Cheese

Visiting a local restaurant last week, I had to do a double take when I saw this giant bowl of what looks like it's about to be cooked to death into Zambian ndiwo.

Eventually I grew to love nshima in Zambia. But even though I ate it just about every day, I still spent a lot of time attempting to recreate American dishes at home. I actually begged friends to send powdered cheese. And we ate it, gladly.

It may be nearly devoid of vegetables and a heart attack waiting to happen, but Georgian food is delicious. The national dish is a giant glob of melted cheese. What's not to love?

Fishy

Friday was another epic day of field visits, and I am now so busy that I've spent a good chunk of the weekend typing up notes and editing photos before I set out on another week of field visits Monday afternoon.

I'm happy to be busy, and I'm especially excited about the upcoming visit because the CARE project manager hosting me is a fellow Returned Peace Corps Volunteer with stories about getting evacuated from Sierra Leone and who knows what else.

I spent last week being amazed by the businesses launched by some of Georgia's internally-displaced women with the help of tiny start-up grants. And of course I was once again showered with Georgian hospitality and sent home with a big sack of smoked fish (pictured above). I didn't make it home with the bread this baker ran over and presented me with, hot out of the wood-fired concrete oven.

Culture

My mom's friend Nani has appointed herself my Tbilisi tour guide. Unfortunately, I have been frustrating her in her attempts to entertain/educate me because 1. I'm busy and 2. I have an aversion to most of the cultural enrichment she suggests, including museums, churches and opera, which she keeps bringing up, perhaps in an attempt to get me to say I was just kidding, I actually love it. (Not gonna happen.)

I do enjoy dance, though, and hoped she would come up with ballet tickets, but she called last week to invite me to a puppet show.

Um, OK.

Prior evidence suggests that Nani believes I am 12 years old (ie, insisting that my host family meet me at the corner to walk me home), so I was a little worried we were headed to the Georgian version of Disney on Ice.

Instead, I was pleasantly surprised by the world-famous Tbilisi Marionette Theatre's production of Autumn of my Springtime, which was touching, entertaining and apparently very funny to people who understood what they were talking about. (They had an English translation but it was rather...shall we say... artistic.)

The most surprising thing was the audience, made up almost entirely by Tbilisi hipster types. On Saturday night. At a puppet show.

Another field visit

As I have mentioned before, field visits more than make up for the frustrating, irritating and tedious elements of this job. I had started the day out feeling the unpleasant aftereffects of a suspicious Greek salad compounded by a sobering home-repair estimate in my in-box this morning.

But it's hard to feel too sorry for yourself when you're on an epic tour of sites helping people who are still displaced from Georgia's 2008 war with Russia.

Also, I had the good fortune of getting paired with my favorite of the staff drivers. He has a wonderfully manly deep voice (and speaks English!), always commands the best car, drives like an action movie hero and crosses himself whenever a church comes into view.
In addition to the usual Georgian hospitality (yes, they tried to ply us with alcohol in the morning again), I received two bouquets of flowers (!) plus one of these lovely crochet roses, which I swear I was just trying to admire, not fishing to take home with me.
I also managed not to get beaned on the head while getting an action shot.

During our last stop, we visited a lovely woman who fled her village during the war and now runs a bakery. She fed us the most gooey, delicious khatchapuri I have ever had and I felt like a total jerk doing my job, which meant asking her how, exactly, her husband had died. (He wasn't killed in the fighting, but by the stress of knowing his family's houses were burning to the ground.)

Nothing like a field visit to bring a little perspective to a dull stretch in the office.

Walking

Larisa must never know her shoes fit me or she will start trying to dress me every time we leave the house together. (In fact, I am wearing one of her sweaters right now.)

When Larisa came home from wearing them Sunday afternoon, she told me about the man who asked her to a nightclub--and how she refused by saying she had to get home to feed her baby (me).

I support the right of any woman (or man!) to dress like a hooker, a rodeo clown or David Bowie in Labyrinth, but I personally will not be wearing the zipper shoes for more than a snapshot.

I prefer shoes made for walking.

Night with the guys

I spent Sunday afternoon cooking up a storm and, as part of the global adopt-a-bachelor program, invited over Cuttino, whose wife is working in Kutaisi for a few weeks.

Larisa had to get her nails done so it was just me and the guys. The nice thing about cooking for bachelors is they don't seem to mind if the lasagna is a touch crunchy or the meal is missing essential food groups (like vegetables).

After dinner, we played a few hands of cards (and watched part of a James Bond movie while waiting for Vakhtang to help get Cuttino's car started) and I marveled at Anri's skill at keeping a lively conversation going by asking such probing questions as:

• What do you think killed the dinosaurs? (And its corollary: What's your favorite dinosaur? His is T. rex, naturally. Boys.)
• Do you like ice hockey?
• Have you ever been hypnotized?

We adults also sampled a bit of the fresh wine and didn't mind at all that it is no longer quite so fresh.

Lake Lisi

An impending half marathon and an underwhelming weekend calendar inspired me to make the hike about a mile up the plateau behind my house to Lisi Lake.

I had despaired of finding a running route in Tbilisi, but it turns out that not far from home is a decently paved road that's more or less free from unleashed dogs and kamikaze drivers. Now I'm kicking myself for waiting until I got completely out of shape before finding this place.

This has also inspired me to finally switch my simm card to the Blackberry I've been carrying around for a month, mostly so I can have music along with being able to assure Larisa that she can call to make sure I'm OK every 30 minutes.

This morning's inaugural run left me breathless and red-faced and my initial attempts to text with the Blackberry inspired a flurry of curses as I once again climb aboard the learning curve.

Turkish baths

We had a new set of translators at the conference Friday morning. They couldn't hear the presenters, so they listened on the headset to the Russian version and shouted the resulting incoherent stew at me and my fellow English speaker.

All the yelling meant nobody else could hear, either, and the dirty looks from the other conference-goers was stressing me out, so after lunch (naturally) I escaped to the Turkish baths.

Aside from the faint rotten-egg smell, the Turkish bath is now my favorite activity in all of Tbilisi. I paid 10 lari (about $6) to have the adorable grandmother (pictured blurrily above) scrub me down with what felt like an entire bar of soap and an enormous loofah that removed several layers of skin.

Afterwards, I met up with some friends at the Ossetian restaurant and was so relaxed that I accidentally drank an entire jug of wine.

This has made Saturday morning a little slower than usual, but luckily I also picked up a bag of French-press coffee at the English-language bookstore, so I think things are going to work out.

Interpretation

I spent the morning at a work-related conference and experienced the wonders of expert simultaneous interpretation. (In addition to some extremely swanky snacks, like roasted vegetable sandwiches with the crusts trimmed off and cream puffs, for which the Georgian word sounds like "shoe.")

The conference is about Georgian and Armenian cooperation and also includes English and Russian speakers, hence the headsets on the table. During the sessions, there was somebody sitting at the elbow of the Important People translating for them (that's why Thomas up left is listing over, staring into the middle distance--a guy is whispering in his ear). For the rest of us, headsets.

It felt very exotic and UN-ish, like that Nicole Kidman movie where she plays an interpreter who accidentally overhears a death threat. Only there were no death threats, just PowerPoint presentations, big puffy headphones and a lady in a booth at the back of the room, doing a really impressive job of switching languages. (Also the translation radio frequency picked up flashbulb pops and cell-phone rings, which was distracting but also fascinating.)

My experience in Georgia is posh enough on a daily basis that I was not overly wowed by the fancy hotel, though I did try every single one of the desserts on the lunch buffet and was tempted by the free wine. My favorite part was going home at 2 to write something up for the English-language newspaper and being in my PJs by 3:30.

Scooby snacks?

Either I discovered an awesome new snack, or I accidentally ate dog food for lunch.

(I'm guessing they are meant to be cheese crackers, especially since they don't typically sell dog food here; people just feed their dogs bones and bread and table scraps. But when you can't read the label, you never really know.)

In other language misadventures, I was trying to read some words and accidentally made Larisa turn purple with laughter when I mispronounced one of the many spitty "k" sounds and apparently turned a perfectly innocent noun into something very dirty.

Of course, she was explaining it to me when Anri wandered into the kitchen and wanted to know what was so funny. Nothing!

Bananas

At first I thought it was just my host family, but after careful observation I think I can safely generalize that Georgians, as a rule, peels their bananas from the other end.

Speaking of things that are kind of bananas, when we were driving home the other day, Larisa went to a market up the street (which is crap and had none of what we wanted) instead of our normal corner market because she was wearing tennis shoes. Not even junky old sneakers like we Americans tend to wear, but cute little ones that look like flats (that are much cuter than the ones I am currently wearing, ahem, at the office--although mine look pretty good today because Larisa washed them).

This made me realize that when we stop at the store normally and she tells me I can stay in the car, what she is really saying is: please stay in the car so the ladies in the market don't gossip about me/my crazy American houseguest for the rest of the week.

Even though I now understand this, I will continue to go inside with her so I can bumble around like a nut, gawking at everything and making her read the labels to me. (As a bonus, this morning I found package of soy pieces!)

I hate causing anxiety to someone I like so much, but maybe I can help her get over the gossip thing, because I think worrying about what the ladies selling frozen fish are saying about your footwear (or your crazy American houseguest) is truly bananas.

Lost in translation

Last week's field visit reminded me of the limitations of interviewing through a translator.

The lengthy periods while questions were being turned into Georgian and back into English gave me plenty of time to snap "action shots." Alas, by the time the answers had gone through the meat grinder of not-entirely-fluent-translation, they had generally been reduced to chunks of coherent-ish paraphrase.

Which makes this week's task of writing stories based on my notes a little challenging.

At least I don't have to contend with my more common problem of having way too much material to wrestle into submission.

Gorgeous Georgians

I think I'm experiencing gorgeous overload.

On the weekend drive to Vardiza, I actually stopped taking pictures because it started to feel ridiculous--I wanted to record every single thing I saw. But here are a few more snaps from last week's field visit, this one to a woman with a demonstration plot of a new variety of apples.
She fed us Turkish coffee, grapes picked right off the vine, and of course apples.And showed off her daughter with the huge eyes. (Knitters will note the amazing neckline detail on her sweater, which I didn't ask but I suspect is also handspun yarn.) (This woman also has a three-year-old grandchild. No photoshop necessary; she is naturally stunning.)Meanwhile I swooned at the view from her apple plot--yes, that is the Caucausus mountain range in the background. Like I said, gorgeous overload.

Consuming in Tbilisi

I didn't mean to spend the entire day shopping, but that's how it turned out.

In the morning I took the Metro to the big Western-style supermarket G-mart, which is way farther from my house than I thought--it took 30 minutes including walking to the Metro, waiting, riding, and walking again. My hometown grocery store is 20 times bigger and a 10-minute walk away. And carries popcorn.

But I was able to find lentils, plain oatmeal (I had to use museli with raisins in the first batch of veggie burgers), curry powder and more--including a tiny bag of "taco" flavored Doritos. Then Larisa took me to Lilo Mall, the kind of sprawling, semi-open-air market that really says (in my mind) this place is developing, not developed. We walked for what felt like miles and only covered the kitchen, underwear and fabric sections. They sell everything China has ever produced and it felt like a significant percentage of the world's 6.77 billion people were milling under the leaky tarps with us. Larisa and I both bought a bit of fabric and a couple pairs of socks. And kept a firm grasp on our handbags.My favorite stop of the day was this other market (basically a garage sale) featuring scruffy-looking baby dolls, super smelly old clothes, the family china and the occasional animal pelt. I bought a cool old Russian wooden spoon for a lari (60 cents) and we ate some ice cream and called it a day.

Vardzia

Friday was a Georgian holiday so some Peace Corps friends and I took a trip to the 12th-century cave city of Vardzia. We spent Friday afternoon catting around tunnels and hidden passageways and checking out some of the hundreds of rooms carved into the stone. (Monks still live there, too!) So cool.
Being Peace Corps Volunteers, we decided to cheap out, er, camp out on the grounds/cattle grazing fields just below the mountain. This being Georgia, the guard's reaction was, But it's gonna be cold. And it's gonna rain.

We established our little tent/tarp city at the base of the hill, found enough wood to make a decent campfire, strolled down the road to an OK restaurant (that may have given my friends food poisoning, alas) and listened from afar to a jolly supra complete with traditional music, and got rained on a bit and survived.As a bonus, when I got home the water was back on and I have all day tomorrow still to goof off.

Field visit

Field visits are far and away the best part of this job. I got back last night (at midnight!) from a two-day trip to Tsageri and the CARE projects in the poor and isolated communities tucked up in the mountains in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains.

I took about 350 pictures in two days and wanted to take more but knew there was no way I could do justice to the unbelievable scenery at every turn. The leaves were changing and the moon was full, to boot.Not to mention the people: warm, friendly and hospitable like all Georgians, but taken up a notch even from the usual. The ladies kept pouring me foamy little cups of Turkish coffee and trying to get me to drink their homemade apple vodka (It's sweet! They told me. For ladies!). I was able to resist.

And naturally all the food on that table--which they grew themselves, of course--ended up in a bag (uh, two bags. Big bags.) and came home with me. They insisted.

New cat in the house

Thomas is the newest member of the household. He likes chasing that pingpong ball around on the wood floors.

I feel like I'm cheating on the guinea pig.

Sunday drive

Sunday afternoon the family and I took a drive in the country to visit the cute village of Sighnaghi (obscured by me and the host family in the photo above) and the Bodbe Monastery, which is a popular pilgrimage site because it contains the grave of St. Nino, who brought christianity to Georgia in the fourth century.
Naturally, there were also plenty of snacks. In Sighnaghi we bought the little green and brown fruits in the box above (it's almost empty because we bought a giant sack of them), which taste kind of like apples. I love meeting new fruits.We also met these dudes and took a little ride around town. I tried to pet the horse but the guy said it would bite my fingers off. I knew better than to try and pet the many stray dogs we saw, but Anri and I did feed them potato chips.

Since this is wine country and grape juice is a key ingredient for churchela, there were many stops along the way to stock up, but the photos I took make it look like something Lorena Bobbitt would toss in a field. Trust me when I say it looks seriously icky but can be surprisingly delicious.

Martha and Tamilee

Two of my constant companions from home have been Martha (Stewart) and Tamilee Webb. That's Martha's cupcake recipe there, which the family loved even they turned out kinda tough and dry.

If it seems like I've done nothing here but bake fattening food for my host family, well, it is true that I have not yet tired of the novelty of making treats. And I still marvel that so many ingredients are readily available here, and that the power rarely goes out. And the reception my cooking gets here is pretty gratifying. (Trevor is ever complimentary but it's been awhile since he clapped at the table.)

Anri, who is 12, even loved the lentil burgers (the gloppy grey mess to the left of the cupcakes). He said they were better than McDonald's, and I'm still not sure how to take that. (McDonald's is so expensive here that people allegedly consider it "fancy.")

Luckily, to balance out all the butter and cheese, my daily commute involves a brisk 40-minute walk (each way!) to the office carrying an overloaded bag. And since my host mom is currently dieting, I've gotten her to join me for some Tamilee Webb workout DVDs.

It seems that the world over, we all want Buns of Steel. And cupcakes.

Farmers market

Today I accompanied some of my colleagues to a CARE-sponsored market set up to connect rural farmers with urban buyers. There were a lot of familiar sights: dogs, strollers, and ladies selling cheese, honey and vegetables. There weren't nearly as many hippies as my hometown market, but there were adorable old ladies pushing hot sauce and even a cotton-candy stand.
And plenty of the uniquely Georgian. Above is fresh churchella, a sweet made by threading walnuts on a string and dipping it in a giant cauldron bubbling with a thick paste of grape juice and lord only knows what else. Definitely an acquired taste (that I have not acquired).
And then there was the folk dancing with accordion and lots of jolly drunk dudes singing along.

I now understand that grapes are the Georgian equivalent of zucchini this time of year. Stand still long enough, and somebody will press a sackful on you. Same goes with fresh homebrewed wine.

I'm not complaining.

Chestnuts roasting

Every night, Vakhtang comes home from work bearing bags of treats like rolled-up cakes (giant Little Debbies!), fruits from all over Georgia, massive jugs of fresh wine.

This week it's been fresh persimmons (which I haven't tried yet because I had my mouth turned inside out by an unripe one at work the other day), pears, apples, and last night, chestnuts. Larisa boiled them and taught me how to crunch them open and extract the meaty part from inside.

They were delicious and I'm sure not responsible at all for the gurgling in my stomach today.

To complete the cultural exchange, I'm doing a little cooking for the family today: lentil stew and Martha Stewart cupcakes. And of course we'll all work on finishing that jug of fresh wine before it spoils.

Building

This statue of King David the Builder overlooks Tbilisi's historic Old Town--which is lively and bustling with gorgeous old buildings and tons of new construction.

Georgia is trying madly to develop like its European neighbors, though it is in a difficult position geographically, economically and politically. The government seems to hope that tomorrow's visit by French President Sarkozy will help strengthen Georgia's European aspirations.

Me, I was mostly excited that his visit has sparked a Tbilisi-wide holiday, with schools, roads and offices closed. Office besides mine, that is.

I guess I'll be sitting at this dang computer tomorrow, developing. And grumbling.

Bars

It's not for safety. The real reason Georgian houses have bars on the windows: 12-year-old boys + soccer balls.

(That's my host family's house. My host brother is on the right.)

Junk

Along with learning bits and pieces of a new language, tackling important issues of international development and tasting tons of new food, I'm also devoting a fair amount of time to truly important questions, such as: Where do Georgians keep all their junk?

Recently, I learned that many of the little shops I pass on my way to work are actually selling secondhand clothes. And last weekend I found my way to Tbilisi's famous Dry-Bridge Market, where Georgians are selling off their grandparents' china and silverware and the crystals plucked from their chandeliers, along with all kinds of Russian medals and posters, dusty old books, electronic thingies and quite a selection of accordions, which sadly are priced out of my range.

Better yet: On an unrelated minibus ride, I discovered that the #50 travels practically from my front door to said market. And upon learning about my interest in other people's junk, my host mom promised to take me to another, non-touristy, even better flea market.

Pig person

In America, I am very much a dog person.

Sadly, my host family's dog, Gary (which currently ranks among my favorite dog names ever), is terrified of me. When I come into the yard, he cowers in the corner of his sad little kennel shivering with fright, even when I bring treats and practice my dog-training-class tricks.
Hemingway, on the other hand, squeaks with joy when he sees me. This is mainly because he knows I'm always bearing something excellent from the kitchen: fresh herbs, carrots, apple slices.For now, I'm a pig person.

Pizza night

My language skills are not even at the toddler level, but I have managed to impress the host family with my cooking. Saturday night I baked pizza in Larisa's ancient Turkish monster of an oven. Even with non-melting Georgian cheese, the pizza was a hit.

Later, I impressed them even more by popping popcorn. Apparently, Larisa tried it once but didn't know you were supposed to keep a lid on the pot.