The Day of the Tura

Sometimes, I can have an active imagination. For instance, one night during my first week here, my host brother came inside with a firecracker and waved me over to the back door. He motioned for me to listen, and I heard some howling in the distance. He lit the firecracker and threw it outside, where it presumably scared off the animal.
Afterward, I asked, "Wolf?", to which he replied, "No, tura, tura." Neither of us knew what a 'tura' translated to in English, and for 15 minutes or so, I had visions of a beast known as the "Tura" roaming the giant hill behind our house. It was something no American had ever seen before, sort of a combination of a grizzly bear and werewolf, with glowing red eyes and fangs as long as my fingers.
At that point, my host brother found his old Soviet-era dictionary and found the translation:
"tura - n. jackal"

This overactive imagination made itself known again the last week of Februrary. We had a really windy week, which one night led to my room door and window swinging open loudly at 4 AM. Visions of Paranormal Activity briefly dominated my thoughts before falling back asleep.

My imagination took another flight as we planned our next trip. For the last weekend of the month, we took the night train to Gori, a town about 90 minutes west of Tbilisi. Gori is most famous as the birthplace and childhood home of Josef Stalin. During my initial trip from Tbilisi to Zugdidi (wayyyy back in January), I remember looking south from the road as we passed Gori, and seeing a collection of shadowy buildings wedged between two mountains and covered in a dense fog that seemed anchored to the city.
These two things gave me some apprehension about visiting Gori. I pictured it as a place of great evil. I very much had it pegged as a snowy, urban version of the Dagobah cave.

"What's in Gori?" "Only what you take with you."

In fact, Gori was none of these things (except snowy). We had a nice time walking around the town and climbing up to spot where a fortress had been since ancient times, and where the current stone structure dates from the Middle Ages. It provided a lovely view of the town and the mountains to the north, which comprise the southern border of Tskhinvali Region (South Ossetia).

The big attraction in Gori, however, was the Stalin Museum. It was conveniently located on Stalin Ave. The outside is notable for a green train car and a large stone statue of Stalin, recently relocated by the Georgian government (in the middle of the night) out of the town's main square (Stalin Square). The same statue is replicated inside, and there's another inside Gori's train station. The yard also features Stalin's boyhood home, where he lived for the first four years of his life. It's a small building, and his family rented only one tiny room in it. Now, it's protected by imposing columns and stands alone as the only surviving building from his old neighborhood. Apparently, the others were bulldozed to make room for some sort of museum.

If you lived here, you'd be home by now and one of the most murderous rulers of the 20th Century

 Inside, the museum is chock full of pictures and artifacts our guide was sure to speed us past without getting a chance to enjoy them. There were paintings (Young Stalin in a Field Outside Gori, Stalin at the Seminary, Stalin with Stalin's Mom, Stalin Leading the 1905 Revolution He Actually Played Little to No Role In), poems (Stalin's pastoral poetry), and newspaper articles (Stalin Wins War!) There are lots and lots of photos. Some of the best include 'Stalin as a Young Man' (and quite a handsome one at that), 'Stalin Awkwardly With His Arm Around The Founder of the KGB', 'Stalin Voting for Stalin', 'Stalin With Lenin and a Whole Bunch of Other Bolsheviks Who Aren't Trotsky', and 'Stalin Definitely Not Sending Millions to the Gulag'. There are a number in which Stalin seems to have been enhanced or possibly added later, and one of Stalin with a large number of military officers, a few of whom seem to have different lighting, as if they were originally in a different picture.

Stalin proves he has a Cheka friend

Top left is Trotsky, killed by Stalin. Bottom right is Khrushchev, who denounced Stalin after Joe's death. To his left is Lavrentiy Beria (another Georgian) who purged millions for Stalin until he was purged. And then to the left of Beria...

We have this guy. GLENN BECK WAS RIGHT

There are also a lot of gifts Stalin received, including a mink coat ("He never wore it," added our guide), a giant table clock/lamp/compass/desk with a big tank on it, and a plate from the PR China for its 50th birthday in 1999 ("Oh, he's been dead for 45 years?" said China, "How embarrassing. Our mistake.")

Background: Stalin's house (exterior). Foreground: Statue of unidentified figure.

Notable for its absence was the mention of anything really negative about Stalin. I never heard the word "gulag" once, nor was there any mention of the Ukrainian famine in the 1930s or his purges of just about everyone. The guide did show us the small space the museum devoted to the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression pact signed in 1939, which included a picture of a smiling Stalin shaking hands with the Nazi foreign minister. For some reason, this picture had deteriorated far more than any of the others in the museum. The guide noted that soon after the pact was signed, "Hitler broke the agreement by invading Poland." Although the Museum only showed the first, public part of the pact ("The USSR and Germany are friends and promise not to attack each other..."), both the guide and display left out the second part of the pact ("...and super secret promise to cooperate with invading Eastern Europe.") and the fact that invading Poland was a fulfillment, not a violation, of the agreement.

"Stalin and Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov with unidentified man who is most definitely not Nazi Foreign Minister Von Ribbentrop"

We also got to visit Stalin's personal train car, which he used due to his intense fear of flying. Stalin's toilet was probably the top attraction. On the way out of the museum, I poked my head in the gift shop, but aside from some books ("Stalin Kills His Team of Rivals"), a few statues (Stalin Looking Heroic, Stalin Looking Heroic Again), and commemorative plates, the only thing that really interested me were some baby booties I saw hanging on the wall. I couldn't tell if they had Joe's picture on them or not. In other words, the museum is well worth a visit, but I'd recommend skipping the guide.

Stalin's toilet on his train car

It's like the old adage "Vote Early, Vote Often", except replace "early" with "Stalin" and "often" with "Stalin; also you are under arrest"

Meanwhile, back home, the power was out for 10 days in the days around my trip to Gori. It's been very windy, and the old Soviet electrical system just wasn't up to handling it. Fortunately, we have running water - a friend of mine in another village outside Zugdidi lost power, and with it, use of the electric crank to his family's well. He now is subsisting on hand-cranked well water, which takes a while and must be used sparingly. Power is back on now, and hopefully will remain so.

Next up: Bakuriani!

Stats:
4 - children hiding behind Stalin's train car planning a snowball ambush during our visit. (And you thought Stalin had Snowball exiled...)
2 - UNHCR SUVs parked outside the apartment building next to our hotel in Gori. Both Zugdidi and Gori have large IDP/refugee populations, as they're both located close to Georgia's conflict-prone breakaway regions (Zugdidi to Abkhazia, Gori to Tskhinvali/South Ossetia). Both towns have sections of identical houses for those IDPs, along with a number of international NGOs, the UNHCR, UNDP, and World Food Program. Both towns were also occupied by Russia in the 2008 war, so they both host EU Monitoring Missions presumably keeping an eye on the ceasefire.

Vocabulary:
atami - peach
amindi - weather
gemrieli - delicious
deda - mother
mama - father
cheemagoatch - friend (Magrelian)

Phrases the authors thought were important to include in my Georgian-English phrase book:
"Piss off."
"He's a tacky bloke."
"He's a tawdry guy."
"He's got the buzz."
"Stop it with the PDAs/Stop it with the petting (inappropriate places)"

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."

So We Had A Little Aftershock

Most importantly: I have not figured out what I'm doing about the Super Bowl, but I will watch it somehow. I must.

First off, I'm not actually in Zugdidi. I'm in Zugdidi District (similar to a county), but about 10 km south of the city itself in a village called TsaPPishi. (Sometimes transliterated as "CaiPPshi", just as "Tsar" is sometimes "Czar".) According to a rough translation of the Georgian Wikipedia article on TsaiPPshi, the town has about 2200 residents. From my observation, it has a similar number of cows and probably 6 times as many chickens. It is most famous for its resort status during Soviet times, when apparatchik from all over the USSR would come here for TsaiPPshi's baths. Those baths were a result of the natural hot springs that send very hot sulfur water out of the ground.

I have yet to acquire a proper Empty Bottle to make full use of the Hot Spring Water

I do not have internet at my house, so blog posts will likely be a weekly thing at most. Kate does, though, so hopefully she will update you on the embarrassing situations I find myself in. She is a ways from me, in Zugdidi proper. This is not ideal, nor is it what we asked for from the program, but, to paraphrase one modern philosopher-singer, we are where we are.

The 7-hour marshutka trip taught me that my observation of Georgian driving was somewhat unfair. There is a system - most roads are three lane roads. One lane goes one way, the opposite lane goes the other, and the middle lane straddles the center line and can go either way at any time. On the plus side, seatbelt use is far more common than we'd been told during our training.

That trip was capped off with a lovely welcome dinner (at 11 pm) from my host family, their neighbors, and fellow teachers at my school. My host brother Imedi is 15 and speaks some English. His father and I generally communicate in my broken Georgian and broken Russian, while his sister (12) doesn't seem to want to speak to me, even though I know she's taking English at school. They are farmers, raising chickens and pigs and growing mandarins, kiwis, and a variety of other fruits in their extensive backyard. It is a change for me from everywhere I've ever lived, that's for sure. They are wonderful people though, and have been excellent hosts, even when communication between us is difficult.

I've wandered a bit around TsaiPPshi, seeing the hot springs, the River Jumi that runs through town, and the hill behind the house that provides an outstanding view of the Svaneti range of the north Caucasus. The town is easy to spot from the road, as a giant Georgian flag on a giant Georgian flagpole dominates a hill outside my window. Assuming the flagpole isn't brand new, it has seen 3 flags in my lifetime. The Soviet flag that flew there until 1991. A new Georgian flag came about after Communism, and lasted until 2003. When the old regime fell in that fall's Rose Revolution, the old flag was deemed too controversial and was replaced by the current one, which is based on an old flag of an independent Georgia.

New Georgia flag

Former Georgia flag

Aside from my phrasebook, mentioned below, my host family has an English-Georgian dictionary that they've used to help them with their homework. It has some peculiarities, as it was written in 1974. It therefore contains translation of such commonly used phrases as "class struggle", "petty bourgeoisie", "Leninist", and "dictatorship of the proletariat".

Next up: Teaching!

Stats:
1 - signs saying "Happy Journey" while leaving Tbilisi. My guess is someone translated the Georgian into English as "Bon Voyage", and then someone else, believing that to be French (technically, they were right), translated that to "Happy Journey."
3 - seemingly wild horses that ran across the highway in front of our marshutka just outside TsaiPPshi at 9 at night. This was one of many events that caused the driver to make the sign of the cross on the window, but by far the closest call.

Georgian:
marshutka - "minibus" used as the most common form of mass transit. A Russian loan word (originally Marshrutka)
jgiro - "goodbye" in Maghreli.
puri - bread
kargi/kargad - good/well
capitalisti - capitalist (Note: I do not know how to translate "capitalist lackey")

Phrases the authors thought were important to include in my Georgian-English phrase book.
-"How can we protest against (something)?"
-"Are you a believer?"
And, lifted in order from the book:
"Let me buy you a drink."
"Why are you laughing?"
"Is my Georgian that bad?"
"Shall we go somewhere quieter?"
"Leave me alone, please!"

I finally found the part of the pig I don’t like.

On any given day since I've been here, 6 or 7 neighbors or relatives (I’m not sure where the line is that separates the two) have popped their heads into the house, and proceeded to hang out for a few hours. Two such neighbors are of ambiguous “old age” dressed entirely in black with head scarves. They love it when I mispronounce Georgian words and clap, laugh and kiss me when I do. These two ladies usually show up as a pair and bring some sort of home-made delicatessen with them. Today they brought what can only be described as head cheese if it were left out in the sun through nuclear holocaust. It looked like organs suspended in aspic and tasted just about the same. Now, you all know my fondness for everything pig so you can fully appreciate the gravitas of this moment: It was disgusting. What I thought would be gelatinous had the texture of bone meal. There were things floating in there that I didn’t even know pigs had. But under the eager eyes of our neighbor, I ate one big fork full and said yes to seconds.

But as they say, things can’t be all entrails and gelatin! After a few confusing days here of attempting to adjust to a culture completely different than I’ve ever encountered (more on that later, I’m sure) I’m slowly getting into the swing of things. My family is accommodating and I enjoy their company. I live with grandma Madonna, Lela the mom, Lasha the dad, Chako and Giorgi—two sons. We spend the entire day while not at school in one room around a wood burning stove. I have a huge house. It has wireless internet (most of the time), a grand and normal size piano, 4 chickens, and a big enough storage of “chacha” to sterilize an entire hospital. (Much more on that later!)

Georgian seems much less scary as a language than it did a week ago. I am fumbling my way through conversation at home much aided by the fact that both the mom and son, Georgi, are in English school. I have most of the alphabet down, but I still fumble my way through every word. It will take a lot of practice. Now that I am more settled I hope to update with more frequency. So look forward to a pig, found.