Basketball

is making a comeback. I played with the 12th grade boys. They’re all done with real school now, and taking goverment-mandated exams in the computer lab. This is the first time it’s been used. They had to have tech guys connect everything to the internet/set up four more computers which had been lying unsused, still packaged, in the director’s office.  After tests, everyone plays outside. Come to think of it, half of my “lessons” today were badminton.

The last day of 12th grade (which was also the last day of 1st grade), there was a concert for the first graders. White curtains had been hung around the walls, and a surprisingly modern stereo system had appeared in the room. It was very, very crowded. Everyone in the school, and I mean teachers, students, and a few parents, were packed into one side of the first grade classroom. The first graders were being cooed over by their parents, who’d undoubtedly been waiting all year to stuff them into tiny tuxedos and party dresses. There was a very large cake.

Then the kids lined up opposite us. They’d spent a month learning lines of a (long) Georgian poem so they could spit it at us in the manner of a firing squad. Then, they performed a traditional Kartuli dance for us. Then, we all danced, and suddenly the air was full of flower petals. Everyone was throwing flower petals.

All that day, the 12th graders had their graduation ceremony, or “bolo zari” (last bell). All that day, the 12th graders wore white shirts, which teachers and students could scrawl well-wishes upon. Then they all get to ring the bell.  Then, in the evening, they feast. I didn’t know about the supra, so I went home for an hour, and heard the pulsing sounds of beat from the school during my evening walk. I went in. The students had pushed the desks in the teacher’s lounge together to form a long table. One of them poured me a glass of wine from a plastic barrel. Giorgi, who speaks the best english, was acting as Tamada. He gave a few long toasts which I did not understand, and then we all drank. Then we danced. Repeat.

Please note: graduation day should forever be known as “bolo zari.”

***

I’m considering extending my contract. I’d be moving to Batumi with the eminent Laura Deal and her friends until December. Not that I don’t love the village, but life moves very, very slowly here. The most exciting non-school thing is when I go to the purple cafe in Chokhatauri to meet my friends Rachel and Patrick for 3 lari pizza. (Make sure, when you get here, to order pizza WITHOUT mayonnaise.) Or, last night, we walked across the cornfield to my neighbor Manana’s house for dinner and Nitchieri (Georgia’s Got Talent).* Or, a few nights ago, and this is like most nights here, I wandered up the street and my students called me in to play with them. I sat on the edge of the well and they all told me that Gudian would eat me. He lives in the well, and has sharp teeth and long somethings (claws? fingers? wasn’t sure on this word.) It really hit me the other day, that the three Dumbadze sisters (Mari, Kesa, and Eteri) exist nowhere else in the world, and leaving would mean not being their teacher anymore.

Then again, if I eat anymore khatchapuri, the salt content alone might kill me.

*Let it also be known that Georgia has some fabulous television personalities. Vake on the Vake show is really funny (even though I don’t understand him). They’ve got an Oprah (Nanuka somethingsomethingshvili) and on Dancing with the Stars, this judge Gocha who lived in NYC for 20 years and sometimes forgets the Georgian words for things, so he inserts “What a girl!” and “Allright!” into otherwise unintelligible conversation. The Georgian version of Wheel of Fortune is absolutely terrifying. The host is a 40-something lech’ with a mullet who brings in musical acts and strippers between each spin.

Accidental Supras

This is a feasting culture. The Georgians have a story about how they got their land: while God was divvying up the world for the various cultures, the Georgians were all drinking at feasting, so they didn’t show up to receive their handout (damn liberals.) So God fusses to them, “Where were you?” And the Georgians respond, “We were feasting and toasting in Your honor, Lord!” And so God says Aw Shucks and gives them the land he was saving for himself. Altenatively, my Peace Corps friend in Ozurgeti claims that Georgians have supras to forget.

I was walking home from the burned-out gas station awhile back, and before I managed to make it home, a bunch of neighbors feasting outside invited me to their table. It was laid out with many small plates of bread, chicken, pelamushi, pkhali, and other delights. It was…someone”s birthday? He may have been dead. The grandma showed me a picture of her son, in the casket, and we drank in his memory. We also ate a lot of food and drank a lot of wine (typical). What was atypical was the incredible singing. I’d read about the wildy polyphonic songs of rural Georgia, but this was the first time I actually heard them at the table. It was amaaaaaaaaaaaaazing. It was loud and drunken and boorish and I loved it.

Kind of like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTkFrWc36XI

Suddenly everyone at the table leapt up and ran through the gate. I was left with my students. “What’s going on?” I asked, and ran to the road. They whole party was walking with a man who had blood pouring down his face. “Bicycle,” Tamta told me. “It break. Front wheel come off.” They walked him to the well and poured a bucket over his head. Once he was cleaned up, they pulled a horse-drawn cart up to the gate and got him home. The supra ended. The song, incidentally, Teona and I did our best to translate:

When autumn begins to fall,

the thrush begins to sing.

When men run out of money,

They begin to insult their wives.

I love eating fresh green cheese

between my clicking teeth,

as much as I love winking at and

kissing pretty girls.

 

Even Georgians find this song strange.

SVANETI

Every time you get a receipt in Georgia, you can dial #200* plus a few numbers, and play the lottery. There are commercials for it everywhere, and there was even a sketch on Comedy Show about it (wasn’t funny). I have not yet won.

I’m sitting in the internet cafe in Chokhatauri on the way back from a long, long weekend of travel. We had Wednesday off this week, so a few friends and I decided to take the rest of the week off as well to travel to Mestia. Svaneti.

What is Svaneti? you all ask. Allow me. Do you like knife-throwing dances? The mighty Caucasus mountain range? Goat sacrifice? A people who have remained unconquered for millenia, people who are crazy enough to build multiple defensive towers in the mountains and sacrifice goats? People who speak a dialect of Georgian so obscure that few people alive can still understand it?

It’s nearly impossible to get to, though. We loaded out from Kutaisi on Tuesday afternoon for Zugdidi (“Big Hill,” and also the city with the worst reputation in all of Georgia), then woke up at five in the morning to take a second marshukta into the mountains. The drive was amazing: waterfalls, towering mountains, and of course, ambient livestock.

Mestia’s the capital of the region. It’s tiny. The muddy streets were littered with fresh lumber and rebar. Our driver left us downtown to locate our guesthouse so we walked for about ten minutes outside until we found it. It was pink.

The next day we climbed the mountain immediately behind the city. You can see a giant cross on top. “To the cross!” we cried. It was a really, really long hike. Some of us turned back. Me and this Irish guy Cillian led the herd and spoke of our love for climbing, and the adrenaline rush. As we climbed higher, our panorama of the Caucasus improved.

“I could climb to that one!” Cillian said.

“Yeah! Me too!” There was no stopping us. At the top of the mountain, next to the cross, we got a view. Snowy mountain peaks cut into the air, every way you looked.

The next day we hiked to a glacier and got followed by a dog with massive teats. Her name was patches.

This is what it looks like. All of it. Why would you build towers? Not because anybody wants to invade. No, because your neighbors attack you, and so you take them prisoner, stash them in your tower’s dungeon, and then trade them back for livestock or crops.

Anyways, I’m going to go home now and write about two successive weekends in Batumi.

Tqemali, and get learned up

I tried Tqemali fruit. It’s a fruit. I thought it was made from plums, but the chutneylike sauce that I love so much is made from small, rosehip-shaped fruits that only grow here. It figures. They come in a green and maroon variety, have the consistency of fresh snow peas, and taste awesome and sour. The kids (Niko and Zela especially) scale the school’s tqemali tree at lunch to pick handfuls of them. I cannot imagine american kids going crazy for any fruit, or such a blastingly sweet taste. 

Now that it’s warm outside, the kids run totally loose during the breaks. I mean, they always ran loose, but at least now they don’t do it in the hallways. Our school has a cracked pavement basketball court where they kids play soccer. The balls are faded and have bits of loose stitching poking out in places.

Inside the school, it feels much darker (though the color scheme’s still bright pink/white). The sun doesn’t penetrate the concrete walls. We got new windows recently, still complete with housewrap, but our doors are still knobless and cracked. Sometimes we have to use kindling as a wedge to keep them shut. 

We’ve been doing a lot of testing this week. Lela picks, at random, a test from a book which bears no relationship to the studied matieral. Tests are then collected and scored, and then the scores are ignored in favor of the official 5-10 point scale, 5 being terrible and 10 being perfect. These scores are then recorded in each teacher’s official government gradebook, and mailed to Chokhatauri, where the student’s semester grade is determined, and then the books and grades are mailed back to Buknari. Regardless of the grade, or of their performance in class, students are advanced to the next year’s material and classes. It is either the setup to a Beckett play, or very stupid. 

FOOD UPDATE: Pkhali is spinach paste with garlic and walnuts, then compressed into a round. Great. My third-grader Tamta invited me over to her house and we ate this, plus Tqemali liquer. (Not her. Though she did lure me over by asking “Ernesto, do you like cognac?”)

Pelamushi is a sort of hot grape jelly and the strangest thing I’ve ever eaten. They think you are crazy if you eat it on bread. It is the only thing not eaten on bread. It is eaten plain, with a spoon.

Mch’adi. Cornbread. Every day.

Iamze made salsa just like Dad used to make and called it tomato salad. She also made an awesome buttery pilaf and I drenched it with the salsa, and it was everything I ever wanted. 

 

Spring spring spring

The clouds wreath the mountains. They look like golden butter on the peaks. The dirty Supsa, brown with snowmelt, curls around my ankles. I can hear about ten different species of bird and ten million different frogs. Smooth stones blanket the riverbanks. I spend a few minutes tossing them into the river. The trees riot in green in lavender. It smells fresh.

I’ve just come back from a run. The sun’s been out all day, so I had decided to walk as far as I could towards the mountains, and then run back. Perfect weather the whole way. I’ve passed my house and passed the highway and gone all the way to the river. My sandals lie beside me on the banks. It’s hot outside and cold underwater.

As I walk back, Jemali (my student, not my dad) rides his bike beside me and asks me all about the girls I like. We dodge cow poop and watch plastic bottles float down the stream towards larger clots of garbage. He dismounts and hisses at a few cows, which saunter away from us. He refuses to tell me who he likes, so I threaten him with telling random sixth graders he’s in love with them. Or in love with cows.

 

BEES

Georgia in Spring is gorgeous. (Giorgi-ous). The mud of Guria has transformed into a green-and-purple paradise. It’s about 70 degrees every day and sunny. I come out on my staircase in the mornings and smell yummy rain, and watch the sun hit the mighty Caucasus. Sorry I don’t have a camera that works. All our bees begin to generate a lot of honey. To extract it, we have an awesome barrel apparatus. We remove the honeycombs, slide them into a holster in the barrel, and then crank it for all it’s worth. The crank spins the combs around and around until the honey flies out by centrifugal force. It oozes down the sides of the barrel, coagulates in the bottom, and then we open the hatch to distribute it. SO MUCH HONEY. Tengo and I had to hold down the barrel while Iamze cranked.

In animal news, a baby cow ran away today. Tengo and I had to run down the street before school to locate him.

 

How teach English?

Lela and I hit upon a solution for students who don’t bring their notebooks or pens anymore. After enduring several weeks of this, we asked the fourth graders to copy some new words down. And one little foobar threw up his hands as if to suggest the problem was out of his jurisdiction, so Lela and I (and the other, gleeful students) held him down and wrote the words on his forehead with a red permanent marker.

Also I pretended to be a cat for my eighth graders. Not sure how either one of these teaching techniques will pan out, but educators should take note: I’ve had no more trouble with sparrows in the classroom.

Birds

Yesterday there was a box full of birds. I’d been exhausted all day after a weekend of vicious food poisoning of some sort, and had flopped on the couch next to Iamze to lament. She was holding a bos in her lap. It was about the size of a two-pack of lightbulbs. She opened it. It was crammed full of speckled chicks. She took a few out and we played with them for awhile before she scooped them back up and sealed the box again.

On an unrelated note Chokhatauri’s cultural minister Kenino wants me and an 11^th grade Georgian girl to sing Stevie Wonder’s “Part-Time Lover.” To quote my estimable co-teacher Teona, “It is the greatest.” Concert’s tomorrow. Will post video soon.

Georgian Questions

Some things Georgians ask:

1. Do you like Georgia?

2. Do you like Khinkali?

3. Do you like Georgian wine?

4. Do you like Georgian girls? (to men only)

5. Do you like football?

6. Do you like Smoking? (this is Zela only. He is a silly-butt.)

These questions will be asked whether you have known someone for ten seconds in a marshutka, or for two months and it’s in the middle of class, and you say, “why are you asking this now? Are you just trying to get out of writing down the exercise? Because that would be reasonable since, as we have no photocopy machine, you copy these from the board. Or is it because you don’t take your notebook out from your backpack and pretend you don’t have it? Why do you tortue me like this, Zela? You eat my soul. I will eat your head.*”

 

*This is perhaps why Lela tells me “They not respect you. They think you funny boy.”

Easter Weekend

Basically the last two-three weeks has been almost nonstop travel. It originally was my reaction to realizing that, for all its relative charms, willage life is pretty dull. Cow. Chicken. Small cow. Corn. We went skiing, we went to Vardzia, we went to Tbilisi, we went to Kutaisi.

The actual Easter Vacation*, though, I was set to spend in Buknari. It’s the biggest holiday in Georgia. For a few days beforehand, flower stands and dye-shops opened up around market squares in every city. In Georgia, so we have heard, everyone goes to the graveyard for a big party on Easter Monday. Anna’s host parents are sometimes weird and passive-aggressive, so she asked to come with me to my village. As I may have mentioned, my host parents are muslim, so they lay on the couch for easter.**

The actual Easter day was spent at Gelati monastery in Kutaisi. This is a GORGEOUS old cathedral from the 11^th century with frecoes on the walls and old praying Georgian nuns practically spilling out the windows. We took a way overpriced taxi up the mountain and hung out and took pictures for awhile. Two cows meandered into the monastery yard; two men chased them out of it. Some Georgians showed us how to do their easter tradition: you and a friend each take a red egg, then smash them together. It’s like an edible wishbone. The winner’s egg doesn’t crack, and he wins the loser’s egg. I say “he” because Anna won exactly no egg smashes that afternoon. I ate a lot of hard-boiled egg on Easter.

Anyways, back to my heathen parents. We came home and ate first, then had coffee, then had coffee at a neighbor’s house, then went back to the field to ride a tractor and take pictures. (Jemal was pretty insistent about that. “Fotoebi!”) Then we walked to the cemetery. The PE teacher hailed me towards his family’s plot. He poured us each a glass*** of wine, hugged us, and greeted us with the Georgian equivalent of “Christ is risen.” (kristeaghzdga AAAAHHH HOW SAY) Then his friends took us to several other grave plots where I visited my students and their parents, and lots of drunk guys followed Anna around. We ate cakes and salmon and vegetables and Russian salad and mtsvadi (delicious, delicious BBQ pork). And, of course, more eggs.

 Following this whole drinking-and-feasting episode, we caroused in the direction of Jemal’s sisters place of residence on the other side of (ha-ha!) town, where I saw my host brothers for the first time in two weeks. They were shoveling shit into the back of a giant soviet truck. We took pictures of them. “Facebook!” we said. “They will go on facebook!”. We wrestled and hit each other with sticks for awhile. Then Jemal’s brother-in-law appeared from the pasture with the cows. I herded the cows with a stick and pretended I was Moses. As they came up the hill towards the family, Tengo pointed to the nearest cow. “Fuck you cow!” he shouted. “Fuck you Ernie! Fuck you cow!”

 Happy Easter, America.

 

*Americans, take note: we celebrate us some Orthodox Easter over here, which means ours was a week later than yours.

** “Lots of red eggs, right?” –Jemal Iremadze

***Wine in Georgia is not consumed from the thing Americans know as “the wine glass.” We use tiny glasses the shape of dixie cups, and we must drink the entire glass when we toast. No sipping, no sniffing, no palate-cleansing, just QUAFF IT ALREADY