Excursion

In Georgia they call field-trips “excursions,” pronouncing it only slightly differently than we do in English. Usually these outings center on a visit to a museum. However, unlike field-trips I went on as a student, it usually requires several hours drive to reach the museum. The class, along with a few teachers, pile into a marshutka early in the morning and return, exhausted, long after the school day has ended.

My first excursion is with the 11^th and 12^th grade classes to visit a museum in Mestia, a four hour drive from our village. I still don’t know exactly what this museum commemorates since it was closed when we arrived.

We meet at the school an hour before regular classes start and our marshutka is filled well past capacity, wooden stools having been added to the center isles to provide a seat for every student. The scenery, the yellow and orange foliage stretching across the mountains, is truly breath taking, as is the volume of the conversation within the marshutka. Part of this is due to sickening English Pop music that is blaring from large speakers duck taped into holes in the ceiling of the van, halfway back from the drivers seat.

Upon discovering that the museum we are going to visit is closed, we head into town to buy bread. We spend a total of approximately forty-five minutes within the actual city borders (as if there was any such official zoning here) of Mestia. We stop just a few minutes outside of town and make camp on a hill on the side of the road, selecting what is most assuredly one of the worst picnic spots of all time, the hill sliping away steeply under our blanket toward a small stream. We lose several dishes, a dozen or so tiny plastic cups filled with soda, and a box of cookies to this incline during our stay.

The meal is a feast of twelve khachapuri, eight gubari (a meat pie exclusive to Svaneti cuisine), three roast chickens, five large loaves of bread, twenty hotdog-like sausages, three meatloaf-sized sausages, and all manner of cakes, cookies, and soft drinks, including an incredibly rich banana cake covered in chocolate and transported up the mountain in a hat box. The boys also produce an unopened bottle of vodka, which the finish in the course of the meal.

Just when I think we are on our way home, the marshutka begins to slow. We pull up alongside a farmer leading a horse that is dragging a large wooden palate of potatoes. We stop to buy some of these potatoes, as I understand it, but when I exit the marshutka, I’m lead away from the man with the horse toward a nearby farm with a large apple tree in the yard.

After scaling the crumbling brick wall dividing the farm from the road, I see that the students are climbing into what appears to be a hayloft. They are laughing as they take halting steps across the spongy surface of the piled hay and calling to me to join them. As I approach the ladder that will take me up to the loft, I can see that it doesn’t sit flush against the floor of the upper level and that it is handmade, some of the steps sitting slightly askew. I stop, this is clearly in conflict with my “don’t do anything with a high risk of injury because I’ve seen the hospital and I hope never to see it again” rule.

“It’s only one ladder.” I think.

When I reach the hay loft I am led into a small dark brick room at the end of the loft. There is a hole in the ceiling letting in just enough light to reveal another ladder leading up through the hole. This one is shorter than the first so I reason there is little harm in seeing this through to the end.

The short ladder brings me into another small brick room, lighter than the first, but otherwise the same, complete with yet another ladder, this one leaning significantly to the side with several steps hanging off just one pole or missing entirely. At this point, I’m already going to have to climb down two hand made ladders sitting on uneven stone, one of them in the dark. Might as well feel the sunshine, before the wings start to melt.

I continue to climb through several more identical chambers, one of the boys who lead us to the farm climbing behind me, his head frequently knocking against the back of my legs impatiently. As I come through the hole in the floor of the final chamber, I suddenly realize where I am. It’s the slanting wooden tile roof that gives it away. I’ve been climbing one of the Swanet towers. They were built by families living in the Svaneti region, in order to make war with their neighbors. The tall square brick structures are built with narrow slits near the top to shoot out of, should one come under attack.  Now they serve as walls for barns, haylofts, or just impressive yard decorations.

From the large hole in the roof of this tower I can see far down the valley where farms and villages cluster in the hills. Other towers stand piecemeal throughout the valley, stately guarding decaying farmhouses and recently gutted potatoes fields.

My second excursion is to Skhvitori. We are visiting the home of a famous Georgian poet, Akaki Tsereteli. This drive takes us through a very different kind of mountain range than the road to Mestia. Rather than dramatic rocky peaks, these mountains are green and rolling, and the road runs along the top of the range, looking over a deep green valley below.

Using some creative hand gestures, the 7^th grade teacher, Louisa, tells me that these are the Kavkasioni mountains, it’s the range that runs across the northern portion of the country. She gestures north as if she were shooing a fly and says, “Russia.”

This museum is open. It is a simple recreation of the home of the poet. A guide gives us a s short tour and we are gone. We must have driven at lest two and a half hours for this twenty minute tour. We spend more time stopping on the road than we do at our destination.

On our way back to Lesichine, I am pleased to see that we are making good time and may even arrive before it is dark. The excursion to Mestia kept my host sister and I out until almost midnight. We are making our way through Kutaisi around four-thirty, when we make a sudden stop. The students blunder madly from the van before I can even get my seatbelt off (one of the first I have worn since arriving in Georgia). I follow the other teachers across the street to a park lined with large dark pine trees. Nestled into the clearings of these this ominous foliage are several arthritic carnival rides.

Most of the children are already gathered at the bumper cars, but I am dragged away by a group of girls who want to ride something else. It is one of the spidery looking rides; legs sticking out in a circle with little red cars attached to the ends. When it begins to spin, there is a terrible scream of metal grinding against metal. At one time the entire ride would have lifted off the ground, I can see the arm that raised it. As I watch the seventh girls lift their arms over their heads and wiggle their finger in the breeze created by the movement of the ride, I am relieved this feature no longer functions.

After the children have emptied their pockets at the park, and one more stop to eat, we arrive back in Lesichine. It is a little after nine. As Saba and I walk to the house gate, still waving to the receding call from the marshutka, he says, “My mother not sleep.”

“What?”

“My mother not sleep, when I home.” He is pointing to the kitchen, and the light pouring out the windows of the wooden building behind the house.