Jamie Goes to Mestia

Note: This took place quite awhile ago, but I'm just getting a chance to put it up. 

The mountainous region of Western Georgia is called Svaneti. The Svans who live there are known for their distinctive hats, but mostly for their ruggedness. You have to be rugged to survive Mother Nature in the Caucasus, not to mention a long history of war and conflict. Here's a joke about the Svans shared with us by a Svan who got drunk with us - ahem, I mean explained the subtle nuances of the different wines we were tasting - at the winery we visited in Sighnaghi:

A couple Svans were sitting around in their village talking, when suddenly one of the villagers ran up to them and said "I've got terrible news! 10,000 Russians are coming!" 

"That is terrible news!" one of them replied. "Where are we going to find room to bury 10,000 Russians?"

My co-teacher had planned an outing for us in Tbilisi on Friday, so I decided to go to Mestia, in Svaneti, from Saturday until Monday, which I got off school. After school on Friday, we took a marshrutka to Tbilisi, visited the National Gallery, where they had a special Pirosmani exhibition, Georgia's most famous painter. Afterwards we walked up and down Rustaveli Ave., visiting some of the shops, and then went to the Rustaveli Theater to see King Lear. I was told it would be performed in English. It actually turned out to be completely without dialogue. All of the characters were played as sinister mute clowns. Because if there's one thing you can dispose of in a Shakespeare production, it's the dialogue, right? I've never actually read King Lear, so not surprisingly, I had no idea what was going on. First of all, it was hard to tell the male characters apart, because the differences in clown makeup and clothing were not quite distinctive enough. Second of all, did I mention no one spoke? Remember that movie Wall-E? Where they got by with no dialogue for like an hour? It worked, because it was just a robot who compressed trash into cubes and then saw a girl robot and fell in love. That's a pretty simple story line. Like I said, I've never read King Lear, but I'm guessing the plot line was a little more complex than Wall-E. Either way, at least it wasn't in Georgian! And it was still entertaining. At one point the clowns were snorting coke and having a rave (like they did in Shakespeare's time) and there was some cool dancing and fighting. The entire thing was performed in a giant sandbox, and at one point they had sand raining down on the stage and strobe lights going, which had a really cool effect (on the viewer anyways, I'm sure the actors did not appreciate all the sand stuck in unwanted places after each performance). 

After the performance we went to my co-teacher's parents house where we spent the night. On Saturday morning I went to the train station at 5:00 a.m. to make sure I got a seat for the 6:00 marshrutka to Mestia, because there was only one a day. I got the seat, and in true Georgian fashion, it didn't end up leaving until 7:00. The ride wasn't actually as bad as I had feared. The combination of the roughly 4 hours of sleep I had had the night before and the dramamine that I had finally (thank god) found, knocked me out for most of the trip, and by the time I was conscious again we were in the mountains and there was plenty of beautiful scenery to see. We stopped every 3 hours or so for bathroom breaks, and around noon we stopped at a little restaurant for lunch. Mostly everyone got khachapuri (cheese bread) and for one of our passengers, it didn't sit well with the mountain roads. About an hour later, I turned around to see that this pre-teen girl had just projectile vomited all over the marshrutka. It got all over the floor, all over the girl's sweater, and all over an unfortunate passenger's bag. It also got on my coat sleeve a little bit, but being 2 rows ahead of her, I missed the worst of it. We pulled over and she cleaned herself off, and her grandma tried to clean the marshrutka with a plastic bag and with the pack of kleenexes I gave her ("Spasiba" she said, assuming that since I'm a foreigner, I speak Russian.Something that happens quite often and is a problem for me considering I know even less Russian than I know Georgian.) I still don't understand why marshrutka drivers don't start putting rolls of paper towels and bottles of Lysol (if they have that in Georgia - germs and bacteria don't seem to be much of a concern here as far as I can tell), because I've been in this country for 3 months and already have been in 2 marshrutkas where people have puked. The first time my dog pooped in my car, you can bet that within an hour my trunk was stocked with paper towels and cleaning agents. 

The rest of the ride was gorgeous, and slightly terrifying. There was a lot of fog, a lot of blind turns, a lot of falling rock on the roadway, and a lot of steep mountainsides. But we survived, and arrived in Mestia around 3. My friends had gone the day before, and I was trying to get a hold of them, but hadn't been able to. This was a problem, since I didn't know which guesthouse they were staying at and it was a rainy cold day in the small town of Mestia, meaning it was practically deserted. I wandered around in the rain for a while, found the Visitor's Info Center. The lights were on and the sign said 'open' but on the outside the doors had no handles and I knocked but couldn't see anyone inside. So I wandered around some more. After about an hour my friends got a hold of me and said they were on a hike and would be back in a few hours. They gave me the name of the guesthouse and directions. So I went there and had tea with the lady of the house and watched TV with her while she prepared supper. After a few hours, everyone came back, and we hung out and had a delicious supper. Unfortunately I had missed what I'm told was a beautiful hike into to an ice cave. 

The next day we walked around the town. We tried to go to the museums and go up one of the stone towers that are common in Svaneti, but the museum that we found was closed and we couldn't find the museum with the tower. So we stopped in a cafe for a while, walked around some more, and then headed back to the house. The next day we caught another super early marshrutka back to Tbilisi. I did get a little sick during this ride, but it wasn't too bad, and at least no one threw up.