Whatever Comes!

It's cold. There's ice on the roads. The mud is frozen most of the day. I wear my thermals most of the time and have taken to sleeping in my sleeping bag. The only source of heat is a large wooden stove in the living room. Everyone gets up late now, and school starts at 930 instead of 900.

One of our English teachers wants to do a musical production with our ninth grade, and I suggested Fiddler on the Roof. I downloaded the music and film and script and burned it all on cds, and the ninth graders are already learning the songs and talking about it all the time. I watched the whole film through just the other day, and got a little weepy.

"And if our good fortune never comes, here's to whatever comes!"

Yesterday I footed it to the hills with my camera and some khachapuri, up to the huge canals that run above the village. They are dry now and about ten feet deep, and go suddenly underground. I walked a little ways into the tunnel and played with the exposure time on my camera.

that wall spot at the end there was looking like a shadowy figure in wait when i'd review the shot in my camera screen

The autumn passed quickly and busily. I spent a lot of it planning and writing an English room grant for our school, and I will find out if we got in a few weeks. I had two Thanksgiving dinners this year. The first was at our annual 3-day All Volunteer Conference, and it was a huge production with at least two hundred people, and other volunteers had been slaving away in the kitchen for days straight. The second was at my friend and follow PCV Misha's place. He hosted a Thanksgiving for all the volunteers in Kakheti, our region, at his huge formally-a-guest-house in Kvareli. I had trouble sleeping and got up and watched the sunrise, and then went back to bed and slept until 2.00 when Misha woke me up and said I'd better go before I missed my marshrutka back.

But on Thanksgiving itself I went to school, and at one point thought, "Oh hey, it's Thursday. That's right. Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving ol' chum."

Since moving from my last site, things have been going well. The family I live with is a kind and happy family, they don't fight much, and don't drink too much, and they work hard. My Georgian's slowly improving as well, now that I've people to talk to, and the teachers are warm and we like working together. The kids are a rowdy bunch but good-natured, and like to chat. Yesterday a couple 2nd graders were walking home next to me. "How old are you? Do you have wife? What kind of Georgian food do you like?" The same questions they all love to ask.

My friend Jake visited a few months ago, before school started, and we traveled all over the country, only failing to make it to the coast. The night I went to the airport to meet him, my Taxi driver was wasted drunk, his lane choice vague and inconsistent. The music was distorted and blasting and he left his blinker on. I was ready at any moment to grab the steering wheel, and would have told him to let me out, but standing on the side of a highway in Georgia at 2am with drunk taxi drivers swooping past sounded even more dangerous. At the airport I paid and said my friend wouldn't be arriving for a while, so better if he didn't wait. Jake and I didn't go straight back to the hostel, but stopped at a nearby all night restaurant and got some food and drank beer. Jake had just been to Turkey, and we stayed there until light discussing and comparing toilet situations, among other things.

He also taught me to tie my shoes, or rather a new way to tie my shoes he'd learned from Lifehacker- not only quicker once you get the hang of it, but also it stays better tied. Our trip to the mountainous region Tusheti with some other PCVs was the highlight of the trip.

Tusheti

I received a package a month or so after he left, with something called an Aeropress in it. It was accompanied by a bag of Peet's Coffee and an attached note informing me that the coffee situation in Georgia is "abominable." I thought about how we had been using powdery espresso-grade Turkish coffee in my french press and shrugged. Maybe he was onto something. So I tried it. As it turns out, the Aeropress, is a world-changing piece of coffee-making technology, compact, efficient, simple to use, funny-looking, peace-spreading, and also fantastic at squirting out damn fine coffee. The quotes from ordinary good-hearted Americans sharing similar sentiments are all over the box, and leave little room for doubt.

Finally, I'm growing a full beard. I've never had proper one before. It's time.