Diet

Yesterday my sister bought new pants. She was very excited about them, and couldn't wait to tell me about her purchase when I came into the room. They're pretty cool, honestly, and if I could get away with any kind of skinny cut jeans (since that's ALL they sell here!) I would totally rock these.

My brother, in typical young-Georgian-boy-with-too-much-energy fashion, decided to try on these pants, thus upsetting my sister. But what made her even angrier was the fact that he could fit into her pants at all. She promptly turned to me and said, "I am fat! I need diet! I will start tomorrow!"

Now, my host sister is not fat by any notion of the word, and being a thirteen year old girl is rough enough without having to worry about body image. So I scoffed at her and told her she wasn't fat, which she giggled and shrugged at, clearly not believing me. I then told her that if she was dieting, I would, too, so she wouldn't be alone. Was I trying to show solidarity with a younger girl so she wouldn't be riddled with insecurities for the rest of her life? Absolutely! Is it also completely self serving so that my own ass doesn't grow exponentially from here on out? Absofruitly! Either way, she was surprised and excited to have someone to do this with, so much so that we even shook hands on it.

We spent a half an hour hammering out the details of the diet - no eating past 6 o'clock at night; no sugar; no chocolate; no uncooked vegetables; no bread; no khachapuri; no cake.

Fruits are allowed (which is hilarious to me, since they're basically just sugar and water, but whatever), as are cheese khinkali (Georgian dumplings), meats, and eggs. Milk is especially encouraged in the mornings. Lots of buckwheat, oatmeal, and noodles.

I don't really understand the logic in this diet, but I was willing to give it a try. At least until this coming Saturday, where I had already informed Ani I would break all rules during our janky Developing World Thanksgiving Feast, but that's another post for next week.

Cue today at school.

My coteachers celebrate a lot of things, such as their children getting married or becoming grandparents, with cake, pop, and khachapuri. Sometimes the chacha is even busted into. So it was really no surprise when I walked into the teachers lounge this morning and there was a gaggle of my fellow teachers hovering around a large cake and khachapuri, dividing it up. One of Nato's sons had just gotten married, so she had brought us all a treat to mark the occasion. As I walked to my seat a plate was literally shoved into my hands. According to the stipulations of this diet, I wasn't supposed to eat either of the things on said plate, and I even tried to fight it by saying I could not have it. This, of course, was laughed at, and I was told, "ჭამე." Arguing with a room full of Georgian mothers will never result in you getting your way unless your way coincides with what they want, so I [really happily] ate the khachapuri and cake, since they are two of my most favorite things on the planet and I am secretly a fat kid on the inside.

Feeling ever so slightly guilty, albeit way happy, I walked home to the ever waiting arms of Bebia. Bebia, my host father's mother, is currently staying with us while something happens to her house. I'm not sure what all is going on but she's very upset about the whole thing, and all I can get out of conversations with her is "bank" and "bad." She's constantly here now, lurking, waiting for me to even look at the kitchen so she can offer me food. It was almost a full half an hour of being home with her before she got all "ჭამე" on me, and busted out the tolma (Georgian dolmades - meat, spices, and rice stuffed and rolled into cabbage or grape leaves), cheese and bread. Not wanting to break my diet for the second time in less than 24 hours after agreeing to it, I politely ignored the bread. When she insisted I have some, I reminded her, in broken Georgian,  about Ani's and my agreement from the previous night. She laughed, waved a hand at me and said "It's fine, just don't eat a lot." Like I was crazy or something for not automatically assuming this.

I love that, in this ridiculously chaotic and nonsensical place, people are most logical about food.

It's wild to me that people here care so much about body image. I mean, coming from the United States, I'm used to it. Most girls I know have some sort of insecurity about something on their person, myself included, but I've always tacked that onto a First World Problem kind of thing - something we don't NEED to gripe about, but we can afford to, both monetarily and temporally. Diet, and weight loss, is a luxury that I've attributed to vast amounts of capital, which the US has compared to most other places, especially here, hence why so many Americans in my age bracket especially do four types of yoga and try a new type of diet every other month in addition to exercising an hour every day.

Many people in Georgia are undernourished and living just on the poverty line, yet meticulous care is given to how they look. Girls here dress strikingly similarly to LA women - heels, tight pants, low cut shirts, lots of makeup, perfect hair - and also strive for the ever desirable slim figure through dieting alone. Men either look like Gucci models, or hip hop wannabe's, but both genders smell amazing thanks to watered down Chinese knock offs of various popular perfumes and colognes. Not older people, mind you. This blanket statement is only speaking to the demographic of Georgians 50 and under.

It's a weird contradiction, like most things here tend to be, and I've been trying to suss it out. Is this obsession with appearance a new trend in Georgia's desire to be more Westernized? Was everyone here so image-centric during the Soviet years, or is this just one more way Georgia is culturally rebuffing Russian sovereignty for so long? When I figure it out, I'll let you know.

However, I will unabashedly admit that I was partially looking forward to coming to a country where people had bigger fish to fry than what shoes they would wear today. Having lived in LA for a few years, I was pretty burned out on self centered people who wouldn't even leave the house before looking like they stepped out of a fashion magazine. Since I am the complete opposite of that, it was really exhausting to be around it day in and day out, and it unfortunately started making me feel crappy about my own appearance. Which is stupid, but so are girl brains. Georgia sounded like it would be the perfect get away of all of the material crap that was driving me crazy in America. But it's the same shit here, except that my choice of clothes now marks me as a foreigner instead of only someone with bad fashion sense.

When I first arrived I was very concerned about fitting in. I wanted to make sure that I didn't get too weirdly American on my family and neighborhood, to the point where tanktops and shortsleeved shirts that showed my tattoo felt wrong. I didn't like spending too much time alone, which included walking around or sitting in the park by myself, because no Georgian willingly spends that much time individually. I even felt weird wearing jeans that were slightly baggy and bootcut, since neither of those things exist for women here. I meticulously kept my Converse shoes white, which was a hassle and a half on dirt roads. Even my hair, which is always slightly frizzy due to the shampoo I use and that it hasn't been brushed in months on account of me losing my brush, made me feel like an outsider. I was self conscience of people staring at me on the streets, because I knew that they knew I was obviously NOT from here.

And then one day, one glorious day, I stopped giving a fuck.

I was sitting outside of a cafe in Batumi with a few of my TLG friends and some random Georgians we'd met, and one of the guys caught a glance at my shoes. They were my Converses, and they were incredibly dirty on account of my having a busy few weeks of adventuring around and not cleaning them. So this ridiculously drunk and very sketchy Georgian kid asks me, incredulously, "Why are your shoes dirty? They are so dirty!" Internally, I was yelling at him. "Because they go places, dammit! These shoes are transcontinental! They've walked more miles than you clearly have, ever, and I've got better things to do than keep them meticulously white!" Outwardly, I shrugged and told him that they were my traveling shoes, which he seemed weirded out by and promptly stopped talking to me. It was strangely empowering, embracing those dusty shoes, and it caused an internal chain reaction.

I'm not from here. I'm from America, from a weird little town in the middle of the woods where I spent a lot of time crawling around said woods and being generally ungirly. I still like crawling around woods, and rocks, and fucked up abandoned places, and that's frankly hard to do in six inch stiletto pumps. I've climbed Half Dome, visited ancient monasteries, and driven 1,500 miles in two days, all while not being a size zero. Some of my favorite moments in life have been while I was utterly disgusting and feeling generally gross, tired and smelly, but I would never trade these for perfect hair at the time. And now that I'm here, wearing strangely cut jeans and dirty shoes, with messy hair and almost no makeup, it's clear that I stand out, because I'm not Georgian. I don't have to fit in here, because I'm not from here, and why try to fit a mould which isn't meant for me?

It's really nice to finally feel comfortable in my own skin. It's something that I've faked for a long time to a lot of people but it's great to finally believe the crap I'm saying and embrace my inner honey badger.

So look out, world, cause old Joey is getting what she wants!

And don't call me Joey!

Because really, who else but a tacky ass American would buy purple fuzzy bunny slippers from the weird little Chinese shop in her town? 

Daily Dose of WTF

I've learned to stop questioning a lot of my day to day routine. 

However.

When there's a space heater on top of the toilet, I really need to ask "why?"

Every Day I'm Chame-ing

Yesterday at school I had an interesting interaction with my teachers. It went something like this:
(Yeah, I'm sorry that I'm THAT person who writes stuff in a language system that you can't read, but I just really like the look of Georgian, and I'm not trying to be douchey about it, so apologies!)

One of the Teachers: ჯოანა, გინდათ ხაჭაპური?
Me: არა! გმადლობთ!
A Different Teacher: არა? მართლა?
Me: ხო! მადლობა!

Translated, this interaction went something like this:

One of the Teachers: Johanna, you want khachapuri?
Me: Oh, no! Thank you!
A Different Teacher: No? Really?
Me: Yeah! Thank you!


Five minutes later, they came back with khachapuri, and handed one to me with a declarative "ჭამე"(eat). We all laughed, and my English coteacher jokingly said, "We knew you wanted."

I'm not really going to complain, because khachapuri is, hands down, my most favorite thing in this country. I could, and usually try to, eat it at least once a day. Not the crazy boat and butter one from my previous post, but the more simple cheese filled bread that's common in my part of the country. I think my fellow teachers knew I was bullshitting them, and they absolutely called my bluff.

Well played, Georgian mothers! Well played, indeed!

Georgians sound incredibly bossy. This is largely due to how their language is set up. Being heavily context based, the things you say have vastly different meanings depending on how you say them, or where they're being used in a sentence. My host mom is pretty polite, by English standards, and will add a "თუ" to things, which is "if." So when I get home and she asks if I want food, instead of phrasing it like my teachers (გინდათ სარგომელი, აქა) she will say "თუ გინდათ სარგომელი, აქა" ("If you want food, it is here").

This applies to pretty much any kind of offering. Georgians seem to use the imperative a lot, but they don't mean to be the bossy that form implies. If they offer you a seat, it's not "have a seat," it's "sit!" If they ask you if you want wine, it won't be "do you want wine?" It will be "drink!" I caught onto this pretty quickly, and think it's hilarious that the second I'm around any kind of maternal figure she'll immediately start shoving food in my face and saying "ჭამე! ჭამე." Coming out of a very large and in charge Greek family that was constantly making me eat a lot, this seems totally normal, and if I take just a little bit of food they're happy and get off my back.

Talking to a lot of other people in this program, it sounds like they're having real issues with this facet of Georgian culture. I usually forget that not everybody had an in-your-face-and-lives type of family like mine, and therefor this might all seem very unusual. It's also strange to me that many other volunteers mistake the tone with which these things are said for being an actual command. I've yet to encounter a Georgian who offers you something with anything less than genuine hope that you're comfortable, be it a seat, a meal, a drink, or even a book.

Also, I'm finding more and more that even by Georgian standards I'm absurdly polite. I say "thank you" and "please" and even "hello" all the time, which is just not done here. If you know someone, you say hello. If you're at a store, you just ask for what you want, and don't need to throw a "please" onto your request. Certainly it's ludicrous to use "thank you" when someone hands you something you asked for, and then again when they give you back change from the transaction, and especially crazy when you leave! I'm slowly dropping some of these out of their daily use, but it's hard since this is something that's been engrained since I was little. Nothing is ever said, and I'm never openly laughed at for overusing these phrases, but there are little snickers and grins that tell me I'm being a way too happy spaz about buying some tea.

Blank Stares Abound

If you've been reading for a while, you know that I'm of the opinion that Georgian is hard to learn. Once you master the Elvish looking alphabet and its various sounds, which is really the easiest part to becoming proficient, you get to the bizarre structure of it [I say bizarre as it pertains to us English speakers]. Verbs have seemingly arbitrary stems which, depending on tense and person, you add different letters to. There are no articles and no prepositions because you tack these onto words in the form of infixes and suffixes, and in certain cases you even drop a few letters to make the word sound better. And if that's not enough, you're usually dealing with some throaty sounds that are absent completely in English conversation, as well as navigating dizzying consonant clusters that make you want to give up your first born for a freaking vowel to be thrown in.

It's a tricky language for even the most language savvy person, and Georgians know it. So foreigners are met with great enthusiasm and appreciation for even attempting to communicate in Georgian. But many times, if you try to say something you will be met with a blank stare. When you repeat yourself a few more times, you start to get more and more disheartened as confusion clouds the poor Georgian's face. Eventually, you will either start charading in hopes they'll understand, or just write out the word. You will inevitably get your point across, however, and they will say the word you wanted back to you and guess what - it will sound exactly the same as what you have been saying for the last five minutes.

Or at least to you it will.

I've been experiencing a lot of frustration in regards to communication over the last few weeks. Even with my coteachers, who supposedly speak English, I have to phrase things very simply so they will understand. I'm a [fairly] decent and eloquent writer when I want to be, and can construct pretty complex sentences in English. We'll count that as a side effect of speaking it for the last 26 years. So being plunged into a place where hardly anyone knows my language, let alone speaks above a certain elementary proficiency, has been a bit taxing. Which is fine! It's what I expected! It's just been strange to be on the minority side for once.

And that's exactly what I am - a minority. Being a Caucasian English speaking female has never before put me in this category, but in this part of the world that's totally what I am.

The upside to not being able to exercise my native language so much is that I'm picking up Georgian really quickly. I'm able to read at a fairly decent pace, and even in class I'm able to understand more and more what my coteachers are saying to the students. It's a good feeling, finally being able to frame and pick out small parts of what is happening around me. Of course, this good feeling goes away almost the second I try saying something in Georgian and everyone looks at me like I was prattling on in Chinese.

My friend and I were having a chat last night about our inability to communicate with people around us when she said something that has made everything else finally fall into place - Georgians aren't used to hearing non-Georgians speak Georgian.

Duh.

I mean, it's so simple.

As English speakers I think we really take for granted just how global our language is. It is dominant on two continents and one very large island, and that's only native speakers. We won't take into account the various other parts of the world where it's taught from an early age so that children are fluent by the time they're ten years old. We're used to hearing familiar words sound different due to the accents and influences of other languages. Australians and Brits are different from me, but I still know what they're saying [most of the time]. I've grown up hearing the various regional dialects present in America, so just because someone has a drawl doesn't mean I can't have a conversation with them. Accents have been a part of my life for as long as I can remember.

I'm aware that I sound borderline ridiculous when I pronounce Georgian words, and I've accepted that for a while I will have a pretty bad American accent with it no matter how hard I try. Given the people I regularly speak English with here have similarly thick Georgian accents with English, I figure they've likewise accepted my crazily affected speech. And accept, yes. But that is not the same as understand.

Georgia has only recently had a steady influx of foreigners. Up until a few years ago, most people that spoke Georgian were actual Georgians, with the random Russian or Turk thrown in for good measure. This is not a large country, and aside from a couple secluded communities in the Greater Caucasus mountains who speak a different form of Georgian (think of the difference between French and Quebequois and you have the difference between Georgian and Mingrelian), there isn't really much regional variety in how people sound. External entertainment, like music and movies, is either dubbed in Russian or Georgian, with a few songs making it here in English. But you're still dealing with a group of people who, for the most part, never had to deal with obvious accents in their own language. And when you've never encountered different pronunciations of familiar words, odds are you will have a hard time figuring out what is being said.

It's strange to be an outsider. I refuse to say that I understand completely what Spanish speaking immigrants are currently going through in America, because that's just an outrageous claim, but I do sympathize a lot more with them. It's hard to be somewhere and not possess the ability to communicate your most basic needs. I'm very lucky here, as I've an incredibly supportive host family who patiently tries to help me navigate through their crazy phonics, as well as teachers who give me any resources I could possibly want for learning Georgian. I'm also lucky enough to know how to read, which is a pretty big game changer. So I'm off to a way better start than most immigrants in America, and I'm still incredibly frustrated by it. In fact, I've almost every single advantage I could possibly want when learning a foreign language, and by the end of most encounters I'm exhausted and feel like going to sleep for twelve hours to give my brain a rest.

It would be awesome if Americans could adopt the attitude that Georgians have to outsiders. Most signs here are in Georgian, English, and Russian. All of the ATM's and street pay boxes have multiple language options, with English always being one. Every single restaurant I've gone into has an English menu - even ones in tiny villages. And even though they can't seem to understand a freaking word I say other than "hello," "thank you," and "goodbye," you can bet your ass that every Georgian I've met gets incredibly smiley when they see me trying. I've never had so much encouragement for such blatant linguistic slaughter. Juxtapose this with many people stateside, who hate the fact that we have billboards in Spanish in predominately Latino neighborhoods. Or even my personal favorite, the folks who get irate when they have to "Push 1 for English" when calling a hotline.

Leaving your home country, and entering into a minority, is tough. It's hard even when you're educated and have resources, because you will be very different for a while. It's even more difficult when you don't have the tools to learn on your own, and you're forced to pick up the language through interaction. When you're met with hostility and general annoyance, you're going to feel self conscious and not want to try speaking their language. Instead, you will find other people who speak your language, and create self sustaining spheres inside the larger community and never fully integrate. Immigrants in America don't know English for a lot of reasons, and being lazy certainly is not one of them. They don't know because our whole cultural apparatus - schools, public buildings, signs, television, even the testing system for higher education - is biased towards the English language, and is completely bilingually unfriendly. As a whole society, Americans are fairly cold when it comes to helping foreigners on our turf. We've this strange sense of entitlement, like if you're going to live in our country you better learn the language before coming here, and if you don't then clearly you're just lazy and rude, when there are actually much larger forces in play that make this a completely unrealistic expectation.

I guess what I'm trying to say is this: 
Next time you're frustrated by the cashier whose English is heavily accented, just imagine it's me trying my hardest to practice your crazy ass contradictory language in some vain attempt to fit into where I'm living. Cut people trying to learn English some slack, because for as wild as Georgian is, I'm pretty god damn happy that English is my first language.

An Unsent Letter

Dear Punky 5th grader,

You are not as badass as you think you are. First off, you are in 5th grade. Secondly, you weigh like 70 pounds. And lastly, it's hard to take you seriously when you are wearing a Hello Kitty hoodie. So shut your pie hole and stop sassing!

Just sayin'.

Love, 

Me

Shit my siblings say #1

On her brother, who is on the computer playing video games and currently preventing her from Facebooking her little heart out, Ani says, "Goga is everything that is wrong with the world."

Pilms!

Telavi has a movie theater! It's in a little nook in the main concert hall in the town center, and you have to go up some pretty shady stairs to get to it. Independently run by a younger guy from Tbilisi, it sports a decent sound system, HD projector, and fairly comfortable tiered seats! In true Georgian fashion, he just torrents whatever he wants to show with Russian subtitles, and voila! A marketable movie for a demographic of bilinguals of Georgian and Russian, also known as this whole country! He's also gotten on the 3D bandwagon and shows movies in 3D.

So tonight, after drinking a few hot toddies and making some kind of awesome pudding dish with my host sister, my friend and I headed up and watched Pacific Rim in 3D and Russian.

I don't care what language it is - gigantic robots fighting insanely huge monsters with a soundtrack of really cheesy heroic music is amazing. Cause I'm an eight year old boy at heart...

This is an interactive post about churches!

How many churches can you see in this shot of Old Town Tbilisi?

[hint: you might need to move your mouse over the picture if it's not loading properly...this is my first time composing everything in HTML and some stuff might be a little janky]
[p.s. In regards to the title, it's only "interactive" because of this sweet mouseover image I made, and that you have to click on "read more" to actually get to the post. So if you were hoping for some Angry Birds level of interaction, I'm sorry to disappoint!]

The answer is ten. Eleven if you count the church courtyard from where this picture was taken.