Books of 2018

Outbox - only the latest editions here.

Before I came to Peace Corps, everything I read talked about how I would have so much time that I wouldn't know what to do with myself, and that when I came back to America I would miss that. I don't believe that will be case. Peace Corps Georgia seems to lend itself to overwork by volunteers, and between my lessons, English Club, collaborations with regional groups, my work writing grants for GLOW, my English Cabinet renovation grant, language learning, Peace Corps trainings and meetings and tasks, personal writing projects, community relationship building, grad school applications, and general life (and fun things like exploring all ends of Georgia and showing visitors around and growing plants), I'm busier here than I ever was in the U.S. - I never got home from work there and then sat at my computer to work for another 4 or 5 hours, but that has been the case here on many more than one occasion.

Nonetheless, my remote location has provided me with some time to read, in the form of excessively long public transit journeys - 9 hours to Tbilisi, 2 hours just to my closest city. But I am blessed to be able to read on marshutkas, and so here we have it: a list of what was read in 2018. Not quite a book a week, but not terrible. The good, the bad, the dumb:

1. Red Journeys: Inside the Thai Red-Shirt Movement - Claudio Sopranzetti - first week of January: This was a long time ago. I know almost nothing about Thai history or politics (ok, a lot more than the average American, but a lot less than the average Thai), so this slice of life/protest experience book was a little confusing, but still interesting. Plus! It was a book in English, which is much more common on the island (I was visiting my dad in Thailand) than it used to be, but pickings are still slim.
2. Stalin - Unknown Author - early January: Another random island book, this time a Soviet biography of Stalin published in 1947 or 1949 (I gave it away so I don't have any of the details). A simplified depiction of events, no famines, almost nothing about Georgia that I recall 11 months later. 
3. Confronting the Classics - Mary Beard - late March: A gift from a wetland ecologist friend, who was reading it and then no longer wished to carry it. My classics education has been somewhat slim, not much beyond some early childhood acting as Hestia, goddess of the hearth, some books of Greek myths for kids, and AP Art History in senior year of high school, so while this book presented some intriguing perspectives on the study of classics, I feel like I have quite a bit of reading to do before I can have any of my own ideas on these topics. Reading this before reading the "classics" does provide some good background and a large pile of salt to consume while reading.
4. The Far Away Brothers - Lauren Markham - sometime in spring: My mom's cousin's book about the lives of two Salvadoran students at the immigrant and refugee high school she works at, that I also volunteer taught at for the summer before I came to Georgia. A timely and empathetic insight into the refugee experience, and something I think more Americans should read, especially in this time of caravan scares and border walls.
5. The Iliad - "Homer" - finished in the first week of May: See above for explanation, the first "classic" I found in the Peace Corps library. An easier read than I was expecting because I always get it confused with The Odyssey and then I confuse that with Ulysses. Probably better in Greek or if I knew what dactylic hexameter is. I'll get there eventually.
6. The Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger - first week of May: Fruits of the Keda Center for English Education library. If only I had read this during the angsty high school years. It was fine. Made me miss America a little bit.
7. A Clockwork Orange - Anthony Burgess - first week of May: Another Keda library hit. I distinctly remember trying to read this in 9th or 10th grade and being so frustrated with the "made-up" words that I stopped after a few pages, a rare thing for me. Now that I've finally read this, all that's left on that list are the Bible and Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown (a failed attempt at reading what my mom was reading in middle school). Anyway, after a year of college Russian the fake words make much more sense, and it was a fun, occasionally cringe-inducing read. I've never made it to the end of the movie either (it's something that people always seem to put on at the end of the night & then I immediately go to sleep), so I have no idea how it compares.
8. Salvage the Bones - Jesamyn Ward - end of June: Another book that I think all Americans should read, this one about the experiences of one family during and after Hurricane Katrina. Despite being aware of news coverage at the time and then living in New Orleans for college, I don't think I have ever come as close to understanding what it's like to live through a hurricane and its attendant devastation as I did while reading this book. Thanks mom for sending me books to keep up with the literary world outside of the Peace Corps library :)
9. Redbreast - Jo Nesbo - first week of July: I have a soft spot for Nordic thrillers ok?
10. Sindbad the Sailor - Unknown Author - last week of July: A book found on the free table in the Peace Corps office and foraged for my school's library. Charming, short, reminded me that I should read the whole One Thousand and One Nights.
11. The Valkyries - Paulo Coelho - 9 August 2018: Another free pile salvaged book, not my style at all, but the western desert settings reminded me of happy road trips through the Eastern Sierra, and Death Valley and so on. Put it in the school library but I don't anticipate any of my students reading it any time soon. 
12. The Possessed - Fyodor Dostoevsky - sometime in August: At this point I think I have read almost all of the English language novels in the Keda library. I am usually a fast reader, but this put me to sleep every time I read a few pages, so it took months. I carried it to Tbilisi and back home, from Mestia to Ushguli on foot, and a lot more places. I assume it's better in Russian. Someday...
13. Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides - sometime in October: Probably my favorite book this year, and one that I have no idea about going in, except that other people also thought it was good. I especially enjoyed the descriptions of life in Turkey in the early 1900s and the Greek diaspora, though I asked a former professor of mine who studies the Ottomans and World War I and also happens to be from Izmir (which is mentioned in the book in its Greek name, Smyrna) about the depiction and he said to keep the 19th and 20th century British mindset in mind while evaluating accuracy. A great story about the 20th century American experience, covering so many aspects of life while still staying utterly engaging. I was sorry to reach the end. 
14. Dead Souls - Nikolai Gogol - early November: Brought back traumatic memories of the Performance class I was forced to take in college back when I wanted to be a lighting designer. We had a Russian visiting professor in the department that year, and spent an excessive amount of time on Gogol short stories, which was fun until we had to do performance activities in response to them. For the record, I got an A though the professor said he had never had a student who hated his class so much. Anyway, it was fine, though not as funny as some of the short stories, an interesting look at 19th century Russian life. More importantly, after reading it I started noticing regular references to "dead souls" that wouldn't have meant anything to me before - "dead souls" rumored on Georgian voter rolls, "Dead Souls" as the title to a song on my favorite Joy Division album (Les Baines Douches, obviously), and it's a book I can refer to in conversation with older Georgians (i.e. my Georgian tutor). Valuable for it's influence for sure. 
15. The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkein - early November: Somehow never read this during my high fantasy days (aka like every day from 4th through 9th grade), despite reading all of the Lord of the Rings books. A delightful one.
16. The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkein - mid November: You know.
17. The Fellowship of the Ring - J. R. R. Tolkein - 18 November 2018: See above. 
18. The Return of the King - J. R. R. Tolkein -  19 November 2018: #3.
19. The Picture of Dorian Gray and Three Stories - Oscar Wilde - 23 November 2018: Oscar Wilde is insufferable and so are most of his characters, but still a fun read. I enjoyed the filler stories more than The Picture of Dorian Gray. 
20. Dissolution: Sovereignty and the Breakup of the Soviet Union - Edward W. Walker - early December 2018: Another one that took me over a year to read because I kept opening it and promptly falling asleep. I started reading it before coming to Peace Corps because it was one of two books about Georgia (in part) that I could find at my local used bookstore before coming here (I went every week for a few months and asked if they had anything about Georgia, they thought I was insane, love you Moe's). Glad I finished it though, I feel like through school and other stuff I've learned a lot about the Soviet period, and through living in Georgia I learned a lot about the post-Soviet experience, but while reading I found that a lot of the assumptions I had made about the break-up were wrong, and filled in some very large gaps in my knowledge, especially regarding the Abkhazian and South Ossetian conflicts, even though not much space in the book was devoted to them specifically. 

*Also a wide variety of books for young children, abridged versions of classics, etc. for classroom purposes & because they're what I have in the village...

In progress...

I am currently very slowly reading:

1. A Reader of Modern Arabic Short Stories - Edited by Sabry Hafez and Catherine Cobham: (Arabic & English) Kill me.
2. Amirani and Hanzel da Greteli: Georgian children's stories, shouldn't be taking as long as they are.
3. Hari Poteri da Pilosofiuri Qva - J. K. Rowling: The Georgian translation obviously. Gonna learn some useful words!
4. Persepolisi - Marjane Satrapi: A graphic novel in Georgian! Easy, right? No.
5. Backpacking: One Step at a Time - Harvey Manning So many details about methods of waterproofing clothing! Wau!
6. Deda Ena - Iakob Gogebashvili: The classic first grade text. Also the reason I know a million animal names but nothing else in Georgian.
7. The Real Thief - William Steig: A children's book about a goose. I keep leaving it weird places so I still haven't finished it even though the student I was supposed to be asking about it returned their copy long ago.

Also, shout-out to my reference books. 

Finally, I spent a lot of time with A Field Guide to Birds of the USSR, the Lonely Planet Guide to Georgia, Armenia, & Azerbaijan, my dictionaries & Georgian textbook, and Forsman's The Raptors of Europe and the Middle East: A Handbook of Field Identification.

Wish me luck for 52 books in 2019, and as much learning as I did in 2018!

Coming up next...

Eids aka ბაირამები aka أعياد

The neighborhood men working on 2017's cow, a collective project (Keda, Georgia)

Eid al Adha (or Eid al Kabir in the Maghreb or Kurban Bayram in Turkey and Georgia), or the Feast of the Sacrifice, is on of the two holidays celebrated by Muslims across the world. Eid al Adha is considered the holier of the two, and honors Abraham's willingness to kill his son Ishmael on god's command (the Muslim version of the story differs slightly from the Christian and Jewish versions in which Isaac is the son to be sacrificed). The holiday begins on the 10th day of the 12th month of the Islamic calendar, Dhu al Hijjah, during which many Muslims are also on hajj (pilgrimage) in Mecca. This year, that corresponds to the 21st of August. Celebrations differ across the world, but one thing they all have in common is the sacrifice of animals, representing the animal that Abraham found under his knife as he prepared to sacrifice his son on Mt. Arafat.

Eid al Fitr in Ibri, Oman 2015

Eid al Fitr, the other widely celebrated holiday, marks the end of Ramadan, the 9th month of the Islamic calendar, during which devout Muslims fast from dawn to sunset every day. Muslims give money to the poor (and often any children in the household) before saying the special Eid al Fitr prayer.

Visualize Keda summer- hot, rural, humid, hills, perfect (2018)

I have now had the privilege of experiencing both Eids with three very different host families, in Morocco, Oman, and Georgia. I'm from a basically agnostic Thai Buddhist/Catholic (?) family, so grew up on typical American Christmas, with lots of presents, an annual Christmas ornament, a picture book with an abbreviated and not very religious Jesus story, and the occasional Christmas mass with my grandparents, so all of this was fairly new to me in 2014, minus the occasional news story full of bloody sheep heads from Cairo or whatever. I only learned the story of Abraham because I took AP Art History in 12th grade (turns out the history of Western art is mostly churches and things that go in or on churches. Ask me about the paper model of the Cathedral of the Intercession of the Most Holy Theotokos on the Moat aka St. Basils).

My street, Rabat 2014

"Please don't panic." - Rabat, Morocco 2014

Jad at the sheep market (Rabat 2014)

In Rabat I lived with a middle-class young grandmother, her daughter, and her daughter's young son. It was a small household in a tall, cool, and dark medina house. I had acquired my first real smartphone two months prior. I wasn't close to the host family, because my Arabic was terrible, their Arabic (darija) was incomprehensible because it was mostly French, and honestly I wasn't very good about trying to build a good relationship with them. I spent all of my time outside of the house wandering or traveling and I never really learned much about them, their beliefs or thoughts or even their favorite foods or basic stuff like that. I could only assume that since the host grandmother was divorced and wore pants instead of the djellaba typical in our neighborhood that they weren't very conservative. She always had a head covering but it was usually a hat. Anyway, one day we bought a sheep, kept it on our roof for a few days while my host brother ran around yelling "knife! knife!" in baby darija and waving a plastic butter knife, and then on Eid the neighborhood butcher came by, killed it, and then cut it into manageable pieces. Luckily the roof was already painted red. They left the skin on the roof for a very long time, and I never figured out why.

Our cute roof sheep, Rabat 2014

The first time I remember seeing a non-fish animal die for me to eat (Rabat 2014)

Then we ate it! They set up a little barbecue INSIDE THE HOUSE and made delicious sheep foods. I ate a liver sandwich for the first time, and then a lot of other organs, and also pretty much every other sheep part. Other people on my study abroad program had lots of guests or had cows killed in their living rooms instead of sheep on the room, but my first Eid was pretty low key. We ate, and then went back to our typical daily activities. My host family gave some of meat to the neighbors, as you're supposed to do, though not enough for us to not eat sheep for like the next month. One part of the holiday is wealthy people who can afford to sacrifice an animal are supposed to share with poorer people who aren't able to eat meat as often and buy their own sacrifice. I went for a walk that afternoon and the streets were quiet and empty, except for young men tending fires full of burning sheep heads and hooves, one of the more ~heavy metal~ afternoon strolls I've gone on. There weren't any men in the household, so no one went to the mosque for prayers or anything. For an American used to holidays as a BIG DEAL it seemed very low key - sheep killed and done - but they were also a low key family, so it shouldn't have been a huge surprise.

Crunchy (Rabat 2014)

Bread, sheep, olives, eggplant, yum (Rabat 2014)

My next Eid was Eid al Fitr in Ibri, Oman (a provincial city on the edge of the Empty Quarter). The day before was 117° F. My "host family" here wasn't really a host family, but rather the family of my language partner, whose house I occasionally stayed at. This family was very, very different from my Moroccan one (high key?). My language partner's husband worked for an oil company, they had the entire extended family in one house, they had a maid. This relationship was better than the one I had with my Morocco host family, but was still pretty superficial. I adored my language partner, but we had nothing in common, and since we didn't actually live together, nothing to force us into commonality. We talked a lot, and I learned about her views on race and things like that, but I never responded the way I wanted to, because I never got that comfortable. Holidays with her were fun though. Ramadan in Oman was harsh days of fasting (not my fasting, but no water, every day over 100° has got to be brutal) alternating with nights of wandering the town in a pack of girls and eating the weirdest, richest Instagram video dessert recipes at like 4 am. Also a lot of Vimto.

Ibri at dusk, 2015

Honestly, if you see this, buy it & drink it, it's great (Source: http://www.vimto.co.za)

Host cousin Hagar & I, approx. 8am and the ground is already hot enough to burn my feet (Ibri 2015)

Eid al Fitr began with waking up at like 5:30 am or some unreasonably early time to discover all of the Omani girls already dressed and made up and ready to go. I got into my borrowed Salalah-style wedding dress (we were not given a choice in dresses), and we all went to the family's patriarchal home with about 100 other people, were given money by the adults (in my experience, random Americans will always be included in the "children" category), went to a riverbed market (Eiood) to spend the money on toys and sweets (only children, male chaperones, and the Americans), and then went back to the patriarch's house where other family members set up little stands selling food like barbecue, ramen, french fries and ice cream (and also fireworks). The Omani women mostly stayed inside in the women's room, but I took the freedom to wander. This Eid was basically a party, with beautiful dresses, a lot of money exchanging hands, and greasy, sugary, delicious food, followed by a purgatory of photo-taking and napping, and then 14 girls in one car being driven to eat Pizza Hut in the park for dinner.

Eating mtsvadi at Eid al Fitr in Ibri, Oman 2015. This is party Eid. 

And finally, Georgia! Morocco and Oman taught me a lot about language learning and cultural integration and mistakes and regrets I didn't want to repeat and also I've matured and I'm here for two years instead of a matter of months, which has all helped a lot with my time here, and I think I'm that much happier for it (I am very happy). My relationship with my host family is much better than previous ones, both because of their personalities and a conscious effort on my part. I also have a 12 year old host sister who really wants me to be like a real sister to her, since she doesn't have one, and won't. In the year I've been here I've visited her father's grave with the family, had crying host cousins run to me when they're scared late at night, gone to a collective five days of funeral, including three for someone who I'd gotten to know and care for, yelled at my host sister for mindlessly reposting racist stuff on Facebook, and been offered pocket money by my host grandfather every time I leave the house even though I pay them to live here. This relationship has changed my perspective on their holidays and traditions too. Instead of an external observer, I participate - I entertain the kids while their parents cook and help set the table and clean up and explain to angry host uncles why I haven't visited, where before I just wandered and watched. It's been interesting to compare Adjaran Islam to my previous experiences, mostly because they're practically nothing alike, but again, my experience here is not like my study abroad ones were. I don't know how much of it is former Soviet Union, or Georgia, or Adjara, or Keda, or village life versus city life, or class, or my host family in particular, or just a change in my perspective but it's so very different here. They're probably the richest family living in this village, but the lifestyle is very different from old Rabati people, and radically different from the upper class Omani life. Everyone farms. Most drink, they cook pork in my house though not everyone eats it, my house computer's screenshot is a picture of my host sister on an excursion to a church. At the same time, the older women wear headscarves (but so do a lot of the Christian ones), my host grandmother prays 5 times a day, and the people that did fast fasted for real, while still working on the farm and the kindergarten in the summer heat (not the air-conditioned nap days of my Omani experience). My educated guess is that my host family is very religious for Keda, but considerably less religious than communities further up in the mountains (Khulo) or in Kvemo Kartli or Pankisi. My Moroccan and Omani experiences both seemed strictly family based, but in the village it seems like everyone participates together, though family members stick around the longest. 

The view from my bedroom window through the persimmons, Keda 2017

For my first Eid al Adha in Keda, I had scheduled a summer camp for that day and half my students didn't show up, but no one told me why, including my (English speaking and usually very helpful) host sister. And then I came home and half the village was in my yard dismembering a cow. I think they just didn't think I would be interested, since it's not actually the biggest holiday here. This year they didn't even do the cow at our house - I guess the Muslim families in my village take turns, so all the men except for one grumpy host cousin disappeared for the afternoon, and returned with a reusable shopping bag full of meat. Unlike in Rabat, we don't appear to have a local butcher, so last year all the dudes just grabbed whatever implements they had and went at it - some were clearly more experience than others, but just imagine two guys holding a massive cow leg and one guy swinging an axe at it trying to break the bone, while little chips of it fly around the yard. 

I looked for a picture of something other than dead cow but failed (Keda 2017)

My host family visited graves this morning with halva, baklava, and roses, and then cooked the meat for dinner, but my host grandfather's birthday party the day before was a much bigger event. It had to end at exactly midnight though, because drinking on Eid is not permitted. By the time dinner rolled around, all the guests were pretty much gone anyway, and more tragically, all the leftovers from the birthday had been eaten. It was such a non-event that I went to Georgian tutoring in the middle of the day. My tutor is Christian, but her neighbor (and my 6th grade student) brought her a plastic bag full of meat anyway. My teenage Christian neighbor (from a Muslim family) went to visit her father's grave today too. Likewise, when the father in my host family's was alive, they had a Christmas tree every year. New Years and Easter were also marked more enthusiastically than Eid al Adha, though I think that might be because Eid al Adha is a religious holiday, whereas New Years and Easter are just for fun - fireworks, pretty eggs, and pasca and no contemplation of death and god. I didn't take any pictures this year, except for one of my baby host cousin watering my plants because there was nothing to take pictures of. 

Nikolozi, King of the Sea (Keda 2018)

Last year's Bayrami feast, because we had to feed all the guys that were hacking apart the cow (Keda 2017)

I missed Eid al Fitr both years, so stay updated for next year I guess.

Waiting - 29 guests for Mawlid (Keda 2017)

Addendum: events that have featured more religious activity here than either Eid: funerals and Mawlid (მევლუდი), Mohammed's birthday and a holiday that very conservative denominations of Islam reject. Both of those events had an imam come to the house for prayers. For my host great-grandmother's funeral, the imam said some words over the body inside with the women (who sit and mourn around the coffin for days), before going outside and leading an actual prayer with the men, who stood hands up in the rain. Her shroud was green, with Arabic writing and a picture of the Grand Mosque of Mecca, the most overtly Islamic symbols I'd seen in our house aside from the Quran that's kept in our top kitchen shelf. During the Mawlid prayer was the only time I've had to wear a head scarf for anything Islam related in Georgia - you have to wear one in Orthodox churches, but apparently not in mosques here if you're just looking around. In conclusion, different countries are different places, and I'm not shocked that a religion as big as Islam is practiced in different ways, but I love having the opportunity to see these different traditions, to try to understand why they're there, and to keep learning. 

My host grandmother's headscarf and prayer rug, my host great-grandmother's shroud (Keda 2018)

Mawlid feast (Keda 2017)

Bonus pic for anyone who finished reading this: host grandfather Shalva, Eid al Adha 2017, Keda

Georgia's (Probably) Most Famous Export: Mineral Water

Image taken from the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan.

Mineral water is Georgia's most famous export, especially in the former Soviet Union. While La Croix has become recently trendy in America, mineral water (and here I am discussing the sparkling kind) has come nowhere close to reaching the ubiquity it has in Georgia. It's on every supra table (feast), it comes around at funerals, it pours out of springs across the country, and there's an amusement park centered on mineral water in the town of Borjomi. It is also considered an excellent hangover cure. It's most commonly served in 500 to 750 milliter bottles that you pour out into small cups (4 ounces?). If you're at a supra you just pour it into your own cup. If you're at a funeral or otherwise sitting in a place where not everyone has a cup it will be poured for you, the pourer will wait for you to drink it, and then refill and continue on to the next person.

Source: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan

Source: Mr. Wilson's History Website, Liberty Middle School

Since it's already been mentioned, we'll start with Borjomi, the most famous of Georgia's famous mineral waters. This one comes from a town, Borjomi, in the southern Samtskhe-Javakheti region. People travel to the town in hopes that the water will cure their ailments, and a small tourist economy has grown up around the springs, including the aforementioned park with a cable car, and ferris wheel, a public spigot where a grumpy lady will fill any size bottle you hand her with water, and a museum in the former bottling factory. The spring was apparently discovered and bathed in thousands of years ago, and then rediscovered by the Russian army in 1829. Exports of Borjomi began during the imperial period and continued during Soviet times, reaching around 400 million bottles annually in the 1980s.

All u can drink.

As far as the taste of Borjomi goes, it's one of the saltier ones around. Some days it's a little too salty for me, and some days I love it. This drink is not super popular with the American crowd, but is with the Georgian and Russian ones. A fellow PCV says: "Borjomi is like on the bottom of my list because it's so salty. Also because it's so popular and I don't do mainstream shit." It's not the most bubbly and goes flat pretty quickly. The bubbles are pretty average tbh - medium size, middle-of-the-road frequency. I almost never buy Borjomi, but if I'm at a conference at a fancy hotel and they put bottles of it on every table I will take them all. The glass bottles are nice but probably not worth the extra 20 tetri or whatever they cost more than the plastic ones. Also comes in cans for some reason, so they get extra points for being widely available, and for coming in a wide range of containers. 7/10

A Borjomi branded cable car in the Borjomi Mineral Water Park in Borjomi.

Pic and science stolen from Rakuten.com

Likani is the saltiest and more minerally tasting of the bunch. I've heard it compared to "drinking blood," or to "licking a rock," and a number of Americans I know won't drink it. I will if there's not other option, but it's not my favorite, and also probably too salty for everyday consumption. If you're really looking for that straight off the rocks vibe or are feeling mineral deprived, this is the drink for you. If not, look elsewhere. Honestly it's been so long since I drank this that I don't even remember the bubble quality but I feel like they were sparse. When I do drink this in large amounts I think constantly about how much extra sodium I don't need. This also comes from the town of Borjomi, from an area called Likani, which is also home to a Romanov Summer Palace that was later frequented by Soviet officials including Josef Stalin. Likani has a nice blue-green bottle, but I've only ever seen it in the 500ml size. It's widely available. 4/10

The author color-coordinating with Likani Palace a long, long time ago.

Nabeghlavi is by far the most popular brand of mineral water in Peace Corps. It's minimally minerally, has a nice amount of bubbles, and has an excellent advertising campaign. It's widely available, and the bottles have a weird yellow-green color scheme but it's ok. It apparently comes in cans but I've never seen them. Also it's from Village Nabeghlavi the region next to mine, Guria, and obviously the closer anything is to Adjara, the better. This water had an 8/10 but then I found out that apparently the spring was discovered in 1905 when local buffalo showed a preference for this water. 9/10

A Nabeghlavi ad taken from their Facebook page

Another high quality ad.

I am so persuaded by this advertising. 

Sairme is an ok bottle of water. I bought it once to try something new but it was a hot Batumi day and it was warm before I opened it, not a good start. It got flat pretty fast too, but it didn't have a super strong mineral flavor, which is nice when you really just want to hydrate and not turn into a human salt lick. The second time I got a bottle of this I waited too long to buy my train ticket and second class was sold out, so I had to pay an extra 26 lari for first class. The only thing different about first class is your chair is a lil bit bigger and you can get a bottle of mineral water but you have to know it's happening and go get it before they run out. Definitely not worth 26 lari. My rating of this water is tainted by bitter memories. It's not widely available and I've only seen in in plastic half liter bottles but has a nice deer logo. It's from Sairme, a resort outside of Kutaisi in Imereti, where it was purportedly discovered by two hunters following a wounded deer sometime in the 1890s. 5/10

Some people like it more than me I guess, pic borrowed from Caucasus Business Week.

Kokotauri is the best water on this list by far, and it's probably not just because the spring is 5 minutes from my house. It is not super minerally tasting and it has large bubbles in large quantities. It's very refreshing. The label has a nice picture of the local forest on it. It comes in one and two liter plastic bottles, and can only be purchased in the Keda Municipality as far as I can tell. In news that won't shock anyone who read the rest of this post, it's bottled in Village Kokotauri, and was first bottled in 1972. It has apparently been "branded by the people" as the Water of Immortality. The company's web presence is low and there do not appear to be images of the bottle online but it's the one with the forest on it. It also says Kokotauri in three languages, so if you want to, you can figure it out, and you should. It's the best. 10/10

I guess I've never actually taken pics of Kokotauri, but it's in the distance somewhere.

Just kidding, I apparently have a pic of the bread stand, but they painted it blue this morning.

Honorable mention: my village once had a bottling plant for Kemisi, a brand I can find no other information about. Awarded a posthumous 10/10

An old sign.

P.S. Please comment with any mineral water fun facts, opposing opinions, brands I missed, or sketchy springs you think I should drink from!

Every Single Thing I Did This Summer

A bus stop in between nowhere and nowhere, Khulo.

So it was summer and I’m a school teacher… so I didn’t have to do anything, right? No. Despite many warnings that I would be bored out of my mind during these last two months (I arrived at site on July 7th and school started on September 15th), I was very busy.

My host sister Diana & I by the very historical bridge near my house.

The main thing I was busy with was ~*integrating*~ into my community, which overlapped with the other main thing, work. Peace Corps likes to tell us that this is a 24/7 position, in which we are constantly working towards the three goals of PC: supplying qualified people to address the country’s needs (in my case, an English teacher), representing and teaching about the United States, teaching Americans about Georgia, and the PC way of doing those three things focuses heavily on integration. Integration basically means being accepted as a member of your community, and being able to use that position to stay safe, content, and effective. And of course, a large part of being able to integrate comes from learning to speak the language, so I have been studying Georgian for an hour a day on my own, and trying not hard enough to find a tutor. In addition to that, I spend a fair amount of time drinking coffee with my host mom and grandmother, doing yoga with my host sister (everyday!), wandering around my area, and picking fruit in one of the family’s many gardens/fields/vegetable gardens/other fields (I know how to name all of these in Georgian).

Learning how to make compote, a fruit drink, from my host mother.

Aside from all of that integration, I also had work duties. The week after arriving the new Keda volunteers and our counterparts were invited to help out at a camp organized by the local Education Resource Center, were the supervisor of all of Keda’s schools works along with a bunch of other people and a Peace Corps Response (PCR) volunteer. The camp was mostly planned before we got there, but it was a good opportunity to work with my counterpart, other volunteers, and some locals interested in education. My counterpart and I were responsible for the daily reading hour, which was perhaps not the most exciting camp activity, but the students seemed relatively engaged. I also helped out at another volunteer’s summer school later in the summer, where I taught a lesson and activity related to hobbies and taught a lot of extremely useful vocabulary, like “bird-watching” and “cacti.” My final collaboration for the year was at another volunteer’s girls basketball camp, where, thankfully, I was responsible for taking photographs and not playing basketball.

Keda Camp students with posters they made about (a very abridged version of) The Tempest

Another big side project of mine is GLOW, short for Girls Leading Our World. GLOW is an NGO started by PCVs that is slowly moving towards being Georgian led, and deals with girl’s empowerment through summer camps and conferences. I was selected to be on the grants & finance committee with a G16, and will be writing grants and dealing with other aspects of GLOW’s finances. This summer I also had the opportunity to attend one of GLOW’s two camps, and worked with a group of 7 girls over the course of the week. It was a very interesting experience, and I really enjoyed getting to know the girls and the Georgian counselors, who are all university students close to my age. At the camp girls learn about a very wide variety of topics that are minimally covered in Georgian schools,

We made a bunch of cheesy posteri to decorate for GLOW

A found supply fashion show! The fish dress didn't win but it should have.

Me, Analise, and Cherish, some of the G17 GLOW team.

Another thing that kept was busy was the 15 hour summer camp that all first-year volunteers are obliged to hold at their school. Mine was 3 hours a day over the course of 5 days, and required 3 or 4 planning meetings with my counterpart and director beforehand and a trip to Batumi to buy supplies. Our camp was an English camp with a focus on environmentalism, with an hour of English, an hour of environmental education, and an hour of active activities planned for each day. As with so many things, much did not go according to plan but I would still call it an overall success. My counterpart took the lead for most of the English lessons, teaching more formal grammar content while I provided some games and fun activities. I led sessions on environmentalism, pollution, and appreciating nature and also made the children pick up trash with only small amounts of candy bribery. We also played volleyball, went on a poorly planned hike to a very beautiful but also very distant waterfall, and had a potluck picnic at the historical bridge nearby, featuring a lot of potatoes and some wildly dangerous bridge jumping.

The English part of camp, featuring my classroom & one of my counterparts, Nineli.

A nature appreciation activity that even my director, Inga, got excited about.

They were already tired, and none of us knew how much hike there still was to go...

But also! Who knew such a beautiful & giant waterfall was here?

I spent a lot of the picnic picking up trash and putting it into a trash bag that someone else took away from the site, but the next time I walked to school I saw that it had been thrown on the side of the road into my host family’s field. It was very disappointing, because I felt as though nothing that I said during the five hours that week when we had talked about environmentalism and appreciated nature had gotten through. I couldn’t bring myself to pick it all up again. It’s still sitting there, every time I walk by. Maybe I’ll bring a bag down tomorrow, now that everyone who reads my blog knows it’s there too. And then I will try to teach it again, but differently, and try to remember what was said to me to make me care.

One weird picnic picture, and then all of my devices died and I went swimming.

I am also on a Peace Corps committee called the Diversity Working Group, which deals with issues related to volunteer diversity. We are still figuring out what exactly we are going to do for the next year, but we are hoping to provide opportunities for PCVs and PC staff to talk about their experiences, learn from each other, and learn about diversity related issues. Our last meeting was in Borjomi, which was a nice place to meet.

Olivia (a DWG member) & Annie, the education volunteer lucky enough to live in Borjomi.

Finally, during the month of September teachers are required to go to school every day, so I went too. Generally they seemed to prepare a little and chat a lot, but it was a good opportunity to get to know some of my new co-workers and use the school’s wifi before school started. Everyone usually stayed for about one or two hours around 11-12, and sometimes there was coffee and snacks. I was told to be there at 10 but nobody else was ever there that early. I kept coming at 10 because the weather was nicer for walking and I can get a fair amount of work done in a silent building with wifi that restricts access to social media and video content.

My school, decorated for camp.

Plus I’ve been trying to study a little Arabic everyday so I don’t forget it all and studying for various exams and also trying to learn English since apparently I teach that now.

I also went to a surprise funeral with all of my coworkers. I thought I was going on an excursion, but no. There was still hiking involved.

In addition to all of that important work stuff, I’ve also been able to see a little bit more of Georgia, though I need to work faster if I want to see it all before I leave.

A view of deep Shuakhevi, the neighboring region, from the funeral.

The first place I visited was Vaio, my friend Cherish’s site. I had to stay because my last marshutka is at around 8:30pm and I had been invited to a birthday dinner. Her house is at the end of an hour-long hike that you only usually get a ride for half of, but it is a beautiful village and her host family is extremely sweet, so it’s worth the trek.

The aforementioned birthday feast, pizza in the foreground :D

The view from Cherish's house~

Cherish, her host mom, and a host aunt visiting from Russia.

The next place I visited was Zvare, my friend Jenna's old site. We just went for the day, to hike, swim, and visit her host family, but it was lovely.

Jenna's ex-host-dogs

More lush Adjaran forest views

Post-swim snacks with Daniel, Jenna, and Jenna's host brother.

My first real trip was to Borjomi, for the DWG meeting. Borjomi is known for being home to the favorite mineral water brand of the Soviet Union, also called Borjomi. While I don’t dislike it, it’s not my brand of choice (more on that later). Two of us stayed in a very nice guesthouse overlooking the city that we happened upon after our reserved one seemed to be unoccupied by any staff members. Guesthouse #2 had a pleasantly all-female environment, with Olivia and I, two backpackers, and two women who lived there. While I feel very comfortable at my host family’s home, it’s nice to be able to make your morning coffee without a bra on. The morning after our meeting we went to some hot spring pools in the Borjomi park that I had read about. They turned out to be rather far down a path through the woods, though that hadn’t stopped the masses from getting there. We had met up with one of the volunteers in Borjomi, Annie, and ended up sitting in the icy river more than swimming in the small and crowded pools. I am ever on the lookout for more hot spring opportunities.

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I have had two meetings in Tbilisi so far, and more to come. It’s tragic because Tbilisi is between 6.5 and 9 hours from my site and between 40 and 60 lari, but glorious because Tbilisi is a wonderful city that I would never otherwise go to because it’s too far. Tbilisi is fun because I can dress up and there are always other volunteers around including ones I haven’t met and there are different types of food and beautiful buildings and tourists that I can speak Arabic with and several cablecars. I also use these opportunities to go to the PC office, where I get most of my mail and books from the library and very useful things from the free bin (All of my envelopes! A real towel! A very large scarf!). Despite all of this, I am dreading the next time I have to go back.

Tbilisi's bathhouse street, aka my 2nd favorite place in Georgia.

Also hummusbar has the best food I've had in Tbilisi and it's vegan ?! (Full disclosure these pics were taken during PST, but still in the summer)

On the way back from one trip to Tbilisi I stopped in Kvishkheti, turning a 9 hour marshutka ride into a 3 and 6 hour one. It was nice and weird to see my PST host family and the village, and I hope to go back again soon because I really want to maintain the relationships that I built there.

Remember these guys? <3 <3

While most of the trips I took this summer were work related or I was tagging along on a trip that someone else planned, there was one wonderful one that was all me. While researching my new site during PST I happened to read in passing about a mountain festival called Shuamtoba in Khulo, a nearby region. All I could find online were some pictures of it and evidence that it had occurred in previous years and may have once been the site of some illegal electioneering. The dearth of information obviously entranced me, and I had to go. I asked my friend Natali at the Keda tourism office about it and she called her Khulo counterpart and confirmed that it would occur during the first week of August, and it would be in a village called Beshumi and not in the town of Khulo. Despite my efforts, this was the most information I could find, until another volunteer happened to go their with her host family and sent me the phone number of a guy I could call to reserve a cabin. I did not reserve a cabin but I did recruit two of my fellow Kedalebi, Daniel and Cherish, to go up with me, a marshutka ride away of an unknown distance.

Marshutka views on the way to Khulo.

We paused in the town of Khulo for a bit after losing Cherish, which provided me with the opportunity to ride one of Georgia’s most scenic and underrated cablecars, and to order a meal that consisted of 7 hotdogs and a cucumber tomato salad. After we found Cherish we stopped to get her a beer after a difficult journey, and there encountered a man who decided that we would be riding in his marshutka to Beshumi. We decided not to argue and were rewarded with a small supra in a lovely field, and all the chacha we didn’t want to drink.

Happy **~~~**

Ugh just look at that cablecar

Daniel, a guy with a marshutka, and some of the most painful chacha I've ever experienced~

Eventually we reached Beshumi and wandered around until we ran into Daniel’s host family, who fed us a delicious meal and helped us find a cabin for the night. Cherish fell down the stairs of the host family’s cabin and sprained her ankle, though we didn’t know it at the time and didn’t let it stop us from our wandering. We had planned to camp if we couldn’t find lodging, but it kept raining. There was definitely not lodging though, since we had decided to come to a popular resort village during it’s most popular weekend. People come up from Adjara and Akhalsitkhe with their children because the dry air is apparently good for their health. The woman who rented us a cabin on the first night didn’t charge us because she felt bad about not having space for the second night, and they had had good experiences with prior PCVs. On the second night Brittany’s host family came back and was kind enough to let us stay in their cabin. I may have learned a lesson about the virtues of advance planning from this, but I’m not sure.

Beshumi has a lot of cabins and not much else

Jenna showed up with her host fam and I made her hike with me

Right before the rain

By the time we got to the actual festival we were already tired and it was hot and sunny above the treeline. We watched a series of very old men (I think one was 94!) dance traditional Georgian dances, and then a lot of other people dance them, and then we saw the head minister of Adjara come and say something. There were balloon sellers and fruit sellers and a lot of people with umbrellas to hide from the sun. There were also mysterious food stands with beautiful displays of local specialties that I could not quite figure out the source or purpose of, but after lingering by one long enough someone offered me a plate and I had some delicious sniori (cheese layered thing) and baklava. The highlight of the day was the horse races, which were the exact opposite of horse races that I have attended in America. They seemed to consist of all the local boys who had horses running in a big circle in a rocky and uneven field, with spectators permitted anywhere they felt safe enough to stand. The majority of the horses didn’t even finish the race, including, tragically, the one that I had bet my 5 lari on.

Mystery food and handicraft stand

The oldest dancer (94!) and a bride who just got married at the festival, awwww

A festival attendee and her pet chicken

The highlight of my festival experience~

I’ve also been to Batumi a few times because I have to go through it anytime I want to go somewhere other than Adjara, and it’s easy to come down and say hello to people rolling through. I go for the beach and the food, and occasionally for the bazaar or the cultural experiences. My best Batumi moment so far was walking to Carrefour and buying ingredients for spaghetti though. And also drinking 20 tetri cups of KVASS. I also went on a tour of the Batumi water company's intake and processing centers by tagging along on a water-company sponsored English camp excursion. It was strange and delightful.

Fun fact: on a water company tour, behind every door is... more water

The apartment facade of my dreams.

My final vacation of the summer was one night in Ureki, otherwise known as the beach with actual sand. Rachel and Dora and I went and buried ourselves in the magnetic sand and late afternoon light. The sand is supposed to have some variety of healing property. There were so many people, but no ATM. I bought pickled herring but it was very slimy and strange. Ureki was peak Georgian tourist town, and I loved it.

The beach with the sand

Also the most beautiful bus stop in the most perfect light

SNAKE UPDATE: My Peace Corps live snake sighting number has been raised to 10.

High quality evidence of one snake, by the family cow shed.