Countdown

I've only got 39 days of school left.

58 days total until my friend Helen comes for our insane Caucasus Hilarity Fest.

86 days before I board a plane and go back home.

I'm. Freaking. Out.

Eight months in, with only two more to go, and I don't feel like I've DONE anything. Which is silly; I've seen a lot of this country, eaten most of their national dishes, almost died at least four times per marshutka ride. I've made incredible friends and can speak a ridiculously hard language in the most basic survival modes.

So I don't really know what it is that my brain wants from me, because it's not like I've been idle while here. There are just so many more places I want to see, and I feel like I'm running out of time and money to do all of them. Which is terrifying, since I don't know when I'll be able to come back here (although, according to Ani I will be visiting for three weeks every summer. So. There's that!), and I don't want to leave without having DONE everything.

"Oh, how cool! You were in Georgia? For how long?"
"Almost a year! It was wonderful!"
"I bet! Did you see this-really-cool-awesome-famous-thing-that-if-you-didn't-see-you-basically-wasted-your-entire-time-there??"
"...No. I was probably dicking around in the mountains with my friends, hitting water with sticks..."1

Not that I regret the dicking around with my friends, because they're goofy and awesome and a lot of fun is always had no matter where we are or what we do. And I keep telling myself that the next few weeks have to be low key so that when Helen gets here in June I'll have enough cash to run around and show her all the beautiful places and see the new ones I want to. Time is just marching on, and I feel like if I blink then it'll all be over and I'll be getting onto the plane at the Tbilisi airport with no picture of me doing big arms from the back of a horse with a crazy mountainous backdrop. Which cannot happen, since that has been my number one goal of my time here since I first decided to apply to this program. The whole teaching kids English was always secondary to my selfish desires of being a free mountain spirit. Or something.

So here are two lists - one of places I still need to visit, and the other comprised of things I need to buy2. I'm making these public so that I'll have some accountability in the matter, because maybe my procrastinating ass won't keep putting them off for "next week" this way.

Ha. Good one, Jo.

Places To Go!
1. Svaneti - Mestia, Ushguli.3
2. Tusheti - more crazy pretty untouched wild mountains!
3. Vardzia - big cave city of awesome!
4. Borjomi - home of the mineral water that has somehow won me over. Also a park.
5. Chiatura - if I'm going to die, it might as well be an awesome way, like a cable car line snapping over an old magnesium mining town.
6. Gremi - a super close and beautiful monastery that I've only ever driven past.
7. Lagodekhi - waterfalls and mountains and general prettiness!

Things To Buy!
1. Panduri - 3 stringed instrument of Eastern Georgia (my home!). I've decided that 2014 is the year that I stop letting string instruments outsmart me, and what better thing to learn on than a Georgian stringed instrument and YouTube videos (of which there are many!).
2. A mini book of Shota Rustaveli's The Knight In The Panther's Skin.
3. Periodic Table of Elements in Georgian. Cause it exists and it's badass looking!
4. Star Map in Georgian. Cause it's also badass.
5. Fourteen thousand packs of my favorite shitty Icecube flavored Dirol gum that loses its taste after about 45 seconds! I think the Russians put crack in it or something, because god damn if it's not all I want every day.
6. Four packs of the most perfect graph paper notebooks I've ever written in.
7. A Chinese Goosebeery cup which is so common all over this country. (No, not Gooseberry. Goosebeery.)
8. A few of the universal wine glasses - they hold exactly 100 mg, so they're incredibly useful for baking. And drinking out of.
9. Vakhtanguri horns - essential for when you link arms with a friend and down your glass of wine. Or in this case, a horn of wine.
10. Lots of chacha. Yum.
11. Even more wine. Double yum.
12. A janky film Soviet camera from the Dry Bridge Bazaar. Or a lens. Cause how cool is that??

Sorry for a pretty pointless post. My mind apparently is everywhere today thanks to five cups of coffee, so apologies for that.

But here's a picture of the puppy I'll be coming home to in 86 days!!

Meet Amelia Pond!

1. True story. That's how I spent this past weekend. In the greenest mountains I've ever seen, crawling around lush forests, and sitting next to a stream hitting the water with a stick while making dinosaur sounds. A lot of times we ask ourselves, "Georgia, what are you doing to us?" This was one such moment.
2. I use the term "need" very loosely. 
3. They say that you haven't seen Georgia until you've seen Svaneti. So clearly this is a mustmustmust.

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?