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.

Sighnaghi, ho!

This past weekend I pulled a page out of the old book entitled “Go On A Trip With Almost Zero Planning And See What Happens!” Myself and three other TLGers decided to head down to Sighnaghi, a town a couple hours south of Telavi which is known as the tourist destination of Eastern Georgia. We figured we would go down early in the morning and come back that evening. Fool proof, right?

So onto a marshutka we climb. A marshutka is a type of van that acts as a share taxi. They have specific departure and destination locations, as well as routes, but no prescribed stops. Instead, you can get on or off anywhere on said route. They’re also very cheap and, since they’re driven by Georgians, relatively speedy. They can comfortably sit around fifteen passengers, but uncomfortably that number hovers closer to twenty five. Think of them as Eastern European clowncars, cause that’s basically how they function. For smaller villages, marshutkas are a lifeline to civilization. People go into town to shop, then bring their newly purchased items back onto these vehicles to transport them home. Sometimes there’s even a ridiculously calm chicken in a plastic bag full of children’s clothing, like there was this particular day.

After a marshutka change in Gurjaani, we started the subtle climb up to Sighnaghi. The city itself is perched on the top of a very large hilly plateau that overlooks the Alazani Plain and has a front row seat for the Caucasus Mountains. 

Sighnaghi on the hilltop.

As mentioned previously, Sighnaghi has recently undergone intense renovations and most of the buildings in the town proper have been redone. Subsequently, the streets are lined with building fronts that look like they walked out of an issue of the Most Quaint European City Magazine – colorful balconies, beautiful doorways, impressive wooden facades. But that’s what it is – a façade. A closer look at these structures reveals that most of them are completely abandoned on the inside, usually with broken walls, trash littered floors, and broken windows in the back. So while Sighnaghi looks brand spanking new (or as new as you can make a city which is surrounded by a medieval stone wall look) it’s really just like the rest of Georgia; mostly abandoned. This place is seriously an urban explorers wet dream come true. Sadly, no one else in the program shares my enjoyment of crawling around weird abandoned places, and I’m sure as shit not going in any of them by myself, so I have to just deal with looking at them from afar.

Anyway. We ended up sauntering over to the Bodbe Monastery, a sacred location for Georgian orthodoxy, as it is where Nino, the Baptist of Georgia, is buried. The chapel on the grounds is painted floor to ceiling to floor with incredible icons, panoramas, and scenes. All the churches in this country have incredible artwork, actually, and they also have that same orthodox incense smell. I’m not remotely religious, but that particular scent has always been comforting, probably due to all the weddings and funerals my family attended while I was growing up.

Fellow adventurers! From left to right: Sam, Sophia, and Chris.

Psychoanalytic breakdowns of my memories aside, the monastery and convent had numerous signs for a “Holy Spring.” 

I know we should probably have guessed what a Holy Spring is, but I've never been to one, so I didn't know what all to expect. Was it a spring like in Legend of Zelda, with a crazy, half naked chick living in some water in a cave? How was I to know!

Curious as to what this was, we followed the arrows down a seemingly never ending flight of stairs that were on the side of the mountain. After we ended up walking down seriously half the mountain, we came upon a small chapel which housed the spring, complete with a willow tree outside shading the tiny courtyard. People were lining up next to this chapel, because for the low, low price of seventeen lari you could be baptized right there! Lines in Georgia don’t really exist. In stores, and even at the medical clinic I went to before, there is no “line” per se. There’s a mass of people, and you push your way to the front, even if it means bypassing people who have been waiting longer than you. It’s pretty unabashed cutting, and it really cracks me up (except for when some damn kid cuts in front of me when I’m about to get some ice cream. Then I get upset.). However, under the judgmental and mean looking stares of orthodox nuns, everyone was orderly and polite. It was very impressive, and Sophia even remarked that this was the most organized line she’s seen since getting here.

This little spring has a pretty decent view of the Caucasus Mountains, eh? Also, pretty jealous of all the people that got to just drive there. I do believe our way was much more...pure. Or something. Much sweatier, that's for sure.

Since I’m already baptized, and Sophia didn’t feel like shelling out the lari for her soul, we filled our water bottles up at the fountain that was there and started climbing back up the stairs. These stairs were reminiscent of Half Dome all over again, minus the sheer granite rock face, and impending death if you end up falling. Lack of imminent doom aside, it was just like Half Dome. At least it felt like it. I don’t really appreciate things that make my being so vastly out of shape super obvious, and that’s what walking up stairs that span half a mountain will do. At least I was slightly better than the ancient Georgian women who were making the ascent.  We even exchanged exasperated looks and desperate laughs as I [barely] passed them on the way up.

It looks much more steep in real life. Also, it's never ending. 

After our mini pilgrimage, we decided to secure lodgings for the night, since we had discovered that the last marshutka home had left about three hours prior. We ended up asking a random woman on the street who was drinking coffee and having a snack if she could help us find a cheap hotel or guest house. Next thing we knew, she was on the phone, then motioning us to follow her. So there we were, four super obvious American twenty something year olds and a Georgian woman leading us through the streets of Sighnaghi to a woman named Dodo.

Dodo’s guest house makes me want to get back on Foursquare and write a rave review. It was cheap, clean, had great bathrooms (Western toilets, even!), got a delicious breakfast cooked for us the next morning, and she let us dig into her homemade wine. Dodo is a tiny, vivacious little Georgian woman that resides in a small room in the large complex she owns and uses as a hostel as her means of living. She had piles of blankets for us if we wanted them, gave us our choice of what beds to sleep in, and was more than happy to show us a delicious restaurant right up the road from her. We ate a lot and drank even more before settling in for the night on the balcony with our beds and homemade wine. While the concept of a bed on a balcony is amazing, in a world where Lada Niva drivers go about fifty million miles an hour on cobblestone roads at four a.m., they are not exactly conducive to a restful nights sleep. Still, I would not have changed anything about that night for the world, since we woke up to a [relatively] sleepy, cloud covered Sighnaghi.

The view from our balcony, over to other balconies. I'd be pretty happy living in any of those buildings, honestly.

In true Georgian fashion, there were no marshutkas from Sighnaghi to Telavi that day, so we had to go south to Tsnori in order to catch one heading north. Because what is a trip in this country without it being slightly circuitous and nonsensical?

All in all we saw beautiful places, visited old ass churches (my sister really wasn’t kidding when she said I’ve been to more churches in the last month than in the last ten years), ate fantastic food, drank great wine, and laughed a lot.

Mighty fine shindig!

Stuff and Things

We received our placement information a few days ago, and I've been too lazy to properly talk about it, so I guess that changes now! Kakheti is the easternmost region of Georgia. The capital, Telavi, is slightly smaller than Marquette, sitting around 21,000 people. That's where I'll be - living with a host family who has their own house, complete with an indoor toilet, indoor bathroom, and (WHOA) internet! I'm pretty stoked to meet them. As much as I like Tbilisi, I am way more excited to see the rest of this country, particularly the city which is considered to be the most medieval city in all of Georgia. Why is Telavi medieval, you ask? Because it has ruins from four very different time periods - something no other city can boast! It is also in the middle of a vast reconstruction. All over Georgia, renovations on buildings are taking place to make them more livable and safe. Sighnaghi, another city in Kakheti, recently underwent this update, as did the old capital of Georgia, Mskheta. P.s. I find it endlessly amusing that Georgians keep calling Mskheta the "old"capital as if it was the capital back in the 1700s, when they last had a long stretch of independence from the Russians. In reality, they're really referring back to about 500 A.D., when Mskheta was the capital before King Dachi moved it to Tbilisi. I love that in this part of the world, old is actually fucking old, instead of referring to something from 1936 or whatever. It's pretty awesome. 

We head out to our assignments on Monday, and then apparently have a week to get used to our new families, meet the school teachers and principles, and just kind of chill out for a couple days. That will be nice. Maybe then my brain can slow the hell down and process this jumble of information known as the Georgian language.

There are lots of super neat things about Georgian that I really like, but am having a hard time grasping being an English speaker. First off, it's got a completely different alphabet. And while I really love it, and can basically read it flawlessly now (to be fair, it's at the speed of a 4 year old just learning words, but still!), there are times when it tricks me. I find myself many times writing a Greek letter instead of the Georgian one I want, even though I know the Georgian one. The same thing happened when I was learning Greek, though - I'd constantly be thinking of French words and slipping those in conversations instead of the Greek vocab I knew. So maybe this is just a case of my brain rewiring itself. Whatever it is, it's pretty annoying, because I KNOW what it should be, yet out of habit write something else.

Secondly, Georgians use postpositions for shit like "to" and "from" (-ში (-shi), -იდან/-დან(-idan/-dan)), and you just replace the last vowel of the word, or add onto it. Now, that's pretty cool, and it actually makes a lot of sense, but it's strange sitting there forming a sentence which in English has four parts and only having three words in Georgian. For example, "I am from America" is "მე ვარ ამერიქიდან" (me var amerikidan). The "from" is wrapped in the last 4 letters of the third word. Subsequently, I can change those last three letters to mean I'm going TO America, or I am IN America, and so on and so on. It's really a strange thing to get used to. Also, I have to say that this is the first time I'm learning a foreign language that has no genders, and it is so fucking awesome I cannot even stand myself.

Thirdly, plural forms. So, Georgian does the same thing English does to pluralize objects - that is, add an -s to the end of the noun. I really like that it does this, as it is one of the few really easy things about this language. However, you only ever add the -s when it's a general term, like "tables" or "cats" ("მაგიდას" (magidas) and  "კატას" (k'at'as). The second you have any kind of absolute number, like "3 tables" or "5 cats" you drop the -s, because the number already means it's plural, and the -s would just be redundant ("სამი მაგიდა"(sami magida) and "ხუთი კატა" (chouti k'at'a). Logically, that is awesome, and makes absolute sense, and I get why they do this. But my stupid English speaking brain hates this. Subsequently, I make the mistake of keeping the -ს a lot when I shouldn't.

The last bit that has been the hardest to grab hold of is the different p, ts, t, k, and various guttural ch sounds this language has. My awesome linguistic savvy sister sat me down one night with a bottle of wine and tried explaining the various aspirate sounds that a few of the letters represented. Now, I have to say, after actually hearing them in use I'm starting to distinguish which "t" to use, or which "k" to use. Hell, I can even tell you which "p" is which! But this fucking language has three different types of a sound like the "ch" in Greek and German (think of Bach if you need to verbalize this), with just SLIGHT differences. And quite frankly, when its nestled in between a sea of other consonants, with only one vowel in sight, they all sound basically the fucking same. These three letters, ღ, ჭ, ხ, are giving me hell. Again, I have no doubt that living in a household where these sounds will be commonplace will help dramatically with individualizing them. I'm not being a pessimist or anything, or throwing the towel of defeat in from now. All I want to do is strangle those three little symbols.

This has been a very rambly post, so I'll end it with some pictures of this place. Because seriously, it's so pretty I could puke.

Artwork in the Metro stop at Rustaveli Avenue. Probably for the Rose Revolution, if I had to take a shot in the dark...

The church in aforementioned "old" capital, Mskheta, called Svetitskhoveli Cathedral. I was bad and took pictures inside when priests weren't looking. This church has tombs of several old Georgian Kings, including the last one, George XII, when Georgia became a protectorate of Russia in 1800. 

Vineyard in the church courtyard. I wanted to eat one, but figured God was already pissed enough at me for  walking around such a venerated place with nothing on my head, so I didn't chance it. Georgia apparently has something wild like 9,000 types of grapes.