Sakartvelo Part 1

Gamarjobat (HELLO!),

To my friends near and far. As you may or may not know, I am currently living and teaching in Georgia (as in the country bordered by Russia to the North and Turkey to the South). I moved to my new home of Batumi on the Black Sea coast one month ago and I’m settling into a life that involves a language with lots of strange guttural throat noises, a landscape that rises from luscious citrus filled river deltas to impossibly high jagged summits, and a culture that welcomes guests with open arms and then forces them to drink ungodly quantities of  flammable strength liquor at a rapid pace. My host family is full of love and my students are full of the best kind of youthful energy.

Instead of a true narrative I’m going to tell my story in photos, with some extended captions to fill in the details.

 Sakartvelo, A Photo Essay

Layover: 12 Hours in Warsaw

The most striking thing about my short time in Warsaw, Poland was the quality of the light. From an Indian summer in Portland, climbing just a few degrees in latitude was like leaping 2 months further into fall. The stone of this square caught that low stark light and the whole year felt older and slower.

Orientation: One Week in T’bilisi

I spent much of my first week in Georgia cooped up in the smoky and fluorescently lit halls of the Bazaleti Palace Hotel. When I was able to escape from the information sessions and Georgian language classes I was delighted to begin absorbing all the sights and smells and sounds of my new home. Beyond me is the cityscape of the capitol, Tbilisi.

Climbing the walls of an old fortress with some new friends.

Me and my roommate Emmitt with that apprehensive look of two boys who know approximately a dozen words in Georgian and are about to be adopted by new families. As a side note: Emmitt is from Emporia, Virginia, he studied textiles and color theory (which I point out mostly because we ended up wearing the same color pants on this day, which means my clothing choice has been vindicated by an expert) and he tells the most ridiculous stories. His mother’s mother has 82 grandchildren and they all gather for a family reunion every year. He invited me to join him this year and I said yes please!

The chaos of the hotel lobby where host mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters stood on one side and the TLG (Teach and Learn Georgia) volunteers waited on the other like we were being picked by team captains in a playground flag football game. The introductions happened one by one with much applause and many an awkward moment when both went in for the (Italian style) kiss on the same side. My host father seemed insistent on simply shaking my hand so I had no such trouble.

In Transit

I just like this picture. It was a 9 hour car ride to my new home in Batumi with many many stops for every kind of treat that was sold by the roadside. This photo shows the main highway at its best, it slowly deteriorated to a winding pot-holed affair with harrowing passes between gargantuan soviet-era trucks.

The Many Faces of Batumi, My New Home on the Black Sea:

Batumi the Las Vegas of Georgia:

This skyscraper (still under construction) comes with a Ferris wheel built into its upper stories.

Batumi the boom town of foreign investment:

Although the trump tower site is currently inhabited only by these wonderful ivy covered stumps.

Batumi the odd sponge of western culture:

These avatar characters guard a kids playground filled with other movie characters, which is set against a palm-tree lined boulevard with French/Italian/Greek fountains/facades/gazebos.

Batumi the beach:

The locals are adamant that October is too cold for swimming in the Black Sea but most of my days so far have seen temperatures in the low 70’s with water that is bathtub warm compared to my home Pacific waters. Afternoon swims have been a regular staple of my routine thus far!

Batumi the market town:

Beyond the new construction is a thriving hub of more typically Georgian-style commerce where every block is lined with street vendors sharing the regions bounty of fruits and vegetables and counting their sums with an abacus, like this man.

Batumi the confusing marketing pitch:

I love this picture because there are these weird installations that are each supposed to give a different spin on the cities slogan, “Batumi, the city that loves you”. However, the symbolism here is very unclear. The figure is carrying a heart in some kind of cart, but whose heart is it and is that a shopping cart? If the heart belongs to the person pushing the cart, how did their heart leave their body, and if not, then who’s heart is it and why is it in a shopping cart? Will I lose my own heart from shopping or gambling too much in Batumi? If I do in fact lose my heart here can I then can I just buy a new one?       Your guess is as good as mine!

Batumi all in one photo:

This is my attempt to convey all these different themes in one picture. You are looking through the window of an abandoned commercial space where mold grows on the walls. In the first layer of the reflection are passersby (tourists and locals) crossing the square. Beyond that there is the European style of architecture from Batumi’s previous building boom about 100 years ago, and next to it is a new building which will affect the same style as its neighbor on the outside, but with the cheap and quickly built innards that you see now. And finally in the background is that new skyscraper with its Ferris wheel looming over the city.

Life at Home

You can see our second floor apartment windows from the base where I often sit with some of our neighbors and chat. By chat I mean test out my small repertoire of questions and phrases which is growing at a rate of approximately ½ per day.

 

Sunday Laundry

This is a pretty bad picture but it captures the ambience pretty well. From left to right we have: my host mother Gulico, my host brother Ramazi, Guilco’s nephew Achiko, and my host sister Naira.

Dinner this night included fish from the river near our house, homemade bread and several sauces to accompany it all including a hot pepper spread and a sweet and sour sauce made with the dregs of the grapes in the wine-making process.

Let’s be honest, home life includes plenty of free time, which I’m oh so happy to fill with: creative endeavors like reading and writing, less creative endeavors like the limited number of games that my Georgian cell phone has to offer (“bounce” is my personal favorite so far) and, last but not least the most creative photography that can be achieved without moving from a prone position. If I get bored enough self portraits do happen. 

Village Life:

On a mission to tend the wine, we headed out of the city and into the steep hills where a different pace of life abounds. Due to the significant language barrier I never really know where I’m going when my host father waves me to “modi modi” (come come). On this day I was happy to find that the road took us to a beautiful mountainous village where he spent his childhood summers with relatives.

Ramazi stirs the 120 liter barrel of fermenting wine. From what I can tell, the wine they drink here is closer to 25% alcohol and rather than sip it, you drink the equivalent of  about 1/3 of a glass with each toast. At a typical supra (feast), there seem to be between 8 and 20 toasts…as a skinny, normally casual drinker, the math is not in my favor.

At this point the wine was relatively tame, sweet and delicious!

These structures on stilts, as far as I can tell, are for storing and drying food stuffs.

All those tired crops after a long summer’s work.

Of course the neighbors invited us over for cha cha, a clear moonshine tequila/vodka of sorts that is distilled from the remains of the wine making process…it’s very dangerous!

Ramazi claimed this was the highest waterfall in the Soviet Union. Measuring 50 meters,it was impressive and beautiful but that claim seems a bit large to me.

Ucha on the left, Ramazi on the right, look at that wink and that shirt with colors perfectly suited to a day of wine tending.

Portrait of a Supra 

 A supra is a feast held for a special occasion or in someone's honor or just because it's the Sunday night before Sam's first day of teaching. That was a rough first day!

Acharistkali:

Acharistkali is the name of the town where my school is. It's a 20 minute commute by bus. Some days I have long breaks between classes when I can go explore the area. It’s only 10 kilometers South to the Turkish border along this branch of the river. This is a view back toward the town.

The break room where many an aging teacher has been known to fall asleep with their noses buried in a textbook. The last two on the right are my co-teachers Shorena and Natia.

P.E. class consists of the teacher putting the soccer ball in this caged sort of field and then sitting off to the side to smoke a pack of cigarettes while the kids go nuts.

It’s fitting that my 1’st graders couldn’t even sit still for the 1/200^th of a second that it took for this picture because that’s what class is like. This boy in the middle (still working on the names) usually has a big loaf of bread in his backpack, which he steals bites of throughout class…pretty good system if you ask me.

My 5^th graders ready to get down to some serious preposition business.

The extracurricular class that I lead after school is a mash up of games, some of which have significant English learning value and many that just involve lots of running and laughter. I’m extremely thankful for Teona, a strong 12^th grade student who translates many of the things I say (including all the rules to the games) into Georgian. Without her it would be chaos.

For all you Camp Orkila readers out there, this is a game of “Where’s my…”  

“Dog!”

A Collection of Landscapes

Looking up the Chorokhi river valley from the vantage of a cell tower I found on the top of the hill near my house.

The view North along the Black Sea coast from the slopes of the Batumi Botanical Garden.

The Chorokhi river

On a break from class

Batumi beach at sunset

Turkey Part 2: Trains Planes and Colder Climes

After Cappadocia, our next destination was Antakia, a bustling town just a couple hills away from the Syrian border. Our hostel, it turned out, was closing down and we were the last guests. The conflict in Syria had put a major damper on tourist traffic between Syria and Turkey. Nevertheless our host was jovial enough. We helped him carry some mattresses to storage and in return he cooked us a delicious feast of a lunch the next day. We visited the spectacular mosaic museum and St. Pauls church, an ancient place of worship carved into the rock with secret tunnels and passageways so that the small enclave of Christians could keep their practice secret from the Muslim majority. The Antakia region is also well known for its delectable pastry chefs and I have accepted that on September 9^th I tasted the best Baklava that I will ever taste  in my life and I enjoyed all 29 delicious seconds of the experience to the fullest extent. Many things in life (I hope) will just keep getting better, but the taste of Baklava will not and that’s okay.

Trying to make up for the way he looked in the scooter helmet

Antakia is known for many great things but I'm not sure
that the river running through town is one of them

Taking in the treasures of the mosaic museum

Incredible works of artistry from the 4th century!

Late night at the hostel

Travel weary?

Our informal guide to the hidden tunnels above St. Paul's Church

The only way out of the tunnels was this chimney

After a frustrating confusion, really more like a lying through the skin of the teeth highway robbery that resulted in a faulty bus ticket and an entire lost day of the trip, Martin and I finally did manage to make it to the town of Diyarbakir.

Diyarbakir in the far East of Turkey is the heart of the Kurdish region. The Kurds have been in a long and sometimes bloody struggle for independence from the Turkish state and later when I told Istanbul locals that I had visited Diyarbakir they frowned in disapproval. However, the city itself was fascinating. We tried Kurdish coffee, which is a pistachio infused elixir with a much milder version of it’s Turkish cousin, with less straining grounds through your teeth, and we walked along the park beneath the towering city wall where kids were building castles of mud. But in a place that has hardly been touched by tourism, where distrust toward the government runs high and unemployment is rampant, we also felt an underlying tension. Many people were warm and welcoming but off the main streets there was a certain uneasiness in people’s body language that said, “this is our home, what are you doing here?” and so we didn’t wander too far afield.

Just your standard tractor in a bank on Main Street

Some friendly boys showing off their mud castle

Martin’s plan was to travel south across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan and I needed to make it all the way across the country to Istanbul where in a few short days I would be bound for Ireland. The cheapest, albeit slowest, way to get there was by train, so I booked a ticket on the Guney Express. This aging train line would carry me 837 miles in 36 hours (yep that’s an average of 23 miles per hour with many many many stops along the way).

A young boy names Azan followed me along my walk to the train station asking for money. He dutifully matched my strides the whole mile and a half route in the hot sun so I bought him a bottle of water at the station. He kept sticking around so I taught him a card game. My Turkish was about as good as his English, in other words not very good, but we still managed all right. He wanted to follow me all the way to Istanbul and when I finally found my train car he just waited outside until nobody was looking so that he was suddenly standing at my compartment with a wide smile. Now I was afraid of getting in trouble and causing a grand confusion so I told the train official and Azan was kicked off the train for good. He walked alongside as we pulled away, still smiling , and he stayed with me throughout the evening as I wondered where he would be sleeping that night.

With my new friend Azan at the train station

Waiting for the Guney Express to Istanbul

Made lots of friends waiting for that train

The train moved at a snails pace when it wasn’t outright stopped, but that gave me plenty to see through my window. I had my own sleeper compartment with a little fridge and a fold down bed with fresh sheets. I read and read and wrote and read again and played solitaire and mostly watched the whole of Turkey passing by my window. Most of the other compartments had families of four or five and the atmosphere was a festive one with little kids running around and more than one passenger offered me bread. It was nice to relax and catch up with myself a bit after such a torrid travel pace.

Crawling along through the mountains

Morning moonset somewhere in the middle of Turkey

One of many sheep herders along the way

I read many many pages on the 36-hour journey 

My bed was as comfortable as any on my journey and when I woke the fields were glowing with sunrise and a full moon was setting over the far hills. Goat herders and railway repairmen and women hanging the laundry watched us travel by, some waving and some throwing rocks.

My only problem came when we arrived in Istanbul several hours late at 12:30 a.m. Istanbul is a confusing enough city to navigate in the daylight but with darkness and limited public transportation still operating and a sketchy hand drawn map to the hostel that made much more sense when I first drew it, the task became even harder. With generous help from another commuter I found a bus across the Bosphorous strait to the European side and from there I gave in and took a taxi the rest of the way.

Two days on the train had exhausted me in the way that makes you just want to walk all day and so that’s exactly what I did. I wandered (waded really) through the chaos and craziness of Istanbul peeking my head in gigantic mosques and getting utterly lost in the Grand Bazaar. I no longer had the kind of energy to wait in line for the Blue Mosque and the Aya Sofia but I did visit the underground cistern, which was a cool respite from the hot city.  I bartered for new shoes and jeans in preparation for the much colder rainier climate that awaited me in Ireland and I sipped Turkish tea and watched the city happen all around me. It was only on my second to last day writing in my journal in a park that I noticed all the dead leaves piling up. I held one up for the older man sitting next to me on the park bench with a gesture that said “how the hell did fall sneak up on me like that” and he shrugged right back with the same incredulity.

The New Mosque

The first signs of fall

The cistern (something like 350 columns)

These guys caught good looking fish right from the bridge

The constant crush of humanity on Istiklal Street

Boats on the Bosphorous

On my last morning I walked down the hill from the hostel with a new friend Guyom from France for a final gaze across the Bosphorous to Asia. Guyom takes pictures for a street art magazine in Berlin and so he shared his incredible work with me and I shared a couple poems in return. It was a special hour reflecting on travel and where we each were in our lives.  We were almost complete strangers sharing so much, both transfixed by the power of the moment. I couldn’t have asked for a better way to end my time in Istanbul and in Turkey.

My french friend Guyom

My flight took me back to Budapest (three months after my first visit with Marah) and then after a lengthy delay finally to Dublin. I had already missed the last bus to Limerick so all that stood between me and luxurious food court booth of a bed for the night was the immigration official.

Well, as it turns out, these innocent and entirely honest answers are not what the immigration official was looking for:

Immigration Guy: What’s the purpose of your visit?

Me: To visit my girlfriend who’s studying at the University of Limerick

Immigration Guy: When are you returning to the U.S.?

Me: Not sure exactly, about a month from now

Immigration Guy: How much money do you have in your bank account?

Me: _________dollars (feeling pretty good that I even had that much after 4 months travelling)

Immigration Guy: (Eyebrows raised with a bit of a frown) Well I’m going to have to send you back to Budapest on the next plane because you don’t have sufficient funds to enter the country and there is no reason for me to think that you won’t just stay and try to find work.

So with the panic rising I was given one final chance to prove that I wasn’t planning to stay and find work and I’m not quite sure what I said but after looking me up and down and weighing his mood the guy finally (reluctantly) agreed to let me in!

After my nap in the food court it was getting toward morning, even though it was blacker than night with a violent rain storm raging outside. I put on almost every layer I had and trudged to the bus stop forgetting how cold it gets in the non-Mediterranean world. And after the final adventure of watching the elderly bus driver zig and zag as he nodded off at the wheel, and after several brilliant rainbows and signs pointing out mountains that were shrouded in mist, I finally arrived in Limerick and into Jo’s waiting arms!

Reunited at long last!

Jo with my recreation of Turkish breakfast

Ummmm...

What a happy reunion, to be together with Jo in this mystical verdant paradise. How far away from home we are but how familiar it all feels, walking hand in hand to the milk market and wandering the brilliant green fields along the Shannon river swollen with Autumn rains. What wonderful comfort and joy waiting at the end of my travels.

Much love to you all!

Sam