Some of the Adjara volunteers an I took a trip to Khulo, a town way up in the mountains of Adjara (didi adjara, as they call it, which means big adjara, I guess I live in small adjara). Khulo is pretty remote, so the folks there, especially the police, were curious about what we were up to. Some photos:

The cable car. (wasn't working)

Supra at Brian's

Khulo

A guy we met on the street packed us into his car and took us to see his bear cub. Why does he have a bear cub? How does one catch a bear cub? He couldn't really explain. The bear was not so happy to see us. In other news, we haven't had electricity at my house for about a month, apparently because some Czech company bought the local power station and is demanding payment (!?), and my neighbors are refusing to pay. Using the wood stove to cook in the summer heat makes it seem so much more medieval. I feel bad for my host mom.

My friends are running and ecological education project in one of the remoter parts of the country where there aren't any volunteers. If you can donate to their project, please do. Here are instructions from Aus:

To donate to this project access the following website: www.peacecorps.gov. On the homepage there is a link to "donate now". Click onto that link and from that page again click on the link to "donate now". This website is pretty self-explanatory, but if you're confused, next click on the Eastern Europe and Central Asia region to find my project. The projects are classified by country, so next find Georgia and you'll see the heading for A. Cowley's "Racha Eco Training of Trainers". If you want more information at that point, there's a small project description.

Gmadlobt! Thank You!

I made another trip to Turkey two weeks ago. I missed the Georgian Easter celebrations, unfortunately, or maybe fortunately- I'm suffering from serious supra-fatigue these days. And anyway, I got to enjoy the leftover dyed, red eggs and paska (sweet bread) for a week after I came back.

Turkey is an amazing place; the more I go there, the more I want to go back. The goal of our journey this time was, appropriately enough for an Easter Sunday, a 4th century Greek monastery called Sumela located in a canyon near Trabzon, only a few hours from Batumi. The weather was great, and the location of the monastery was jaw-droppingly gorgeous. A sense of a adventure may have been lacking, compared to a similar excursion in Georgia, due to the superior quality of the Turkish roads and the convenience, comfort and cleanliness of public transportation there (Turkish buses often have a conductor cleaning up after you, serving tea, and pouring cologne on your hands at every opportunity) and the general absence of domesticated livestock as passengers (though there was a lamb in a box on one of the buses). But vacations need not be adventures when your job is working at a Georgian public school. Some photos:

I don't know if the photos do justice to the scenery. you can see the monastery in the cliff side, there. See it?

From below.

Byzantine fresco work, Lizzo in the foreground.

Out the window!

My English classroom/library (cabinet, as they say in Georgia) is nearly complete. I'm putting up the finishing touches this weekend. The grand opening will be on Tuesday. It may be difficult to find resources to make a library, or anything else for that matter, in Georgia, but it is never difficult to find the resources to have a party, so our grand opening should be fun. I'll post pictures as soon as I can. I'll leave you with a photo from Batumi that Lizzie's friend took in January that I like.

Spring has come to Georgia. The hillsides are painted in the Easter pastels of cherry and plum blossoms, and the nights are finally warm enough for me to sleep with just one sleeping bag, rather than two. As proof of nature's prolificacy, my host family's cow gave birth to a calf this morning. Wow, I have to say, live birth is pretty... gory. As the calf was fighting through the slime of its placenta and trying to stand up on its little yellow and purple proto-hooves, I couldn't help but think that mammals would be better off laying eggs. I think the platypus got it right (being semi-aquatic is also really cool). But the birth was exciting to watch if not only because it means that the cow will be giving milk again, and I can return to my dairy-heavy diet of khatchapuri and warm milk twice a day. I'll put on a few kilos for summer.

The incessant rain stopped being so incessant this weekend, and I have been enjoying the sunshine. I was just relaxing the Batumi park here by the internet cafe: soaking up the solar warmth, getting my necessary dose of vitamin D, watching the children and the pigeons run after each other. They fixed up the park last fall by cutting the weeds, installing benches, and restoring the statue of a woman aviator who I always thought was Amelia Earhart, but turns out to be the first female, Soviet fighter pilot, a woman from Batumi. A good city is really made by its parks, so it was a step in the right direction for ole' Batum. There is also a new, huge (and free!) Ferris wheel by the beach that I took a ride on with John a few weeks ago, before he left.

In other news... I got my hair cut in Rustavi by and old man at in a corner barbershop. After trying to convince me that I should really be Georgian Orthodox, not Catholic, so that I can marry a Georgian girl, and telling me that I was like some famous Georgian movie character who returns after years in the wilderness with log hair and a beard, and with a portrait of Stalin watching over us, the old man (who could have used a shave and a haircut himself) chopped off my locks with a pair of dull scissors. I will never complain about a haircut in America again. I told John that it was a symbolic act, a reversal of the Georgian tradition of not cutting one's hair during a period of mourning, the mourning in this case being for the loss of the fabled leader of the shadow administration of the rebel Volunteers of the formerly-autonomous Peace Corps Adjara, John.

I've also been having to contemplate my obsolescence as Ambassador of American Culture to my village since my host-family got satellite TV and my students have been receiving insightful letters and pop-culture magazines from their pen-pals in the USA. In Turkey, the satellite dishes hang on the corners of every building like some strange fungus, and Georgia is starting to look the same. The other week, I had the strange experience of drying my (now gone) hair by the wood stove while watching my host-father flip though Teen Vogue, wearing his gigantic reading glasses, while my host-uncle looked at Teen People, and the new Snoop Dog video played on MTV France in the background. What do they need me for now?

Volunteers came back from their vacations in foreign lands, so I met up with them in Guria to hear about their travels. It was a good weekend. I don't have much to report, as visits to Guria tend to follow a similar pattern...

Frisbee

Music

Hiking (I'm getting good at that trick) Supra

Arm Wrestling

And Clint and Erin came back from Egypt. Can you guess what they brought me? No, not the facial hair... Yes, a kefiyeh!

I wish I could figure out how to un-underline this text, dagnabit.

Merry Orthodox Christmas! I spent New Year's with my host fam. We had a supra, and after midnight we walked around to all the neighbors to make a few toasts. (In khutsubani this involves much drunken stumbling through the mandarin groves.) They have the tradition in Georgia that the first person who enters your house on New Year's Day will determine the events of the next year, i.e. a good person will bring a good year. Do they have that tradition in other parts of Europe?

I just got back from a short trip through Northeastern Anatolia in Turkey. Traveling outside Georgia is a good way of reminding myself of what corner of the world I live in, exactly. Not that I need to be constantly reminded, but the ability to communicate my basic needs, the network of friends and acquaintances in Georgia, and a familiarity with the random “surprises” I confront everyday, can make life here seem pretty comfortable, mentally if not physically. Not so in Eastern Turkey. A combination of factors, my inability to speak even a single word of Turkish, the occasional military checkpoint where some men with big guns give the perfunctory look through your documents, and the end-of-the-world, frontier quality of some of the towns among them, reminded me that I am not, in fact, at home in this part of the world. And telling folks you’re an American always elicits an interesting response; reactions ranged from the hotel manager who explained to me that Saddam Hussein’s death was very bad, America did it, Bush is crazy, and “All Americans should kill George Bush, or soon you will have many problems in with other countries” to the old Kurdish man who just said “Eh, America, good. English, good. Israel, good. Kurdish, good. Turkish, eeeeh. Iraq, eeeeh. Iran, eeeeh. Terrorist.” In both cases I just raised my hands to make the universal sign of “I didn’t say it.”

We saw the ancient, ruined Armenian capital at Ani and the Ishak Pasha palace in Dogubayazit at the foot of Mt. Ararat. Here are some photos:

John explains to us what we're looking at in Ani

I contemplate the decline and fall of empires

We enter the "forbidden zone" (the ruins are right on the border of Turkey and Armenia; not a friendly border.)

Ruin of Armenian Church

John, Lizzie and me at the Ishak Pasha Palace

Our hotel in Dogubayazit. It was very cold in the room, and there was a mouse. Mt. Ararat is in the background.

Sheepdogs in the snow

Ishak Pasha Palace

Some photos from Aus's birthday in Khoni and Christmas in Bakuriani

Lizzie and I made guacamole, salsa, tortillas and tortilla chips on Christmas

The weather has been great since I wrote you last. It’s much colder than I remember last December being (there’s frost every night), but we’ve had a stretch of remarkably clear weather across the country. Today I could see the Greater Caucasus across the Black Sea and the Kackar Mountains over the border in Turkey.

I’ve been feasting on clementines, and the few kiwis on our kiwi tree are just ripening. It’s also the time of year for another delicacy in my house: baked sardines with cornbread. Yummy. Speaking of unusual treats, I had probably my grossest food experience in Georgia last weekend. I was up in the mountains of Adjara, at another volunteer’s site, when, as we were making our way home, his neighbor, a scruffy, gruff, bloodshot-eyed, store owner, offered us a shot of chacha (70%+ home brew, like vodka but stronger and harsher, even better when it comes from a plastic gas can) and something resembling pickled eggs as a chaser. I took the shot and stuck the hunk of jiggling white mystery substance in my mouth, because I figured nothing could be worse than the taste of that particular brand of Georgian hillbilly moonshine. But it was. It was awful. With watery eyes, and through my gagging coughs, I managed to ask this man what it was I had just ingested. He laughed and told me it was pig fat, raw pig lard. Thanks, buddy. I still gag a little bit when I think about it.

Another element of the Georgian winter that I don’t remember from last year is the dense petchi haze that settles over Batumi in the evenings. Petchis are the wood stoves that most villagers use to heat their houses. In the cities, most people have gas or radiators, but Batumi is a petchi city. Apparently, after the fall (of the USSR, that is) everybody sold their radiators as scrap. So now almost the entire city heats their apartments with wood, and the smoke from those thousands of petchis burning every night, when trapped in the mountains surrounding the city, creates a smog that is, at times, unbearable. It's like walking around inside a forest fire. I think I have some idea now how it must have felt to live in 19th century London. In fact, I have come to see the PCV experience in general as a way to get in touch with the past. It’s like now I, you know, get The Depression, man. I understand how people survived. I see these movies about pre-war America or Europe and I feel like I have something in common with the characters: the laundry drying in the windows, the livestock running around in the yard, the apartments stuffed with 3 or 4 generations. I’m like “hey, my family has that same heater!” or “yo, American’s ate that, too?!” Of course, having the farm in Indiana occasionally provided the same kind of feeling and imparted some special knowledge, like the fact that roosters crow all day, for example, not just in the morning, and goats bite. I remember explaining to my study abroad group in Chile what, exactly, asparagus is (“is it from, like, a… tree?”).

Despite the sunny weather, it’s been a dark couple of weeks for us Georgia volunteers, because the administration forced our friend and fellow volunteer, John, to quit. They are being really ridiculous. It’s made us a bit disillusioned about the whole Peace Corps thing, for sure. Luckily, John has decided to hang around for a few more weeks of Georgia fun.

Yesterday was Austin's birthday supra, and the weekend before was Erin's b-day party, so I have been dutifully partying. Next weekend: to the MOUNTAINS for skiing and x-mas/hannuka celebrations! gilotsav shobas da akhal tsels (merry christmas and happy new year)

So I survived my round-the-world journey back to the Black Sea shores, the in-Georgia leg taking about as long as the to-Georgia leg (or maybe it just seemed that way since time actually slows down when one enters the vortex of the much loathed Tbilisi-Batumi marshutkah), with only a minor cold and a couple of postcards from Vienna gained en-route. The volunteers who greeted me at the airport made sure to give me a reality check by handing me two half-finished Kazbegi beers in the arrivals terminal and arranging a taxi that broke down immediately, forcing us to switch to another taxi-driver who had no idea how to get to Old-Rustavi and took us on an hour-long tour de apocalypse down a cratered road that I'm pretty sure crossed into Azerbaijan for a while. But no worries. I'm back safe and sound. For about an hour on the marshutkah ride across the country we followed a huge rainbow that stretched across the mtkvari valley in eastern Georgia. It was amazing. It was like being welcomed home. Of course, after the rainbow came the rain, and the rain didn't stop until this morning. As Austin, who also returned from America this week, said "My favorite part about coming home is always the cold, the rain, and the no electricity... that and the speed at which my soul begins to wither again."

It's that time of year again... The time of year when I spend my days either curled up in bed or by the woodstove downstairs trying to stay warm, reading, playing 'snake' on my phone, staring at the wall. The time of year when the students don't show up to school when it rains, and it rains almost every day. The time of year... Well, anyway, you know what I mean. The highlight of my week was delivering the pen-pal letters from America to their ecstatic recipients at school. My host-family is well. Nanuli has almost completely recovered from her surgery, but she is still on crutches. The mandarinis will be coming in soon. I should hear if I got my grant for the English cabinet this weekend. I miss you all. And cornchips. Somebody send me some corn chips.

I would have posted these last week, if the internet had not been so excruciatingly slow.

Frisbee at 9,000 feet

The village of Bakhmaro

chemi megobrebi

Pretending to think about the future. Hannah gave me the pretty haircut.

It's a crisp, cool, fall evening here in Batumi, and I have to say, fall is the best season in the world, anywhere you are. In Adjara it's still the hills are still green but the air is clearer and drier, and the sunsets are better.

I'm writing this blog in John's new pad. He moved into a tiny apartment furnished with fabulous, old, bright-red furniture, red carpet, and floral wallpaper. It's sweet. I took the bus into Bat-town today because we had the day off for Election Day. Yeah Democracy! Yeah drunk guys on the street and the bus celebrating Democracy! I can smell the Freedom on your breath!

The bus from K to Bat town is called the Yushchenko. It's named after the president of the Ukraine who gave us the buses. I think it's third-hand from the Netherlands, because the instructions for an emergency exit appear to be in Dutch. But we call it the Yushchenko, in honor of our fellow colored-revolutionary, as in:

-How'd you get home, by taxi?

-No, by Yushchenko.

So anyway, I took this Rotterdam/Kiev/Batumi city bus down our newly paved road through the teafields of Adjara, watching the sun set over the pale blue waters of the Black Sea, to celebrate Democracy and give Jhousewarmingarming gift, two Warstiener beers. And I thought I'd write a blog entry, because Dad asked me to.

So, I have three things I have to tell you about: Eco-camp, the Beginning of School, and an Epic Trip to the Top of Guria.

Eco-camp deserves an entry all to itself, but I am lazy and I forget most of the details by now anyway, so I'll stick to the main events. Our campsite wgorgeouseorgeous little canyon near Borjomi and we had some scouts and PCV's all running activities for the 35 kids who attended. a lotdid alot of team-building and leadership activities and learned about enviroproblemsroblemds in Georgian. Austin and I slept out under the stars every night. The hard ground was a welcome relief from the metal-hammock-cot-torture-device things our host-families make us sleep on, and the last bits of the Persied meteor showers were still falling through the atmosphere. On day two of our camp one of the park rangers strolled into the campsite with a sheep over his shoulders. It was a gift for us for Mariamoba, St. Mary's Day. They haven't totally gotten over the whole ritual slaughter thing here in Georgia. The scouts tied the sheep up to a tree for a day, slaughtered it the next, and we ate it for dinner. At the end of the week we took a long hike that began in the back of an aging Soviet pickup truck (see photo below). It was a fun and rewarding week. I think the kids learned a thing or two about environment and why they should protect it.

The beginning of school was bad, just bad. You get your hopes up in August, you know, you think everything's going to be different this year, the kids are just going to eat it up and get it, and you spend hours making these posters about the days of the week and the weather and a really cool one with an illustrated poem, and you get all your sweet maps ready and your new books all stacked. Then you show up and nothing sticks to the walls because they are all unpainted plaster, and there aren't any shelves for your books, and the kids don't care about anything, and your counterpart abandons you to the pack of wolves that is the sixth grade and these aren't even wolves you can reason with because they speak a language that isn't even Indo-freaking-European, and you just want to quit. You know? But it wasn't bad, really. I'm over it. It's better than last year. It's fine. It's good.

The latest event was a trip to the highest mountain in southwestern Georgia, a 2755 meter peak in Guria, from which we could see the whole of Adjara. I picked fresh blueberries and played some high-altitude Frisbee. We spent 2 nights in a small cabin in Bakhmaro without electricity or running water, had a campfire, and sang songs while Austin rocked an old Russian gee-tar. It was great.

Since my last visitors left, I have had a lot more time on my hands. Too much time. I've had to craft homemade adventures to keep myself occupied. One such adventure was tubing down my river from the mountains to my village. It was the most masochistic tubing trip ever undertaken by humans, I am sure of it. It started with a 10k hike without drinking water and ended with 5k hike without drinking water. The middle involved a lot of water, but mostly fast moving water running through a lot of boulders. Hard boulders. Needless to say, our over-inflated but still undersized Lada innertubes were insufficient protection.

Another adventure was riding bikes with Austin. I hadn't ridden a bike in over a year, and I hadn't ever ridden a bike in such bad shape. I could hardly walk the next day.

This morning, I had breakfast with Senator Lugar. He was generous enough to let us Hoosiers (minus Clint- Looozah!) spend an hour with him talking about Georgia, Peace Corps, Wabash, some college called Denison, etc. Here are some pictures:

Homies

What.

Beau and Amy with Nanuli and me

At the grave of the apostle Matthew Levi in Adjara

A waterfall near Kazbegi

Batumi beach

Dinner with Lizzie

So... I haven't updated you all in a while, but it's not my fault. I have been so pleasantly distracted by visitors from abroad that I haven't had the time. The summer has been flying by, and, lucky for me, having visitors is the perfect excuse to get out of work (he he). It has also be a good excuse to explore my the remoter corners of my Caucasian homeland. So a quick rundown for those who haven't seen me lately: Matt visited Tbilisi for a few days in May and we went to Davit Gareja (a remote monastery in Georgia) and Moscow. Matt got to reminisce about his days in the USSR, and I got to see the heart of the former empire at the Kremlin. Lotten came for 3 weeks and we went to Armenia. The coolest part of Armenia was the beekeepers who live up in the high mountain meadows in the summer with just a trailer and a tent and maybe a horse and their bees. They keep bees. Anyway, Lotten did some reportage for Swedish Radio from Georgia, so I got to pretend I was helping her with that.

THEN, in July, Jim and Walker came. That's when things got really wild. Not really, but we did some epic hiking in the Caucasus (which rule). They had survived, remarkably, their weeks together in Europe and a bus ride across Turkey, so Georgia, despite its inherent stress-inducing chaos, may have been something of a respite. Beau and Amy were my most recent stumrebi (guests), and they did me good by entertaining my host family, who absolutely loved them, with noble attempts at speaking Georgian and random facts about Americana (which I nobly attempted to translate). For proof of the excellent time I have been having, check out the pics. And a note to those of you who haven't visited me: fall and winter are a great time to see Georgia, too!

Matt at Davit Gareja Monestary, Georgia

Trying to imitate Russian badass-ness in front of St. Basil's, Moscow

Lotten iterviewing a refugee in Georgia

Jim, the light and the way

Walker's photo of Samebatsminda (Holy Trinity) Church and Mt. Kazbegi

Yipee

Back to work (boo), reading "The Runaway Bunny" to kids in Batumi

It's been a busy month. Lots of birthdays, holidays, comings, and goings. We moved into a new school. It's a hundred times better than the old. The prime minister came to the "opening ceremony" with his entourage of armed men in Land Cruisers, and a picture of me and him ended up in the Adjara newspaper. There was a solar eclipse. It was very strange because I had no idea that it was going to occur until I was trying to figure out why it was so dark, rubbing my eyes and checking the sky for clouds, when my host mom explained that the moon was in front of the sun. I promptly ran to the shed to grab the welding goggles. It was 95% of total, total in northern Geo. It got very dark and cold and an eerie fog rolled in off the sea. The next weekend, a congressional delegation visited Tbilisi. Some of us met with them and tried to give them an idea of what life in Georgia is like. They took us out for drinks later. Last weekend was Orthodox Easter. Traditions include: dyeing eggs red, eating special cake, visiting relatives' graves on Easter Monday, and, of course, drinking. This weekend will be my birthday, and that means one thing for sure: more drinking. I am well! Ego me bene habeo. I bought a sweet Mac G4 12" Powerbook from Yuta, a volunteer who left (traitor). Here are some pictures from my recent trip to Gori and the cave city of uplitsikhe.

Bird-flu has landed! The first case of bird-flu was detected in Adjara two weeks ago. I was actually a little relieved that the government found it, because that means they have the capability to detect it. It had been detected in all the neighboring countries but was suspiciously absent from Georgia... Anyway, all the chickens at my house have been killed, so I'm not really at risk. In other news, there was an earthquake in Georgia last month (not major) and an energy crisis (didn't really affect me, I read about it in the Times online). I stayed at site for all of February and we had a couple weeks of gorgeous weather. Oh, also last month Georgia was rated by Forbes magazine as one of the 14 most dangerous countries in the world. Say what?! I think they were being a bit nostalgic for the separatist fighting-civil war-no electricity-roving bands of armed thugs-good ol' days when they wrote that article. You can read it here. They even have a crazy picture of guys running down the streets with Kalishnikovs. I ain't seen none of that. So rest easy all you Forbes readers (few of you I'm sure), I'm safe as a kitten.

Tomorrow I'm heading to a conference that I helped organize for Eco Project 2006! We will be training Georgians to help PCVs manage Eco Clubs. The kids from the Eco Clubs will participate in Eco Camp 2006 in August. It's an ambitious plan, but we are getting things done. Much of my internet time this month was consumed by e-mailing folks around Geo to get some speakers for the training. Hopefully this month I'll have more time to update the Bloggy. Here are some photos to tide you over until then...

Blue Mosque interior: nice decorating, boys.

Golden Horn at dusk with fishermen.

Backgammon, nardi, tavla, whatever you call it, I beat Kevin every time.

Austin imitating a minaret. (I made him do it.)

Me in my huge Georgian tough-guy coat in Bakuriani. (That's a dude's got a monoski, Hilary.)

Winter has finally come to our sub-sub-tropical Adjaran sub-paradise, and snow is falling on the beaches, the mandarins, the palms, and the bamboo, across Batumi, on the towering soviet apartments and tin roof-tops of houses below. Along the coast, the lush, green hills have turned white. The doubly long Georgian holiday season has come to an end, and we are back to school.

The cold is kind of a shock, since the weather’s been so mild until now, but the snow is a welcome relief from the half-frozen slush that’s been falling for the past few days. I’ve had to abandon my room during the daytime and retreat to the life-giving warmth of the woodstove in the family room downstairs. At night, I seal myself into my precious, zero-degree sleeping bag and play games on my cell phone until I’m warm enough to fall asleep. The worst part of the day for me has always been getting up in the morning, but the pain of leaving the safe, sleepy world of my warm little cocoon has become almost unbearable on these frosty mornings.

Last week was my first week back at work. After my month-long, travel-filled vacations, it required some readjustment. I’m looking forward to the next semester and our much-anticipated move to a new school on Feb. 1st, but I have to get used to showing up to my cold classrooms, misbehaving students, and tedious lessons, once again. The new school we are moving to is the old school that has been renovated 7 years after it partially burned down. I haven’t seen it yet, but I have high hopes (which is probably not good).

My holidays were excellent. No time for any long travelogues, but I will tell you a little bit about Istanbul.

Istanbul is probably the greatest city on the face of the earth. At least for a few days in December. There are trams and ships and the third longest suspension bridge in the world. Did you know that the Blue Mosque is the only mosque in the world with six minarets? (Mecca used to have six but they added one after the Blue Mosque was built.) Istanbul also has amazing street food. I can’t speak for the restaurant food, because I didn’t eat any. The Bosphorous also rocks. I love a city with good waterways, and I love it even more when those waterways are major international shipping lanes.

Istanbul was a good destination for a break from Georgia. It was relaxing, but still exotic and exciting. Aspects of the city were almost overwhelmingly large, especially coming from wee, little Georgia, but we could still appreciate its smaller treats: the apple tea, hooka and backgammon, the detail of the architechture, the lights on the water at night, the turkish delight. It was also very laid back. I wanted to post some pictures, but the computer is not cooperating. I will try next weekend. gilotsav akhal tsels! Happy New Year everybody!

Now that I've adapted to my village routine in Adjara, I really never think to tell y'all about it. Any "news" worth telling is whatever I've been up to in Tbilisi recently. But I realized that I've been neglecting to give you a good idea of what my daily life is like. I'm sure I've mentioned that it's pretty boring. But boring can be good... And sometimes my host fam slaughters a calf and we get to have a bunch of supras! The supra is the traditional Georgian celebration and involving: at least 3 times more food than those present could possibly eat during the 6 hours at the table, lots of wine, and complicated toasts to things like peace, love, Sakartvelo, parents, siblings, women, young children, health, Americans, Georgians, friendships between Americans and Georgians, and occasionally Ronald Reagan. And, if your (un)lucky, there's singing. I carried on Matt's Caucasian cultural exchange by singing "I've Been Working on the Railroad" with friends at a recent supra. The leader toasts is called the tamada, but often the toast travels around the table and is elaborated upon by all participants before drinking. I passed a cultural milestone the other week by successfully, but not-so-eloquently, adding my two cents to all the toasts. I can speak the Georgian! Sort of.

Speaking of which, I know you know Georgian is an impossible language, but I thought I'd give you some examples of my daily frustrations. It starts with pronunciation. Aside from the ever-present consonant clusters in words like varskvlavi (stars) and namskvari (cake), there's always the guttural K lurking in the shadows. The K-bomb requires you to make a choking sound in the middle of words, important words like water and the verb "to be." Beyond pronunciation, there is the fact that Georgians tell time 'backwards' so that seven seventeen becomes seventeen minutes into the eight hour, and they count by twenties. Ridiculous, no? Then when you really get into it, you learn that there are no patterns for verb tenses, and you conjugate the verb based on the subject and the object. People, come on!

An update on school: nothing has changed. Just kidding. I had a conference with my Georgian counterpart this week in Tbilisi and we went to sessions on things like "the communicative method" and "classroom management" and "point-based grading systems." Hopefully it will be easier to make changes now that the ministry of education's goals have been better explained to her. Who knows... My English club is fun. I taught them some christmas songs. I didn't think to teach 'em some songs from James Brown's Funky Christmas. Next week.

The weather is still pretty warm, so I haven't had to buy any firewood. Hoping it will stay that way. I'm about to be kicked out of the PC lounge. Here are some photos. No time for captions. My beautiful village, supra shots of host fam, preparing cow head jello, austin with my clementines (I eat them till I'm sick. Jim can't stop me now!), and my English club at school (in one of the nicer rooms):

This week was our all volunteer safety and security conference, so I've been kickin' it in Tbilisi for a few days. Last night we celebrated Thanksgiving together. The the turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie was some excellent medicine. We had a reception at the US ambassador's house. His father went to Depauw, so I talked to him about Wabash for a few minutes. Their residence is impressive, of course, but its location is interesting as it overlooks the most famous brothel in Georgia.

I'm sorry I can't write more in these entries but I am the slowest typist you will ever find, and I just don't got the time. But a picture is worth approx. 1,376 words, so here are a few from the past few weeks:

The view from my balcony on a cloudy day with some early October snow in the mountains.

Adjara! Rocks!

Papa Stalin and the Gang in GoriUm... me at Halloween as a....um... cowgirl...

Happy halloween!

I went to a halloween party in Gori this weekend. We had it at the supper creepy old Intourist hotel there, which was appropriate. And Gori is the birthplace of Stalin, so his presence and a gigantic statue of him loom over the town, also kinda creepy. We went to the Stalin museum and got to see amazing Stalin artifacts like the house where he was born, his personal traincar, and his accordion. The highlight, though, was the deathmask room, complete with a portrait of dead Stalin and a dramatically lit bronze cast of his face from day after he died. (shudder)

Now I'm in Tbilisi (aka The Blissy) trying to get some things done but mostly just avoiding too much time in the rain. The Peace Corps lounge is so nice and warm..

By the way, 280cm of rain per year= way too much. And I've only been here for a couple of months! It still amazes me when it pours for four or five days straight or when it's pouring and then a thunderstorm rolls in and it pours x 3. I really didn't know that there could be so much water in the sky. Its amazing. But, as I like to say, in Adjara all the rain just washes our troubles away... When it's clear it is glorious. And now the mountains have snow on them.

One of the directors of the PC education program came to my site on Thursday to check up on me and talk to the director of the school and my Georgian counterparts. She brought me lots of donated books for the school and brownies, and my counterparts told her how perfect I am at everything. (I think that they thought it was an evaluation or something and that I might get fired.)

Otherwise I've just been hanging out, trying to teach, getting wet, and sitting by the fire to warm up. Last week I could hear the jackals? howling in the mountains (they sound like coyotes), and a bat flew into the bathroom with me. I took it as a sign of good luck, of course.

In one of my posts I talked about food, but I didn't really give an accurate description of the diversity of tasty produce that I get to consume. The fruit from the orchard at my house includes apples, peaches, cherries, pears, oranges, lemons, tangerines, figs, persimmons, and, of course grapes, plus hazelnuts and walnuts. Now the persimmons are coming in and the citrus will be ready soon. Also the fresh dairy products are amazing even though I get a lot of them. Turkish coffee with fresh milk makes my day.

Here are some photos of me in Georgia. Hopefully, I can get some pics of my permanent site and host family soon. Sarpi (photo 3) is close to my site in Adjara.

Me and my training group with lizzie's host mom when we first got to Kvishkheti...

Hanging out in the Jesus room at Lizzie's...

Building sustainable projects on the beach in Sarpi (the border and Turkey behind us)....

And moments before being sworn-in as volunteers in Tbilisi.

Well, 100 days down. I'm starting to get used to life here, but I still have moments where I realize how far from home I am. Georgia can be a confusing and surreal place to be sometimes with all of its contradictions and incongruities, so my cultural adjustment gets a little thrown off. Starting work has definitely been the rockiest part of the road so far, but I'm sure things will get easier with time.

Now at least I have a routine. I wake up reluctantly every morning at 8:30 and head downstairs to the kitchen for some fresh khachapuri and tea. Khachapuri is fried dough stuffed with cheese. It's pretty good but the Georgian cheese is a little too salty/sour for some people's tastes. When I first got here, I was sure the cheese was going to be the bane of my Georgian existence, but now I usually like it, especially when its fresh and it squeaks in your mouth.

At nine I go to school. The children in the schoolyard greet me with laughs, hellos, and handshakes all around. I inspire laughter everywhere I go. 6 hours of yelling at school (the teachers seriously scream at each other and the kids about the most mundane things) with a khachapuri break, and I get to go home. Soon I should start doing something productive. I will be teaching the 7th and 10th grades.

My evenings I spend playing nardi (backgammon), listening to my bro's radio (russian techno, american hip-hop), or staring at the epic view from my balcony, with coffee breaks. In the evening I get some more tea and khachapuri. Then I read and go to sleep. Its not exactly an adventurous lifeslyle, but its nice.

Every weekend I usually take a trip to the city, Tbillisi or Batumi, which is a nice break from the village. In the village I have to have a little conversation with everybody I meet on the street, which is nice but it gets a little exhausting. But then again everything I do here is a little exhausting...

The news here is Adjara is the new tunnel between Kobuleti and Batumi, which shaves about ten minutes off the trip. Also today there are parliamentary elections in goblet. The weather is getting cooler, but its still warm enough for some swimming in the Black Sea. Unfortunately, I discovered there are jellyfish.

These internet sessions are so stressful with my time counting down, but its almost up so adios!

This week was my first week of school- honestly, pretty depressing. I was supposed to start the 26th but they changed it to the 19th. The first day was a ceremony followed by 4 hours of absolute chaos. There aren't enough chairs for the kids, no chalk, missing windows, and several of the rooms reek of gasoline. The English lessons are more of a shouting match between the teacher and students. On the upside, the kids are really excited when I come to class and seem to be motivated to learn English. Hopefully things will change with time... It is really frustrating, though, when I'm trying to create a fun and positive learning environment and my counterpart just tears the kids down when they make a mistake. I think we'll have to have a talk. At the moment, I'm in Kutaisi where I helped with a breast cancer awareness rally. Lots of fun. I'm planning to write y'all about the more quotidian details of my life- the insane marshutkah rides, the endless khachapuri, and the intense amount of vodka foisted on me- but that will take more time than I have right now. Everything is generally good with occasional lonley hours and battles for control of my bowels. Talk to you soon.

So now I'm officially a Peace Corps Volunteer. We were sworn in on August 17th. You can read about is here: http://georgia.usembassy.gov/events/event20050817PeaceCorp.html. There's a picture of the play we performed. I was this dreamer character called Sizmara and this king tries to steal my dream, but it doesn't work and I get the princess and become king and have kids. That's how it went down. It's a Georgian fairy tale and we did it in Georgian which was pretty impressive and the crowd really ate it up.

I moved to my permanent site in Adjara, and I've got some down time now until school starts on the 26th. I took a litlle trip to Sarpi on the border with Turkey last weekend, which was really nice. There was some good rock jumping and a sweet view of the Turkish coast. Now I'm in Tbilisi catching up on news, in disbelief about the situation in New Orleans. I have to go catch my marshutka back to the West Coast, though. I will try to update you soon!