I'm in the Republic of Georgia!
First impressions:
Tbilisi (the capital) is definitely a study in contrasts. The neighborhood where my friend Lisa lives is a warren of twisting cobblestones streets (or streets of no stones at all) that feels very much like a village, even though it's just steps away from one of Tbilisi's major streets. These little side streets do feel like a developing country, with their broken sidewalks and hardscrabble corner stores with dusty signs out front, but the main streets remind me more of Spain or something.
There was a smell in the air, my first day, that was fresh and enticing, strangely different and familiar all at once. Lisa couldn't smell it, since she's already been living here a while. I couldn't smell it after that first day, either.
Grape vines simply drape over everything. And these are real grapes, bursting with flavor, not the supermarket kind. Here's Lisa's street:
People make their own wine. Lisa's wonderful neighbors invited us over to see. They'd bought bags and bags and bags of freshly harvested grapes at the market – the entire garage floor was full of them – and were tipping them into this huge press:
Georgia's legendary hospitality is just as tremendous as I'd always heard. The same neighbors invited us over for a dinner that was an absolute feast. Meat, yes, but also a bunch of delicious vegetable dishes, and wine, wine, wine. (Homemade, goes without saying!) So I got to see the Georgian tradition of toasting: The head of the table makes specific toasts, in a prescribed order, on such themes as peace, loved ones who have died, parents. Everyone lifts their glasses, and once the toastmaster has made the initial toast to a specific theme, others can add what they would like to say on the same topic. It also functions as a way for strangers to get to know each other, Lisa's neighbor Khatuna told us.
Lisa's neighbors speak German, so add Georgia to the surprisingly long list of countries where my German has proven more useful than I have any right to expect. In general, lots of people here speak at least two out of English, German and Russian, if not more languages as well. When I went to the theater box office to get tickets for a dance performance this weekend, the woman working there was older and didn't speak English, so I asked another woman behind me in line to help me; she spoke English to me, then turned around and spoke Russian to the woman behind the counter! And the young woman at the café Lisa and I went to yesterday evening spoke English with us, but then when she heard us speaking German, she got excited and switched to that.
I arrived here speaking zero words of Georgian and only knowing 3 or 4 letters of the alphabet. Whoops. While waiting for my luggage, I quickly memorized "hello" ("gamarjoba"), so I could say it to the taxi driver Lisa had sent to pick me up. I was annoyed with myself, the first day here, because though I'd learned both "hello" and "thank you," I couldn't ever seem to keep both in my head at once – so "hello" or "thank you" were both options, but never both at once. Which was frustrating. But then I remembered that I'd only been here one day. Now I've been here a few days, and I know a handful of words (hello, thank you, goodbye, yes, no, I, bread, coffee, street...) and probably close to half the alphabet. The Georgian script is unrelated to anything else, so mnemonic devices are definitely my friends in this endeavor!
Yesterday, Lisa and I went to a café nearby with our learning-Georgian materials, and had a little study session:
I learned "bread" ("poo-ree," but with the difficult unaspirated "p" that sounds almost like a "b") because I walked into a little tiny basement-level bakery on Lisa's street, run by an elderly woman who definitively would not speak English, and realized I hadn't yet looked up the word for bread. She cackled with delight at my fumbling attempts to read it off of my printed out sheets of vocabulary, and I felt rather pleased to have been the hilarious highlight of her day. We succeeded with one-word sentences and hand gestures.
In restaurants, too, people are understandably proud of their wine and want you to try it, so much so that they'll bring you a glass on the house – that's happened to me twice already in my few days here, once over a meal in restaurant, and once when I'd simply ordered a hot chocolate in a café.
Speaking of hot chocolate... It's the real stuff here, melted down from actual chocolate. Mmmm.
A glass of wine and a view out over the city:
Traffic here is horrendous; the driving style is the same as I'm familiar with in other developing countries where I've traveled, which is to say, conducted with complete disregard for either safety or reality. Think I'll take the train whenever I can...
On the other side of the coin, though, the city itself is incredibly safe. Police are around all the time, just kind of keeping up a reassuring presence, and Lisa says she walks around alone at any time of the day or night with no worries. Georgia apparently managed within the space of just a few years to turn itself around into one of the world's safest countries.
Cats! Cats everywhere. Cats cats cats. Being adorable and savvy and surprisingly okay-looking, healthwise, given that they're street cats. Here are two visitors at the café where I went today:
