when the fridge is off, either because the power is out or because they’ve unplugged it for reasons I haven’t been able to understand). With this in mind, I made pancakes from scratch last night, which came out pretty well, although I used a little too much baking soda. Marika was making a cake at the same time and had some left over chocolate sauce, which, when eaten with the pancakes and syrup, almost evoked chocolate chip pancakes. Almost.
• And speaking of pancakes… I had three kinds of wheat product for breakfast this morning: Georgian style pancakes (denser and fried in oil), bread with jam, and a slice of Marika’s cake. This sort of meal hardly bothers me any more.

Plague

As you may have guessed from the title of this post, this hasn’t been the best of weeks for me. I came down with a horrible stomach bug in the early hours of Tuesday morning, from which I am still in the process of recovering. For most of the first day I just hoped that it would pass quickly, but when I almost fainted and then started vomiting a somewhat alarming shade of green, I decided I’d better go to the doctor.

Because it was already evening, this meant going to the hospital, but we weren’t there for long before we were sent on to another, smaller hospital (for reasons not entirely clear to me), which turned out to be a dark, nondescript building at the end of a dirt road in a part of town I’d never been to. This made the part of me that still cared about such things somewhat nervous, but fortunately the doctor I met inside was very nice and sympathetic, and explained that my light-headedness was due to low blood pressure, which in turn was due to loss of fluids (at least I’m pretty sure this is what she was saying, and it all made sense to me). After a shot and a spoonful of some kind of caffeine concoction to boost my BP, we stopped at a pharmacy to pick up some more drugs and an IV hook-up, then went home. There, our neighbor who’s worked as a nurse gave me the IV infusion, which took about 45 minutes and went smoothly, with a coat tree standing in for an IV pole.

By Wednesday night my stomach and light-headedness problems had disappeared, but had been bewilderingly replaced by a sore throat and stuffy nose. The doctor had said she saw what looked like an infection in my throat, but at this point it just feels like a nasty cold. Maybe the cold virus took advantage of my weakened immune system? Who knows… All I have to say is that it doesn’t seem fair. I went back to school on Thursday, but I cut out early on Friday and went home.

Now, on to other matters. Other than the aforementioned plague, my time since our trip to Svaneti has been fairly uneventful, as far as major happenings go. I’ve spent a lot of time with Paata puzzling through the new official guidelines for lesson planning and student assessment which we are now supposed to be following, a process which has had its ups and downs. The biggest benefit is undoubtedly that we are now writing lesson plans for every class, which helps me to prepare and to make the most of my participation in the classroom. Because this is a pretty new idea for most teachers here, it is one of the very few cases where I actually have more experience and am able to help Paata, instead of the other way around. The benefits of the new grading system, on the other hand, are far less clear. Essentially, we are being asked to assign far more grades than the teachers here are used to doing, and working out how to do so is turning out to be pretty complicated.

Another issue taking up a lot of my attention is a school play that we’re trying to put together for the end of November. Marina, the principal, had broached the idea with me when we first met and she found out that I was interested in theater, and in the last week we’ve actually started working on it. The initial parameters for the production were basically that it should include English dialogue and that there should be opportunities for students to perform folk songs and dances along the way. After talking with Paata, and no doubt influenced by my many years of summer camp theater pieces full of aliens and time travel, I soon came up with a scenario involving a visit to Georgia by a team of Martians looking for a place to establish a Martian colony on earth. These Martians would travel around to different regions of the country (experiencing the folk songs and dances of each region, naturally), before deciding that it was far too nice a country to take over after all. Somewhat to my surprise, my proposed scenario was accepted, and I am now well into writing the script for what may well be one of the stranger pieces of theater I have ever been involved in.

The issue of language in the play—how to have English dialogue and still be intelligible for a Georgian audience—was a tricky one at first, but I think I’ve solved it pretty well by borrowing a trick from Indonesian wayang kulit (shadow puppet plays). In these plays the primary dialogue is in an archaic language that the audience can’t understand, but the salient points are translated along the way by clown-like characters, who also add their own comments and jokes. Similarly, in the script I’m writing, the Martians converse with the people they meet in English (the intergalactic lingua franca of the future), while two observer/interpreter characters who remain to one side of the stage provide the audience with translations and commentaries.

I’m hoping I don’t find I’ve bitten off more than I can chew with this play, but I think it’s going to be OK. There are only four characters with a lot of lines, and two of those are the interpreters, who will be speaking in Georgian. The music and dance components are also for the most part out of my hands, which leaves me free to work primarily on the dialogue. If I’ve learned one thing about this country, though, it’s that the most bizarre problems arise from the most unexpected places, so it’s always good to be on your toes.

P.S. It absolutely poured all day yesterday. I don't think I've ever seen that much volume of rain come down in so short a time in my life. It stopped in the evening, but then overnight we had some spectacular thunderstorms, complete with hail!

Svaneti

It’s 9:00 in the evening, and I’ve just finished a light evening snack of bread (never absent from any meal), cookies, and kisiri. This cousin of Jello is a gelatinous concoction made from a powder, but thin enough to be drunk from a teacup. It is made in Russia, and apparently prized enough by Georgians to be smuggled across the border from Abkhazia, which explains why we haven’t had it until now.

This, however, is not the main reason for my writing. As the title of the post suggests, I want to tell you about our trip to Svaneti! On Friday fifteen teaching volunteers, plus two of our hosts (both named Dato and therefore distinguished in speaking as “Big Dato” and “Little Dato”) hired a minibus to take us the approximately 150 kilometers to Mestia, the nearest major town in Svaneti, the remote and mountainous region to the north. This journey, despite its relatively short distance, took us about six hours, and included stops to change a flat tire and to move the debris from a recent rockslide out of the road. The road itself was in horrible condition, and in many places we found ourselves plowing through mud six inches deep, if not more. Once in Mestia, we checked into a hotel, where we celebrated our safe arrival with a large dinner that included, among many other dishes, the famous kubdari (stuffed break like khachapuri, but with meat instead of cheese inside).

On Saturday morning, despite our hopes, the rain that had persisted all through our drive up to Mestia was still coming down, and for a while it was unclear what we would actually be able to do without putting ourselves at risk of being killed by an avalanche or flood. Eventually, however, we were cleared to go on the hike many of us had been looking forward to, up to the edge of the nearby glacier. This hike took us six hours, almost entirely in the rain, and involved crossing several streams, only some of which had stepping stones or logs to assist with the process. If you look at my pictures, though, I think you’ll agree that it was definitely worth the trouble. Through the rain and mist we had stunning views of craggy snowcapped mountains, and when we got to the end of the trail, we saw that the rive we’d been following actually flowed out from underneath the glacier. By the time we got back to town it was getting dark, and I was incredibly grateful that (a) I had dry clothes to change into, (b) there was a space heater in my room, and (c) I could eat dinner in the hotel and thereby avoid going out again for the rest of the night.

Sunday morning I got up early and went for a walk around the old part of town, which is dotted with centuries-old stone towers. The area around the hotel, by contrast, is a flurry of construction activity (including the hotel building itself), all aimed at making Mestia a skiing destination for tourists. Before that happens, though, they’re going to have to do something about the road. It had gotten even worse over the weekend, and at several points the prospect of our making it back to Zugdidi that day seemed somewhat dubious. In one spot a big tanker truck had gotten stuck, and we had to wait while a tractor essentially plowed a new road through the mud, one that cut even closer to the cliff edge than the original route had done. In another spot a large tree had fallen across the road, and we teamed up with the drivers of several other vehicles to roll it off the cliff, then watched as it fell several hundred feet to the river below.

Despite all these obstacles, however, we did in fact make it home, tired, wet and sore, but entirely satisfied with our adventure. Since then several people have asked me how my trip was, and my standard answer has been: “K’argi! Bevri tzvima, magram dzalian lamazi” (“Good! A lot of rain, but very beautiful”). It’s not much, but it’s all in Georgian, so I’m proud of it.

Gaumarjos!

Well, I wasn’t going to post again before going to Svaneti this weekend, but then the trip was postponed by a day, and I had something to write about, so here it is.

Marina, our school director, put together a big supra last night, ostensibly in honor of the successful renovation of the school over the summer. She invited several people who worked on the project, the few male members of the school staff (don’t ask me why), me (possibly as one of the previous category but also because I’m Someone Special in the community), and a few people from the regional Resource Center in Zugdidi. Then, in what was essentially a gift to me, she invited Polikarpe Hubilava, a beloved 88-year-old local singer, from whom Village Harmony actually gets some of its Georgian repertoire, and some other older folks who sing with him. Thus, in between the many toasts that passed around the room, our end of the rather long table was engaged in a lot of singing, which made me very happy. I got to listen to a number of great songs, and with Paata’s help, I figured out what songs we knew in common, so I got to sing with them too! Marina explained that while she was very sad that I was leaving in December, she wanted to give me one really great day, and she certainly did. There was so much food on the table that it was both beautiful and almost disgusting, with some plates piled on top of others for lack of space, and we didn’t leave until after midnight.

This morning, we were summoned back to the same house for what is apparently a traditional part of a big supra that I hadn’t heard about, namely eating leftovers and renewing the drinking and toasting for another couple hours.

In other news, we, that is, about fifteen volunteer teachers and a handful of Georgians, leave tomorrow morning for a long weekend in Svaneti. There’s not really much of a plan, which bothered me at first, but then I just decided to give up and go with the flow, so we’ll see what happens. A lot will depend on the weather, so I’ll have to wait and tell you more about it once we get back.

I’ll leave you for today with a little reflection on one of the unexpected obstacles of teaching in a Georgian classroom: the kids all have the same names, and the names are all really similar. The vast majority of students in any class will be called Giorgi, Giga, Gega, Gio, Nino, Nini, Nana, Nata, Natia, Nika, Lika, Lana, Lasha, Vasha, and other maddeningly indistinguishable names. A few names, like Salome, Irakli, Zuriko, and Shotiko, are more distinctive, but no less abundant. This problem extends to the staff as well, which contains, as far as I can tell, two Ninos, two Nanas, and two Nunus. I’m doing pretty well at remembering the names of the kids in the oldest grades, who I am able to communicate better with, but in the younger grades, it’s pretty much a lost cause.

Planning Ahead

When I signed up for this program initially, I signed on for one semester, with the understanding that I could, and probably would, extend my contract for the full school year, provided things went well in the first month or so. Well, the time has come for me to decide, and after much soul searching, I’ve come to the conclusion that one semester will probably be the right amount of time, and that I won’t be coming back in January.

This has been a very hard decision to make, because I know that I am still very much in the process of adjusting to life and work in this country, and that many things may change between now and December. And I am happy, for the most part. However, I didn’t realize before I came just how difficult it would be to have so little contact with other English speakers, when I don’t speak Georgian or Megrelian, and even more importantly, how difficult it would be to try to teach kids when I don’t speak their language. I had thought that any sort of classroom teaching experience would be good for me in my quest to become a history teacher, but it’s become very evident just how big the gulf is between the kind of teaching I want to be doing professionally and the kind of teaching I’m doing here. For these reasons, and for many others that I don’t need to go into, I think that I’ll get the most out of this experience if I limit it to four months.

That said, I hope to do a fair amount of traveling in the time that I have, since the different parts of the country have very different physical and cultural characters. A nice first step was a weekend trip with my host family to visit Marika’s family in a nearby village. I got to see the local castle, and to meet the 82-year-old family matriarch, who remembers when Stalin spent the night in the village when she was a little girl. There are also plans afoot to visit the mountainous Svaneti region before it gets too snowy, but I’ll wait to write more about that until the plans are more definite.

I’m also certainly not giving up at integrating myself better into the family and the community. I’m determined to learn my way around the kitchen, to start with, so that I can make some food myself, as well as hopefully learn how to make some traditional Georgian dishes. I’ll let you know how it goes!

Independence

I have been building up my independence in small increments. The first stage in this process was discovering how little independence I really had, at the start. When I went for a walk in the fields and was gone for not much more than an hour, Paata and one of the neighbors came looking for me, worried that I had gotten lost. And when I mentioned for the first time that I might like to go into town, it turned into a group expedition that included a neighboring household as well as our own (and didn’t end up going until evening, after all the stores were already closed).

So, I thought, I’ll have to start small. When Paata had to stay at school for a meeting after our last class one day, I suggested that I could walk home myself. Well, sure, why not? Then, when he was going into town last Saturday morning, I asked if I could come along, just to wander around and see the city in the daytime, and maybe get on the internet. We took the marshutka (minibus) together both going and coming, but other than that I was on my own. Incidentally, it was on this trip that I got my hands on a deck of playing cards, with which we have been teaching each other Georgian and American card games at home.

Finally, on Thursday, I was able to make an entirely independent trip into town. Fortunately, since we live on the main road connecting Zugdidi with most of the rest of the country, almost any passing marshutka will be going the right way. My only real hitch had to do with the Georgian concept of time. For the return trip, I bought a ticket for a marshutka that I was told (in German, which has actually come in handy several times in communicating with strangers) would leave in half an hour. I returned promptly at the appointed time, got on, and then sat for almost another half an hour while the driver waited for more customers to fill the bus. Still, I suppose it’s always better to be early and have to wait than to be late, though I suspect that many Georgians would hesitate to agree with me.

I should probably explain why independence, and particularly the ability to get into town when I want to, is so important. Tsaishi is a lovely village in many respects, but aside from houses and the school, there’s very little here. There used to be a sort of village center, with stores, a barbershop, and a few other small businesses, but these were all completely destroyed in fighting in the early ‘90s, and none of them have been rebuilt (the same is true of a hotel that was built for people coming to visit the local hot springs). This part of the village is full of crumbling foundations, and feels almost like a ghost town. The closest thing the village has to stores is the occasional shack by the side of the road, no bigger than the size of an outhouse, with an old woman sitting inside who sells bread, rice, canned foods, and a couple household products. In addition, no one I know has internet, and there’s none at the school (the school doesn’t even have water at the moment, though I think that this, along with the lack of light bulbs, is due to the summer renovations and may eventually change). All things considered, then, if I ever want to buy something, use the internet, eat out, use an actual toilet (not really a priority, but I figured I’d include it in the list), or meet up with a fellow native English speaker, Zugdidi is the place to go.

Now while I’m writing, I should also say something about teaching, since that is primarily what I’m here to do, after all. I have 21 45-minute class periods each week, in all the grades from 3^rd to 12^th, and I’m dividing my time working with Paata and with the other English teacher, Sopho. Once a week I’ll go help in a 3^rd grade class in Tsatskhvi, the next village over.

The classes, and the students in them, are a real mixed bag. The 10^th grade, for example, is probably the best in terms of their engagement in learning, while the 11^th grade is probably the worst. Within each class, there is a very wide range of competence, which makes it difficult to teach at an appropriate level for all the students. Some students are significantly behind the majority of their classmates, but because everyone in any given grade has to study the curriculum for that grade, these students seem destined to fall farther and farther behind every year, unless they get the kind of extra help that the school really isn’t in a position to give. Some of them clearly have learning disabilities and other special needs, but the system is completely incapable of giving them the accommodations they need. Unfortunately, this isn’t my area of expertise, and there’s really not much that I can do, so I’m following the other teachers’ lead in basically letting them fail and focusing on the students who can actually do the work and learn the material that they’re supposed to. I have to invest my time and energy where I actually have a chance of making a difference.

In each class, we mostly follow the textbook, making changes where we see fit (or where, for example, we can’t do a listening exercise because we don’t have the tape, and we don’t know where the teacher’s book is that has the transcript). Some of the textbook material is pretty good, but there are a number of pieces I’ve found that seemed too artificial or contrived to be of much use, and I’ve tried to skip over these whenever possible. Once I get a little more familiar with the structure of the classes and have a better idea of what parts of the curriculum are actually required, I hope to be able to introduce some more activities that encourage the students to be creative and spontaneous, especially in speaking. I know that this will be an uphill battle, though, since for most of the students speaking is one of the things that they find most difficult in English. Given that most of them have never even met a native English speaker, I’m actually impressed that some of them can speak as well as they do (and I’m very impressed by teachers like Paata and Sopho, who have had very little contact themselves with native speakers).

I think I’ll leave it at that for now, but I’ll certainly write more about how my classroom adventures proceed in the weeks and months ahead.

P.S. I've finally gotten my pictures to be visible to everyone (look over on the right)! You can also see them here.

Pictures

I just tried to make a link over on the right to a photo album, but I'm not sure anyone will be able to see it. Please let me know if it works. Thanks!

Shuki Ar Aris

Following up on my initial posting of basic conversational Georgian, I offer here a selection of phrases I had no idea would come in handy until experience taught me their value:

“Shuki ar aris” – This useful phrase translates as “There’s no electricity,” and is one that I have heard rather dismayingly often. Sometimes there’s a reason, usually related to the weather, while sometimes there’s no apparent reason at all. The best reason so far, however, was that someone hadn’t paid their electric bill. Apparently this happens every month (always the same man), and as there are no individual meters on the houses, they turn off the power for the whole village until he pays. This may seem like punishing the innocent, but it can also be seen as a way of leveraging community influence, since everyone knows who this man is and pesters him until he pays up and the power goes back on. In fact, it seems to have just come back on as I’ve been writing, judging by the happy chant containing the word “shuki” coming from Paata downstairs and the sound of the evening news on the TV.

“Kartveli ts’oli ar ginda?” – “Don’t you want a Georgian wife?” I was warned about this one during orientation, and sure enough, it has cropped up twice in conversation with village residents. It is the follow-up question to be expected if one reveals that one is not yet married.

“Bavshebo, ramdeni ts’ignia?” – “Children, how many books are there?” One challenge of teaching in a Georgian village school that I hadn’t considered was that the kid’s families have to buy their own schoolbooks, and this process takes a while. Thus, many classes in the first week began with this question immediately after preliminary greetings (especially in the younger grades, the kids all jump up when we come in the room and shout, “Good morning, teachers!”). And while the books themselves have their limitations—more about this in a later post—it makes it very difficult to do any work in the books when only a handful of students in the class actually have them.

“Bavshvi!” – Grammatically, this is simply the singular form of bavshvebi (children, as in the previous phrase). In practice, though, in a house with a resident one-year-old, it means something like, “Watch out, the baby is coming your way, so try to keep an eye on him and make sure he doesn’t fall down/touch the stove/stick his fingers in an outlet/try to eat the chicken feather on the floor.” I should perhaps explain that there is a constant low-level war going on against the chickens, who will exploit every opportunity to get into the house, and are in constant need of being chased out.

“Soplis Harmonia” – The literal translation of “Village Harmony,” used in the dubbed footage of my second TV interview. This one was for a local Zugdidi station, and was a considerably longer segment, focusing on my interest in Georgian culture and folk music. The crew was very nice, but insisted on some rather contrived shots, such as one of me playing the panduri, even though I don’t really know how. I’ll admit to being relieved when they didn’t ask to come back to the house, thus avoiding another interview/supra extravaganza. Incidentally, while I’m on the topic of music, it turns out that one of the few other foreigners to spend any amount of time in Tsaishi was none other than ethnomusicologist and Village Harmony collaborator Carl Linich, who was here collecting songs from some of the older villagers.

Despite knowing these handy phrases, most conversation still passes straight over my head. I would have thought I’d be used to this, from the amount of traveling I’ve done, but I’ve come to realize one important difference: people here very often sound like they’re arguing, even when they’re not. Perfectly mundane exchanges quickly escalate to raised voices, emphatic gestures, exaggerated facial expressions (shock, disgust, scorn), and banging on tables, but then are just as quickly laughed off. I’m hoping I’ll get used to this, but as someone who ordinarily feels uncomfortable just being around an argument, let alone engaging in one, I’m finding it kind of stressful to be surrounded by so much conversational tension. I’m not sure if the fact that I have no idea what they’re saying makes the situation better or worse.

Lest all this sound like I’m feeling overwhelmed, I should say that on the whole, I really am enjoying my time here. School is certainly stressful, but I would be crazy not to expect it to be. It’s a new job, a new language, a new culture, and new rules to follow, all wrapped up together. And while I don’t think that it will necessarily ever become easy, I know that it will become less unfamiliar with time, and that I’ll eventually work out certain patterns and strategies to work my way through it. In the mean time, I just have to remember to treat everything as a learning experience, and consider how to use what I’ve learned going forward.

Lastly for now, I want to give you the closest thing I have to a mailing address, in case any of you feel like writing me on paper. The Georgian postal service is notoriously unreliable, but if you write to the following address, there’s at least a good chance that it will get to me:

Ben Sachs-Hamilton
Zugdidi, Village Tsaishi
Samegrelo
Georgia

I’m the only person in the village who could possibly be receiving a letter addressed in English, so if it shows up, they’ll be sure to bring it to me. I look forward to hearing from you, by whatever means you prefer!

Home, Sweet Home in Tsaishi

Well, this was supposed to be posted on Monday, but various events, including a windstorm, a series of thunderstorms, two blackouts, and a horrible 24-hour stomach bug, have prevented me from getting to the internet cafe in Zugdidi until now.

The ten volunteers from my group who are going to be living in the Zugdidi area took a marshutka (minibus) here on Friday morning, where we met our host families at the local Educational Resource Center in the city (these are scattered throughout the country and serve as intermediary agencies between local schools and the Ministry of Education). There I was handed off to my host father, Paata, who is an English teacher at the school here in Tsaishi, and Marina, the school principal. It was about a fifteen-minute taxi ride to my family’s house, where I met my host mother Marika, their one-year-old son Nikolozi, and Paata’s mother, who lives nearby and was visiting for the day. Marika was also an English teacher before getting married, but she is not very confident in her English and doesn’t use it much. They are all very nice, generous and welcoming without being overly solicitous, and very interested in hearing about my life and my home in America.

Before dinner, Paata and I walked about ten minutes to a nearby hot spring, where I had a refreshing wash in the steaming water. As we walked back, the setting sun lit up the snowcapped mountains of Svateni, which rise abruptly off to the north. At dinner I met several neighbors, who toasted to my arrival and the prospect of a successful stay here in Georgia, in addition to the traditional toasts to family, to those who have died, and to many happy meals together in the future. I was encouraged to drink a lot of wine, but no one seemed put out when I only had a sip for each toast. After dinner, just in case there hadn’t been enough adventure for one day, I found myself corralled with the rest of the men to go tromping off through the brambles in the dark to gather up a litter of piglets that had been born that day and bring them back to the pen.

The next morning Paata and I walked through the village to the school. I am told that Tsaishi is one of the oldest towns in this part of the country, but from a newcomer’s perspective, it mostly just looks like some houses and a partially-roofed government building clustered around the main road that runs from Zugdidi to Kutaisi and points east. The school was just renovated this summer, which meant that we arrived to find many of the classrooms devoid of furniture, and the staff engaged in a prolonged (though seemingly not very hostile) shouting match about how to go about disposing of the piles of construction waste that filled the schoolyard. Slow progress was made in these areas over the course of the morning (my participation, as a new guest, was limited to input regarding the arrangement of desks in the fourth grade classroom), but there still seemed to be a lot to do by the time Paata and I went home for lunch. This meal ended up taking place at the house of his aunt and uncle, whose backyard adjoins ours. That evening a windstorm arrived, bringing a power outage in its wake, both of which lasted until Monday. Fortunately, life in Tsaishi doesn’t depend too much on electricity.

Sunday afternoon saw the four of us, plus our next door neighbors and their young daughter, all piled into the neighbors’ old Opel and off to the Black Sea coast. The strong wind meant stinging sand and murky water, but it still felt great to go swimming, and we found enough shelter to have a picnic before heading home. That night, however, I came down with some serious GI issues, about which I’ll spare you the details. Suffice it to say that having to use an outhouse doesn’t sound too bad, until you have to go there several times throughout the night, with a fever, in a windstorm, and with only a flashlight to find your way (remember, the power is still out).

I spent most of the next two days recovering, while the wind finally stopped and gave way to a series of extremely violent thunderstorms (leading to more blackouts), and before I knew it, it was Wednesday and the beginning of school. The day was ostensibly to begin at 9:00, but in what I am learning is true Georgian fashion, the opening assembly didn’t actually start until closer to 11:00. Everyone I’ve told about my interest in Georgian music has seized on the idea, and so a couple other teachers and I had prepared a couple of songs that we knew in common to sing when I was introduced at the assembly. After this Paata and I had a few minutes of a somewhat normal 12th grade class, talking about what we did over the summer, though the classroom we were in still didn’t have any furniture. Before long, however, we were informed that a TV crew wanted to film us, so the class was whisked off to the fully furnished staff room to repeat our discussion for the camera. I was then supposed to go to a 3rd grade class with the other English teacher, Sophie, but the TV people wanted to film me with my host family, so we all—myself, Paata, Sophie and Gocha, the music teacher—piled into the reporter’s car and went home (don’t ask what happened to the 3rd graders; I don’t know). After some “candid” family shots and a short interview, some more school people appeared, and the afternoon suddenly turned into a supra (a feast with lots of toasting and singing), which lasted until the 8:00 news, on which our segment aired. There were only a few seconds of our footage, mixed in with clips of several other volunteers, but they included a bit of us singing, so I can now officially say that I’ve sung on Georgian national television. In all, it was a pretty exhausting day, but I felt good about the time I spent with the students, and about getting to know Gocha, who says he wants to sing with me more.

I know this is an incredibly long post already, and I promise that I’ll summarize more in the future, but there are a few things I’ve jotted down during my first week with my host family that didn’t fit in anywhere else. So until next time, I’ll leave you with these thoughts:

Food:
• Cornmeal-based products seem to be a common substitute for bread here, as a filling starch and a sponge for various sauces. Examples include ghomi (think grits, but just solid enough to cut into with a fork), and small corn pancakes.
• Cornmeal also appears in a surprisingly good dessert dish, mixed with sugar and grape juice and served in a cup like a mousse.
• While I still wouldn’t choose it of my own accord, as far as wine goes, what I’ve had here is actually pretty good. Having a glass with dinner on a semi-regular basis shouldn’t be too hard.
• Other dishes so far: two kinds of khachapuri (cheese bread), roast piglet (not those ones, at least not yet), some kind of white meat in a creamy herb sauce, various eggplant-based dishes (all of which I’ve at least tried), cheese dumplings, pasta in hot, sweet milk (for breakfast), homemade cream puffs, cheeses, and fruit.

Other odds and ends:
• There is a water heater and a showerhead in the bathroom, but the toilet is a hole in the ground, located in an outhouse at the end of the garden.
• The house is large for a family of three, but has a surprisingly small amount of furniture, given that they’ve lived here for two years.
• The light fixture in my ceiling mysteriously raises and lowers itself on its cord when the wind is blowing (unless it’s the ceiling moving up and down—I’ve spent a lot of time watching and I still can’t tell). I know it sounds crazy, but I have video to back me up on this one.
• Oh, and of course, the first language of people in this region isn’t Georgian. They can all speak it, but amongst themselves they speak Megrelian, which is related, but different enough to make it almost impossible for other Georgians to understand. Learning the local language has gotten a lot more interesting.

Destination: Tsaishi

More to come later (though when I'll next have internet, I'm not sure), but as much info as I know for now: my host family is located in the village of Tsaishi, outside of Zugdidi in the region of Samegrelo. I'll be heading there on a bus in about half an hour. Wish me luck!

Georgia: First Impressions

Gamarjobat!

We’ve been in an intensive orientation session for five days now, and the levels of both excitement and fatigue in the group are steadily growing. We’re staying in a residential school building on the outskirts of Kutaisi, the capital of the Imereti region where we will be placed (we go to our host families on Friday). We have three hours of Georgian language classes in the morning, then four hours of other subjects in the afternoon, including teaching methodology and intercultural learning. From my perspective, the language classes have been more useful than the others, particularly since we’ve been told that our host families may have a very limited knowledge of English.

We’ve been living in a pretty well insulated bubble so far, which may be good in terms of letting our bodies adjust to the food, the water and the climate here, but also leaves us feeling that in a way we haven’t really arrived in Georgia yet. That will all change in a couple of days, of course, but for the time being, here are some first impressions:

• Despite our location in a fairly urban setting, there are often dogs, cows and chickens within sight of the front door.

• There are lots of good combinations of bread, meat, cheese and spices in various forms. Unfortunately, many of them contain cilantro.

• Having experienced firsthand the driving habits of bus drivers in Tbilisi and Kutaisi, I have no complaints about the program rule that forbids any of us to drive while in the country. Nino, our orientation director and Mother-Hen-in-Chief, says her belief in God is renewed every time she gets out of a motor vehicle alive.

• Georgian is hard. I’m making good progress with the alphabet, but conversational ease is extremely slow in coming. Yesterday’s crowning achievement: “Shvid saatze k’ontsertze mivdivar. At saatze sakhlshi viknabi.” (At seven o’clock I’m going to the concert. I’ll be home at ten.) Today’s: “Tu sheidzleba, me minda kartopiliani khink’ali da upamidoro salati.” (Please, I want meat dumplings with potatoes and a salad without tomatoes.)

• We spend an inordinate amount of time in group meetings talking about toilets. Many volunteers are not familiar with concepts such as dual-flush systems and putting toilet paper in the trash, and this leads to a fair number of technical difficulties.

• As we were warned early on in orientation, waiting in line is an unknown concept here. The first time I went to the store, I waited my turn, only to have a man elbow in front of me without so much as a glance in my direction.

We did break out of our bubble briefly last night, when we went to see the 12th century Gelati monastery, about 20 minutes away. This is a complex of buildings, including a church covered with magnificent wall paintings of saints and angels (which were kind of hard to see, since it was dark), and the oldest known academic institution in the country. It is also the burial place of King David the Builder, one of Georgia’s most famous and revered rulers. I’m looking forward to seeing more churches in other places, preferably in the daylight.

***Updates since first writing***

I wast interviewed on film (not sure who for) yesterday about the program, and what motivated me to come here and teach. The reporter tried to get me to say something political (there is some opposition to to the program within the country), but I did my best to be positive while avoiding saying anything sensitive. Also, last night after we were done with our last meeting, a bunch of the trainers and I ended up singing a Georgian song we all knew (Aralo, a.k.a. Imeruli Maqruli) out on the front steps. Definitely a highlight of the week!

Safe and Sound

Well, here I am in Georgia! My flight from Munich was easy, and I had my first direct experience with Georgian hospitality before I even got off the plane. The man next to me gave me a lesson in Georgian, told me that his region (Samegrelo) is the best part of the country and that I should try to be placed there, and ended up giving me his e-mail and telling me that I would be welcome to stay at his house if I ever wanted.

After meeting up with people from a couple other flights, we went to a hotel and slept for a few short hours. We're off shortly to a meeting at the Ministry of Education and Science (our sponsoring organization within the government), before heading off to the city of Kutaisi, where we will have our orientation. I'm tired, but exhilarated, and looking forward both to getting to know my fellow teachers and to seeing some of the country today.

Grüße aus Deutschland!

Unexpected, perhaps, but true. I write from the Munich airport, from whence my flight to Tbilisi will depart in a few hours. I had essentially the whole day here, so I took advantage of it and went into the city. Went first to the Staatliches Museum für Völkerkunde, which has an impressive collection of traditional art from many (non-European) parts of the world. I had a lunch of sausage and a soft pretzel at the Viktualenmarkt, a big open-air market in the center of the city, wandered around and read on the grass for a while in the Englischer Garten (Munich's version of Central Park), and even managed to catch the 5:00 playing of the clockwork automata in the tower of the Neues Rathaus, a ridiculously Neo-Gothic but nonetheless impressive edifice.  By that time, however, it had started to get cold, and as much as I appreciated a cool day in between hot Burlington and even hotter Tbilisi, I decided to call it a day. In addition, as I realized after falling asleep several times on the S-Bahn train back to the airport, I was exhausted.

Unfortunately, there's not really any hope of getting a good night's sleep tonight, either, as my flight will cost me another two hours in time change and land me in Georgia at 3:00 am local time. That's the traveling life!

Still haven't left

Just a quick update to say that, although initially I had been told that I would leave today (Friday), the latest word is that it will actually be either Sunday or Monday. Still don't have a ticket, so I don't know exactly when. I'm basically all packed and ready, so it's not a big deal, but it would be nice to know.

Update: Apparently I'll be leaving Tuesday. Still don't have a ticket, though.

And update again: I finally got a ticket confirmation, less than two days before leaving. Flying out of Burlington at 11 on Tuesday morning, stopping in New York and Munich (most of a day there - maybe I can go into the city?), and arriving in Tbilisi at 3 in the morning on Thursday.

Next post should be from Georgia!

Getting Ready

Hi folks, and welcome to my Georgia blog!

For anyone who may not have gotten the full story, I'll be leaving soon to teach English in the Republic of Georgia. I've signed up for six months, but unless catastrophe strikes, I'll be extending my contract through the end of the school year in June. I'll be living with a host family, and teaching alongside local English teachers in a public school.

There are many things I still don't know about this adventure: where exactly I'm going to be placed, what age group I'll be working with, what my host family will be like, and other similarly large questions. I'm trying to take the stoic/experienced-world-traveler approach to all these unknowns, though, and tell myself that I'll adjust and make the best of whatever comes my way. So far, this attitude has managed to prevail against the, "What on earth am I getting myself into" attitude, if only just barely at certain times.

What's that you say, you thought Georgia was just a state known for heat, humidity and peaches? Well, long before Columbus reached what he thought was India, and even longer before James Oglethorpe was inspired to create a colony for poor people, there were a people who called themselves Kartvelebi (Georgians) living high in the Caucasus Mountains between the Black and the Caspian Seas.

Georgia was one of the very fist kingdoms to officially convert to Christianity (in the 4th century), and the people there have managed to preserve their unique religious traditions, along with their unique languages, foods and musical styles, through repeated invasions by Persians, Byzantines, Turks and Russians. It was through singing, in fact, that I first learned about Georgia, and I go there in the wake of many friends who were drawn there at first by the music but came back raving about the food, the scenery, and most of all, the great hospitality.

I have been trying to learn a little bit of basic Georgian before I go, but this is not proving to be an easy task. The South Caucasian language family, of which Georgian is the dominant member, is unrelated to any other language family. The language has its own unique alphabet, and is also unbelievably stingy with consonants ("gvprtskvni" is an extreme example, but seeing as it means "you peel us," I don't think I'll be needing to use it too often). In case you're interested, here is some rather more useful vocabulary:

Hello: Gamarjoba (გამარჯობა)
Good morning: Dila mshvidobisa (დილა მშვიდობისა)
My name is Ben: Me mkvia Ben (მე მქვია ბენ)
Thank you: Gmadlobt (გმადლობთ)
Goodbye: Nakhvamdis (ნახვამდის)


So, nakhvamdis for now, and stay tuned for the next update!