Marianabat

Babua, grandfather, told me last night that we would be having a picnic for Marianabat.  According to my research (asking Kelsey), Marianabat is the Feast of the Ascension of Mary in the Georgian Orthodox calendar.  Grandmother spent the whole morning at church while Maka and Maya spent the whole morning cooking.  I spent the morning being shooed out of the kitchen and talking to the pigs. 

This is my new best friend.  I call him Hank.

Just after noon, we all got into Babua’s old Impala with baskets of chicken and bread and tomatoes.  And wine.  Lots of wine.  Wine in what looks like gasoline cans.  Babua drove us up the mountain on roads that really didn’t look like roads.  The roads on the mountain are in such bad repair that I could feel the rocks scraping the underside of the car beneath my feet several times.  I’m pretty sure we drove through peoples’ orchards. 

Not a dry stream bed.  This is the road we took.

Eventually, we got to a point where the Impala couldn’t go any further, though I saw several other cars even higher up the rutted, washed-out trail.  Pretty sure they had hover jets or something.  Babua’s friends were all waiting for us beside the river.  The whole scene looked like something out of Lord of the Rings (I guess that means New Zealand).  While we waited for the mtsvidas to cook, Babua’s friends went fishing in the river and Goga and Ani went swimming.  Maya spent most of her time trying to keep Niko from drowning himself in the river. 

I love Georgia.  Even the rocks are hospitable!

Supra translates literally as ‘tablecloth’ and is a very big tradition in Georgia.  A family will throw a supra to celebrate any momentous occasion, like a guest arriving or a birthday.  In this case, we were celebrating the religious holiday.  Friends come over and everyone eats and eats and then eats some more.  One person is designated as the Tamada, the toastmaster.  He (almost always a he) makes numerous toasts through the course of the supra, with Divine Inspiration.  The words are supposed to come from God to his lips and then to the rest of us.  After a few toasts, my inner translator stopped working and I called him the Tostada.  Georgian wine is pretty strong.  He didn’t understand enough to be offended.  Thank goodness.

Supra!  There was even more food on here before we started.

In this case, Babua was our Tamada.  He toasted Marianabat, the friends who were all there, my friends and family in Virginia, the friendship between Virginia and Georgia, and my other friends in Georgia.  At one point, Babua invited me to give a toast.  I don't remember what I toasted.  Georgian wine is very strong. 

Then all the guys there declared themselves to be my new brothers and my family to be their family.  I didn’t get names, so Christmas cards may be a bit awkward.

My new brothers

This guy pulled out a guitar and started singing, and all the others joined in.  Naturally, this being Georgia, they were all perfectly in harmony and knew all the words.  A bunch of half-drunk guys on top of a mountain with a beat-up guitar making some of the best music I’ve ever heard.  Go figure.  Some of them even got up and started dancing.  And they took off their shirts.  Did I mention how strong Georgian wine is?

Full Monty, Georgian style!

Being a mere female, I was allowed to get up and walk around after about an hour of toasting and drinking.  My new brothers were not so fortunate (or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it) and spent several more hours toasting and drinking and eating.  I wandered back whenever I heard singing, but spent most of my time admiring the scenery.

If you look really closely, you can see Merry and Pippin in the trees on the left.

Eventually, Babua half-stumbled and was half-carried to the car by two of his buddies.  One of them asked me to marry him.  Apparently, brother doesn’t mean quite the same thing in Georgian as it does in English. 

Babua was a surprisingly good driver while mostly intoxicated.  It might have helped that there were no other cars on the road, just this kid on a horse.  The horse beat us down the mountain.

It helps that horses have right of way.

I think Marianabat is a holiday we definitely need to get behind in America.  Gaumarjos!

Soperapelos

Maka’ s parents live in a tiny, farming village about an hour’s marshrutka ride outside of Telavi.  They keep pigs, chickens, and cows and grow tomatoes, corn, grapes, and various fruit trees.  I finally met the elusive Ani, whom I like very much.  She first asked me what colour nail polish I like best and then kicked the butts of all the little boys playing football out front.  Ani paraded me up and down the street, introducing me to all her friends and neighbours and telling me which boys she likes and which girls she doesn’t like.  Pretty soon, I had all the kids in the village following me around like the Pied Piper of Soperapelos. 

Who has right of way?  Pigs, ducks, or cars?

In the evening, all the adults sit around eating watermelon and sunflower seeds while everyone who has any energy left plays football and tag in the street, dodging cows and the occasional car.  At one point, I saw a guy blasting Eminem on his iPod… while driving a donkey cart.  There are no fireflies here to tell them when it’s bedtime, so I’m just going to assume that all Georgian children have terrible insomnia.  I heard a mother calling her kids in to bed last night and them begging for five more minutes and it was all so familiar and so much like when I was a kid that it was kind of a shock for me to realize that I didn’t actually understand any of their words. 

I understood the pigs, though.  They all said, "Mine.  Mine.  Mine."

Grandmother (Dedua) seems to spend every waking hour making some kind of food.  She made tonis puri, kiln bread, in the giant kiln out back.  She made lobiani, bean dumplings, on a frying pan over a wood stove.  She made sulguni, Georgian cheese, on a Bunsen burner every night.  The whole time I’ve been here, I’ve been hearing a constant litany of “Keti, sit. Eat.  Eat more!”  Georgian doesn’t have a ‘th’ sound, so they can’t pronounce my name.  Everyone just calls me Keti or Ketevan because it’s easier than trying to teach ‘th’ to every person I meet. 

Dedua pulling tonis puri out.

Maka’s sister Maya is also here with her son Nico, who is about two.  Maka’s brother Rezo came to visit but only stayed for a day before he had to go back to work.  Ani took me down the road to see the village church, which is quite pretty and very dark inside.  I had to wrap a shawl around my hips because I was wearing pants, which is apparently a Very Bad Thing.  The graveyard outside was neat.  Lots of the tombstones had pictures of the deceased etched on the front.  It sounds like a good idea to me.  When I die, I want this guy’s picture on my tombstone.

Oh, yeah.  He's still got it.

The whole time I was there, I kept referring to is as the Village of Soppelshi.  Turns out soppelos is just the Georgian word for village.  

Welcome to Telavi

Maka and Gucha met me at the hotel with the friend who was driving us to Telavi from Tbilisi.  None of them speaks any English.  I asked Maka in terrible, broken Georgian if she would teach me to make Georgian food.  In translation, I think I said something like, “You are teacher the chef to me eating Khatchapuri and Kinkhali” (those were the only Georgian foods I could remember at the time).  About halfway to Telavi, we stopped for Kinkhali and Khatchapuri.  I think something got lost in translation there, but the food was good!

The house in Telavi is very nice.  My bedroom has a chandelier in it because why not?  Bare cement walls and chandeliers balance out quite nicely.  

Be jealous of my chandelier

And be jealous of the view from my bedroom window!

Gucha left pretty much as soon as we got to the house, and I haven’t seen him since.  He’s at work all the time.  Goga, the nine-year-old son, has been in and out of the house a bit, but he’s making the most of his summer break playing with his friends outside.  Ani, the twelve-year-old daughter is at her grandparents’ house in the country, and I haven’t met her yet.  I spend most of my time with Maka, my host mother.  Maka doesn’t speak any English and gets very upset when I speak Russian, so I am very thankful for all those late-night Georgian study sessions during training week in Tbilisi.  With all my new free time, I’m desperately studying Georgian just so I can communicate basic things.  Among the first Georgian phrases I learned are “sit down” and “eat.”  Maka likes to feed me and worries that there is something wrong with her cooking if I don’t have third and fourth helpings of everything on the table. 

Orsha, my new best friend

I think I am getting a reputation for being a bit simple.  I walk around the house talking to myself, saying things like “Chair.  That is a chair.  Is it a bed?  No, it is a chair.  I sit on the chair.  I do not sleep on the chair.”  The family has a little puppy, Orsha, who also has to hear me practicing Georgian.  She likes to follow me around and chew on my shoelaces while I tell her the names of every piece of furniture and the colours of all the walls.  It’s cool, though.  Orsha gets me.  Orsha and me, we understand one another.

The next door neighbour, Lali, is a friend of Maka’s and a very nice lady.  She comes over for coffee almost every morning, and we eat dinner at her house almost every evening.  Her daughter, Rusa, is really sweet.  She speaks English about as well as I speak Georgian, so we get along quite well.  She’s asked me to come over and speak English with her so she can improve.  The playlist on her iPod is a very strange mix of American pop music, Russian djs, and Georgian folk songs.  I like this girl!

In training, we were warned not to drink well water or river water for the first few months, until we’d had a chance to acclimate to the new stuff in it.  The tap water in major cities like Telavi was supposed to be fine, so I had no qualms about drinking the pitcher of water Maka put in my bedroom.  Then I went to refill it and found where it was coming from.  By that point, I’d been drinking the water for several days without getting sick, so I figured I’d be fine.  Let’s hope it continues to be fine. 

This is what I've been drinking

School doesn’t start until mid-September, so my days are pretty free at this point.  In the mornings, I teach Maka English while do the laundry or the dishes or whatever cleaning she thinks needs to be done (she sweeps and mops the entire house twice daily!).  In the afternoon, I frantically study Georgian.  Occasionally, Maka takes me to pick apples or hazelnuts and lets me reach all the fruit at the top of the trees.  In the evenings, everyone sits outside on the benches outside their houses and discusses Life, the Universe, and Everything.  Occasionally, they discuss me, but I pretend I don’t understand Virginiashi and Amerikellia. 

Maka told me this morning to pack my shampoo to go to her parents’ house.  I’m sure she told me some other things, but that was all I understood.  Off to the village!

Leaving the Nest

What does one wear to meet one's new family?  I've been considering this question for a while now.  My host family will be here in a few hours to take me to Telavi, in the Kakheti region.  There, I will be living with a mother, a father, an eleven year old girl, and a nine year old boy and teaching at City Telavi Public School N6.  

TLG took us on a shopping excursion yesterday so everyone could stock up on supplies now that we're better informed about what we'll need.  Chalk, it seems, is a pretty hot commodity in Georgian schools.  After a very badly serenaded bus ride (thanks to Chris and Derrick, who are far worse back row singers than the GSGIS cross country team could ever hope to be), we came to the biggest chain grocery store in Georgia.  Goodwill.  Fortunately, no relation to the used clothing stores in America.  It's sort of like a Costco, a WalMart, and a Dollar General all rolled into one.  It was a bit odd, but they had awesome chocolate.  

Goodwill.  Not used clothing in Georgia.

Far more interesting was the bazaar they took us to after Goodwill.  People were selling everything here.  I'm pretty sure I even saw a booth advertising human organs.  Or maybe it was pig and cow organs.  My Georgian still isn't so great.  With Renada's help, I managed to get a surge protector and a plug adapter, which is good because the adapter I brought with me shorted out already.  All on my own, I managed to get sunglasses, earrings, kvas, and food.  Go me and my horrendous mangling of the Georgian language!

Musical instruments and sunglasses.  All of life's necessities in one convenient location!

As we were leaving, we were approached by a pair of really skinny little boys covered in sores begging for money or food.  TLG had warned us not to give anything to the beggars, but what are you supposed to say to those big, brown eyes, especially when you're eating junk food you really don't need?  I still haven't figured that one out.

Kelsey Squared and I wanted to do something besides sit in the hotel and study Georgian on our last night, so Olly suggested we find the church with the gold dome that we've been seeing across the river.  After picking up Tom, James, and Mat, we started looking in the most logical place: a coffee shop.  Eventually, after judicious applications of caffeine, we started in the direction of the church, only to be sidetracked immediately by an ice cream shop.  I managed to order completely in Georgian and was quite proud of myself until the clerk handed me my change.  I mixed up “gamarjobat” and “gmadlobat,” so I told her “hello” and walked out the door.  So much for my fluency.

Olly, James, Tom, Kelsey, Matt, and Kelsey.  If you're reading this, I'm  going to assume you know which one is me.

After a brief detour across the Peace Bridge, which is really nifty when it’s all lit up at night, our quest to find the Holy Grail, er, um, big church continued by asking a policeman for directions.  We conjugated the verb carefully and made sure to pronounce all the letters in the right places, only to have him shake his head at us and say, “English, please!”  One long, winding climb through the back neighbourhoods of Tbilisi later, we finally found the church.  It was locked up for the night.  C’est la vie.

Possibly a wine bar.  Possibly something else entirely.

We did pass this house, with this crazy sign on the door.  I think it’s advertising wine but, as has been proven to me multiple times tonight, my Georgian is pretty terrible.  Rather than go back to the hotel empty-handed, so to speak, we went instead to a bar with possibly the coolest name in the former Soviet Union: The KGB Still Watches You. 

Soviet flags and Soviet propaganda and Happy New Year to Our Dear Leader

On the way back to the hotel, we got the taxi driver almost lost and nearly wound up driving out to Bazaleti Lake, partly because go left and go right are equally unpronounceable in Georgian (marts’khniz and marjvniv, respectively).  Many thanks to Olly and his British charades, which are apparently universally understood by taxi drivers. 

And now, we’re all nervously waiting around in the hotel lobby.  Our host families are all in a meeting with TLG about what to expect from us.  I keep hearing the song from the beginning of Annie playing in my head: “Betcha he reads, betcha she sews, maybe she’s making a closet of clothes…”  We’re all little orphans just waiting to meet our new parents.  I wonder what they’ll be like.

Lost little orphans waiting for a new family