Georgian Words I Continually Fuck Up

Somewhere around cup three and a half of coffee I decided that today I would write a blog post. But I had a problem in that I didn't know what I wanted to talk about. Occasionally I get things into my head that I have have HAVE to do, but then don't actually KNOW what I want to do about them. This is actually turning into a more and more common occurrence, and it was this exact feeling I experienced as I opened up this little composition.

Then I remembered the lists and realized that, with them, I've got at least six posts just waiting to be written up. I would say seven, but one of those lists is Doctor Who related, and since I've already talked about my favorite floppy haired Brits, I don't need to expand on that subject.

As such, today we're going to tackle the list titled, "Georgian Words I Continually Fuck Up." It looks much nicer in my notebook - there are some poofy lines and stars and little sun bursts all through the name, including some very pretty fonts. Cause nothing softens the blow of gratuitous swear words like some frilly cursive lettering!

Most of my difficulty with Georgian, other than the flat-out pronunciation of words, is found in word pairs that my head just cannot keep straight for some reason.

During orientation, we learned a lot of verbs that would come in handy with our host families. Two of them in particular, "I am going" and "I am coming," have proven to be super useful, as I like to be able to tell the family where I'll be at any given time. So these verbs and their imperatives were some of the first words I committed to memory, and they've really stuck to my brain. მოდი (modi) and მიდი (midi) are "go" and "come" respectively.

Only, ha, no Jo. You're dyslexic, and it's the other way around, with მოდი being "come" and  მიდი being "go." Only, I didn't really put two and two together about that until, shamefully, a few weeks ago when my host mom actually corrected me. So essentially, if I've been trying to say, "I am going to Tbilisi with my friends, and I come home Sunday" I'm actually saying, "I am coming to Tbilisi with my friends, and I go home Sunday." For the last six months. Whoops!

Another tricky pair that has been outsmarting me is ეს (es) and ის (ees), or "this" and "that." Why these are so problematic for my brain, I wish I could tell you. I think it's something to do with the fact that since Georgian doesn't have any articles, definite or indefinite, my poor English deprived brain keeps trying to impose English-like rules into conversation constantly, forcing me to overuse ეს to almost annoying levels. And if that's not confusing enough, ის not only means "that" but also the pronoun "it," which wouldn't be problematic except for I sometimes get nervous and use ეს when I should be saying ის because I want to say "it" and instead I say "this." If that makes sense.

No? Yeah, then now you know how any Georgian I talk to feels when trying to communicate with me.

Another pair that makes me sound like an idiot is ფული (puli) and პური (p'uri). The ფ is a soft sounding P, while პ is a more aspirated sounding P. Anyway, differing P's aside, these words mean "money" and "bread." Now, to Georgians, these words sound completely different. Not only are the beginning letters distinct, but the inner consonants are also totally unrelated. However, to my bastardized American ears, the P's are, in conversation, very similar sounding. So much so that unless it's highly emphasized, I can't tell you which P is which.

I bet you can see where this is going, right?

Yup. At the bank it's, "I need bread, please," and at a meal it's, "can I have money, please?" I was interchanging the two so much that I eventually started to avoid saying either one on the off-chance that I still had them mixed up. I've gone so far as to make a mnemonic reminder tying the consonant sounds together, ფული/lari (Georgian money), and პური/bread, which has helped some, but I still have to take a minute and think about it.

The last two tricky words are also completely unrelated, and this particular difficulty only exists in the plural, since every single noun has the same ending for plurals, and that ending is -ები. ჩიტები (chitebi) and ჩიკები (chikebi) mean "birds" and "cups." On numerous occasions, of course always at school, and of course always in front of judgmental Lamara, I will, inevitably, say, "Do we need birds for coffee?" Because god forbid I ever sound remotely intelligent when speaking this language!

So now that we've established that pairs of words are apparently my downfall, we can approach my most hilariously misused word to date. ყველაფერი. I was pretty stoked the day I found out about this word, which means "something," and I couldn't wait to start using "something," "anything," "everything," and "nothing" (all of which I learned at the same time!) as much as I possibly could because they're just so handy for conversations! I felt like such hot shit at the bazaar talking to a merchant, saying things like, "არ ვიცი რა მინდა, მაგრამ მინდა ყველაფერი!"(I don't know what I want, but I want something!), or when comforting an obviously distressed Bebia, "ყველაფერი ცუდია?" (Is something wrong?). Whenever I say this word, I get smiles, and I think, "Wow, look at me! I'm such a good foreigner that I know obscure Georgian words and they're so happy and appreciative about that! I refuse to be a shitty American that doesn't know anything past 'hello!'"

As I'm slowly discovering, I should probably remember that any time I feel really, really good about something, and believe I'm being a total badass, I'm most likely being the opposite.

My friend and I were heading down to a little shop near my house, and I asked my host mom if she needed something from the store. I always offer to pick up any small forgotten items if I'm going out, so I said the same question I'd asked literally dozens of times, "გინდათ ყველაფერი მაგაზაში?" (Do you need something at the store?)

And now we're nearing the point of the story where I stop feeling like such an amazeballs Georgian speaker.

My host mother, smiling like she always does when I ask her this question, shook her head and said, "No thank you," while my friend suppressed laughter. As we were walking down the street, she busted up and inquired, "So, what do you think you just asked her?"

"I said 'do you want something from the store!'"I proclaimed proudly.

"No," Sophia told me as she laughed. "You said, "Do you want EVERYTHING from the store?'"

So for months - MONTHS - in any situation where I thought I was saying "something" I've actually been saying "everything." My ego has taken a serious blow with this knowledge, and I've been knocked down a few pegs on the "Feeling Good About Georgian" ladder.

No wonder Georgians have been laughing at me whenever I say this stupid word! Looking back on the various instances I've used ყველაფერი in, all I can picture is me looking like this:

This is from a pretty amazing blog, written by one Allie Brosh. She is awesome and hilarious, and there are many times where I feel like she and I lead some weird parallel existence...

"I don't know what I want, but I WANT EVERYTHING!!!"

"Is EVERYTHING BAD???"

"DO YOU WANT EVERYTHING FROM THE STORE???"

Sometimes this language kills me.

But mainly it's a single letter that kills me, and that letter is ყ. Transliterated as "kgh," it essentially sounds like you're choking, but with a "k" at the beginning of your being choked. It is hands down my least favorite sound, and I will always fuck up any word that it is present within.

So naturally, judgmental Lamara thought it would be hilarious if I learned a tongue twister in Georgian (as if just normal sentences aren't enough of a tongue twister in this language, but whatever!), so she taught me a really common one:

ბაყაყი წყალში ყიყინება (bakghakghi tskghalshi kghikghineba), or "a frog is croaking in the water."

So here's how THAT went.

Sometimes it's probably better that I don't talk at all.

Unfortunately, that's never happened, not in the 26 years of my existence, and it certainly has not happened here.

I figure if I don't incessantly speak and make mistakes, I'll never learn. It might take me weeks, or even months, to sort some stuff out in my head, but hey! Baby steps! So maybe, by sounding like an idiot, I'll slowly become better at this language, while simultaneously making some Georgians laugh with my super bad accent. And who doesn't like a win-win sitch like that?

Swearing

Unsure if you've noticed, but I've got a terrible mouth. Much to my mothers dismay, I swear an unnecessary amount. But I've actually curtailed my sailor mouth while being here, because naturally everyone knows my favorite expletive, "fuck." I've been super proud of my lack of audible cursing! It means I'm capable of being a decent sounding member of society still, and not only a smarmy, snarky, sarcastic human being. I even have made it a point to not learn Georgian swear words just to completely remove the temptation of using them.

So far, so good!

Oh, except not. 

In Georgian, the possessive first person (my and mine) is ჩემი. You use these possessives the same way you do in English - that is, before whatever it is that you're possessing. My table is ჩემი მაგიდა, my dog is ჩემი ძაღლი, and so on and so forth. 

I thought this was a pretty universal rule. And then I borrowed the Peace Corps language workbook, and found an interesting paragraph discussing possessive pronouns and family related vocabulary. With elder generations from you, you add the ჩემი to the end of the word. ბებიაჩემი (my grandmother), დედაჩემი (my mother), and so on and so forth. So I read this and said, "huh. Interesting! I should fix the way I talk about my mother, then!" (Since I was using the aforementioned ჩემი in front of mother). 

And then I read the following: 

NOTE!! Using ჩემი დედა instead of დედაჩემი is strongly discouraged since it is used in blasphemies! 

Well great. My stupid sailor mouth rears it's head no matter what! I've been essentially swearing at my poor family and anyone who will listen to me speak about mine for the past four months. 

Whoopsies!

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.

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...

Skolashi

After being in the schools for over a month now I think it’s high time for a post on my school that delves a bit more into what’s going on. This is going to be part one, as I doubt I will be able to get everything out of my system without it turning into a novel.

Please note that I have no formal training in education, and that my opinions are all coming based off of having a crappy anthropology degree, as well as being the [successful] result of  crappy American public schools.

I guess the place I should start first off is my schedule. I’ve classes Monday through Friday, with four classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, which are my heaviest work loads. Yes, you heard me. Four classes in one day is the most I work any given week. The rest of the days are either one or two classes. The grades are 1-6, and although TLG strongly encourages us to get into the upper grades (7-12), I’ve elected not to.

Sidenote: I did attend a few of these classes when school first started, but I was way more of a distraction than a help to older kids. Most of them are uninterested about school and their normal teachers to begin with, let alone some random foreigner, and the ones that actually are engaged in class will endlessly hit you with a slew of highly personal questions every.single.class, much to the frustration of your host teacher. I figured it would be better if I just stopped going to these lessons…

So the whole purpose of TLG, and indeed why I am here in Georgia to begin with, is to put native English speakers in English language classrooms around the country. It was a radical new program that began a few years ago by the [at the time of this writing] current president, Mikheil Saakishvili, and it brings in people from America, Canada, and the UK. It’s a pretty great set up, actually. They fly you from your home country to Tbilisi, pay you every month, put you up with a host family that can take care of your dietary needs and creature comforts, give you health insurance and paid vacation, and will also fly you home at the end of your contract.

It used to be that they had two start dates every month, putting the number of foreigners, each month, at 120. Lots of people that did this program were just looking for something to do for a short stint, so they didn’t really invest themselves in the schools or with their families. Some saw it as an opportunity to convert this highly Orthodox country starting when they’re young, and one person was so bold as to actually lock the door of his classroom when his teacher stepped out for a moment and then start preaching his Bible to a whole room of kids. There are horror stories like that riddled throughout the programs history, so it’s no wonder that since last year they’ve cut the number of start dates to two a year and are highly selective with who they bring over. 

Volunteers are not expected, ever, to lead a class, nor teach the students by themselves. Instead, we work with the current English teachers, bringing our Western ideals into the school and helping the kids hear what English is supposed to sound like. When I say "Western ideals," I am basically talking about any type of education method that does not rely on the strictly Soviet style of read-translate-memorize which is so rampant here. 

My two coteachers are on opposite ends of the spectrum. One has been teaching for only a few years, but she's enthusiastic, open to suggestions for activities, lesson plans all the time with me, and has a pretty positive outlook on lessons. The other has been in the teaching business for 47 years. In fact, she had my host dad as a student. While she isn't as super Soviet as other teachers that I've heard of (no corporal punishment, for example!), she never deviates from the read-translate-memorize method I mentioned before. And since she has been teaching for 47 years, and I am her third volunteer, I doubt she's really going to be changing much. Both teachers are technically fluent in English, but their pronunciation of words is highly accented, and there's still a language barrier with them many times. This isn't to say that either of them aren't helpful - they really are, and I'm not trying to bash on them at all. I actually like them a lot, even the older one, who can get slightly terrifying sometimes when she screams in Georgian at the kids. I'm just trying to paint you all a picture of what, and who, I'm working with. 

The books we're using for the early grades are part of a new movement throughout Georgia for teaching English. They're decent enough, and there are a lot of exercises in them that make sense. However, they're ONLY in English. Immersion teaching is awesome and all, but that only works when it's part of a unilateral movement in school and home every single day. Most of my kids have English lessons two or three times a week, with long stretches in between. Added onto that, many times both my coteachers end up speaking mostly in Georgian, and these kids are talking roughly, and this is a very generous estimate, 20 minutes a week in English. Do you know anyone who was able to pick up a language with that little of practice? Cause I don't. 

I can understand for some abstract words, like adjectives and what not, to have a Georgian pairing so the kids can frame the foreign word in their head. However, for vocabulary that has a picture there's zero reason to even think about saying the Georgian word. I've tried to bring this up with my teachers a few times, but they keep reassuring me the students won't understand unless they tell them what it is. I'm skeptical about this, but since I have no idea what they're saying to the kids in class anyway, I'm going along with it for now. Upside is that I'm picking up a lot of vocabulary. I just wish the kids would, too!

The other thing that really bothers me is that these books focus so heavily on reading and writing. There isn't nearly enough practice for the kids to actually speak, which is unfortunate, given that this is where they're really strong. Instead, they’re forced to do the same type of exercises over and over again, never really understanding what it is that they’re saying. One of my coteachers told me the other day that, even in Georgian, kids don’t know what verbs, nouns, or adjectives are. My students are all scraping by based on the examples given in the books instead of freely constructed thoughts. Yet examples aren’t necessarily a guaranteed way to get them to form a sentence since many can’t even copy words down correctly. It’s strange, because they’re not stupid. If I sit there and verbally spell out the words, most of my kids can write them (minus the illiterate ones, of course), but they don’t really put together what the words mean in the overall context of the sentence. I’m going to go ahead and blame this one on inconsistent classes, and having English be the only lessons where the materials are encouraging new types of learning (matching, word banks, fill in the blank, etc) in their otherwise very Soviet style schooling.

So instead of encouraging the kids to speak a lot, and thus actually let them progress quickly through this bullshit language of ours, we bog them down by forcing them to read and write. Most of them don't understand the use of capital letters since Georgian only has one form of their alphabet, so all of their written answers have random capitals thrown in. Classes are full of frustrated students who feel left behind and like they are ultimately hopeless cases. I try to be as positive as I can, and always reinforce kids even TRYING to speak, and they're just now starting to get less shy about yapping at me. Most of them now run up, throw their arms around me in a hug that only a kid can give, and then immediately launch into Georgian at a million miles an hour, giggling when I look confused and say "ar vitsi" ("I don't know"). I'm hoping that this shift means that they'll all start being more involved, and since a few of my more problematic kids have already begun actually doing their homework and volunteering answers, I think we're on the right track. 

Classes are a bit chaotic since speaking out of turn isn't really discouraged. A lot of times lessons are filled with kids talking over each other, or them helping each other out immediately if one is having trouble reading something aloud. It's really cute, actually, and you can see that already in these young ages the cultural dynamics of community and cooperation are instilled. Also, every single kid here would be diagnosed with ADD in the States. And I’m not exaggerating. Even my really awesome kids, who are [mostly] quiet, always do their homework, can recite entire stories at the drop of a hat if you tell them to, would be too “unfocused” and “problematic” in America.  The problem most of the time is the disparity in mastery of the material – a few students per class have it down no problem, some kids are sprinkled in the middle who sort of get it, yet most will fall into the category of not having a clue. The best kids get bored with lessons so they zone out, the worst ones get frustrated by lessons and will just stare into space, and the mid range kids see all their friends being distracted so they, too, become unfocused. And then the teacher screams and stomps her foot, and for a second they’re startled, but nothing really changes. Repeat ad nauseum.

There are no real consequences for bad behavior or not working in class. Grades are sort of given, and while students want high marks their drive to get them is not enough to actually put the work in to earn these. So far we have had one test in my 4^th-6^th grades, and they, for the most part, all failed it. We’re talking scores of 2/40 points failed. Again, it’s not that they’re stupid, because the tests we gave them were straight out of their book, and were all exercises they have been doing for weeks. There’s just zero retention of the material, which is a problem I’ve been trying to tackle but find it challenging when my teachers don’t share the same mindset to sit and drill kids (in fun ways!) until they can answer quickly and accurately. I made flashcards for my first graders for colors, and after two meetings, and two pretty intensive flashcard games, you can bet your ass that those kids can tell you what color your shirt is, and that the leaves on that tree in your yard are green. My one teacher noticed what I was doing with the flashcards, and saw that it actually worked, and has started approaching the alphabet reviews we do in the same way. Even though a few letters still trip them up, these little five year olds are able to identify most characters out of context, and pretty quickly. Being the daughter of a behaviorist, this tickles me.

The only thing that works better than flashcards, however, is Hangman. I never saw my fifth graders try harder than the day we told them if we got through our whole lesson and they understood it that we would play Hangman at the end of class. Everyone was actively engaged, and even my shiest kids were particularly vocal. The best part of it was that after that lesson, they remembered everything from the previous class. They were all smiling, were super happy, and we have yet to have a bad class since this breakthrough. Who knew that bribing some kids with a lousy game of Hangman would ultimately be the proverbial Holy Grail of learning English?

I guess when it comes down to it, bribery really is the way to get what you want out of life.  

This is a page out of my third graders book. I forgot to mention above that while these books fundamentally are decent, they piss me off. The vocabulary that's taught is completely bogus. I think it's outrageous that by third grade, my kids don't know the days of the week, or months of the year, or hell, even ordinal numbers! However, they can tell you all about a space rocket, and Ned the astronaut that lives on a space station. Thanks, dicks.

Streets and Stereotypes

In my reading of numerous blogs, and talking to various people before coming to Georgia, several warnings stood out in my brain. The three that stuck with me the most were:

1) People are insane drivers, and take their cars up to ridiculously unsafe speeds on ridiculously unsafe roads and you will probably get hit by one if you walk in the road.

2) Georgians will feed you no matter what. They also will randomly drag you into their houses and make you eat.

3) Don’t friend them on Facebook, because the second you do, they will go through every picture of you they can and “like” all of them. 

These made me giggle, and I figured I would be spatially aware enough to realize there was a car coming and thus avoid it, and polite enough to refuse food, and that the whole “liking” pictures was one of those stupid stereotypes like “black people talk really loudly in movie theaters.” Clearly, since I knew everything about the world, I paid these no real heed.

Only, they’re fairly true (not the movie theater thing, just the general statements about Georgians). The streets here are in terrible shape. There’s no real reason that it takes almost 12 hours to get across a country that is the size of South Carolina, other than the roads are awful. The main thoroughfares in  Telavi are still riddled with potholes, and that’s to say nothing about the side streets, most of which are rubble or cobblestone. These roads have bred two very different types of drivers: ones who are arguably over cautious, and ones who think they’re F1 drivers. The F1 drivers are more numerous, and they avoid potholes and other obstacles at the very last second, often swerving several feet around it, bringing their thousand pound vehicle within mere feet, if not inches, of hitting you. Since I always walk as close to buildings as I can except in extreme circumstances (i.e. parked cars, leering elderly Georgians on a stoop, sketchy looking dogs, etc), I’ve sort of come to terms with the fact that if I get hit by a car while walking it will not be out of malice. Rather, it will be the driver legitimately losing control of their vehicle and thus obliterating me. And I'm pretty ok with that, honestly, because what use is there in worrying about this particular part of my day since I have to walk everywhere? 

As I mentioned before, my street is cobblestone, and is also on a fairly steep hill. People that go down this are generally pretty cautious, as they don't want to really mess up their suspension. The exceptions to this are the van drivers. There is a huge number of various types of vans here. Also, lots and lots of BMWs, Mercedes, and VWs. In the last few days, I've also seen a fair number of Jeeps, including one that was the same year as Nigel, which made me simultaneously happy and sad. It's stupid how heartbroken I still am over that car. But that's all besides the point. The point is that vans are really the only cars that haul ass down my street. 

I say this because last night, as I was walking down to the fountain at the bottom of our hill for water (my host mom scolds me if I drink a substantial amount of water from the tap, which makes me wonder where our water comes from, if street water is that much better...), a van came roaring down the street, and swerved to avoid a particularly jutting rock and almost nailed me. So after giving the driver a ridiculously dirty look, I started back for home, when my neighbor, T'ako saw me and came running out of her house. She lives two doors down, and threw open the gate to her yard and dragged me and my water bottle inside. After hustling me in past her grandmother, she sat me down on the couch next to her sister, and proceeded to feed me a shitload of fresh grapes, cookies, and coffee, even though I had just eaten back at the house. Her sister was watching Turkish soap operas that were dubbed in Georgian, which are super popular here. In typical social interaction fashion, there was a lot of hilarious gesticulating from all of us to figure out what the hell we were saying, although me laughing at a Georgian pad commercial was totally not understood by either of the girls, and no amount of hand waving would articulate why it was so funny. But trust me, it was wicked amusing. Anyway, T'ako herded me over to the computer once I was done with coffee, where she made me watch videos she had taped of herself dancing alone in her bedroom to really, really bad club music. She then friended me on Facebook, and we eventually struck a really good balance of talking via Google translate, and I think tonight we're scheduled to play some cards? Who knows what all I agreed to through Google translate. I guess I'll find out later!

After about an hour and a half of being force fed and laughing really hard, I returned home. Once I turned 3G back on the iPhone, my Facebook was instantly inundated with notifications of T'ako "like"ing every.single.one.of.my.pictures.from.ever. It was sort of ridiculous, but definitely made me smile.

No seriously. She went a few years back, even!

Anyway. The whole point of this very roundabout post was simply to say that stereotypes exist for a reason, and in the span of two hours last night, I experienced three very prominent ones.