Wet Hot American Supra

“I’m not doing that,” I say to Jack as I peer over the side of the train platform to the tracks at least eight feet below. “Why couldn’t we have gone the normal way?” I’m lamenting our decision to allow the owner of one of our favorite restaurants (Chaplin’s) to drive us to the train station, as he directed us away from the main entrance to a set of stairs accessible only from a dirty covered bridge lined with grimy shops, and leading only to the center train platform. Thus, we stand with an eight-foot drop and three train tracks between us and our train , which is waiting on the next platform.

Jack puts his hand on the small of back and looks over my head to where Mushood is still trying to buy cigarettes from a group of men we met on the stairs. “You just have to embrace it,” he says, referring to the backward, slapdash, Georgianness of the situation, “and cross the tracks illegally.”

With that he steps to the edge of the platform and hops nimbly down on to the tracks. Mushood, now on the platform but still a few yards behind me, calls inaudibly after him before stepping off the platform and into the Tbilisi night air. His landing is less impressive as his limbs and baggage sprawl across the first set of tracks. He yells something else I don’t understand, possibly because he is too far away or possibly because his speech is impaired by the ridiculous amount of wine he and Jack have already consumed this evening. Either way, it sounds as though he is in pain. I wait until he is off the ground and collecting his things before setting off to find a way into the main station, any remote considerations I might have given to crossing the tracks now completely obliterated.

The night train to Poti leaves at 1:30 am and arrives in Senaki, were we will get off to continue our journey via taxi, somewhere between 6:00 and 7:00am. It functions a lot more like a giant Marshutka with a bathroom than an actual train, stopping frequently to let passengers on and off, but lacking any system announcing which stops are which. The seats are wide and recline a little to allow passengers to sleep. I drift in a and out of a kind of half consciousness in which every time I open my eyes the composition of the people sitting around me has changed, but in which I am also constantly aware of the raucous snoring of the man two rows ahead of me.

Suddenly I’m being shaken alert by Jack, who says something to me in rapid Welsh accented Georgian, and then, reading the angry confusion on my face no doubt, repeats in English, “It’s soon.” I look down at my phone: 5:00am.

Jack returns from the back of the train car and invites me to join him in the seats just outside the conductor’s box where he has befriended a group of Georgians. They are journalists, an English teacher, a priest, and a poet. The group is eating triangles of khachapuri and taking shots of Vodka. It’s five in the morning and they have clearly been at it for a while.

When we arrive in Senaki it is dark and raining. The town is completely shut down and only a few taxis are gathered outside the unlit train station. We procure one of these taxis, after some abrasive negotiation on price, and make our way to Natalie’s house in Khabume, where, upon arriving, we all pile into Natalie’s deliciously warm bed.

Natalie’s host family, in a fit of typical Georgian hospitality, has invited almost all of Natalie’s friends in Georgia to their home for a supra (In case you forgot, a supra is an enormous dinner that centers around drinking what can amount to literal barrels-full of home made wine). The family has even offered to put all of us up for the night, since Natalie and I live in the Georgian boondocks.

So lets recap: Eleven twenty-somethings, most of them barely out of college, crammed into a house where they will be strongly encouraged to drink heavily for the entire evening.

Grandma, stop reading now.

When Natalie, Mushood, Jack, and I finally emerge from the bed and make our way into the kitchen, we are greeted warmly by Natalie’s host father Bakuri, as well as his mother and one year old son, Io. We sit down to fresh baked bread, roasted meat, home made jam, tea, and more khachapuri. I’m just starting to feel human again after the sleepless night on the train followed by s sleepless morning listening to Jack ramble drunkenly about how wonderful it is that the women here do all the work, when Bakuri starts passing around shot glasses with tall stems and produces a large glass bottle of cha-cha.

Four shots and two tumblers of wine after the cha-cha comes out some of our friends arrive on the marshutka from Zugdidi. There are eight of us now, Eteri and Nichole having arrived part way through our meal from Kutaisis along with Nic and Elaine from Batumi. We all pile into Bakuri’s five seat sedan for our into the city and I’m relieved that with the addition of Adam, Aly, and Elie, we won’t be able to take the car back.

The snow has topped for a while, but left a thin blanket across the green lawns and deserted buildings of the village (“This place looks like the Russians bombed it yesterday,” Elie observes). The air is a biting, cold and wet, and I’m breathing it as deeply as I can during the two kilometer walk back to Natalie’s, trying to rid myself of the dull ache the cha-cha has left behind.

The house, now busy with people, reminds of the first day of summer camp as everyone drops their backpacks and begins claiming beds. However, there is no lake or horseback riding waiting for us. Instead we are ushered into the family’s small living room filled almost wall to wall with a long elaborately set dinner table.

As is the case with many supras, every inch of the table space is taken. Each place setting has two small plates staked on top of each other, a small tumbler (like a juice glass) for wine, and another glass for Coke, Fanta, or Likani (sparkling mineral water). Sometimes there is also a shot glass, in case the wine isn’t doing the trick.

Natlie’s family has arranged a large bowl of fruit, which is so perfectly ripe it almost seems to litter in the light from the fire. At some supras, there are tiered serving dishes holding cakes, candy, nuts and raisin, and other fruits. These displays are missing but we are each given our own plate of ghomi (cornmeal mush) and our own miniature lavashi (an oddly shaped loaf of bread that is cooked by plastering the dough to the inside of a clay pot sitting over a fire). The rest of the table is set with various salads (all heavily comprised of mayonnaise), cheese, more bread, and sastiva (meat cooked in creamy hazelnut sauce).

A few minutes after we begin eating, Natalie’s host grandmother and Bakuri’s wife, Maia, begin bringing out plates of msvare, whish is pork that has been cooked on a skewer over an open flame. It is some of the most delicious meat I have ever tasted.

A number of dishes are added to the spread in this manner, hand delivered by the ladies of the household, who rarely get the chance to actually partake in the supras they host. The dishes pile on top of one another until the entire table becomes a delicious game of Jenga. Can I get a slice of khachapuri without disturbing the sastiva and cucumber salad? Lets find out.

Bakuri is istting at the head of the table. He is the tamada, the leader of all the toasting for the evening, traditionally an important role at any supra. Next to him is Aly, then me, and then Elie, who, later in the evening when all the food and wine starts to bite back at my stomach, feeds me slices of mandarin from the fruit bowl, which helps. Who knew?

Bakuri wastes no time beginning his toasts, but is disappointed that none of us will understand what he is saying, since collectively we speak very little Georgia, and even less megruli. He asks one final time if anyone speaks Russian, holding his juice glass of wine extended in front of his chest, and we all shake our heads, just as we have every time this question has been posed to us in various locations and situations throughout the country. However, Nic has brought a new addition to the group, and, as it happens, his lovely Italian friend Elaine does speak Russian, as well as French and English. She quickly becomes the designated supra translator, relating to us each toast: all of them beautiful in their simplicity and sentiment. We toast to family, to friends, to Georgia, America, and wherever else we come from, to the dead, to the living who are not with us, to god, to our mothers, and to the moment in which we are all gathered around one table sharing wine and food and each other’s company.

Each time we make a toast, we all raise our glasses of homemade wine (it tastes a lot like rotten juice) and down the entire tumbler. This is especially important to do if you agree with the toast being made, and who could disagree with such heartfelt speeches?

Glass after glass of wine adds up quickly, and we even do a few toasts out of the khantsi, a hollowed out horn that is filled with wine and used in traditional Georgian toasting. It is not long before we are also making toasts, though I have to admit none of my friends’ toast makes it through the haze of wine settles over my senses. In fact, I loose a good chunk of the night to wine and cha-cha, and so relinquish more of my dignity than I would have liked to this traditional Georgian feast. However, even compromised by wine, cha-cha, and a general lack of sleep, I remain, apparently, eloquent to the end, telling my friends who are trying to put me to bed, “I’m fine. I just need to collect myself.” At which point, I cross my hands politely on the edge of the table and lay my forehead down to rest on top of them.

Everyone finds their way into bed around 9:30pm (remember we’ve been drinking heavily since about 4:00pm) after a great deal of shuffling from one bed to another, each of us measuring the warmth of one room or bed compared to the others. The peace, however, is broken again when we all wake up around 2:00am. One of the group, who had passed out naked long before the rest of us, awakens a little shocked at his compromised state, and proceeds to walk around the room, still naked and no doubt freezing, collecting his clothing.

As we lay in bed reviewing the events of the evening, Jack says, “Thank god for the little Russian speaking Italian girl.”

In the morning a majority of the group wakes early and is eager to get home and no longer be a burden to our hosts. We collect our things. Most of my clothing has found it’s way out of my bag and is strewn across the room. Nic and Eteri, responsible adults that they are, make their first order of business cleaning the bathroom attached to Natalie’s room, which has taken the brunt of the destructive nature of eleven drunken “adults.”

We gather by the fire in the living room turned dinning room ready to go, but we are delayed when the family informs us there is more food. We are given huge bowls of steaming hot soup, fresh bread, fried potatoes and meat, juice, and more wine. My friend Nichole laughs at the distress on my face as my glass is filled almost to the brim.

Bakuri arranges rides for everyone into town and we have perhaps the best luck yet finding marshutkas, since no one has to wait more than twenty minutes to be on their way. As we drive down the one road east out of Chkorostku, I point out my village center, the school, the abandoned tea factory, and the gas station my host family owns before we reach my house. I greet my host father, use the last of my strength to force open the door, plug in my electric heater and crawl back into bed, where I remain for most of the day. 

Tbilisi Again

The apartment in Tbilisi has three rooms (if you don’t count the bathrooms, which are really just a pair of closets; one with a toilet, one with a sink and mirror). The kitchen is a slim extension of the front hall and the first thing you see when you enter the apartment. The living room sits to the left, through a set of double glass doors. It is about 20’x 15’ and houses two beds, a small couch, a wall of mismatched wardrobes and cabinets, and the family’s new gas heater. The one bedroom sits off the far end of the living room and is about half the it’s size. It is filled almost completely by a double bed and a bunk bed standing next to each other against the narrow wall.

Six people live here: my host mother’s sister Lali, her daughters Tica, Mari, and Anu, her son Oto, and my older host sister Salome. Lali is a doctor and the four girls study at the universities in the city. With the addition of Irma, my host mother, and myself, there are nine of us: two lovely women, six girls aged between seventeen and twenty-two and one very rambunctious eleven you old boy.

In the mornings the girls and I huddle around the heater in various states of undress, passing around a small plastic bound hand held mirror, brushing or braiding each other’s hair, mending holes in stockings, or wrapping hair-ties in ribbon. They admire my shaved legs, pushing up the hem of my leggings and running their fingers up and down the exposed skin. I have tried repeatedly to explain that all they need to do is buy new razors, but they insist that it is hopeless, telling me they have “Georgian hair.”

The girls come and go, leaving for class or clinical duty. Mari is studying to be a doctor, Tica a dentist. There’s only one key to the apartment so someone always has to be at home, or everyone is locked out.

Much like my own family, when all the girls get together, it’s time to go shopping. We wind our way through narrow isles in the bizarre, peering into stalls barely large enough to hold their proprietor let alone a customer. Clothing, bags, and shoes hang from wires suspended across the isles and it is often difficult to determine who is selling what. Also, it’s cold, below freezing, and the slow shuffle of the crowd from stall to stall is not enough to keep my toes from going numb, making the uneven ground even more of an adventure to navigate.

I’m paraded through a seemingly unending string of secondhand shops, clothing stalls, and warehouses literally hung wall to wall with shoes. When I’m interested in a sweater, the seller calls another woman over and they hold a blanket over the corner of her stall so I can try it on. In the end, I do come away with several sweaters, and a warm pair of socks.

I will not comment on whether or not my purchases were influenced by the temperature of my shopping excursion. However, when I asked my host sister what sites I might see in the city (churches, museums, etc.) she dismisses me, pinching her eyebrows together, shaking her head, and saying, “No, it’s too cold.” She was nursing a hot cup of tea, recovering from the six hours we had just spent at the outdoor market finding her a new pair of boots.

I return to the house late Wednesday night after having drinks with a friend. I’m blushing from the cold and smiling at the accomplishment of making my way home alone via the Tbilisi Metro. The trip from downtown to the apartment requires two train changes through stations with high arching ceilings lined in marble. As I begin to remove my jacket and scarf, I’m ushered to a seat by the heater where Tica and Oto are playing a game. They are going back and forth calling each other animal names in English, trying to match the insult of the other person.

“You are a cow,” says Oto.

“And you are a snake.”

“You are…a giraffe!”

When Tica pauses to think of another animal, Oto climbs on top of his chair and says triumphantly, one hand raised into the air, “I am a lion!”

Karate and Cha-cha

On Thursday, I’m determined to get out of the house with my host sisters. I have been in the city four days and have seen little besides the apartment and the bazaar. When I tell them I want to go out with them their first question to me is, “Where?”

“I don’t know, you guys are the ones that live here.”

Mari, who openly labels herself the “wild sister,” seems anxious as she sits down to tea across the kitchen table from me. “I want to come out with you,” she says, twisting her hands in her lap like a child that needs the toilet, “ but I have to go  with Oto to class. “

“What class?’” I say.

She bites her lip and looks to Salome, “Karate rogor ari?”  (Karate, how is it?)

“Karate?” I say, recognizing the word despite her warped pronunciation, “Can I come?”

The class is held in a narrow room in the basement of a school on the other side of town. There is a stage at one end and wooden bars like those you might see in a dance studio run along the other three walls. There are about twenty-five seven to nine year olds lined up on the floor balancing on their knuckle sand their toes. I notice a few older students in the back, and even one other girl.

“This is not our class,” Mari says, leading me off to one side.

However, the young man in white uniform leading this class soon asks us to join and  gives us a great deal of personalized instruction, walking all the way the back of the class to explain each combination multiple times.

We have been there about twenty –five minutes when the actual sensei arrives. He is carrying a CD player under one arm and Mari says to me, “The music is funny, but you must not laugh.”

The player begins blaring a strange, synthetic upbeat music similar to something you might hear in the background of an arcade game set in space. We begin a rhythmic workout consisting mostly of squats, lunges, and kicks and occasionally the sensei will whip his hand around in a complex patter that none of us can replicate.

When we begin the floor exercises, Mari, the other girl student, and I have to face the back wall.

“Because it is embarrassing,” Mari says. And being the only three people staring at a wall isn’t?

After we finish the aerobics, we take a break for the classes to change. One of the younger boys in our class is crying because he is hungry. The sensei pulls him aside and says that he will buy him khinkali, because no one can train when they are weak. He sends a man away with money.

As we wait for the res of the class to arrive, the sensei lectures the students on all important matters, including but not limited to, why computers are the devil, why it is important to stay in school, and why abortion is killing the country.

When the food runner returns, he has enough bread and cheese to feed sixty people. The sensei sends us all away to wash, after which we pray.

“I’m Jesus’ brother and you are Jesus’ sister,” he tells me.

He breaks off enormous chunks of the saltiest cheese I have ever had (and that’s really saying something in this country). The children eat this with crispy bread and small plastic cups of Creme Soda that has had all the carbonation shook out of it.

“Because, “ the sensei explains in Georgian, “The gas is bad for you kidneys.”

When the food is gone, the sensei announces that he will do a dance in honor of the guest (that’s me). The children clap their hands and jump excitedly into the air. The sensei mounts the stage and the electronic music begins again. The dance is forceful and energetic. It is composed largely of complicated arm movements punctuated by dramatic poses, held for just a moment before the dance continues.

One of the older students, perhaps fourteen, is standing next to me, “It is said, “ he says, gripping his own arm nervously and looking at the floor, “That Georgians keep their traditional fighting in their dancing.”

As I watch the sensei’s dance march forward, it is not difficult to sense the imaginary foe he lunges towards and darts away from.

When we arrive back at the apartment, Mari busies herself getting all of the girls excited about going out that night. Tica is surprised but excited, Anu just eyes Mari sarcastically, and Salome looks downright terrified. I get the impression that these girls don’t get out much. I suspect that the very practical Lali does not approve of the girls going out without supervision.

Tica and Mari are discussing the best place for us to go when my host mother enters the room and announces something in Georgian. There is an immediate uproar. The girls explode after my host mother, following her through the living room and into the kitchen, yelling and whining, talking over each other and tugging on my host mother’s shirtsleeves. After while, they resort to pouting with their arms crossed, slouched on the stools surrounding the kitchen table.

“Pele says we can’t go out tonight,” Tica finally informs me. I’m a little disappointed but trust in the infinite motherly wisdom of my host mother and merely shrug my shoulders and stick out my bottom lip.

At this point we are all gathered around the small kitchen table where my host mother has laid out a small feast of ghomi, lobio (beans), beef stew, and an assortment of pickled peppers. We are just beginning to fill our plates when my host mother places a large bottle on the table. It has a gold “orange soda” label but contains a viscous clear liquid. Cha-cha.

Mari retrieves shot glasses from the dish cabinet and we begin to eat, interspersing face-pinching toasts throughout the meal. I rarely chase a shot, unless it’s with a high-five – a trick my host sisters find strange and exciting – but the home made liquor is so strong I am reaching for the bread and beans with the sting of a good high five still clinging to the palm of my hand. My host mother teases me for shooting the cha-cha so quickly and makes me watch as she slowly pours the fiery drink down her throat. 

After four glasses, my host mother decides we have all had enough. Tica and Mari disagree. While Mari and I distract myhost mother by asking for more food, Tica sneaks the bottle and glasses under the table and pours another round. We orchestrate the trick in English so that my host mother thinks we are simply carrying on a normal conversation until Mari counts to three and we simultaneously down the glasses we had been concealing under the table.

By then end of the meal we are a mess. The girls are teasing each other in Georgian, dancing to American pop music they play from the computer, and tackling each other onto the various beds and sofas. Every few minutes the group settles down for a moment before one of us, usually me, stirs things up again with a jab to someone’s ribs or a particularly ridiculous dance move. We make a trip to the market on the corner for chocolate and beer (the staples of many of my evenings in Georgia) and Mari brings my camera. I cannot imagine what the people in that market must have thought of the giggling American and the two Georgians taking pictures of every step she took through the shop.

The night finally ended when I left the group to take a phone call. We were tangled up on the floor laughing and tickling each other after Irma stole Tica’s hair band. Mari and I joined the fray just to make things interesting. When I returned from the kitchen, where I had been talking to my friend for less than fifteen minutes, my host mother was peeling the sleeping girls off of each other and leading them to bed. She smiled at me as I helped her lift Oto (the one boy) onto the nearby couch and spread several heavy blankets over him.

“Kai gogo,” (Good girl) she said, touching my arm and kissing me on the forehead. 

Day in the Life

On Fridays I teach three classes.

The day begins with the sixth grade, all twelve of them sitting around three of the large desks in the history classroom. My host teacher Nino teaches the first, second, fifth, sixth, eighth, and nineth grade classes, but is still thought of as a kind of adjunct teacher since the other English teacher, Irina, has been at the school so much longer. As a result, Nino does not have her own classroom, and we are often scrambling to find an empty room before the bell.

The sixth-graders are working out of the third level of English World, the textbook set and curriculum that is mandatory for English classes in grades one through six. Some of the material is definitely over these students’ heads, but this class is a sharp bunch (for the most part) and we are making some slow progress.

Today we are reading “Jack and the Beanstalk.” The students are eager to volunteer, and they work themselves into a frenzy, trying to read through the simplified fairly tale so quickly I can barely pick out the English words through all of the “Um”s and “Uh”s.

After reading practice we move onto exercises using new words they have learned from the story. The two most vocal students are a pair of pretty girls, Mari and Teo, who argue about every answer in the activities.

“Mas!” Mari calls, hoping to prove Teo wrong. Her face is distorted with anguish and the plaintive timber of her voice tugs sharply on my patience as she waves her hand back forth at the level of her ear.

It is amazing how worked up the students can get about the smallest things. I’m sure my parents would think otherwise, but I don’t think I whined have as much or half as dramatically over a toy I coveted for weeks as these students do when the pieces of chalk at the board aren’t long enough, or another students gives the correct answer before they can.

The second class of the day, the fifth grade, is always a little painful. Somehow, though these students, or at least a majority of them, have had exactly the same teachers as every other class, their level of understanding falls far below the norm, and this deficit is exasperated by the school’s director requiring Nino to teach this class out of the second level textbook, instead of the first. So, we are left to teaching grammar to students who don’t even know the letter sounds.

Unfortunately, it seems to be general knowledge in the Georgian schools that if a student or group of students are not doing well, it is simply because they are lazy. Which is why, though I have tried to design and integrate outside activities giving the students a basic understanding of phonics, I’m usually told not to waste my time. If they want to learn English, they just will.

Class number three is the third grade, one of my largest classes with thirteen students (not that this many ever show up all together). It is also one of the two classes I teach with Irina, who is considered by most of the school to be the primary English teacher. My classes with Nino, while not always particularly organized or especially productive, are at least usually quiet, especially in comparison to the circus of screaming, nagging children that is third grade English.

Students are running to the board or between the desks, stealing each other’s pencils, pens, erasers, hitting one another, or vying for my attention. They wave notebooks and drawings in my face as they call my name over and over. Meanwhile, Irina is yelling instructions in Georgian to the two students in the front row who can hear her.

During one class she asked me, “Hannah, why don’t you help them with their work?”

“I have no idea what you are saying to them,” was the only reply I could give.

She laughed and placed a hand on my shoulder before slamming the other hand down on a student’s desk next to us, starting the two boys sitting there to attention.

After the third class period there is an extended break. I head to “the cave,” a small room furnished with abandoned desks and rickety benches where a sweet old woman sells cakes and sausages from behind a cramped counter. Nino and I drink coffee – unsweetened, god love that woman-from tiny china cups and munch on wide graham cracker like cookies or small hollow ones filled with jam. Every now and then a student will buy me a cupcake or large marshmallow like sweet. They hand it to me with their arm fully extended and only make eye contact long enough for me to thank them before they hurry back to the safety of their giggling friends.

Any other day I would have to quickly abandon my coffee to return to lessons before walking home. However, since today is Friday, I linger over an extra cake, stop in to see some teachers in the office, and practice my Georgian letters. This last activity always causes something of a stir. Nino is teaching me Georgian from the same book that the first graders use, and everyone enjoys looking over my shoulder as I read.

A little after noon I meet my host sister in front of the school. We are catching the twelve-thirty marshutka to Chkhorostku, she to attend a Georgian lesson and I to catch the two o’clock marshutka to Zugdidi. As I walk the path through the schoolyard from the front entrance to the gate, students wave to me enthusiastically calling “Goodbye, miss Hannah!” 

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.