The days I spent in Sighnaghi – a very small, very picturesque town perched on a hill in Kakheti, a wine-making region in eastern Georgia – were the first time in my life I truly wished I could speak Russian. I don't think I'd ever been in a place where Russian, not English, was an absolute given as the lingua franca that everyone speaks, fluently. It was pretty awesome! Even if it meant I couldn't talk to people...
("Why not speak Russian?" the guesthouse proprietor lamented at me more than once. I thought her English was perfectly adequate to the task, actually, but it was clear that her Russian is fluent – and if mine had been too, we could have had a conversation.)
The guesthouse and the family's home were one and the same, and both guests and family gathered all together at long tables in the dining room, so you couldn't help but fall into conversation with people. Over the course of my time there, I talked to an enthusiastic young Russian couple, a mother and daughter from Kazakhstan, a mixed group of Polish and Israeli travelers who hadn't known each other before but had simply been collecting new members in minibuses and at bus stops as they traveled along, a group of Israelis I played cards with, another group of Israelis I also played cards with, a Russian journalist from Yakutsk (coldest city in the world!), a couple of Germans who (unfortunately) fulfilled my stereotypes of German negativity, two fun young Polish women, some Slovenes who I was pleased to be able to tell that I'd actually been to the town they're from, another group of Polish women that included a woman who was celebrating her birthday so we all toasted to her, the Georgian relatives of the guesthouse owners... I'm probably forgetting a bunch of people. And of course Amanda, an American acquaintance and one of only two people I knew in coming to Georgia – she was a Russian professor back when I was at Oberlin, and now lives here!
The Russian journalist, Alexey, spoke quite good English, I thought, but whenever he wasn't sure of a word he would whip out his smartphone and type into some translation app he had, then show me the screen, which was kind of an amusing way to have a conversation! At one point (we were talking about my last name, which to my surprise he recognized instantly as Jewish – according to him, it's a common name in Russia!) he was asking me if my ancestors were Russian, and I said no, Eastern European but as far as I know not originally Russian, and he typed something into his app that came out in English as "All of Europe was Russian." Wonder if that's actually what he meant to say or not!
And today, back in Tbilisi now, I was in a little shop trying to find out if they sold envelopes (envelopes here are sold individually and thus very overpriced – the same way I remember bandaids being sold in pharmacies in India!); I did print out several pages of basic Georgian phrases at the start of this trip, but those phrases don't include "envelope," and I wasn't able to explain it in mime, either. So the woman in the shop called an acquaintance of hers who spoke English and handed me the phone so I could tell him what I wanted and he could translate. Now that's service!
Photos coming soon, I promise.
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