Yesterday I went to Tbilisi and caught up with some friends from my training group. We were talking about how it felt like it had been forever, but it had been only 6 days since we had said goodbye and gone our separate ways. It’s hard to explain everything, but I do feel like a proper update is in order.
In my village, my life has been very easy so far. I still have no idea about when I’m teaching the police here, so I will call my program tomorrow to see if they can get the ball rolling. I’m not really worried yet because this is Georgia, where people don’t really plan ahead but things usually work out. Also, Saakashvili was in town on Friday, so there was no chance of classes starting then. Since I have not taught actual classes, I have taught my host family some English (required to teach 3 hours a week), worked on my Georgian (still way too limited), and played on my computer. Oh, and ate. The food is great, and they don’t make me eat as much as I was expecting, but since I now live a fairly sedentary lifestyle, I don’t want to eat nearly as much as they want me to.
After several days of relaxation and struggling to make it out of my room before noon (a hard life, right?), I decided to venture into Tbilisi yesterday. My main goal was to buy a modem for internet, but also I wanted to meet up with some friends and just walk around. A neighbor (well, they have a house in Manglisi and one in Tbilisi) took me to Tbilisi. They would have taken me home, but I wanted to stay a while. After spending 200 laris on a modem and a month of internet, I went to McDonald’s (it was sooo, close and I knew it would have a good bathroom) to enjoy the free wifi while I waited for some of my TLG friends who are stationed in Tbilisi. It was great to reunite with the internet. It was also nice once my friends got there to talk to them and share experiences. Tbilisi has over a million people, but it felt like a small world. While outside of McDonald’s, one of the guys found another woman from our group, so our group become 4 instead of 3. It was great to share experiences and just speak in English, where I didn’t have to think about what I was going to say or how slowly I was going to have to speak. We walked around the city a bit and ran into another volunteer from our group outside of the internet store, while another friend was buying a modem. I don’t know what the chances of running into 2 people you know in a city of a million when you know fewer than 25 are, but it was great to see these friends again and again share our experiences. I should have left before I did, but I was enjoying the familiarity too much. Thus, it was after 7, maybe closer to 8 when I finally got to the train station to look for a marshrutka that would take me home to Manglisi. I asked people and kept getting pointed in various directions. I was about to think I was in trouble when I got a call from my host father.
That was when my day turned really interesting. Turns out, my host parents were at a wedding in Tbilisi, so my host father and a friend picked me up and took me to the wedding reception. I was so relieved, although I felt incredibly guilty when my host mom said she had been trying to call me for quite a while. I had never gotten a call until I was at the train station. Oh well, they seemed okay with it. After getting over the guilt and being offered about 20 different dishes, I started to enjoy myself. The reception was very nice and not that different than ones in America. There was more live music, more dancing, and lots of toasts, but otherwise very similar. Also, the table I sat at was mostly women, until the men called me over to take pictures of their table. Then they had me sit down and spoke to me in (drunken) Russian. I got several toasts to myself and the friendship between America and Georgia. It was quite confusing and amusing to hear them explain how they were all related. The words brother, sister, and fiancée were thrown around far too often for them all to be true, which I think was the combination of alcohol and trying to speak in Russian. Also, I think they would just use the word for sister or brother when speaking of cousins. This does not really do the experience justice, but I was so caught off guard by the whole thing and some of it would require far too much explanation, that this will have to do for now. It was a good night and a great cultural experience.
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