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| GEORGIA: Batumi + Gonio |
Thursday, October 23, 2014
Wednesday, October 15, 2014
Pictures: David Gareja and Sighnaghi
A monastery on the foggy, breathtaking expanse that makes up the Georgia-Azerbaijan border, an unexpected expat café in the middle of the steppe, a several-day jaunt into wine-making country, an outing with colleagues and many feasts. Days in David Gareja and Sighnaghi:
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| GEORGIA: David Gareja + Sighnaghi |
Monday, October 13, 2014
Pictures: Tbilisi
Here's an album of pictures from my first week in Tbilisi! Good friends, cute cats, steep hills, gorgeous views, good food, all that sort of thing.
(Pictures from David Gareja monastery and the town of Sighnaghi will eventually follow...)
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| GEORGIA: Tbilisi |
(Pictures from David Gareja monastery and the town of Sighnaghi will eventually follow...)
Life in Translation
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.
("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.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Georgian Modern Dance!
Lisa's neighbors, who I now firmly believe to be the fount of all things wise and wonderful (they also managed to charge Lisa's cell phone, when neither of her own chargers worked!), told us about a Georgian dance performance. Lisa really wanted to go, so I picked up tickets while she was at work. (And because this is Georgia, we ended up with third-row seats for a stunningly reasonable price.)
The performance was AMAZING. Modern dance, but with unmistakeable traditional Georgian elements worked in (like those big, dramatic jumping moves the men do). Endless gorgeous costume changes, music that fused traditional instruments with modern sounds. Oh, and a digeridoo. The whole effect was fantastic. I can't do it justice in words (and of course I didn't take pictures during the show), so instead here's a picture of Lisa and me inside the beautiful Rustaveli Theatre:
I'm out in rural eastern Georgia with very, very limited internet access (I finally found this one café with wifi and fell upon it eagerly, to catch up on a few things), so I have lots more pictures to share, but they'll have to wait until I'm back in Tbilisi.
The performance was AMAZING. Modern dance, but with unmistakeable traditional Georgian elements worked in (like those big, dramatic jumping moves the men do). Endless gorgeous costume changes, music that fused traditional instruments with modern sounds. Oh, and a digeridoo. The whole effect was fantastic. I can't do it justice in words (and of course I didn't take pictures during the show), so instead here's a picture of Lisa and me inside the beautiful Rustaveli Theatre:
I'm out in rural eastern Georgia with very, very limited internet access (I finally found this one café with wifi and fell upon it eagerly, to catch up on a few things), so I have lots more pictures to share, but they'll have to wait until I'm back in Tbilisi.
Friday, October 3, 2014
Juice from Ukraine and Other Observations
Today at breakfast, I discovered that Lisa's carton of orange juice was from Ukraine. (The Cyrillic letters including an "i" with a dot on it gave it away, because Russian doesn't have an "i" with a dot, but Ukrainian does.)
It's fascinating to me to be in this place on the border between cultures and geographies, in between Europe and Asia. If I were in Thailand, say, I would simply expect everything to be different. Different fruits, different foods, and entirely different sources for where those things come from. But here, even though we're at the far end of Europe, lots of products in the supermarket are from Germany. Or presumably from Russia to the north of here or Turkey to the south. And then this Ukrainian juice! Easily transported here across the Black Sea, Lisa pointed out, so Ukraine actually makes good sense as a source of random grocery items.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As is so often the case, this is a trip with multiple purposes; this is both "yay, interesting new country to explore!" and "boy, better use this month to get a serious start on researching and applying to grad schools, because otherwise it's going to be too late to meet the deadlines."
As is also, unfortunately, so often the case, I've been being really hard on myself. You know: I'm not going out and fully enjoying this great opportunity of being in Georgia, but I'm also not being effective at getting things done, what am I even doing with my time, etc. etc. (Was feeling this especially in the first few days. Am not very good at remembering that it's normal not to have gotten much done yet in a just a few days in a new place.)
After spending one day making some good progress on grad school research and the next day finally getting back to work on my maybe-it-will-someday-be-a-novel, I'm feeling considerably calmer. The trick is to hold onto that calm enough to keep staying focused and keep getting things done...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Speaking of German things, today is the Day of German Unity (reunification of East and West Germany, 24 years ago) and Lisa and I are invited to a reception at the German embassy, with the ambassador. The perks of being part of a small expat community in a small land. (I also recently met the Icelandic ambassador in Berlin, speaking of small countries!)
It's fascinating to me to be in this place on the border between cultures and geographies, in between Europe and Asia. If I were in Thailand, say, I would simply expect everything to be different. Different fruits, different foods, and entirely different sources for where those things come from. But here, even though we're at the far end of Europe, lots of products in the supermarket are from Germany. Or presumably from Russia to the north of here or Turkey to the south. And then this Ukrainian juice! Easily transported here across the Black Sea, Lisa pointed out, so Ukraine actually makes good sense as a source of random grocery items.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
As is so often the case, this is a trip with multiple purposes; this is both "yay, interesting new country to explore!" and "boy, better use this month to get a serious start on researching and applying to grad schools, because otherwise it's going to be too late to meet the deadlines."
As is also, unfortunately, so often the case, I've been being really hard on myself. You know: I'm not going out and fully enjoying this great opportunity of being in Georgia, but I'm also not being effective at getting things done, what am I even doing with my time, etc. etc. (Was feeling this especially in the first few days. Am not very good at remembering that it's normal not to have gotten much done yet in a just a few days in a new place.)
After spending one day making some good progress on grad school research and the next day finally getting back to work on my maybe-it-will-someday-be-a-novel, I'm feeling considerably calmer. The trick is to hold onto that calm enough to keep staying focused and keep getting things done...
~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Speaking of German things, today is the Day of German Unity (reunification of East and West Germany, 24 years ago) and Lisa and I are invited to a reception at the German embassy, with the ambassador. The perks of being part of a small expat community in a small land. (I also recently met the Icelandic ambassador in Berlin, speaking of small countries!)
Thursday, October 2, 2014
Continuing Stray Observations
Accidentally bought what looked like it was going to be cherry-flavored yogurt, but instead was cherry-flavored cottage cheese. Very interesting. (Grocery shopping in another alphabet is always an adventure! The first time I tried to buy milk here, I ended up giving up and walking away without getting anything, because there were about 40 options and none of them made sense to me.)
I went and bought bread from the bakery woman again (a little basement corner redolent with the scent of wood smoke, from a little round wood-burning stove) and again she cackled with delight at my attempts to ask for bread in Georgian. Then I think she tried to tell me I was beautiful (Lisa said people here give compliments all the time, and her students are always telling her how very, very beautiful and smart and wonderful she is), but I'm only guessing, because I don't know the word. Then I said "madloba" (thank you) and she was super impressed. Well, come on, that much I can manage...
People smoke indoors here, unabashedly.
Just getting to the other side of the street can be quite the production, involving first finding then traversing a series of pedestrian underpasses, because traffic is mad and there aren't any traffic lights, so crossing the street itself is not really an option. These underpasses become basically small, underground shopping malls, lined with miniature stores selling clothes or food or electronics.
Oh, goodness, and these uneven streets of scattered stone, and the half-broken sidewalks, with women walking around on them in their super fancy clothes and little high heels. I don't know how they do it, and manage to stay both upright and not covered in dust.
There's a Georgian appetizer that involves wrapping one kind of cheese (cottage-cheese-ish, with herbs) in another kind of cheese (very thin, salty sheets of a mozzarella-like cheese). Cheese in cheese. Hee! Good fun.
The pigeons are unusually small and pretty. Maybe they're doves?
I went and bought bread from the bakery woman again (a little basement corner redolent with the scent of wood smoke, from a little round wood-burning stove) and again she cackled with delight at my attempts to ask for bread in Georgian. Then I think she tried to tell me I was beautiful (Lisa said people here give compliments all the time, and her students are always telling her how very, very beautiful and smart and wonderful she is), but I'm only guessing, because I don't know the word. Then I said "madloba" (thank you) and she was super impressed. Well, come on, that much I can manage...
People smoke indoors here, unabashedly.
Just getting to the other side of the street can be quite the production, involving first finding then traversing a series of pedestrian underpasses, because traffic is mad and there aren't any traffic lights, so crossing the street itself is not really an option. These underpasses become basically small, underground shopping malls, lined with miniature stores selling clothes or food or electronics.
Oh, goodness, and these uneven streets of scattered stone, and the half-broken sidewalks, with women walking around on them in their super fancy clothes and little high heels. I don't know how they do it, and manage to stay both upright and not covered in dust.
There's a Georgian appetizer that involves wrapping one kind of cheese (cottage-cheese-ish, with herbs) in another kind of cheese (very thin, salty sheets of a mozzarella-like cheese). Cheese in cheese. Hee! Good fun.
The pigeons are unusually small and pretty. Maybe they're doves?
Acquaintances
In this city where I've only even met a few people so far, I keep running into acquaintances. Yesterday, it was Lisa's neighbor – she teaches German at the Goethe Institute, and I was there to return some teaching materials Lisa had borrowed from the Goethe Institute library, so not such a surprise. Just now, though, I ran into a friend of Lisa's, another teacher, when we simply passed each other on the street.
I like that. I liked it in Reykjavík, too, that it was a city small enough that I'd walk into a café and see somebody I knew (even though I only knew a few people). I love Berlin and will always love Berlin, but I'm definitely feeling ready to live in a small city or a college town again, in a country where people out and about in public actually talk to each other.
I like that. I liked it in Reykjavík, too, that it was a city small enough that I'd walk into a café and see somebody I knew (even though I only knew a few people). I love Berlin and will always love Berlin, but I'm definitely feeling ready to live in a small city or a college town again, in a country where people out and about in public actually talk to each other.
Tuesday, September 30, 2014
Georgia's Always on My My My My My My My My My Mind
(Yes, Beatles pun/quote. Sorry...)
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:
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:
Wednesday, September 24, 2014
A Good Year, a Year of Peace...
L'shanah tovah, everyone! Happy Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish new year.
Despite having a frantic, panicking-before-a-big-trip sort of day, I was lucky enough to still get a Rosh Hashanah challah from the Jewish bakery down the street, when I dropped in there just before they closed. I'm going to imagine I'm breaking this bread with all of my friends and family out there. May you and all of us have a sweet new year.
Despite having a frantic, panicking-before-a-big-trip sort of day, I was lucky enough to still get a Rosh Hashanah challah from the Jewish bakery down the street, when I dropped in there just before they closed. I'm going to imagine I'm breaking this bread with all of my friends and family out there. May you and all of us have a sweet new year.
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