Kate Provides the Pics part II

A good find during my frog hunting in Kazbegi, Georgia.  We spent a weekend in the upper caucuses about 3 hours North of Tbilisi.  We stayed a nice little homestay with two other volunteers and another traveler who happened to be from Washington, DC.   

While surrounded by gorgeous snow-capped mountains, most of the pictures I took were of livestock.  

I did happen to take a few mountain pictures however.  This is  Tsminda Sameba Church built in the 14th century.  It is very modest inside, but that's fine considering the atmosphere.  If you can say anything about the Georgians, they love building their churches in hard to reach places.  This one is 2200 meters above sea level and takes about an hour to hike here from the town below.

Also in Kazbegi, on our third day of hiking.  

Here's another one of the church.  

For some reason there are etchings of two dinosaurs above the window of the church.  Holy dinosaurs, apparently.

Yet another church picture.  This one is from ground level. and you can see Kazbeg mountain in the background.

I took a field trip with the UNDP one day to a new dairy farm that is beginning to process specialty cheeses.  They have their own home-made cheese cave.  Their cheese is unprocessed, unpasteurized, and cave aged for only one month.  For those of you who know a little about cheese, this should make you nervous, but they say they test the bacteria every day.  .  It was very delicious, though.  It had a texture much like fresh mozzarella but with a little more bite to it.

These are two of my twelfth graders, Mukha and Irakli.  Irakli was the best in my class, and  Mukha the class clown.  He loves the color yellow so he would always steal my purse and model it around the classroom.  One day early on he summed up all the differences between American and Georgian cultures by saying, "In America you ask neighbor, 'Give me sugar!.' 'No sugar!' In Georgia neighbor give you many sugar."  

Here I am in Mestia, Svaneti region of Georgia--way up in the upper Caucuses on the West side of the country.  Here they have their own language, own foods, and own traditions.  This is a traditional Svan house, untouched in 800 years.  The house is decorated with intricate carvings of the sun, as ancient Svans were sun worshipers.  I am sitting in the "man's chair." To the right left of that is a long bench for the women of the household and then across from the man is a smaller, lower bench for the children.  Between these benches and this chair is the fire.  All around the room, as you can see behind me are these window-looking things carved into the wood.  Traditionally, the livestock lived in the same one-room house as the family.  The cows would stick their heads through and eat from the trough directly in front of them and directly behind me in this picture.  The family would sleep on a platform above the animals, using the cows' body heat for warmth.  

The view of a Svan house from the outside.

The town of Ushguli in very remote Svaneti.  This town is the highest altitude settlement in all of Europe at 2200 meters above sea level (about 7,000 feet for you non-metric-types).  Now this town was living the way we were told Svans lived 800 years ago.  Remote doesn't begin to describe it.  (Sidenote: In Georgian, the word for surname is the same word for clan.  This system is still very alive and well in remote Georgia today.)

Here is the town of Mestia at night.  All the Svan Towers are lit up with spotlights.  Every family had their own tower for when inter-clan warfare broke out in the village and the family needed somewhere to hide.  Also, when avalanches came, or other natural disasters.  Women would be hidden up here to prevent the art of "bride-napping" which is still a tradition up here from time to time, but not a very accepted one.  The traditional  rule is that if she screams when she is being 'napped' the family has a right to go after her and kill whoever is trying to marry her.  If she doesn't scream the family doesn't have that right.  However, if she does scream, but the family can't catch the man who is stealing her by day break then she is considered not a virgin anymore, and therefore is married off to her kidnapper.  If a feud begins between clans it can go on for 12 generations, but no more than that-it's the cut off.  There was recently a movie made about this, where a man was going to literally take a bullet for his family to end a blood feud, but then died seconds before from a heart attack and the other family went after and killed one of his children.  Another note on the remoteness of this area:  While Georgia has been conquered by Turks, Mongols, Greece, Russia (twice), ect, ect, ect, Svans, with the help of their landscape were able to defend themselves every time, so while Georgia is kind of a cultural melting pot made from a series of conquerers, Svaneti was never touched by any of this, and therefore developed a very different existence.

Dan and I climbed 1 vertical kilometer in about 3 hours (you can be impressed) and found ourselves in one of the most amazing places.  Here is the town of Mestia below us.  

We were not alone up there.  Meet Bessy.  

It's a little tropical.  Not in temperature, but in precipitation, certainly.  This made for some over-sized Mosquitos.  

Here we are on our first day's hike.  It was a doozey, but we managed with careful maneuvering and the gracefulness you have come to expect from the two of us.  

Our final destination Day 1.  Yup.  That's some snow and ice.  

Ok, for real final destination Day 1:  This was about 3 hours beyond that last picture.  We were way up there.  We even got to witness an avalanche--small though.  

This is the inside of one of the Svan Towers where we could actually climb to the top.  People wondered how the towers stayed so perfectly preserved and vertical after 1,000 years so the composition of the mortar was analyzed.  It turns out the mortar is mixed with eggs, so it became more and more solid throughout the years instead of weathered.  It also explains the slightly yellowish tint they have on the outside.

It has to go somewhere.

Here we are at the top of the world.  We hiked up an hour to this spot.  It once was the summer stop for the "king" of Georgia, Tamar.  "King" is in quotations, because she was a queen.  But she is a Georgian hero, so she is called king.  

More frogs to add to my collection.  The tiniest one yet on this trip.