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. 

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.