Important Bread Discussion

If one is planning on blogging about the Georgian experience for long, one must eventually discuss the one constant in Georgian life - პური (puri, aka bread). It is present at almost every meal, and certainly every meal that involves more than just kasha (rice porridge) or buckwheat (what I would call kasha in the US), and there are infinite varieties of said bread. I will be discussing the ones I have encountered thus far, though even here I run into some difficulties. Firstly, what is bread? How much dough must be in something before it stops being a dumpling and becomes a bread? Is a cake a bread? I have no answers, so I will instead use a broad and all-encompassing definition that says that anything that feels breadful is bread, which happens to exclude cake. I am open to critiques of this definition and further discussion. And now, the details. I have selected a few basic bread types to start, because though the bread here is infinite, my time is not. I will continue in a later post with more details, types, better images (sorry), and bread-related anecdotes.

Basic bread, in the fam's basic bread bucket.

Regular Puri: This is a standard bread product, similar to the breads I've eaten in other bread-heavy cultures (aka Morocco). Round, breadful, very good fresh from the oven. I have not seen this in action, but my Kvishkheti host grandmother baked this type of bread once or twice a week, inevitably when I was not at home. For almost all of Pre-Service Training (PST), I toasted a piece of this on the stove and at it with homemade (!!!) butter for breakfast. On busy days I just grabbed a piece and ate it as I walked. We also ate this with lunch and dinner. It is very good for picking up other food with, since it has a very high crust to middle ratio. Unfortunately it does get stale like normal American bread. I learned to eat a lot of it on day 1, so there wouldn't have to be a day 4. This is easy to do in a household of 8.

Bread products from right: lobiani, piroshkii, regular puri, mchadi

"French Bread:" I don't know what else to call this. Sometimes instead of delicious homemade puri there were these longer loaves of white bread. They are fluffy and have a decent crust but the middle is barely worth eating. It is harder to toast nicely, especially when you only have blunt instruments to cut said bread with. On days where we had this I would usually eat one or two of the biscuits that the baby ate instead.

Slices of french bread can be seen, but luckily they are surrounded by other, better bread products.

My New Host Family's Bread - My new host family makes a different kind of bread that I haveჭხა not seen before. They bake it in a very large toaster oven, and it comes out in big tray-shaped loaves that are maybe 18"x18"x3". This bread also has a very nice crust to middle ratio. I have only eaten it once so far but it was straight out of the oven and a lovely experience.

ხაჭაპური aka Khatchapuri - Round cheese bread, with many regional variations. I have had only two types - the boring one with just cheese in the middle, and a fancier one with cheese in the middle and on the top. The first one is the standard - typical Georgian kveli in typical Georgian khatchapuri dough, though once I had it with some kind of cottage cheese thing inside and that was great. The dough varies - sometimes it's more flaky and buttery, sometimes more crispy, sometimes chewy. I personally don't eat a ton of it unless it's the flaky kind or a new one. Adjara, my new region, has an eponymous khatchapuri variation that is shaped like a boat and has an egg in the middle, but I have yet to try it. In Kvishkheti, my host grandmother made a fair amount of khatchapuri, probably once a week. When it was cold and we still had the petchi (wood stove) going (until May!), she cooked it in there, in a big 18" or so round pan. It is a very thin bread with a layer of cheese in the middle. When it's not winter I suppose she could bake it in one of the three or four other ovens that were present (two normal ovens, a toaster oven, the tonis puri oven), but there's a second petchi in the second kitchen that she uses instead. When I arrived at my new site at 1am, my host mother who had also travelled all day from Tbilisi started making khatchapuri, so I stayed up and ate that until 1:45am before excusing myself. She cooks it in a similar pan to my Kvishkheti fam, but on the stovetop instead. I have seen square khatchapuri for sale that looks very flaky and delicious but I have not yet had it. I will report back.

Khatchapuri slices on the right, regular bread on the left.

ლობიანი aka Lobiani - Bean bread. As far as I can tell this one does not have the same regional variations as khatchapuri but instead varies between the homemade variety and the fast food version. Basically something like pinto beans smashed and placed in between two thin layer of bread, the same size and shape as a standard khatchapuri. I didn't think I liked it much until my host grandmother in Kvishkheti brought me some fresh from the oven - a fluffy, soft, warm, savory delight. I have not had the experience repeated yet, alas, and for me it is not worth eating cold, as I always remember how it could be. The fast food version is a burrito variant - a piece of bread rolled up around a column of beans about 1" in diameter. This is not as good as the flat kind, but will do if you're protein deficient or just more enthusiastic about lobiani than I am.

"Fast food" shop khatchapuri and/or lobiani, plus some other stuff.

In conclusion, Georgia would be a very difficult and sad place to be gluten intolerant. Stay tuned for the next installment where I may or may not discuss five more varieties of bread, new khatchapuri experiences, breads with stuff inside of them, and whether or not dogs can survive on bread alone.

A plate featuring a mysterious bread that I only saw in the orientation hotel and thankfully not since then. It might have been good but it was always stale.

Job Shadowing in Gori

Keep on readin'

A view of Gori's fort (Gorisitkhe) from a churchyard

Several weekends ago I was in Gori for job shadowing, my first time spending more than one night away from site (it was two this time!). I followed around a volunteer that has been here for a year, observing her teaching, working with counterparts, and generally living. Peace Corps gave us a 70 question questionnaire to help guide us in this experience, and I answered... most of it...

Some variety of decaying Soviet-era monument, my favorite.

Stalin's childhood home

Gori is an interesting city - famous for being Stalin's hometown and for being occupied by Russia in 2008. Before Stalin was Stalin, he was Dzhughashvili, and is still the world's most famous Georgian, and he is unexpectedly popular with some Georgians, and loathed by others. Gori is a city that wears its history openly - the Stalin museum has a pretty grand road leading up to it and there are murals and bullet holes to remind one of the 2008 invasion. 

Behind the very new municipal hall in the center of the city there is this unofficial monument to the 2008 war.

Pockmarked, I believe from the war though I'm not sure.

The official 2008 war monument, eerie and ancient, especially in the rain.

A mural featuring real bullet holes from 2008.

It has been fun to see what city life is like - I thought I really wanted to live in a village, but now I think I'm open to pretty much anywhere (that doesn't require me to learn another language in addition to Georgian). The volunteer I'm staying with lives in a tiny apartment across the street from the school she works at, with a host family of one elderly woman. The apartment is very cute, though their water situation is kind of weird - you turn it on with a switch and then it flows from every tap, not just the one you need. It seems a little wasteful but it seems to work for them. I expected city life to have more amenities than village life, but it turns out that in the village there's more space for stuff like a washing machine and a hot water heater, both of which my family has in Kvishkheti but the apartment in Gori did not. There are still grape vines everywhere - sometimes just one lonely one leading up to a balcony, sometimes enough to make it look like we're back in the village and not in an urban environment.

The current volunteer's adorable apartment building

I also had the chance to go with the current volunteer to her pre-service training site in Kvakhvreli, a small town about an hour from Gori that is directly across from an ancient ~*cave city.*~ The volunteer was there to get her old host sisters to sign up for some Peace Corps run summer camps, and I enjoyed seeing life in another village but I was really there for Uplisitkhe. I did not find the informational plaques there extremely useful, since they mostly just had pictures of the caves I was looking at on them, but it was still pretty cool looking and you can read about it here. Unfortunately it is excursion season in Georgia, when children, parents, and teachers from schools all around Georgia go to other places in Georgia and picnic and culture, so the place was crawling with people and we had to fight our way into the church. However, we walked up past the big main attraction caves to the top and there somehow it was just and two German tourists and we could enjoy a peaceful chat overlooking the Mtkvari river and a lot of mountains and forget that there were hundreds upon hundreds of school children roaming just out of site. I'm excited to go on excursions with my school next spring though!

It was also interesting to see a current volunteer at work, and I learned a lot about working with counterparts and how the day to day life of a volunteer might be different in a city and just site by site. For example, the volunteer has a lot of options for other groups to work with in Gori - there are a few organizations that focus on internally-displaced peoples' (IDP) issues, and British and American Corners, as well as a cultural center. She also works at a fairly large school (around 700 students), and it made me want to work at a smaller school, because I feel like it will be easier for me to build relationships with my students and fellow teachers and to work on secondary projects.

Even big cities here feel small, not much urban sprawl and I appreciate that.

After job shadowing I had an extra day in Gori that was ostensibly for travel but Gori is about a 40 minute drive from Khashuri so I just wandered around. In my two days I think I managed to see most of Gori's sites - there's a castle, a 2008 war monument, some recently renovated churches, some thrift stores, a lot of fun Soviet apartment buildings and monuments, and the State Stalin Museum. The Stalin Museum was weird. There were a lot of carpets with pictures of Stalin on them which was unexpected but kind of makes sense if you think about Central Asia enough.

An example Stalin carpet feat. some other guy too

A copy of Stalin's death mask

Annnd a pretty random but of FDR, I think

Gori fortress has been used for centuries and was most recently used in 2008. I don't understand why it's so easy to go into the center though... 

Mid-PST ANNOUNCEMENT

Zach #1, me, Jon, and Vadood under the chestnut tree where a man named Giorgi feasted after winning some battle in 1609
Photo: Racheli

Hello!

I am still alive. I am too busy (and too not-internet having) to blog regularly, but Georgia has been pretty good so far. I am in a littleish (somewhere between 1,800 and 4,000 people) village called Kvishkheti which is outside of a small city called Khashuri. I live with a host family of 7 people, 3.5 cows, many chickens, a pig, a dog, and a lot of barn swallows.

My host siblings Anano and Datchi eating leftovers from a holiday meal. There are a lot of holidays, I'm ok with it.

My host mom Nana and I, a selfie was obligatory as soon as I entered the house

My beautiful house for three months.

In the mornings I either learn Georgian for 4 hours or I teach English for 45 minutes and watch another volunteer and a Georgian counterpart teach for the remainder of the morning. At ~12:30 or 1 we (my 4 cluster mates and I) leave the Dmitri Kipiani Public School for lunch at one of our houses, which may be either across the street or like a mile and two bridges away.

Lunch is the biggest meal of the day, and apparently pre-service training (PST) lunches are about as good as it gets - a typical one might include soup (often borsht), cutleti (basically very garlicky hamburger patties), bread, khatchapuri (cheese -filled bread), lobiani (bean-filled bread), cheese, cucumbers, tomatoes, a salad (usually cabbage), a plate of whole green onions or parsley or tarragon, plum or tomato sauce, salt, some variety or potato dish, cake or candy, coffee, and juice. We are not permitted to drink wine at lunch. After lunch, if we taught in the morning we have Georgian lessons, and if we didn't teach we go to Khashuri for technical sessions.

Example lunch, Allison's house

Kvishkheti's school when we first arrived and the grapes weren't growing yet.

Khashuri feat. Vadood, me, Zach #2, and Olivia #1. Photo: Mark #1

We take a Peace Corps marshutka there, which takes about 20 minutes and is the most peaceful part of my day (usually). The afternoon sessions are on various PC things like data collections or on English teaching, which is very helpful for those of us that don't have any real English teaching experience (me.), but they can feel very, very long. We do that five days a week, we get Sundays off, and one day a week is usually a "Hub Day," where all 55 trainees get together and listen to different Peace Corps lectures, usually the more general ones about health and culture and inclusivity and all that. Those are also long but they are at a snazzy hotel (the only hotel) with wifi, coffee breaks, and fancy bathrooms.

In the evenings I wander around Kvishkheti, hang out with my cluster and the other cluster in KV, look at birds, help my host sister and host mom with English, eat dinner alone because my fam eats at like 5, study Georgian, read books, lesson plan and make materials for classes, sometimes eat second dinner with the fam, and then I go to sleep at like 10:30 or 11, which is crazy early compared to my American schedule but I think I'm adjusting alright to the village life.

A Soviet ruin from one of my walks.

Host family dinner at my host mother's parent's house - another volunteer, Rachel, lives here.
Feat. Dato, Valerie, Mariam, Datchi, Anano, Nana, and Rachel.

We have a lot of rules about where we can go and how late we can be out, so I haven't gone too far from my village yet - I'm in Gori right now for job shadowing, but for my other free days I have staying in Kvishkheti and gone hiking, I've gone to the site of the Soviet Union's favorite mineral water spring in Borjomi, I've stayed overnight in the village next to ours, Tezeri, and I've gone back to Khashuri for the day just to eat and hang out somewhere new. I still have yet to go to Tbilisi proper, but I'm not too worried - I have two entire years after training to do that.

Day off in Khashuri

KV hiking krewe - Allison, me, Josh #1, Kaigler, Dora, Tylar, Kevin, Jon, Matthew #1 - before the unexpectedly long hike~
Photo: Racheli (ty!)