On Thursday I ended up on a surprise trip to Davit Gareji Monastery with my host family. They have never really taken me anywhere so I was pretty surprised on Thursday morning (it was a holiday and we didn't have school) when my host mother asked me if I wanted to go with them somewhere (I wasn't clear on exactly where we were going, to be honest) and I said ok. Two and a half hours later, we were there. It was a really beautiful place. Basically it's a cave monastery, so all the parts of the monastery are built into caves. There were sheep all over the countryside we drove through. More sheep that I've ever seen in my life. After we were finished at the monastery we pulled over into a random field and the men made mtsvadi (bbq pork) and we had a big picnic. It was really nice. Except for the part where I was trying to show Tiko how to do a "bridge" and I bulled a muscle in my back so badly I thought I was never going to be able to get up off of the ground. I felt like a 60 year old man who threw his back out. And Tiko really didn't understand that I had hurt myself and kept trying to sit on me as I laid on the ground in the dirt and grass. It's pretty funny to think about now, but at the time it really sucked!
On Friday, it was my friend Kristen's birthday, so she invited a few of us to her village for a little supra. Basically we ate a ton of mtsvadi (this is like my new staple food apparently) and drank a TON of wine. We all made toasts to Kristen, mine went something like "it was great to meet you here, blah blah blah, I hope you find a Georgian husband and have a bunch of Georgian babies and live in Georgia forever!" And then later I made more toasts (apparently a little wine in me gets me wanting to start toasting to anything), one of which was to my brother and another one was about Phil (our British friend) moving to Nebraska. By the end of the evening, we were all quite ridiculous (because you have to drink every time someone makes a toast). Phil was stuck talking in a terrible Australian accent for long periods of time, the Georgian men kept asking us to dance with them (and we did), Phil got a bit sick (everywhere!), and all of us girls were just up late being giggly and having conversations that seemed really important at the time but I can't really remember any of now.
Yesterday after leaving Kristen's, Shannon Shay and I took a marshrutka to Tbilisi and met up with a few of our other friends and we all caught a marshrutka (after fighting off scary gypsy children and scary relentless taxi drivers) to Borjomi. Borjomi is a little town where there is natural mineral water. This water is really gross in my opinion. It tastes like bubbly salt water and Shannon described it as tasting the way your mouth tastes after barfing. But yeah, some people really like it! So anyway, Helene had met a Georgian guy who lives there and he took us all over the town buying things like pork and bread and vodka. He also took us to a hotel where we could stay, which ended up being a massive old place built in the 18th century and had been a sanatorium in the past. This place was creeeeepppppy. And it only had turkish toilets and the water that came out of the tap was brown. Excellent. But anyway, we got in our swim suits and we went to have a picnic/bbq in the woods where there is a natural hot spring pool. Turns out it was over 3km to get there. Poor Shay didn't even have a jacket and we were both wearing flats and it was quite a muddy trek and on the verge of raining. It was very beautiful though and definitely an interesting experience. Especially the part where we had to cross the river on a bridge that was made of a log with planks across it and a wire to hold onto. Once we were there, there were some other TLG people and the Georgian guy was making mstvadi (like I said, I've been eating a ton of this stuff). Then we broke out the vodka and people went into the pool (I didn't). I did pee outside like three times, which now that I've used so many squat toilets and outhouses I don't even really care about peeing outside anymore. Funny how normal things start to become after a while... So we hung out there for a while and I had some embarrassingly long conversations about Hanson and other things that no one even cares about but me.
Then we walked back to the hotel and it was raining and even more muddy and I had to walk through small creeks with bare feet (rather than getting my shoes wet), and we crossed the scary bridge again and the walk seemed a lot shorter on the way back than it had on the way there. In the hotel while everyone else was drinking more, my new friend Cody (also in TLG) and I decided it was the perfect time to investigate the creepy old building. Basically we went through the entire place and tried to open every door. We found some interesting things like a big empty room with an old stage and old piano behind the curtain, and an old library with strange old books written in Russian and old magazine pictures (some of which had Xs drawn threw the women's faces). We also found a room labeled "Laboratory" and we tried to pick the lock to get inside, but gave up when I got scared and kept thinking I heard footsteps. I ended up going to sleep fairly early because I was tired and everyone else was in the living room area watching TV on a tiny black and white TV.
Today we had to get back to our villages so we took a marshrutka back to Tbilisi and then Shannon and I got on one to Telavi. Of course, for some reason we were the only ones going all the way to Telavi and the driver didn't want to go just for us, so he pulled over in Vachnadiani and flagged down a random car and asked them to take us to Telavi. There were two men with bad teeth in the front seat, and a woman sitting next to me in the back. The men kept asking us questions and talking to us in Georgian and we didn't really know what they were saying, but they ended up buying us ice cream randomly (awesome!) and took us all the way back to our villages (my village is like 30 min from Shannon's village, so it was pretty cool). It was pretty random though.... of course, I'm kind of getting used to things like that.....
On Friday, it was my friend Kristen's birthday, so she invited a few of us to her village for a little supra. Basically we ate a ton of mtsvadi (this is like my new staple food apparently) and drank a TON of wine. We all made toasts to Kristen, mine went something like "it was great to meet you here, blah blah blah, I hope you find a Georgian husband and have a bunch of Georgian babies and live in Georgia forever!" And then later I made more toasts (apparently a little wine in me gets me wanting to start toasting to anything), one of which was to my brother and another one was about Phil (our British friend) moving to Nebraska. By the end of the evening, we were all quite ridiculous (because you have to drink every time someone makes a toast). Phil was stuck talking in a terrible Australian accent for long periods of time, the Georgian men kept asking us to dance with them (and we did), Phil got a bit sick (everywhere!), and all of us girls were just up late being giggly and having conversations that seemed really important at the time but I can't really remember any of now.
Yesterday after leaving Kristen's, Shannon Shay and I took a marshrutka to Tbilisi and met up with a few of our other friends and we all caught a marshrutka (after fighting off scary gypsy children and scary relentless taxi drivers) to Borjomi. Borjomi is a little town where there is natural mineral water. This water is really gross in my opinion. It tastes like bubbly salt water and Shannon described it as tasting the way your mouth tastes after barfing. But yeah, some people really like it! So anyway, Helene had met a Georgian guy who lives there and he took us all over the town buying things like pork and bread and vodka. He also took us to a hotel where we could stay, which ended up being a massive old place built in the 18th century and had been a sanatorium in the past. This place was creeeeepppppy. And it only had turkish toilets and the water that came out of the tap was brown. Excellent. But anyway, we got in our swim suits and we went to have a picnic/bbq in the woods where there is a natural hot spring pool. Turns out it was over 3km to get there. Poor Shay didn't even have a jacket and we were both wearing flats and it was quite a muddy trek and on the verge of raining. It was very beautiful though and definitely an interesting experience. Especially the part where we had to cross the river on a bridge that was made of a log with planks across it and a wire to hold onto. Once we were there, there were some other TLG people and the Georgian guy was making mstvadi (like I said, I've been eating a ton of this stuff). Then we broke out the vodka and people went into the pool (I didn't). I did pee outside like three times, which now that I've used so many squat toilets and outhouses I don't even really care about peeing outside anymore. Funny how normal things start to become after a while... So we hung out there for a while and I had some embarrassingly long conversations about Hanson and other things that no one even cares about but me.
Then we walked back to the hotel and it was raining and even more muddy and I had to walk through small creeks with bare feet (rather than getting my shoes wet), and we crossed the scary bridge again and the walk seemed a lot shorter on the way back than it had on the way there. In the hotel while everyone else was drinking more, my new friend Cody (also in TLG) and I decided it was the perfect time to investigate the creepy old building. Basically we went through the entire place and tried to open every door. We found some interesting things like a big empty room with an old stage and old piano behind the curtain, and an old library with strange old books written in Russian and old magazine pictures (some of which had Xs drawn threw the women's faces). We also found a room labeled "Laboratory" and we tried to pick the lock to get inside, but gave up when I got scared and kept thinking I heard footsteps. I ended up going to sleep fairly early because I was tired and everyone else was in the living room area watching TV on a tiny black and white TV.
Today we had to get back to our villages so we took a marshrutka back to Tbilisi and then Shannon and I got on one to Telavi. Of course, for some reason we were the only ones going all the way to Telavi and the driver didn't want to go just for us, so he pulled over in Vachnadiani and flagged down a random car and asked them to take us to Telavi. There were two men with bad teeth in the front seat, and a woman sitting next to me in the back. The men kept asking us questions and talking to us in Georgian and we didn't really know what they were saying, but they ended up buying us ice cream randomly (awesome!) and took us all the way back to our villages (my village is like 30 min from Shannon's village, so it was pretty cool). It was pretty random though.... of course, I'm kind of getting used to things like that.....
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