Away to Mestia

When I step off the marshutka in Mestia’s town square, it seems as though up until that moment I had only been half breathing, never filling my lungs completely, only taking in enough oxegyn to keep the mechanism of my body functioning. As we admire the green mountains surrounding the town and the way they are stained yellow and white, the first cold of fall spreading its colors like finger paints across the landscape, I drink the crisp air deep into my chest and let it nip at the bottom of my lungs. I relish each breath like rich chocolate, turning it over in my mouth and examining every element of the flavor.

At home, in Colorado, the mountain air taste like pine trees and sunshine. In the fall you can smell the sweet golden rot of the aspen turning and the sharp tang of the cold that is to come. I feel that in Mestia too. My breath slices into my lungs with the promise of snow, but here the air is heavier than at home. It taste of the thick forests and dark waterfalls that run through the mountains, of the flaky grey slate rock covering the trails and the stalky cows that litter the hillside. (Almost everything in Georgia smells a little like cow)

To get to our home-stay, we must cross a small pond in the middle of the stone road. It is fed from a stream springing from the road a little further up the hill. Someone, probably the woman running Manoni’s home-stay, has stacked long thin wooden boards across the narrow side of the water.

We leave to climb the mountain in the afternoon and quickly shed the jackets we wore in the village, soaking up the sunshine. At the top, the valley, the village and the road stretch out before us to either side and then are lost behind dramatic snow frosted peaks. The wind is cold and the clouds role away rapidly overhead, making it seem as though the range is really a great turbulent sea of rock and forest and smooth green pasture.

As we make our way back to the home-stay, our thoughts are full of food since our stomachs are pointedly empty. The smell of a nearby fire seems tinted with the sugary aroma of roasting marshmallows.

“I could definitely go for a s’more,” Adam says. We have to explain what this is to our friend Eamonn, and the discussion of graham crackers makes me wish we had just a few of those and some peanut butter.

“Or apples,” I say, “Apples and peanut butter is just as good.”

“Don’t even say that,” Adam says, wincing at some delicious memory of home.

“Actually,” I say, “What I could really go for is some hot chocolate.” Everyone groans.

When we arrive back at the home-stay, our hostess reads the hunger on our faces and offers us soup, though we have not paid to have meals included in our stay.  The soup is thick with onions, cabbage, and carrots, and we can hear the plastic spoon scrape the bottom of the pot as the last bowl is filled. We are also served plates of bread that we smother with rich honey and tart cherry preserves, red syrup running down our fingers and bubbling like sticky rubies on the table.

All thoughts of graham crackers long forgotten, we retire to our rooms with beer and several bars of chocolate. The day hangs heavy on our bodies, and we quickly resign ourselves to the exhaustion, sleeping two to a bed or tucking our clothes into the sheets to ward off the cold that settled in with the evening.

We catch the 5:30am Marshutka back to Zugdidi. It’s the only one that leaves Mestia all day. I step out in front of the bazaar in the rain and pull up my hood. The city tastes of mud with just a hint of marshutka exhaust, which fades as I leave the station. Mostly I taste the rain running down my face as I begin my long walk across town to catch another marshutka home. 

A Note

I have added some pictures to the Lesichine album and will probably add more soon of my trip to Mestia this past weekend. Check it out if you are so inclined.

Natia the Great

Natia lives with her two sons and their grandmother across the street and two houses down the road from me. She must be in her mid-thirties – her older son is almost thirteen – but unlike many of the other mothers, she still boasts smooth, youthful skin the color of heavily creamed coffee. Though her body has become thick and awkward from childbearing and the heavy labor of maintaining a Georgian house, it is clear that she was once very beautiful, with rich brown eyes and thick black hair.

She greets me with her eyebrows raised, her palms held out towards me as she shrugs her shoulders dramatically, “Sad midi khar, Hannah?” (Where are you going, Hannah?)

Most Georgians don’t understand why anyone would ever want to go for a walk (I’m always being offered rides when I’m out running) so I just shrug my shoulders in return and make a walking motion in the air with the first two fingers of my right hand.

“Go,” Natia says, pointing down the road, and then, “Ak,” (here) pointing to her feet. I gather that she wants me to return here, to her house, after my walk. I do return, just as the sun is sinking behind the mountains at the back of Natia’s house, and I make my way to the kitchen because I assume that she has something she wants me to eat.

Natia loves giving me sweets and pastries that she has baked, presenting me with Tupperware when I enter her first grade class for their English lesson. The first time I visited her house with my two host sisters, she gave me an enormous pair of red and grey striped panties and laughed with delight when I taught her the English word for them. She often tells this story at school, relishing her knowledge and emphasizing both syllables carefully and forcefully when she repeats it to her colleagues, “PAHN-TEES.”

Among an endless parade of cookies, chocolates, doughnuts (not the Georgian name), and even iced coffee, I have also received a glittering rhinestone studded hairpin and a large tube of Mascara so old the label has worn completely off.

Tonight I find Natia deftly wrapping soft dough around what I recognize from my host family’s table as curds, or khacho. She shows me how to stretch the delicate disks she is cutting with an old coffee mug and fold them around a small hanful of the curds. She moves swiftly, lining uniform half-moon dumplings onto a towel she has laid out on the kitchen table and chuckles as I slowly construct a few clumsy dumplings. She retrieves my camera from the other room and mimes taking a picture of me, then gestures over her shoulder and says, “Rebecca!” Yes, I’m sure my mother would love to see a pictures of this.

As Natia is fishing the first cooked dumplings out of the large pot she has balanced over a very precarious looking gas burner, she says authoritatively, “Skverebia.” It takes me a couple of tries to get the consonant cluster correct, but after my first bite I’m determined to remember this name. The dumplings are juicy and the curds have melted into a creamy, salty heaven inside.

After some argument about how many of these I can physically fit in my body – Natia and the bebia (Grandmother) are rather cavalier in their estimates – Natia gives me a tour of the rest of her house. She takes pictures of me in the well-furnished rooms of her home. It is one of the nicer houses I have seen in the village, and has a distinct light, woody smell that reminds me of my grandma’s house in Danville, Illinois.

In almost every room there is a version of the same picture. It is a man who looks to be in his early forties smiling at the camera with a pale green backdrop behind him. He has curly salt and pepper hair and a welcoming smile. This is Natia’s husband who died in a car accident two months prior to my arrival in Lesichine. As her older son, Shotiko, sits at the table with his homework, she secretly shows me the scar across the top left side of his head where he was injured in the wreck.

Natia also informs me that her husband had applied to have an English teacher come and stay with them. In fact, had the accident never occurred, I would probably be living in one of the rooms I have just toured.  Natia and I would walk to and from school together and I would help Shotiko with his English homework and teach four-year-old Giorgi the English words for colors and the names of the animals the family keeps. I would be in the kitchen with Natia everyday, and she would laugh as I tried to figure out her quick Georgian instructions.

I am so inadequate in the face of Natia’s world. Even my wishing for her life to be different, to be better, is like the smoke of a candle going out in the face of a hurricane. I will be her friend, her small, insignificant friend because she is kind to me and because I love laughing with her, but there is no one who could be enough for Natia, no one who could give her all that she deserves. 

On the Level

I have grown accustomed to the raucous banging of the metal garage doors located right under my room, though I sometimes resent my host father’s habit of opening them just before my alarm goes off in the morning.

It actually seems characteristic of almost every door in the village to require a great deal more force and volume to open than it is worth expending to enter the rooms beyond. Most are old and wooden; thin, and heavily inlaid with molding so that they look like they were stripped from some lavish beach house where they once hung straight. Now, they lean into one another or against doorframes that have been cut crooked into the cement walls. Most are meant to open like French doors, but one half sticks or has been neglected and remains always closed: a wall masquerading as a door.

Much of the furniture is afflicted with a similar disfigurement. It is rare to find a cabinet door that closes, most of them colliding with each other or part of the cabinet frame, and many of the drawers are too narrow for their tracks. They collapse into the drawers or cabinets below them, creating a knot of cheap plastic and laminated particleboard. Some mornings my jigsaw of a dresser requires more problem solving skills than I have ready five minutes out of bed. But the pieces of a puzzle fit together, whereas it would be difficult to convince me that the doors of my wardrobe could sit flush even if the entire structure did not lean precariously to one side.

Today, there was a greater commotion than the usual door clanging that accompanies my host father returning to the house. I pry open my bedroom door to see my host father’s little black sedan towing what was once the back of a sea foam green pick-up truck through the front gate. The truck bed looks like a display stolen from some high school’s Octoberfest or Fall Ball. It is loaded with ears of corn. Their fraying heads poke out of the openings in overstuffed white cloth sacks sitting on a bed of loose ears that comes right up to the lip of the truck.

I try to imagine the control it must have required for my host father to drive slow enough to maintain this cargo. Certainly the usual Georgian driving attitude of accelerating until you encounter an obstacle would not have been practical with this load.

When the car has been maneuvered into the small garage, my host father and sister lift the truck bed off the tow hitch and wheel it around to the side of the house where Bebia (Grandmother) is waiting on a wooden bench. She immediately begins to shuck the ears of corn, an activity that consumes most of the family well into the evening. They pile the naked yellow ears into plastic barrels and haul the shells away in laundry baskets.

My host father holds a bright golden ear in one hand and a pale butter colored ear in the other. “American, “ he says, brandishing the golden ear, and then, “Kartuli,” (Georgian) as he hands me the paler corn.

No one can articulate to me what any one family could do with this much corn, but as it begins to grow dark the task of unloading the truck is abandoned for the day.  The family moves inside to watch a favorite soap opera. I can hear the droning Georgian voice-over overlapping the sharp staccato of the original Spanish dialogue, the Georgian phrases never completely covering the Spanish ones. The sound bleeds through the floorboards of my room, where the wooden planks can't quite reach the thin cement wall.

On the Table

Georgia is full of exciting, delicious, and sometimes strange food. As much as I want to include descriptions of everything interesting I eat, these details often get left out of my longer blog posts. My solution - a series of posts dedicated purely to all of the curious cuisine I encounter here.

This time of year is a big one for making preserves and compotes here in Samegrelo and, as I have gathered, all over Georgia. Families buy huge quantities of tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, and various summer fruits, in order to bottle or jar them in the form of sauces and spreads. 

When I returned from visiting friends in Zugdidi last night, I entered the kitchen to discover that my host mother had spent the day filling large glass jars with what smelled like the most delicious spaghetti sauce I have ever encountered. Irma informed me that this sauce that smelled as though it was made primarily from tomatoes, garlic, and onions was called ajika. We ate it that night spread across cucumber halves or hearty chunks of bread. My host mother's eye grew wide at the liberal portions I spread for myself. It did taste a little like spaghetti sauce, only there was a good deal of heat from the spicy peppers included in the recipe. 

At the end of our meal my host mothered retrieved her purse from the house and began pulling items out and placing them on the table. I recognized a packet of what is basically hot chocolate mix and a chocolate bar with Russian packaging, but could not guess what the third item she produced was. It look a little like grey mud packed into a block and then wrapped in plastic. Irma was searching for the word she needed to describe it to me and eventually pointed to the Sunflower on a bottle of oil from the kitchen. It turns out this little treat, called khalva, was made of ground sweetened sunflower seeds. It was sugary and rich. I enjoyed it but had trouble finishing the huge portion they cut of the block for me.

Rules of Engagement

Georgia has no dating culture. Girls and boys may spend time together in public if they are apart of a group, but a girl and a boy out alone attract a good deal of unwanted attention, especially from the older generations. There are many public places in Georgia, parks and beaches for example, where you could be fined for a public display of affection. Even married couples rarely touch each other in any kind of intimate way in public.

On the second night I spent with my host family, I was sitting on the couch with Irma, my host sister, and a strapping young neighbor who was resting his hand gently around Irma’s shoulder, while her mother and father conversed just a few feet away at the dinning room table. This casual intimacy had me eyeing the interactions between Irma and this young man with particular interest, but was of little interest to my Georgian family for two primary reasons.

First, as it turns out, this neighbor has been a good friend of my family for years, and Irma later informed me that she thinks of him as a second brother. The fact remains; I cannot imagine myself sitting with a brother quite that way. 

Which brings me to reason number two. Georgians are a touchy people. My friend Elie recently shared with me the his unusual experience at a school meeting. He was sitting in a room with his three host teachers and the principal. He had stacked his hands one on the other on the table in front of him. This would seem a professional pose, except that one of his host teacher’s was gently rubbing her knuckle against his as the meeting progressed, the second had entwined her arm with his at the crook of his elbow, and the third was standing behind him, resting her hands on his shoulders.  Though Elie’s discomfort was liberal, no one else seemed to notice.

A great deal of the appropriateness of any touch here is determined by circumstance and location. As previously mentioned, a boy and girl sitting in a public place should not be touching, or even sitting particularly close, but are granted a great deal more freedom if they apart of a group. In a similar way, I think, school is a place where intimate touching just does not occur. Therefore, touching that occurs in school just isn’t intimate.

Another factor playing into Elie’s situation is that the affection that many of our colleagues feel toward the TLG volunteers, particularly because we are foreigners, is similar to the affection an American might feel for a pet. The other teachers at my school often approach me, pet my hair, and say, smiling, “lamazi, Hannah, lamazi.” (beautiful, Hannah, beautiful)

Finally, the arena that is the most immune to any familiar touching rules is public transport. In the marshutkas and buses it is perfectly acceptable to lean on, sit on, cross legs over, and for all intensive purposes cuddle with the person sitting, standing, leaning, or holding on for dear life next to you. This can get particularly unpleasant if your fellow marshutka passenger happens to be an individual that doesn’t put much stock into the idea of bathing. It happens.

And so it was on Friday, Sept. 23^rd that I set off, via marshutka, from Chkhorotsku to Zugdidi. For part of the ride I was sandwiched into the back row between two slim young Georgian men. When one of them got off, a much larger and older man lumbered back to take his seat. This man did not remotely fit the small space left by the younger man, and suddenly I was trapped, half of my right leg serving as extra seat cushion for Mr. Suit (he earned this nickname during the ride by sporting a scratch brown suit coat at least three sizes to big).

Seeing my discomfort, the young Georgian I began my journey with extracted his arm from between the two of us, reached around behind the seat, and gestured for me to move closer and fill the space his arm had been taking. I hesitated, but only for a moment before I decided that any effort I might have to make later discouraging this Georgian youth was well worth the thirty minutes left of our marshutka ride during which I did not want to be sat on. In the end, other than advocating to our driver to give me all of the change he owed me, this young man showed no interest in me after our cozy ride into town.

Only Hemingway

My friends Natalie, Adam, Eli, Aly and I are sitting at a small round table at Café Press. The café looks out over a wide road running parallel to where the Black Sea meets the rocky shores of Batumi. It is Sunday morning and we have spent the past two nights in this historic resort town. I am sipping an Americano, a cup of coffee someone actually had to brew, and we have just ordered what promises to be an incredibly satisfying brunch of pizza and club sandwiches when Adam, lounging in his chair in the late morning heat, says, “Only Hemingway could have had a better weekend in Batumi.”

Tequila Mr. President?

I leave school slightly early Friday afternoon to catch the two o’clock marshutka from Chkhorotsku to Zugdidi, where I will join Natalie and Adam on another marshutka to Batumi. Crammed into a van designed to hold fifteen people but holding about twenty-five, I marvel at how quickly and easily this excursion came together after I received a phone call from my friend Nic at around 9pm Thursday night.

“I don’t know. I’m pretty broke, but I guess I could call Natalie and see how much it is to get there.” I said, my host sister eyeing me across our abandoned English lesson.

“Yeah! Call Natalie. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nic said, just before hanging up the phone.

When Adam, Natalie, and I arrive in Batumi, Nic informs us that he has found a hotel room for 70 Lari that will sleep five people. We are thrilled by this bargain, and quickly drop off our things before heading to a local bar for 2.50 Lari beer.

Adam has ingratiated himself with some people in the peace corps who are also enjoying cheap beer at the bar. He accompanies them when they leave for a party at a nearby apartment, and they invite us all to join them later at a bar called The Quite Lady.

After beer, we find a restaurant on the beach and enjoy some kabob and French fries. It’s not the most Georgian meal we’ve eaten, but it’s delicious.

Toward the end of the meal Natalie pulls out her phone and says, “Adam says he’s doing shots of tequila with the president.”

If you received this text message in The States, you would simply assume that your friend had consumed an egregious amount of alcohol, and was probably making some kind of scene. However, this wouldn’t be the first TLG volunteer to meet president Saakashvili. Only a few days before, one of the other volunteers in our training group was visited by the president at his school, shook the president’s hand, and made the evening news.

Having finished eating, we decide to try and make our way to The Quiet Lady, where we would supposedly be able to enter unquestioned into the same room as the president of the country. And that is exactly what happened.

Though we became thoroughly lost on the way to the bar (we were taking directions from someone with multiple rounds of tequila under his belt), we arrived at The Quite Lady to find a smattering of army guards and men in jackets with plastic earpieces popping out of their collars. No one tried to stop us, or even took a second look at us as we took a table right next to Mr. President himself. His table was littered with glasses, his shirt slightly un-tucked in the back, and he was leaning slightly sideways to address a rather lovely woman seated next to him.

We are not there long before President Saakashvili collects his entourage and leaves.

The next day we spend some time at the beach before eating a large afternoon meal at a small restaurant near our hotel. Our numbers have increased, our friend Mushood having arrived late the night before, and Kristine and Elie are fresh off the noon marshutka from Zugdidi. I am sitting at the far end of the two tables we placed together to accommodate everyone when my phone rings. It’s Nikole, another TLGer and friend stationed in Kutaisi.

“Well, I guess I’ll see you in Batumi tomorrow,” She says.

I’m not sure how to respond. I want to say a combination of, “don’t bother we’re leaving tomorrow,” “what made you want to come so late?” and “huh?” I manage a hesitant, “What” as I try to shake off the confusion.

Nikole explains that she just received a call from one of the TLG representatives who informed her that all of the TLG volunteers living in west Georgia have been invited by the president to attend the premier of an opera Sunday night. The opera is a famous Georgian story called Keto and Kote, and hotel and transportation will be provided though, in true TLG fashion, no details are available as to where we will be staying or how we will get there. 

“You guys should get a call soon,” Nikole finished.

The next half hour was a round of musical chairs as our phones begin to ring and invitations are accepted. It was during the barrage of phone calls that one of us was told that the invitations to the opera had only come into TLG an hour before. What could have made the president decided to bring us all down on such short notice?

It Half Works

Having accepted invitations to a free night in Georgia’s premier resort city, we pay the bill for our meal and head back to our hotel. Some of the group wants to go shopping for opera clothes. I, however, am tired and much too poor for new clothing. I remain behind with Elie for what he dubs a “pre-party nap.”

A flimsy wall with an arched glass door divides the hotel room. Kristine and Adam have also decided to stay at the hotel and are talking in the other room. When I get up to shut the door in order to muffle the sounds of their conversation, it moves haltingly and lacks a latch to keep from swinging part way open. Elie laughs a little at my struggle with what should be a simple task.

“Everything in this country half works,” he says, as I use a shoe to wedge the door closed.

This is actually an amendment to something that Elie told me during our orientation in Tbilisi. We were walking back from a bakery at lunch when a large truck rumbled past. It looked so old it was surprising that parts weren’t dropping off as it bounced along the uneven road. “Nothing in this country should work, but it does,” Elie had said then.

It’s true that most of the systems that this country takes for granted would sound absolutely ludicrous in the states. For example, lets take a look at the marshutka: mini buses running routes within and between cities. As far as I know, they have no set schedule, nor do you have to have any kind of special license or permit to drive one. All you need are willing passengers. But this system works; most of my travel within Georgia has been via Marshutka.

However, this system seems less appealing when something goes wrong. On his way to Batumi, our friend Mushood ran into some trouble with his marshutka. Road work prevented the driver from taking his usual route, and as a result the driver got lost, adding a couple of hours to Mushood’s trip.

The schools are another good example. Many of the people I have met here, are well educated. My school however, lacks usable toilets, running water, backs to about half of the chairs, and has floorboards that shift under my weight when I cross the room. Though all the TLG volunteers received training with an English textbook that was to be provided at no cost by the government to teachers and volunteers, we have yet to receive our books and have no curriculum for grades 1-3 since this is the first year those grades are participating in English classes. It works…kinda.

In any case, this fact of life of Georgia can be endearing when my host sister laughs at me trying to figure out how to hand wash my laundry, frustrating when a hotel can’t figure what room you’ve been booked to because they don’t know how middle names work, and frightening when the flimsy panel on the floor of your bus that separates you from the engine is forced open by a gust of wind.

However, recognizing this fact has been cathartic and for the past few days I have found a new mantra. When it seems that things have gone wrong, or something is off just a little, I remind myself, “It half works.”

Singing in the Rain

After our nap and the return of some of our comrades to the hotel, we decide it is time to venture again into Batumi nightlife. The cheap-beer-bar we visited the night before is overcrowded due to a musical performance that will start there soon. Someone suggests we buy beer at one of the local shops for cheap and stand at the back of the crowd gathered outside the bar to watch the show. But why take beer to a bar, when you can take beer to the beach?

Not long after this we are sitting in a circle on the beach taking significant swallows of beer that seem to have little to no effect on the 2.5 liter bottles we purchased. I have just laid back against the smooth rocks of the beach when an unforgivingly large raindrop lands precisely on my eye. Soon we are running for cover, the rain stretching out into the sea where it seemed a moment ago the skies were clear.

By the time we reach the hotel again, we are soaked. We begin draping our clothing over the small television and wardrobe doors. When the rest of the group returns we are forced to reconcile the fact that our five-person room will now be sleeping ten. By the end of the night, it seems the room is hung in equal parts with clothing and bodies. We are hanging off the edges of the beds and sprawled across the floor. Bottles of champagne, beer, and chacha (Georgian vodka) pepper the scene. It is this scene that inspires Adam’s comment the next morning, something about that room and the whole weekend is significantly Hemingway-esque.

Night at the Opera

Sunday morning begins with some helpful advice from Elie. “Be sure to check your shoes,” he says.

“Why?” says Natalie.

“You know those holes in the bathroom ceiling?” he says.

“Yes.”

“That’s a scorpion nest.”

It had clearly been fumigated, and a close inspection revealed pincers protruding from some of the holes. I had told myself that they only looked like giant nasty bug parts, but were probably harmless. Well, they were mostly harmless, though Elie does also point out a very small live scorpion on the wall. The room had seemed pretty nice for how cheap it was. The bathroom alone is a huge step up from where I am living, but there were scorpions.

It half works.

After our meal at Café Press, we make our way to the beach. We swim in the Black Sea while our clothes finish drying in the sun. In the afternoon we receive a call from another TLG volunteer looking for her hotel roommate. The fact that they have selected a hotel is news to us and we rush there straight from the beach and dripping wet.

It’s a short walk. We have been put up in one of the nicest hotels in the city, just a few minutes walk from the water. From the hotel we are taken to dinner in buses with no air-conditioning. It was sort of like riding in a large moving greenhouse: hot and sticky. At dinner we wrinkle our noses over glasses of green soda and nibble khachapuri (it's good, but it's also everywhere).

The Batumi Arts Center is a large building made mostly of glass. When we are finally allowed inside (we rushed through dinner in order to wait outside the center for about an hour) it feels as though we have walked into a crystal palace. The glass is strategically lit from the inside and sparkles further in the orange sunset. Our seats are in the third row and when the president enters with his guest of honor, the Prince of Monaco, he catches Adam’s eye and gives him a slight wave.

Keto Da Kote is as surreal an experience as any of the rest of the weekend. The costumes are surprising and whimsical in a Dr. Seuss kind of way. There is a large digital screen on the back of the stage that is used to set the scene several times, but only portrays an awkward kind of digital animation. Finally, though English subtitles are projected for our benefit, the translation is lacking and the transition from one plot point to another alarming. It feels a little like being in someone else’s dream. At the end of the performance the volunteers look around suspiciously as the Georgian crowd applauds in time with one another to the beat of the song playing over the bows.

When we return to the hotel we are disappointed to find that someone has cleverly cleared the mini-bars while we were gone. We are soon off however and arrive at the beach carrying more large bottles of beer as well as a few bottles of wine. One brave group of people has even bought more chacha.

There must be fifteen of us now, most of our orientation group having been brought in for the opera. We sit in a large circle on the beach. We talk and drink, sing and swim naked in the Black Sea. Sometime after 3am we trek back to the hotel and assign ourselves to the beds most convenient for us; some people sleeping in their assigned rooms, others simply sleeping where ever there is space.

In the morning we say goodbye in front of our respective buses as we are shipped back to our various regions of the country. Lesichine and my host family’s house feels a world away, and it takes a good part of the day to get there since our bus requires several stops for maintenance.

As I get out of the car TLG hired to return me to my village, my host mother emerges from the house and yells, “Hannah! Batumshi!”

In Georgian, postposition “shi” can mean both “in” and “to.” I’m still not sure what she meant when she called this to me but it seemed appropriate as a simple but sweeping synopsis of the past few days. The combination of “to” and “in” seeming to imply that the city had collected us, drawing us to it and folding us inside it.