Ink'd

Today I was finally brave, and walked around the house in a short sleeved shirt, thus exposing the giant nerd tattoo on my arm. I’ve been trying to tip toe around this particular subject with my new family, since a lot of people, in Russia especially, only have tattoos if they’ve been to jail. TLG even warned us to not really advertise our body ink, since most people in Georgia have never seen them, and they have a lot of negative connotations associated with them. However, I ended up talking with one of the guys who has done TLG before, and he has several very large and visible tattoos on his arm, so we delved into how Georgians actually feel about them.

Ken put it very well. He basically told me that I shouldn’t hide it because this is a cultural exchange – my tattoo is a part of me, a part of where I come from, and they have to deal with my culture as well. He’s right, of course. This is an exchange, meaning I am thrown into the deep end of their life and they have to just deal with sticking a toe in my pool. But even with this empowering mindset, I still was nervous about showing it to them. Like more nervous than I was with my actual blood parents. My own parents have to love me. It’s a mix of me sharing their genes and them dealing with my charming self for 26 years that ensures I can do whatever dumb shit I want and at the end of the day they’re sort of stuck caring. This family, however, doesn’t know me, doesn’t have any fealty to me, and I wanted to make sure I got off on the right foot with them.

So out of the bedroom I walk with a short sleeved shirt, Boba just staring at all of them. And no one even cared. No one did a double take, or even looked at it. No one said anything until Ani, my sister, came up to me and poked at it, telling me it was very pretty. My grandmother and grandfather both still even hugged me when I tried saying an entire sentence in Georgian. My host father didn't scream in Russian and Georgian and then throw me out of the house. I got all wigged out and worried for nothing. Shocker, right?

Later that night, Ani and I were sitting in the kitchen, and she was asking me about it. I really enjoyed tonight – it was the first time she and I have gotten to hang out and talk. She is hilarious, and super animated, enthusiastic, and adorable. She has the absolute best laugh I’ve ever heard, and she calls smiling too much “pain in my face.” We ate a lot of fruit, she talked about  how she is going to be going on a diet (all women in Georgia apparently diet constantly. It’s part of the reason they’re so annoyingly drop dead gorgeous), and I showed her an Ansel Adams book of photography, which she really got a kick out of. Anyway, amidst her and I talking in very broken English and Georgian, and her laughing ridiculously hard when I kept trying to make various sounds in Georgian, we got onto the subject of tattoos. She was asking if it hurt, what it was, why I picked my arm, etc. And then she admitted to wanting two of them; one on the back of her neck, and one on her wrist. It was kind of awesome to hear this little 11 year old Georgian girl talk about getting tatted up, not gonna lie. So dad, if you’re reading this, just remember that if a family in the middle of an ex Soviet country can like my tattoo, you can, too!

I think TLG gave us a lot of “worst case scenarios,” which is great, considering the last groups didn’t get any kind of cultural warnings or language training. And while I think they went very, very overboard in this respect (they should’ve summed it up with “don’t be a dick” and we probably would’ve been ok), I think they wanted to let us know that in some cases things will be vastly different for us. I’ve been lucky enough to be in a larger city, with a family that’s already had a volunteer, so I’m living the easy life comparatively! Like today, the weirdest “Georgian” thing I did was scrape off moulding and plaster on the stairs with a steak knife since we didn’t have a razor! Tame day in Telavi!