The big walk

Yesterday was the official walking tour, but today we managed to walk many times farther by heading up the island and across a bridge over the Golden Horn to the northern part of Istanbul. Along the way we watched man fishing off the bridge and admired and petted some of the city's gagillion stray cats.
By ignoring/misreading our map, we managed to get good and lost among the city's twisty streets, thus stumbling upon a warren of fascinating little shops where we visited and/or observed a wood carver, a miniature-maker, men playing cards and backgammon, a very attractive older woman with the most lovely lavender hair, a musty secondhand book/record/radio/ephemera store tucked deep in a narrow building, and a hairdresser sweeping water out of his basement thrift shop.We also managed to find yet another restaurant where nobody else spoke English (best. chocolate. cake. ever.) and came home exhausted enough to collapse in our hotel room with a couple of giant cans of Efes beer and a sack of cheese, halvah, olives, bean salad and pomegranates.

Culture club

On our second day in Istanbul, Trevor and I decided to soak up a little of the ancient city's history and culture (in addition to its beer, trinkets and snacks).We started the day by soaking up a little of its rain while waiting for our walking tour guide. (I like how Trevor is gamely attempting to act like he's having fun.) Miraculously, the rain let up while we were touring the Hagia Sophia, just when our guide was showing us the windows designed to point towards Jerusalem.After spending a day hitting the high points and listening to a running commentary that was equal parts crash course in Turkish history and mispronounced English gibberish, we felt we had fulfilled our mission.

Next up: more drinks, shopping and pomegranates.

Istanbul (not Tbilisi)

We're not in Tbilisi anymore. One way I know this for sure is by the food, which blessedly leans more towards vegetables than cheese and bread. This is what I got at a little hole-in-the-wall-dive where the menu was only in Turkish and the waitress only spoke enough English to understand "vegetarian."
Score! Also, there are bikes.
And the Grand Bazaar, oh my. I only wish our suitcases weren't already crammed to bursting.

Goodbyes

One of the things about Peace Corps that truly sucks is meeting people you never would have met in a million years, growing to feel like they are your long-lost beloved family members, and then having to say goodbye, knowing that it's possible you will never see them again.

Monday was wrenching, to say the least, especially at the airport when Larisa and I said goodbye amidst quite a bit of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Luckily, most of the weekend was more fun, such as our attempts to devour this giant cake my mom's friend delivered in honor of our departure. (The cake won. Larisa tried to pack some of it up for our trip, but I refused. I also deflected the offer of a bottle of home-brewed cha-cha, which I now regret.)

Getting it

As a Peace Corps Volunteer, it can be frustrating to have this incredibly intense experience that you want to share with everybody at home but that is maddeningly difficult to capture in any amount of blog posts or pictures.

It doesn't help that people at home tend to ask how it was but glaze over after the first 15 seconds of the answer.

As challenging as it was to spend the past three months away from Trevor, I'm glad that he at least got to visit. He didn't get the whole experience, but at least he's sat in the kitchen with my host family, walked Tbilisi's streets, sampled khatchapuri and homemade wine--and even slept in the race car. On some level now, he gets it.

Fun

Trevor and I spent the afternoon walking around some of Tbilisi's crustier neighborhoods with a couple of Peace Corps friends. They showed us this crumbling church they discovered, which is knee-deep in the ashes of charred Russian books.We also stumbled upon a painting studio, met Guram the painter and bought an excellent piece of artwork to bring home. (And he threw one in for free! Mbasela!)

Now we're home to eat lobiani (bread with bean paste baked inside) in honor of Barbaroba, the feast day for Saint Barbara,"traditionally the patron of armourers, military engineers, gunsmiths, miners and anyone else who worked with cannon and explosives," and, at least according to Wikipedia, "venerated by every Catholic who faces the danger of sudden and violent death in work."

That would not be me. But we're eating lobiani anyway! Happy Barbaroba!

De-luxe apartment

After Anri got out of school Friday afternoon, Larisa took us all to visit her sister Shorena, who lives across town in one of Tbilisi's high-rise Soviet-era apartment blocks that's grim on the outside but cozy inside.In typically Georgian fashion, we ate until we were too stuffed to move, drank perhaps a bit too much, colored with markers and watched videos from the 1980s on VH1. (Why yes, that is Spandeau Ballet in the background. Made me want to slow dance.)We also rode in a tiny little elevator that costs 5 tetri to go up (eight floors) and another 5 for down. (Normally I would be too cheap to spend even 3 cents for a ride, but the staircase was dark and scary.)Good times. Seriously good times.

Lagging

One of the cats in this household is a little jet-lagged, which means that we've been taking it pretty easy this week. Which is not to say we're missing out on the highlights. Instead, we're pacing ourselves.

Guess who!

Trevor has arrived! After three months, we're pretty happy to see each other again.

And I'm busy introducing him to my favorite things about Georgia, mainly the people, the food and the wonderful crustyness of it all, including this guy whose instrument needs a serious tuneup. (Trevor recorded it.)

File under "Huh?"

I found this in a shop I'd never visited before.

Um, what?

Winding up

When I'm winding up a trip, I enjoy the challenge of timing the end of everything just right: using the dregs of my travel bottle of shampoo for my last shower and getting on the plane with only a tiny handful of change in the local currency.

Trevor collects coins, so I've been thwarted in my attempts to spend every last tetri. But I won't let him keep the paper money, since unlike in Zambia it's actually worth something.

Trashy

Trevor is a magnet for interesting trash.

He found this painting near the medical university on our first walk around town. He decided it was too big to fit in his suitcase so he abandoned it by the Peace Corps office but later decided he wanted it, after all, and when we went back the next day it was still there.

I especially like the nose that somebody has penciled in.

Workshops

On my last day of work, some of my colleagues sent me proof that I had, in fact, been working. I also learned that the workshop participants did not take my session on editing photos (ie, delete the terrible ones) to heart. Sigh. Also, I discovered that both my hair and my hand gestures are much more crazy than I would have guessed. Well, I tried.

Going away!

It feels like moments ago that Trevor & I hosted a going-away party to mark my departure from home, but this afternoon I said goodbye to my colleagues here. We celebrated in true Georgian style, with a cake so tall I had to switch to a bigger knife.
Today's my last day at work. Tomorrow (granted, he's not even awake yet for today), Trevor gets on a plane to come and collect me!

Next week I sign the paperwork to close up my service as a Peace Corps Volunteer, round 2, and then it's off for a little holiday and home again for The Holidays! Where has the time gone??

Crafty

My crafting output hasn't been nearly as prolific as it was in Zambia. This is too bad, considering that with Georgia's wintry weather, it would actually be useful to have all the socks, hats and mittens I knitted there. So far I've only managed to finish one lonely sock.I also used trash to make a coptic-bound journal (from recycled office paper and the cardboard from a box of "rodent" food) and some bowls using Georgian newspapers papier-mached atop take-out containers (also still in progress, but more likely to get finished soon than the poor sock). I blame the internet, and the fact that there are actually things to do here.

Lights

Tbilisi is getting geared up for the New Year and Christmas (theirs is Jan. 7). This week they turned on the wonderfully cheezy decorations along the roads.

Tamarishvili has multicolored bells, Vazha Pshavela has snowflakes and Nutsubidze has birds and leaves strung all the way across the street.

The lights are a nice distraction from the fact that my evening walk home now takes place entirely in the dark. And it's cold.

Birthday

Larisa's sister had a birthday yesterday, and I managed to get invited to her party at Puris Sakhli, a swanky Georgian restaurant in Old Town. I've been to enough of these traditional-style dinners now to know the sequence of courses (first salads, and then: khatchapuri, fish, mushrooms, meat, french fries (?!?), more meat, fruit, coffee, sweets) and enough to know that I need to hijack the salads because there won't be anything else substantial for a vegetarian.

The salads pictured above may not look appetizing but they all contain a tantalizing mixture of garlic and ground walnuts that makes them incredibly tasty. (Except the gooey mystery balls. Nobody but me ever eats those. You should have seen the look on Anri's face when I tried to put some on his plate.)Of course there was cake, along with a multi-lingual (and unintentionally polyphonic) rendition of the Happy Birthday song.
And I earned my keep by instigating a card game that drew a reprimand from a snotty waiter but postponed, by at least an hour, the inevitable war- and zombie-themed shenanigans of two bored and oversugared little boys. (Thanks again for the cards, HRH!)

People

The vendors at Tbilisi's Dry Bridge Market offer an interesting and ever-changing mix of crusty old flea-market treasures from their grandma's basement and the usual tourist "happy crap" (as my mom would describe it).

Sunday afternoon I spent several hours feeling my fingers grow progressively more numb as I scanned piles of old Soviet junk, tested toy accordions and admired some of the handicrafts that were worth taking a closer look at.

I wound up buying a doll from among the collection pictured above. The artist models them on the traditional dress of people from across the region. Larisa was mildly horrified that I spent 10 lari (about $6) on it.

Myself, I was horrified later, when I realized I had accidentally spent nearly 30 lari ($18) on ground coffee. Excellent coffee, mind you. But still. (In case you're wondering, 500 grams may not sound like a lot of coffee, but it fills up a pretty big bag.)

Treasure at the flea market

When I was a kid, we shopped at a grocery store that positioned the entrance so you had to wheel your cart past a giant bakery case full of tempting things like donuts oozing chocolate goo, clown-shaped cookies the size of your head coated in red sugar, and pastry horns filled with the most divine cream.

I've given up on grocery-store baked goods, because these days they taste like the plastic buckets that contain the mysterious hydrogenated slime they're made of.

But yesterday at the flea market, I bought this slab of dough for 50 tetri from a lady selling them out of a giant cardboard box. Dusted in powdered sugar and wrapped around a smear of custard, it tasted like a real pastry, made by a human being out of ingredients actually found in nature.

Once I realized how amazing it was, I tried to chase down the woman who sold it to me, perhaps to buy the entire box, but sadly she had been absorbed into the crowd.

I did manage to pick up a few other treasures, too: old Soviet pins, a set of crystal wine glasses. But I wish I could find that lady again.

Dance

Last night I went with friends to see the famous Georgian dance company Sukhishvili.

Sukhishvili is traditional dancing, not ballet, so I shouldn't have been surprised that it reflects old-fashioned values such as women largely as background decorations (they dance a bit, but mostly just mince around) and a strong emphasis on battle. Many of the dances featured swords and other weapons--in one, the dancers threw giant knives into the ground while spinning around, which made some of us in the audience very nervous.

The spinning was amazing. Amazing. (According to my friend, they wear knee pads, in case watching the video makes you cringe.)

Another life

I would like to return to Georgia some day with my camera and tripod (and perhaps after taking some photography classes) and document the amazing murals that are everywhere here. (The one above is from an abandoned building behind the office that I think was some sort of Olympic training facility; we are still surrounded by sports.)This one is from the big, bizarre circular mural along the military highway to Kazbegi. I want to live in it.

Perspective

My job here is good for providing some perspective to life. For the past two days, I've been sitting around the house feeling vaguely queasy from some bug that's going around.

Today I felt well enough to work on a story for our annual report. I'm writing about the woman pictured above, who lost everything in the 2008 war in South Ossetia. Violence has been simmering there once again this week as the region holds elections.

This woman lost her job as a school principal, and then her husband died from the stress of fleeing home and learning that his house, along with the homes of his three sons, had been burned to the ground. Their entire village was destroyed.

Since then, she has started a bakery that's successful enough to employ five other women. Still, she dreams of the day she can go home.

Homesick?

For the most part I've had such a good time in Georgia that I haven't had a chance to be homesick, other than missing the people (including four-legged ones) I love. I've certainly had every other kind of sick--right now I'm suffering (along with my entire host family) from some queasy-making virus that is no fun at all.

Even though I'm not anxious to leave Georgia, I am starting to miss certain accoutrements of my home: my sewing machine, my piano, my giant fake Christmas tree, and my own personal internal combustion engine. I don't like driving in snow, but it sure is nice to have the option on slushy, windy days like we've had lately.

The view

This evening our office is hosting a media event at the hotel from which I snapped this photo a few months ago. Back then, it was warm, daylight and not snowing. I look forward to seeing the view with twinkling lights, snow-capped mountains, and the improvement in vision brought on by a glass or two of red wine.

Convenient

There may not be a Taco Bell for several thousand miles, but that doesn't mean office-bound Georgians who forget their lunch have to go hungry.

It would take some effort to go hungry here, as you may have deduced from this blog.

Even at work, though I usually bring something from home, I often pop out back to "The Garage," a bakery located in a converted parking space. It's the green door in this picture. The lady inside sells a variety of cheese, bean and potato pies, kept warm on the oven until you show up and fork over a lari or so. The pie pictured above, warm & fragrant & stuffed with delicious mashed potatoes, set me back 50 tetri, or about 30 cents.

Wet blanket

Perhaps it was not such a great idea to leave my laundry out overnight. I woke up to a clothesline--and city--covered in a fluffy blanket of snow. My cashmere sweater is frozen in a Frankenstein pose.

Not surprisingly, Larisa is in a tizzy. Under no circumstances will she now go to the ballet because 1. It's dangerous (never mind that we can walk three blocks to the Metro, then be underground until we're 10 meters from the theater's front door). 2. She can't get her hair "painted" beforehand and 3. She refuses to go out in public without wearing crazily high heels.

I'm still going, of course. Midwesterners aren't scared by a little snow. I just hope that the ballerinas won't twist an ankle on their way to the matinee.

Keep in mind that my going to the ballet today doesn't necessarily mean I'll be able to make it to the office tomorrow. I mean, come on--it's dangerous.

Language skills

This week I've had several opportunities to be thankful for my seemingly effortless command of the English language and my severely stunted Georgian.

I was pretty proud of myself when I managed to score tickets to another performance of Giselle. It entailed burning up all the talk time on my mobile phone (with Larisa doing the talking, because although their website is in English, nobody at the theater actually speaks it), two trips to the ticket office and a grand total of 28 lari, or about $16 (for four tickets--to see one of the most famous ballerinas in the entire world).

During my second trip to the theater, the crazy-eyed Russian lady made me come in to the ticket booth and sit with her by the space heater while we waited for the other lady to arrive, who at least spoke five words of English. Telling them "thank you" and "goodbye" in Georgian was enough to get a huge laugh (as usual).

After my ticket victory, I still had to make my way to work. I tried to get marshutka-route advice from a friend who used to work in my office, but my message wouldn't go through because 1. I was completely out of talk time and 2. I was SMS-ing his office landline. Ahem.

Instead of risking a minibus ride to god only knows where, I ended up walking halfway across Tbilisi. Ah well. At least I got the tickets.

Oh, so thankful

About the only traditional thing about this year's Thanksgiving dinner was the token appearance of a decorative turkey. (This one is made from a pinecone I harvested on my walk to work.)
Despite its unconventional menu (everything from mushroom dumplings to pickled beet + radish salad), the celebration was festive and fun. Wine helps.

At one point I went to the kitchen to find more, and stood for awhile in front of the fridge, confused.

"Is this the wine, in this Coke bottle?" I called to the dining room. (People here decant their home-brew into whatever container is at hand.)

"No," said Patrice's perplexed guest (visiting from Bulgaria). "That's... Coke."

"Weird."

We finally located the wine (under the table, in a pear soda bottle) and the party continued, all of us thankful for the fruits of Georgian vines.

Giving Thanks

This Thanksgiving, I have plenty to be thankful for, including the incredible opportunity to spend the past few months in a place that is the perfect combination of beautiful, bizarre, creative and crusty.Although I'm thousands of miles from my real family, I plan to share the holiday with new American friends and have been welcomed into a Georgian family that is nearly as wacky and wonderful as my own.

There won't be any turkey, but there will be plenty of wine, snacks and laughs. And I'm a vegetarian anyway.