A Belated Thanksgiving

This lapse in updates has been largely due to my time management skills and my notebook problem. I call it a problem because I have this strange urge to buy like a hundred notebooks at any given time, and keep highly specialized notes in each one. But then I get shy about it, and don't think anything is good enough to go into them, so I stop. A few weeks ago, I started an Ultimate Georgian Notebook (which is the title I gave it in my head), where I was slowly working through crazy linguistic books to try to learn this insane language. However, I discovered I was suffering from a huge amount of downtime at work, and so I just started writing random things in that notebook. It now has morphed into this stream of consciousness journal, where I end up scribbling all my thoughts in some sad attempt to feign productivity at school. Unfortunately, this means that my need to write things down in electronic format has declined. Not that this blog is a chore or anything - just that it was also partially therapeutic and it no longer bears that burden alone.

Another factor in this lapse has been my own personal psychosis about what my next post will be. Last week I started drawing out something for a post I've been wanting to address for a while now, and I got it into my head that there would be no other updates until that's done. As you can see, I've told my brain to get over itself, so you will just have to wait for the nerd post to end all nerd posts for a few more days.

Anyway, onwards and upwards! Since last week was the one day that Hallmark told us to be thankful for all the good things in our lives, I figured I'd make a post about all the stuff I'm glad about. And there's a lot, so buckle up, buckaroo!

First off, I'm thankful for the two Thanksgiving dinners I had this year. The first was with an American family who is now based in Telavi, and the second was a few days later with my TLG family. I'm rubbish with words, and a picture is worth a thousand of them, so I'm gonna do the rest of this via photos.

This past weekend, a small group of Kakheti folks went to Akhmeta to stay with a friend of ours. The original plan was to just bum around that part of the region, get a turkey, and have a little Thanksgiving dinner of our own. While we mostly stuck to the plan [mostly], a good chunk of the day Saturday was spent in the Pankisi Gorge. My friend's host mother's brother has a marshutka, and we each chipped in five lari for gas and got a private ride up to the gorge. The uncle was insanely friendly, and made numerous stops along the way for picture taking. Every time I meet someone new here, I fall in love with Georgia all over again. The generosity people have towards strangers is outrageous, and even though we might not REALLY count as strangers to him, this was our introductory trip with one another. He absolutely did not have to offer to take us up a crazy road to a beautiful mountain valley, but he did. 

In case you're wondering why Pankisi sounds familiar, just think back to 2003. This region,  very close to Chechnya, was thought to contain a terrorist cell of Al-Quaeda. Currently, the main demographics in Pankisi are not Georgians, but Chechens and Kists. The road up the gorge is littered with little villages, each one boasting a mosque. It's a very strange sight in this highly Christian country. We stayed with the main road, ignoring the little trails that branched out numerous times. I want to go walking down those at some point - maybe in the spring when we come back...

The end of the trail (or as far as the marshutka could go, anyway) is a dam and large spillway. It's currently dry, as the water flowing from this river goes into grates and comes out underneath the spillway. The dam is apparently a well known tourist attraction, as there are several ladders and a little path for you to climb. After clamoring over the ladders and stairs and bridges, you come out onto a large platform on top of the dam, where you can clearly see the waterfall. However, if you want to get closer to said waterfall, you need to cross the spillway, and climb up some slippery rocks and boulders to get a better view.

Naturally, we all decided we wanted to see that thing up close. I'm glad my friends here share the same stupid love I have for rule breaking (namely since there are no rules about anything here, let alone where you can and cannot go up in a gorge in the middle of nowhere). We had to cross this gem of a bridge, as well as go down several flights of stairs that were made in the same fashion as this.

I mean, why not have a bone in a pipe on a dam?

You can see the platform where the other picture was taken over in the right, as well as the spillway we crossed.  There were a few points in this climb where Chris's host brother, a 17 year old behemoth of a boy, pulled me to the rocks above like I weighed nothing. Even though my ego was slightly bruised by this, I got over it once I looked down the valley.

This was a rock formation opposite the waterfall. It looks like something out of concept art, and I'm thankful that growing up my parents encouraged me to question everything, including how something like this was made. The Caucasus mountains were formed when two tectonic plates collided, pushing the then Tethys seabed up and up. Over the epochs, and through a lot of volcanic activity in the region, the mountains have slowly climbed upwards, with their current composition being mainly shale, granite, limestone, and sandstone, mixed with metamorphic rocks from vulcanism. Wind and water erosion, paired with the ever present grinding of the Eurasian and Arabian plates, continue to shape this place. Anyone that says science kills the romance of nature is an idiot. That shit is cool!

The waterfall I've been going on and on about. While it might not make any lists in terms of impressive falls, it's still beautiful, and that is only magnified by the lack of people who've visited it. Call me an environment hipster, but I think it's pretty cool that the number of people who know about this particular landmark and have seen it with their own eyes is in the low thousands, and that I'm one of them.

I'm glad I'm janky as hell, and can use rocks and my camera strap as a tripod if need be. Spending all those years around weird makeshift Yooper things has certainly come in handy here!

The sky seems bluer in the mountains. I know it's not, but colors just look so much more vibrant in the fall afternoon light.

The road up the gorge follows a river that is full of huge smooth white boulders and small black stones. Most of the time, the water lies about 20 feet below the road, with no discernible trail down to it. However, there are so many little pools that would be amazing to swim in during the spring and summer, and we wanted to see them up close. So down the shale embankment and impending landslide we went, and over slippery round rocks we hopped until we got to this gem. The water itself is pretty deep here - probably at least 8 feet - and there's a series of little caves off to the right that go underneath boulders and trees. While I've got zero interest in checking those out, as I'm terrified of undertows and drowning (thanks, Lake Superior), I still want to spend a day just lounging in the sun in that water. Or maybe not IN the water, since it's glacially fed and therefor cold as a witch's tit.

Pankisi really is breathtaking. This was right before it started to lightly snow, so we got the sunshine and little sparkly snowflakes at the same time. It was pretty freaking magical.

What I love about the Caucasus mountains is that every time you think you're up so high you catch a glimpse of another peak and realize you're so not. Maybe I've got a weird inferiority complex, but I love things that remind me just how tiny we are, and these mountains definitely do that on a regular basis.

We ended up being very Georgian about our Thanksgiving; i.e. next to nothing in terms of planning. We weren't able to get a turkey, since Akhmeta doesn't sell them except for Sundays at the huge bazaar, nor were we able to find milk for mashed potatoes. In the end, we made sour cream mashed potatoes, some stir fried veggies, an Uzbek dish of chicken and rice, fresh homemade bread, pickled weeds called jongjoli, and lots of homemade wine. Not to mention the weird semi cheesecake that we made from yogurt for dessert. It was still an incredible meal, mainly because we were all on a high from the earlier adventuring in the mountains.

I'm thankful that I'm in this goofy and beautiful country, and that places like this exist on our planet. The mountains are incredible, and fill me with all sorts of really stupid happy feelings. I'm glad my parents raised me and my sister to do what makes us happy instead of what will make us money, and while I joke that sometimes I wish they had pushed me to do engineering or something useful instead of anthropology, I don't think I would be here if that had been the case. 

I'm thankful for my goofy little Kakheti family. When I joined this program, I was really worried that I wasn't going to be able to find actual friends - that I would only hang out with other TLGers in some strange form of solidarity and not actual enjoyment. Luckily, the people near me are some of my favorites in the program, and we genuinely get along. They all have a healthy mix of adventure, hilarity, and downright goofiness in their personalities, which ensures that every trip we take together is always fun. I probably would have lost my shit if it wasn't for these mugs. 

Last but not least, I'm thankful for all my friends and family back home. It's not every day that you find yourself a group of people who are so thoughtful and care about you enough to chip in their hard earned money to buy you a super nice camera that has taken all the incredible pictures in this post. I don't know how I lucked out finding them all, but I'm glad I did.