Jamie Gives Thanks

Today is Thanksgiving. I have never thought of Thanksgiving as a super exciting holiday. It mostly consists of preparing a large amount of food, eating a large amount of food, then slipping into a food coma for the rest of the day. However, this year takes the cake for the most boring Thanksgiving ever. 

I had 2 classes at school today. I didn't do any Thanksgiving-related activities with them, because in all honesty I forgot it was Thanksgiving week until yesterday. 

It was rainy and cold today, which has been the norm for the past few weeks. This creates a few difficulties. The first being that the streets are made of dirt and when it rains it takes all my effort to not slip and fall on my butt walking to school, not to mention trying to get to school with minimal mud on my shoes and pants. It has also gotten pretty cold. Yes, I'm from South Dakota, but in SD we have central heating. Here we have wood stoves. That's what they use to heat the classrooms at school and that's what we use in our house. Unfortunately, my bedroom does not have wood-stove capabilities, i.e. there is no hole in the wall to put the vent through. My host parents got me an electric heater, but this also has it's challenges. Namely, unless I have the fan on the lowest setting, and the heat setting halfway between minimum and maximum, it makes the electricity go out in the house. Even with the settings on high, it doesn't put out enough heat to actually be noticeable. But I have very warm blankets, and, since I turn my heater on when I go to bed, by the time morning comes around my room isn't exactly toasty, but it's definitely a comfortable temperature. So this just means that during the daytime, I can't get much alone time. I'm definitely getting my quality time in with the fam-damily, which can be difficult. The weather also poses some difficulties with laundry. I can leave my clothes on the line for days, and they will still be as wet as when I pulled them out of the dryer. So instead, I hang everything in my room, on my window sills, chair backs, open closet doors, and bedposts. The chairs surround the heaters, and my different pieces of clothing get rotated through.

So today was what I fear will be typical for my next 4 weeks (yes, only 4 weeks left, time is flying) in Georgia. I came home, ate lunch in the kitchen, where the stove was burning. Grabbed a book and my iPod and came back to the kitchen where I alternated between reading and playing Call of Atlantis or Tetris. After about an hour of that, my host mom came home and made us coffee, and fired up the oven in the living room. So then I switched to sitting in the living room and alternating between reading and playing Mah-Jong. Until the electricity went out and I was left in the dark with an almost dead iPod. At that point I turned to my cell phone, where I tried to beat my record at Snake. 

And now I am writing my blog. I probably won't be able to post it for a while, since my internet got taken to my cousin's house, and has not found it's way back for the past week or so. Which also makes it hard to work on my TESOL certification course, which would be a lot more productive than playing Snake. I have discovered wi-fi at my school though, so I can still check my email and facebook between classes on my iPod. 

[Update: Apparently my internet had returned from my cousin's house and had been sitting in the living room, I just hadn't noticed.]

Ok. Time to stop complaining. It is Thanksgiving after all. So here's what I'm thankful for this year:

-That I'm here. Georgia is a beautiful country and I've been able to travel all around it for next to nothing (my meager salary has surprisingly been covering most of my trips each month).

-That I'm spending 4 months living like a retiree. Let's face it, I'm not actually working hard. I have around 15 hours of classroom time per week. That's about the amount of time a retired woman would spend helping out at church each week. The rest of the time I spend reading. Not reading ethnographies, not reading Latin American short stories, not reading 16th century Spanish literature, but reading books that I want to read. And also getting pretty good at Snake. 

-I'm thankful that as I'm writing this, my host dad is sitting on the computer playing a game called Tumblebugs, and it is highly entertaining to watch a grown man do that. 

-That the people in my village have been so warm and welcoming for me. When you're having a bad day, the smallest things can make you feel a lot better. Examples: One day I went for a run, and when I was walking up to my house the old neighbor man, who had only been introduced to me once briefly and doesn't speak English, waved me over, smiled, and handed me half of a pomegranate. For no reason. Just to be nice. And yesterday, I had forgotten to bring my umbrella to school, and 2 minutes after I started walking home, it began to pour. I put up my hood and started booking it, but one of our neighbors saw me and told me to come inside. She pulled up a chair by the stove, brought me a glass of grape juice and a plate of churchkhela and I sat and dried by the fire, having as much of a conversation as possible, until they saw my host mom walking home and I went back with her. 

-I'm thankful for my students. I love the amount of Helloooo's I get from tiny Georgian children as I walk through the school. I love that 3rd grade Ani shouts at me from the other side of the hallway every time she sees me to say How are you? I love that my 4th graders come up to me every day after class to say How is baby? because my host sister told them about my new niece. I love that my 10th graders invite me to their civic club meetings, and invited me out to lunch in the restaurant in town, bought beer and khinkali, and refused to let me help pay. 

-Which brings me to my next point. I'm thankful for the experience I had at school while growing up. I'm thankful that we had computers, projectors, TV's, playground equipment, nice bathrooms, walls that weren't crumbling, chalkboards that weren't curling up and detaching from the walls, heaters, air conditioners, clubs, sports teams. I'm thankful for all our teacher's who somehow managed to not lose their minds and run screaming from the classroom. 

-I'm thankful for all my families. My "real-life" family in America (and a healthy new baby niece), my Georgian family, my German family - Regina, Toni, Tobi, Lukas and Carolin - who I miss very much, my Costa Rican mom Rosi who was a giant sweetheart, my Peruvian family in Mama Rosa's house and of course my sister Raquel, who I very much wish still lived down the hall from me.

-Now that I don't have access to them, I realize how much I'm thankful for cell phones and high speed internet which allow me to call or skype my family or friends at any time. 

-I'm thankful for the other volunteers here, who keep me sane :)

-I'm thankful for my dog Macy, who I miss terribly. 

-And for everything I've learned and experienced, and all the people I've met in the last 3 months. 

-I'm thankful that my bestie Kelsey just called me up from America!

Jamie Goes to Armenia

If you asked me what my top 5 countries to visit are before I die, Armenia would not have made that list. I have nothing against the place. In fact, if it weren't for Armenia, I would have no one to keep up with except the Jones's. (If you didn't get that joke, you need to climb down from your high horse and start watching some trashy reality television. You only live once, so you might as well spend at least some of that time living vicariously through uber-rich dysfunctional families, botoxed housewives, and celebrity has-beens). 

My point is, a few months ago, I probably would not have considered buying a plane ticket to Yerevan. Partly because I didn't know where in the world Yerevan was, but mostly because Armenia just doesn't scream "Come visit me!" However, being in Georgia, Yerevan is only a $20 train or marshrutka ticket away. So why not? And I must say, I was impressed. 

I got school off on Friday and Monday, and my friends and I grabbed the overnight train from Tbilisi on Thursday. We were seated in a compartment with a nice Armenian woman, who only spoke Armenian and Russian. To us, she only spoke Russian, assuming, despite our blank stares and shrugging of shoulders, that we understood everything she said. She immediately offered us fried potato cakes and iced coffee (sans ice). The compartment had beds for us, so after crossing the border and getting our visas around midnight, we turned in. 

We got to Yerevan quite early in the morning and grabbed a taxi to the Envoy Hostel (best hostel in the world - if you go to Yerevan and do not stay at Envoy, you are stupid, or you are rich and are staying at the Marriott or something, in which case that was probably the better move.) This began the tedious task of trying to figure out how much money we were spending on taxis, food, accommodation, etc. The currency in Armenia is the Dram, and 1000 dram is about $2.45, or about 4.50 lari. 

After a quick nap we went out to explore Yerevan. It's a beautiful city. It has a population of about 1 million. It seems fairly clean, there are some nice parks, good shopping, and as far as the restaurants go, there is some variety that is severely lacking in Tbilisi. Unfortunately, Taco Maco, which promised tacos and burritos, was not yet open for business. It's a damn shame, too. I could have used a taco. 

We made the short walk to the Cascade, which is a huge flight of stone steps leading up the side of a hill. The different levels of the steps have monuments and gardens, and built into a hill under the steps is an art gallery. When you get to the top, you see the monument commemorating the 50th Anniversary of Soviet Armenia. Once we got to the top, we went to a park down the street which led to the Mother Armenia monument, and a small and strange military museum. 

After that we went to the Armenian Genocide Memorial and Museum. This was definitely worth the visit. It was a very well laid-out museum, and was very informative and moving. The memorial was a stone structure built around an eternal flame in a depression in the stone. When we went there was music playing and white daisies and carnations surrounding the flame. 

Afterwards we walked around the city a bit, and at night we headed to a little cafe that promised live guitar music. The guitarist was a young Armenian woman playing Spanish guitar and singing in Spanish and French. On the way home we stopped in the Troll Bar. Because why wouldn't you? It was a little dungeon-like place decorated with medieval maps and Lord of the Rings posters. So pretty much awesome except for the awful music they were blasting. 

The next day was Education Day. We started out at the Matenadaran, which is the ancient manuscript museum. It had some really interesting manuscripts and we spent quite a while looking around. Then off to lunch. We found a shockingly cheap outdoor restaurant with good food (I had hummus, wiener schnitzel and Mexican coffee, whatever that was, for about $5). Then we were off to the State Museum of Armenian History, where we saw someone who was probably the president walk by us. He was being photographed by someone with a supernice camera and had 2 secret service looking dudes with him, so I'll just assume that's who it was. In the evening we went to an Armenian restaurant...because we were in Armenia and figured we should do that, and then went to a little cafe for a few drinks. After which I was completely exhausted and went to sleep because I am turning into a lame old person.

On Sunday we took the short trip outside the city to Echmiadzin, which is like the Vatican of the Armenian Church, and the former capital of Armenia. We saw a mass at the Mayr Tachar, which is the main cathedral, looked around the other churches and then met an American studying in Yerevan who had actually gone to the same college (and was in one of the same classes) as my friend Mary Ellen that was there with me. Small world! (Side note: Speaking of it being a small world, we talked to a woman from Canada who was doing a 3 month tour all around Europe with about 20 other people. She was staying at our hostel in Yerevan, and then a few days later, when I was in Tbilisi for my S. Korea interview, I ran into her again at a cafe and we had lunch together). We went on a trek with her to try to find the Surp Hripsime church which was built on the site where Hripsime was killed after she refused to marry a king, and it holds the stones in a little chamber in the back that apparently were used to stone her to death. Then we visited the museum at Echmiadzin where we saw a piece of the wood of Noah's Ark, the Holy Lance used to pierce Jesus' side while he was nailed to the cross, relics of various apostles, and pieces of the cross. 

We decided we should probably do something fun for our last night in the city, so we searched for the expat hangout bar Calumet. This was difficult as the entrance is sort of camouflaged into the street. We finally got there though, and hung out on floor cushions drinking Armenian beer. 

The next day we reluctantly headed to the bus station and caught a 5 hour marshrutka back to Tbilisi. It was a great trip, a nice break from Georgia, and I'm really glad I went. 

Jamie Makes Pancakes

During the first few weeks at school, I had planned on starting an English club. Each week would have a different theme. Film, games, cooking, dancing, cultural presentations... I've since learned that in Georgia, simple things require weeks of planning. Not necessarily planning, actually, that doesn't take long. They just take weeks before anyone actually carries them out. And I am completely dependent upon Georgians to help me carry out any of my plans. 

The film week, as I think I've mentioned, was a complete failure. So I moved on to cooking week. I suggested it to my coteacher, and she said she'd talk to the principal about it. About a week later, we discussed recipes, and decided on pancakes. About a week later she had me start teaching the vocab (flour, butter, melt, pour, frying pan, etc) in class. About a week later it was actually time to start making the pancakes. This delay had an actual reason. The oven, which I could have sworn existed and was in the teacher's kitchen had mysteriously disappeared. An entire oven. This makes me question my sanity a bit and wonder whether it was ever there to begin with, but the principal brought in one of those gas camping burners for us to use. Perfect! An open flame from a tank placed precariously on a chair at a perfect height for 3rd and 4th graders. That will definitely end well.

Finally the day came. I was informed I didn't need to bring anything (apparently my guest status has not worn off yet) and the kids were each assigned to bring a certain ingredient. During the 3rd grade's class time on Friday, they all marched in to the tiny kitchen and gathered around the table with their ingredients. The kids took turns dumping in the ingredients that I had measured out (although the concept of taking turns did not get through to a lot of them, so I had to fight off lots of little hands trying to grab teaspoons of baking powder out of mine). When we got to the sugar, I added the 2 tablespoons that the recipe called for, and was then told by my coteacher to add more, lots more. We ended up with probably 10 times the amount in the recipe. She also added vanilla powder for a little extra flavor. 

When it was time to add the eggs, I handed one to a little boy named Beka. He has a really hard time paying attention and sitting still in class, but he always gets super excited when he knows an answer and practically jumps out of his seat. Basically, he's extremely adorable. When I handed him the egg, the usually hyper Beka was all seriousness and concentration. He started to tap it carefully against the edge of the bowl, but the bowl was plastic with a rounded edge, and the egg didn't crack. He tapped again a little harder and a little harder, but still no luck. Just as I was about to offer to help, he smacked the egg down on the edge of the bowl and sent raw egg flying all around the table. He stared up at me with a guilty look on his face, holding out a slimy hand full of shattered egg shells, and I busted out laughing. It was definitely the highlight of my week, if not my entire semester here. For the rest of the eggs I decided to crack them myself, and let the kids pour them in. You live and you learn.

After the batter was made, we fired up the burner and the kids took turns pouring the batter. This was a bit chaotic, since they were all fighting over who would go next and crowding around the burner. While one pancake was cooking I would try to cut up the previous one and give each of the kids a bite. It was a little hectic, especially when the teacher would step out and I would try to keep 15 3rd graders under control while also trying to not burn the pancakes to a crisp. But we made it through, and the kids seemed to enjoy it. The original point was so they would have a fun way to learn the previously mentioned vocab words. I don't know how successful we were in that area, but there are a few phrases that I'm sure they picked up after 45 minutes in that kitchen. They are the following:

"Be careful!"

"It's hot! Hot, hot, hot!" - I'm not sure why, but I would always repeat it 3 times. They would then turn into little monkeys and shout "hot hot hot hot hot!" back at me

"You guys! Seriously! Calm down!"

"Wait your turn!"

"Stop grabbing!"

"No more pancakes if you don't sit down!"

"You guys are acting like a pack of wolves!"

"Don't your mothers ever feed you?!"