Jamie Wraps It Up

During a recent visit with my Grandma, Kay Ambur (shout out! You're internet famous G-ma!) I was informed that she was somewhat disappointed that my blog had come to a sudden and abrupt halt and that I needed to wrap things up a bit. This is that.

The last week of my stay in Georgia was a bit hectic. The weather got really cold, which I believe caused the pipes to freeze, so we didn't have running water for like a week. That meant using water heated in the kettle to wash your face and brush your teeth, and using tubs of water heated over the wood stove to bathe. It also meant that I couldn't do laundry. Jamie smelled a little grody that week. The snow that we had also made it difficult for me to get to Telavi to turn into my books, and to Tbilisi to turn in my phone and go to the doctor to take care of an infected belly button piercing. But I made it both places safely.

The last week also entailed me being blessed by a Georgian Orthodox priest, licked on the face by a drunk old man (long story), and I received a lot of homemade cards from my kids at school saying things like "Me <3 Jeimi" It was adorable.

My host family drove me to Tbilisi after my last day with them and then I headed to Batumi on the overnight train, where I caught a flight to Istanbul. There, after getting royally ripped off by a taxi driver, I met my fellow English teaching friends Mary Ellen and Max at a hostel. We spent Christmas in Istanbul, where we went to one of the few (if not the only?) Christmas Eve masses at a Catholic church. We also saw the Hagia Sofia and had our first Starbucks in 4 months.

Then Mary Ellen and I bussed to Athens, where we spent a beautiful day exploring the Parthenon. Then we got on a ferry to the island of Santorini. It was obviously the off season, so we were able to stay in a nice hotel with very friendly owners who gave us free pasta, free cake and coffee, and a free bottle of wine. This awesome place only cost a bit more than most of the hostels we stayed at. On Santorini, we did a day hike from Fira to Oia to watch the "most beautiful sunset in the world." Unfortunately, it started raining, and we didn't get much of a sunset. We did see some water spouts in the ocean though, which I was pretty excited about. We also saw the ruins of the ancient city of Akrotiri, and ate a seafood lunch less than 10 feet from the Aegean.

We ferried back to Athens and rang in the New Year at the James Joyce Pub. Mary Ellen headed back to Tbilisi the next day, and I stayed in Athens one more day to explore the ancient Agora and to take the tram to the top of Lycabettus Hill, Athens' highest point.

Then I took the night train to Thessaloniki and spent the next day in Greece's second city. I bussed back to Istanbul, spent a day seeing Topkapi Palace and eating more delicious Turkish food, and then got a flight back to Batumi the next morning. I had a lot of time to kill in Batumi before my night train to Tbilisi, which was kind of depressing because it was rainy and cold, and I was carrying around my bags. I got back to Tbilisi the next morning and hung out at the hostel where I had stored my bags, met with a couple of friends, pulled an allnighter, and got a taxi to the airport at 3:30 a.m.

My journey back to the U.S. was long, but went smoothly. I arrived in Atlanta to see my sister and my new niece, Lucia, waiting for me at baggage claim. An hour later, I was reunited with my dog Macy, who I missed most of all :)

I spent the next month with friends and family in North Carolina, Tennessee, Iowa, and South Dakota.

As most of you probably know, on Monday, February 11th, I arrived in Denver, CO to be a corps member in AmeriCorps first FEMA Corps class on the Denver campus. It's now Thursday the 14th (Happy Valentine's Day!) and I am loving it. FEMA Corps is a new branch of the AmeriCorps NCCC program, and entails 10 months of service working on a team of about 8-10 corps members on FEMA projects across the U.S.

I'll keep you posted on how that goes...not sure if I'm going to blog about it yet. But if you're interested in updates, follow the AmeriCorps NCCC Southwest Campus on Facebook to see pictures of our training and updates on our activities throughout the next 10 months.

Thanks for reading :)

Nakhvamdis!

Jamie Reflects

It's nearing the end of my time here. In fact, by the time this is posted my time will probably have already ended. So what have I learned? How have I grown?

Some people have the idea that traveling and living amongst strangers who are completely different from yourself helps you "find yourself." That you "grow as a person." I'm not really sure what either of those things are supposed to mean. I've definitely grown during all of my travels. My ass has grown. My muffin top has grown. My thighs have grown. But I don't know that my 'person' has. 

However, I do always learn a lot by traveling. 

So here's what I've learned:

A lot about Geography - Baku is the capital of Azerbaijan, Yerevan is the capital of Armenia. I could point out both of those countries and the Black Sea on a map. Couldn't do that before.

Turkish coffee, good. Turkish toilets, bad. 

I can't live without the internet. As much as you think your life would be better without it - I mean think of how much extra time you'd have if you didn't watch all those videos of babies laughing on YouTube or didn't stalk your ex-boyfriend's new girlfriend's facebook page every 5 minutes? Yes, it's true. I've read so many books here. And if I had been in a situation where I had other useful stuff to do I probably would have gotten so much of it done! But the truth is, in our society today, you have to be able to use the internet. Everything is done online. So much communication is done through email. Tickets are bought online, hostels are reserved online, jobs are applied to online. If you have a question about anything, you can find the answer online. When we think of how we use the internet, cat videos may be the first thing that comes to mind, but that's because we forget that we also used it to pay our bills and to check the weather and to RSVP to that thing, and to map out the easiest way to get from here to there, and, and, and... Once you don't have it, then you realize how much you need it. 

I've also learned that I'm not the only one. Sometimes I wonder what a job interviewer will think when they look at my resume. Individually all this stuff that I do - exchange in Germany, volunteering in Latin America, study abroad, teaching in Georgia, and now AmeriCorps- is good, experience, something unique that sets me apart. But I'm wondering how it all looks together. If I was an employer, I might look at it and say, "What is this girl doing? She's all over the place. Is it possible for her to do something for more than a year at a time?" And I don't know that it is. Yet. Hopefully someday I will want and have a bit more permanence in my life. But being here doesn't make me too worried about it, because like I said, I'm not the only one. I've met a lot of people here just like me, who just drift from place to place, seek out new adventures, and meet new people. And frankly, it's a good crowd to run with. 

And finally, I've learned that wine doesn't have to be sipped. Really, I mean who came up with that anyway?

Jamie Hangs With Grandpa

I'd like to talk about why my host grandpa is one of the coolest people I know. 

He's a thin, wiry old man with short buzzed gray hair and beard stubble. He walks through the streets with his traditional Kakhetian felt cap, that I've only seen the older generations still wearing, with his donkey pulling an old wooden wagon. 

I assume he's smoked since he was twelve, like many Georgian boys, because now he has no voice left, just a wheeze that looks like it takes quite a bit of effort to produce. He doesn't smoke anymore, and I'm assuming that's why. 

Every morning he lifts an espresso cup filled with chacha (homemade moonshine, made out of the grape skins and pulp that remain after making the wine), wheezes out a cheers, and knocks it back.

Grandpa has made me his drinking buddy. Typically, we are the only ones drinking at lunch and dinner. He will pull out a mason jar filled with wine from the storage room, and once he's poured out the last drop, he lifts his hands in triumph and slams it down on the table. As I think I've mentioned previously, you don't sip your wine whenever you want to, you wait for the tamada (toastmaster) to make a toast and then you drink about half your cup. Grandpa always tells people that he's teaching me Georgian. This Georgian that he's teaching me though, is limited to the drinking sphere. At first he made me repeat all his toasts "To our parents! Cheers! - Now you say it!"

"To our parents! Cheers!" I would reply.

Once he was convinced that I had it down he would sit down at the table with 2 cups and a pitcher of wine, and say "You're the toastmaster." And I would cheers our parents, our siblings, the children, the church, and peace, and would refill our wine glasses after every toast. 

If I came home from school late and he had already eaten, he would come in the kitchen and throw up his arms in exasperation and say "Why aren't you drinking wine? You know where the wine is!"

In Georgia, they don't have the same qualms about drinking alone. Or drinking in the morning. Or drinking before noon. Or drinking with children who's age is still in the single digits. Basically, one thing you can count on here, is you're probably not going to be judged based on your alcohol consumption habits. Unless you drink without toasting. That will get people talking. 

The coolest thing about my grandpa is that he's laid back. He doesn't get dramatic or join in the constant shouting that goes on between Georgians in normal conversation. Granted, this may be because he literally is not capable of shouting, but still. 

His facial expressions are priceless, and make up for what his vocal chords lack. Maybe one of the funniest things I've seen here was when my host dad brought home a can of Red Bull. I declined his offer to have any, telling him it tasted bad, and instead watched him pour a glass for himself, and for grandma and grandpa. I don't know how to say "I told you so" in Georgian, but it was enough for me to see them sputtering and gagging. My grandpa most of all, with a look on his face that so clearly said "What the **** is this ****??"

All in all, he's a pretty cool guy, and I'll miss him. But I know he'll be toasting to me from Georgia. 

Jamie Gets Sick

It is my firm belief that all one has to do to prevent the common cold is to drink one glass of pure, extremely pulpy orange juice per day. Foreseeing the possibility that this may not always be available to me in Georgia, I packed some gummi vitamins, and I've been making sure to eat as much fruit as possible. However, recently I got my second cold while in Georgia. (I prepared for that, too, by bringing packs of pills for anything that may ail me. However, I took them all out of their boxes in order to save room in my luggage, and now I have to wikipedia things like meclozine and pseudoephedrine hydrochloride to make sure I'm taking the correct pills and in the correct dosage).

The first time I got a cold, no one really seemed to care. This time, for some reason, it was different. Maybe because practically everyone in my house got sick at the same time - maybe we should cover our mouths when we cough or sneeze, you say? maybe we shouldn't all tear off pieces of the same loaf of bread with our hands, you say? maybe we shouldn't all stick our grubby fingers in a bowl of salt, you say? maybe we shouldn't use a community water glass, you say? Silly you, that couldn't be it. It must've been because we all walked around without socks or slippers. Or because we showered and then did not completely blowdry every strand of our hair. 

Anyways, I had the beginnings of a cold on Wednesday, and on Thursday I got up and felt like crap. I went down to breakfast with a scratchy voice and a runny nose, and my host mom said "Why don't you stay home today?"

I did the obligatory, "Oh, no, I shouldn't," in a tone that truly lacked conviction.

She asked how many classes I had and I said 2. She goes "Pshh, just stay home then!"

So I did. I went back upstairs, got in bed and dozed until about noon. Then I came downstairs where there was a nice toasty fire in the stove and alternated between watching staged German reality shows on TV when the electricity was on, and Amelie on my laptop when it went out. 

In the afternoon, I went to take a shower, because I was gross and smelly. I went in the kitchen to turn the hot water on, and my host mom said "What are you doing? You can't take a shower when you're sick!" 

I pointed at my hair and made a disgusted face. If you know international sign language, you understand that this means "But my hair is disgusting."

She would have none of it, and told me I could shower at night before I went to bed. This made no sense, since if I showered earlier I would have time to warm up in the living room by the fire, whereas, if I showered before bed, I would be damp and shivering in my quite cold room. However, since I am incapable of arguing this point in Georgian or international sign language, I just nodded assent.

A little later, my host mom told me I was red and looked like I had a fever. I'm pretty sure I did, since I had been having sweats and chills for hours, but when she tried to get me to take my temperature I absolutely refused. It must have seemed really weird to them. What's the harm in taking your temperature? But as much as they tried to get me to, I resisted. The truth is, walking bag of germs that I was at the time, I was a little afraid of what microscopic creatures were lurking on that thermometer. First of all, I didn't trust that they would have washed after whoever had used it last, and secondly, I had seen my sister drop it on the floor a half hour earlier and was pretty sure it hadn't left the room to be washed in the meantime. In addition, if I did have a fever, I didn't want them trying to force unknown medications on me on top of the unknown medications (didn't have internet access so couldn't wikipedia them) I had already taken. 

Evening came and my host mother informed me that I was no longer allowed to shower at night. She had decided, "You can skip school tomorrow, and then it's the weekend and you won't have to shower until Sunday night, and then Monday you can go to school."

This was a horrifying prospect. That would make it six days without a shower. In Georgia, where company just pops in unexpected, and where I, as the foreigner, am judged a little more harshly than most for my dress and appearance. Maybe harshly isn't a good word, but what I'm wearing and how I look is definitely noticed more than the locals. I can tell every morning when I walk in the teacher's room and all eyes turn to me and scan me up and down. 

Also, the thought of missing another day of school was not appealing. Not because I feel I have a huge responsibility to be there, that the kids will be lost without me, that the class will be a failure without my native English voice reading dialogues between Mr. Jolly, Dan, and Lily about King Tub's competition on Saturday. I didn't want to miss it because my phone was out of money, which means I couldn't call or text and I knew that if they didn't let me out of the house for school, they wouldn't let me walk to the store to put more money on it. Plus, the internet at our house wasn't working and I really needed to steal some of the school's wifi to look up some stuff and get some things in order for Korea. So four days in my house with no phone and no internet meant no connection to the outside world and I just didn't think I could handle it. And the no showering thing on top of it would just push me to the breaking point. 

So I did what a good host daughter does and went along with it while secretly planning to get up in the middle of the night and creep downstairs for a shower, and to slip out of the house the next day unseen and disguised as an elderly Georgian to fill up my phone at the store without the neighbors reporting that they'd seen me out and about.

But the next morning I took a much simpler route. I got up to go to the bathroom, and my host mother was there burning the dirty toilet paper (this is the part where you say to yourself "Wow, I'm so lucky to have a toilet where I can just flush my toilet paper, instead of a hole in the ground where the toilet paper has to be collected in a trash can and burned so the hole doesn't fill up too fast." - or, if you have the latter, it's the part where you say "That reminds me, I forgot to go burn the toilet paper this morning. It's getting a little full.")

Anyways, I took this opportunity to say "I feel good now. I can go to school." And then I added a thumbs up, because that's something that I do a lot now. 

My mom agreed but when I went to take a shower she again told me I couldn't, because then I would be cold on the way to school. I said, in Georgian, "I can't go to school...." and then in international sign language, "...because my hair is disgusting!" I don't know if it was the look of alarm on my face at the thought of going out in public in the nasty state that I was in, or if she actually took a good look at my hair and realized how disgusting it really was, but she let me take a shower. 

And so as I write this, my hair is clean, my phone is loaded with 3 lari and 90 tetri, and my pocket is full of a pack of kleenexes I picked up at the store so that I don't have to keep blowing my nose with napkins. I also got a good amount of internet time in during my free period at school, luckily before the electricity went out. 

And so, all is well in the world. 

And now I'd like to take a moment to rant about my host dad, who was also sick. But in addition to fever, congestion, and sore throat, his cold turned him into a giant crying baby. There was a youtube video a while back that I saw about what I think they called the "man cold" if I remember right - basically saying that when men get a cold they act as if they're an inch from death, in grueling agony, in great suffering under the grips of this terrible virus. My host dad was the epitome of this. Staggering around the house as if, with each step someone was twisting a knife deep into his gut. Literally, at least once an hour he would turn to me with a pained expression and say "Jame! How are you?" 

"Eh...so-so."

"Me, I'm terrible. Does your throat hurt?"

"Eh, kind of."

"My throat hurts a lot. Does your head hurt?"

"Eh....yeah, kind of."

"Mine hurts so bad. Do you have a fever?"

"I don't know."

"I'm burning up!"

I am really not kidding when I say this happened at least once an hour. My host dad is the king of repetition. Nothing ever gets old to him. Every time I get done with a meal he says "Jame! Eat!" and I say that I don't want to and he says "Jame!" and then gradually sticks out his arms to the side like a person who is getting fat. He thinks this is hilarious. Still. He does this every day, at least once, but usually 3 times. And he laughs every time. And I try to at least give a chuckle but it's getting harder and harder. 

When my host dad would cough, it wasn't just a cough, it was an entire production. A performance that would put Russell Crowe in Gladiator to shame, that would make Halle Berry hand over her Oscar. If you heard it, it would make you scan the floor to see if his lung was laying there. 

His 65 year old mother, I might add, was also afflicted, and when she had a fit of coughing, it was definitely real, and I definitely was concerned a few times that she might have popped a few capillaries or something. However, she was still expected to cook, clear the table for everyone, and go about her daily household business as usual. Because she just had a cold. Not a man cold. 

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.