I can see Russian-occupied territory from my backyard

It's been a while since my last update, largely due to periodic but short bursts of internet access.

Kate and I traveled to Kutaisi, Georgia's second city (as seen in McDonald's related photos below) for a weekend, then made a visit to Tbilisi the next weekend. The Kutaisi trip was largely hampered by a lot of rain, though I plan on returning. Its development made me realize how Zugdidi is really a frontier town, located on between the Black Sea, the northern Caucasus, and occupied Abkhazia. It's the last stop on the road. Not a judgment, just an observation.
Tbilisi was another story. After arriving late Friday night, we found cheap accommodation with a lovely woman who spoke no English, but with whom we were able to speak in broken German and more broken Georgian. (Note: I have relied on German here far more often than I did during the few weeks I've spent in Germany. My year of studying Russian has proven very helpful as well.) We met up with some other friends in Tbilisi, viewing a concert by Raughley and some of his students. (Raughley and I worked together in college, and it's his blog that inspired me to do this program.)
On Sunday, we visited Vake Park, a beautiful park in northern Tbilisi that hosts the Iranian Embassy and (allegedly) masks the mass graves of the victims of Stalin's purges. It also has a large Soviet-era World War II memorial, commemorating the contributions of Georgians toward the USSR's victory in the war. It gives the dates of the USSR's involvement as 1941-1945, omitting what the Soviets were up to during the first twenty months of the war.
The monument provided some beautiful vistas of Tbilisi and the surrounding Caucasus Mountains, which seem to go on forever. There's a very definite line where the city ends and the wilderness of the mountains begins. Hopefully Kate will post pictures of it.

We intended to visit Gori, Stalin's hometown, as well, but that will wait for our next journey.

Teaching is going well. I recently saw a news clip that seemed to show Georgian Education Ministry folks buying new textbooks from the Oxford Press, presumably in an effort to standardize the English curriculum throughout the country. Hopefully, this also means the Ministry will be buying henceforth the books for students, rather than having the students buy their own books.

Aside from the books, sometimes classes are hampered by teaching materials (posters, charts, pictures) that date to Soviet days, when English speakers were rare visitors to Georgia. One such Soviet poster details parts of the body, including "A thooth" (arrow pointing to teeth), "a hear" (arrow pointing to a guy's hair), and "a foot" (arrow pointing to a guy's thigh). Another pairs the letters of the alphabet with labeled picture examples: for H there's a picture of a "Horce", for S there's a picture of some sort of snail/centipede creature labeled "Sink", and for B a picture of a grizzly is accompanied by the label "Beer". N is correctly paired with a picture of a Nilgai, though I'd never heard that word before coming here. (I originally thought it said "Naz'gul".)

"M is for Mordor, N is for Nazgul" is widely considered Tolkien's worst book.

A good number of the problematic books list the British Council as an adviser, including one in which a fictional Georgian teenager visiting Chicago writes that "it's April," and "baseball season is starting", so everyone is walking around wearing "Chicago Bulls jerseys." My theory on this is that some Briton had heard of the Chicago Bulls and heard of baseball, then Googled the two terms and believed they had a match when they found a picture of Michael Jordan during his year in the minor leagues.

The funniest thing I've seen here so far is the Iranian laundry detergent pictured below. The word apparently means "snow", but...

"Not in here, Mister! This is a Mercedes!"

I like how happy the family looks. ("Honey, it's Barf!" "I know, isn't it wonderful?")



Stats:
1.74 - as of today, the Lari/$ exchange rate. It was about 1.8 when I arrived.
1 - times I've seen Wisconsin on the news here so far. I'd like this number to remain low.

Georgian words:
qaraqi - butter
qalaqi - city
tsvimiani - rainy
vlaparakob (germanuli) - I speak (German)
skami - chair

Phrases the authors thought were important to include in my Georgian-English phrase book:
(in order)
"I want to get to know you better."
"Can I kiss you?"
"Do you want to come inside for a while?"
"Can I stay over?"
"I'm serious about you."

A Photo Montage: In No Particular Order (sorry about the lousy format)

This food was apparently too slow.  

Soon after I came home today my host mother's phone rang. After speaking for a few seconds she hung up and said, "the meat is here." We apparently bought an entire cow and had it slaughtered earlier in the day. The meat was still steaming hot when it was delivered in the back of someone's SUV. All the organ meat was stuffed into the stomach, which was put into a huge wicker basket. The rest of the cow that is not in the kitchen sink is hanging by hooks in the back yard.

"What did I get myself into?"

 One of these pictures is us just leaving New York City.  The other is 5am two days later in Tbilisi.  Can you tell which is which?                                   You may be surprised.

Pleasantly nick-named "face-huggers"

These are Khinkali; Georgian traditional fast food.  They are steamed dumplings stuffed with a mix of pork and beef and some tasty seasonings.  They are finger food.  To eat them you cover them in pepper, grab them by the knot on the top, turn it upside down, bite a small hole and suck out the meat juices. Then eat it.  But not the knot!  That is just the handle.

 

Here is my street out the window of my bedroom facing West.  What's that mountainous region in the distance, you may ask?  It's Abkhazia.

Here is the same view the last few days.  Brrrrr.

This is my school--Skolashi number 9.  It's either a fixer-upper or a tear 'er downer.  

Dan demanded to get a MacHamburgi Happy Meal at the one McDonalds in Georgia.  Unfortunately they told him he was neither under twelve nor the president.  

Things that make you go 'mmm'

My second Super Bowl abroad

Four years ago, while studying in Dublin, I watched the Colts-Bears Super Bowl at a sports bar in that city. The place had about 17 Bears jerseys and maybe 2 Colts ones, so the majority of the place was disappointed at the outcome. The game came in crystal clear, though, beamed into the TV on Sky Sports, Rupert Murdoch's British satellite sports channel.


Four years later, a different story.

Sure, I watched it on a laptop in a basement at 3:30 am on a school day.

Sure, the internet feed was choppy for 75% of the game, only relenting during the 2nd quarter. (On a bright note, it was choppy during much of the halftime show as well.)

Sure, I only saw one touchdown (Greg Jennings' second) live.

Sure, I saw the Steelers' last play as their QB taking the snap, then freezing for ten seconds, then a shot of Aaron Rodgers celebrating, indicating (somewhat anticlimactically) that the Packers had won.

Sure, had I been in WI, there would have been bedlam around me.

But:

This man is not Mikheil Saakashvili

This is why I didn't want to teach English in Yemen

My first day of teaching was intense. I arrived at school expecting to watch a Georgian teacher do a few English lessons, but instead found that the usual English teacher was sick with a nasty fever and I was to teach all three of his classes. Oh boy!

He ended up being out all week, so I taught 15+ English classes on my own the first week. How did it go, you ask? Imagine the usual disorder and shenanigans of having a substitute teacher, then throw in the twist that he doesn't know your native language.

That makes it sound much worse than it was. I actually had some really excellent classes this week, with students following along or and being engaged in my lessons. If nothing else, I think needing to teach to a group of students only fleetingly familiar with English will cure my tendency to speak unintelligibly once and for all. Either that, or northwest Georgia will become known for its mumbly English.

Classes are somewhat hurt by the books, which are fraught with mistakes and typos. I have had to correct them many times in four days (and not just because they use British spellings). Some are grammatical errors, some are just weird typos, and some are just factually wrong. Part of the problem is that the students and teacher have to buy their own books, and since the students at this (public) school generally come from families that aren't too well off, the teacher has to choose a book all her students can afford. This results in a reduction in quality, but choosing a better, more expensive book would leave many students without the ability to get class materials. I think the Ministry of Education should invest in those, so everyone has the same, higher quality book, and maybe cut back a little on the expensive task of flying in so many native English speakers (still bring some). But that's just a few days in one school speaking, and I'm far from an expert on what ails American education after 13 years in that system.

I'm also doing one 3rd grade class a week in TsatsPPkhvi, a town about a mile down the road from here. I've only had one class with that teacher so far, but the two teachers I partner with in TsaiPPshi are well-prepared, speak very good English, and are easy to work with. The students are generally interested in working on their English (the 12th graders do have severe senioritis), though their abilities vary greatly.

Also, apparently my host family has a mother. She just returned for a few days, as (from my understanding) she works most of each month at a store in Khopa, Turkey, not too far from Georgia's southern border.

The TV available to my family tends to be Russian or Georgian satellite, which translates to a lot of American movies and TV shows (and telenovelas!) dubbed in either language. Because of this, my impression of Americans from the TV I've seen here boils down to a few things:
-No job is more exciting than working at an electronics store.
-We are high rollers.
-American police are almost entirely corrupt and shoot with reckless abandon. The only exceptions are two men on each force: a hard-as-nails veteran with nothing to lose, and a hotheaded, but idealistic, rookie cop. These two are always partnered.
-America's high health care costs have one cause: unnecessary procedures caused by doctors not listening to the seemingly outrageous, yet unfailingly accurate, diagnoses of one cantankerous limping doctor.

Obscure pre-existing conditions are covered

Georgia's President is Mikheil Saakashvili, commonly referred to as "Misha" (or, in my brother's parlance, "Mickey Socks"). The news tends to be Saakashvili-heavy, though I guess our news is similarly Obama-heavy. (I do feel I see Obama more on news show promos here than in the US.) Recently, the hour-long news featured a good ten minutes of Saakashvili talking with his economic advisers without additional commentary. From the looks of it, his advisers were telling him things, then he would disagree and propose something else, which they would soon agree with. Another night started with "Saakashvili visits a ski resort" followed by "Saakashvili answers questions at a new business" followed by "Saakashvili visits another new business and talks to people as they work the phones" followed by "Saakashvili prepares for tonight's 3-hour national question time". He sat in a chair for three hours and fielded questions from folks across the country. He took 4 or 5 in a row, wrote down notes, and then answered all of them, presumably one after another. Otherwise it would have made for some very garbled sentences.
If my limited understanding of Georgian is correct, I understood 3 answers: one on South Ossetia and Abkhazia, one on the decline of corruption within Georgian society and government (though he acknowledged it's still a problem), and one on Georgia's identity as a multicultural, multi-ethnic state. In Georgian, "qartveli" means an ethnic Georgian person, while "qartuli" is the adjective for "Georgian". He kept saying (at least, I think he did) that though most Georgians are "qartveli", there are many other ethnicities (Russians, Maghreli, Turks, Muslim Georgians) who are "qartuli", and in the end, being a citizen of Georgia is about being "qartuli", not just "qartveli". It's quite a progressive viewpoint, and I hope I understood his point correctly, because it was a great thing to think I heard.
This week, Mr. Saakashvili has been pushed aside on the news by Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, but I think President Mubarak would probably prefer not to have earned that honor.

Possibly Georgia Governor Mikheil Saakashvili

I've also seen Georgia's version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, though the grand prize is 20,000 Georgian Lari (GEL), or about $11,000. I'm sure that's a lot more than it would have been 10 years ago. The top prize in the lottery this week was 410,000 GEL (about $228,000). The advertising/revenue base for Georgia, though, is only about 4.6 million, so that also has to be taken into account. As rich as Liechtenstein is, I doubt they have too big of a lottery either. (If they have one at all. This requires more research.)

The phone they gave me here appears at first to be a no frills Nokia, but upon closer inspection, it's a vital survival tool. It has a radio, a converter for everything (metric, Celsius to Fahrenheit, currency), a flashlight (!), and is as of yet indestructible. Oh those Finns.

Stats:
1 - Canadians who are going to help me watch the Super Bowl by letting me stay in their apartment and commandeer their internet at 3:30 in the morning this coming Monday.
1 - So far, the number of US shows I've seen broadcast in English with Georgian/Russian subtitles, rather than being dubbed. I see why most shows are dubbed in Georgian or Russian, as I don't think the subtitles really capture how truly desperate Wisteria Lane's housewives are.

Georgian language:
ori - two
ati - ten
otsi - twenty
samotsdateqvsmeti - seventy-six (literally translated, it's "three times twenty plus sixteen". All numbers kind of follow this pattern, making learning your numbers very easy, but requiring a bit of basic math when you want to say 95.)
orshabati - Monday ("Shabati" is, as you may have guessed, Saturday, and "orshabati" means "two days from Saturday". Math is also required for Tuesday-Thursday.)
dghes - today


Phrases the authors thought were important to include in my Georgian-English phrase book:
"I'm four months pregnant."
"You should get on the bus by the back or middle door, get a ticket by inserting change into a special slot machine and get off via the front door at your bus stop."
"Are there any witnesses?"
"You have to make a statement at the station."