18/9/2010

Hey, hey it's Saturday. Yesterday was a good day. After I posted on here I was consequently was late for my only class of the day; it helps to tell me more than which floor it is on. That wasn't the good part. I got home at roughly 1:30. Again they stalled me with their insistence that I eat, but I knew I would be focused; I was walking to Keda. Mari, my 11 year old BFF, in a majorly slick stall tactic tried to detour me to see more of the river and water fall. I saw enough of it, I mean to go back, but then was not the right time. Some guy named Igor who has been living with us while my host parents are away. Did I mention that earlier? Yeah my best connection with English in this house is getting her eye checked out; phrase book is earning its stripes in her absence. Well Igor agrees to walk with me. I'm going to let you assume I took lots of beautiful photos on the way, but in reality it all looked more of the same from my last attempt.

I understand why they don't want me walking to Keda, it's stupidly far away. We arrive and I see the paved roads of this cute little post card town and we immediatley find someone Igor knows. He speaks a little English and then asks if I want to see his church. I agree to be polite and the church is directly above my English resource centre, which I haven't seen since I made my first trip here. And who do I see walking out of there Bejan my principal. I yell out to him "Garmajobat" and usually after that we have translators to help. I go into the church briefly then go down to meet Bejan and he gives me the usual kiss on the cheek, which has probably filled my man kissage quota for a while and he tells me he''s heading back to Merisi and he'll take me back to Merisi. I'm thinking I've walked an hour and a half to go on a secret pilgramage to get ice cream and he's going to deny me. But before anything happens that crushes my soul we head into the English resource centre and meet Duri, my human roseta stone/English resource centre coordinator.

Inside he asks me how I'm going, I tell him I'm good, but I'm worried about some of the other Adjara mountain men, who are outside this region of Adjara. He tells me that the Taliban thing was most likely some guy just fucking with Dan and also told me the American girl that I saw photos of demanded to leave (Americans and their demands eh?) then asked if there was anything I needed; I swung for the fences. I asked if there was any way I could schedule my week so I have Fridays off so I could be able to see friends. I don't want to leave my family, after all they're my family. He looked at Bejan and they had like a four sentence conversation and that seemed to be no problem. That seemed a little too easy, I'm excited, but I know I should be reserved, the last time I saw this much excitement was when a bunch of us landed in Batumi and though we would be living on the Black Sea. Again, I count myself lucky I got the better situation of the Adjara Mountain Men it probably isn't that significant to me, but it means the world to me, I can go visit friends in most places now, plus three day weekends are awesome in itself and condensing my days would be great because I have a lot of free time outside of class. Duri asked if there was anything else and I asked if there was ice cream in Keda. Next thing I know we're driving to she shop and I spend up large, I bought a small tub of Ukrainian ice cream; a 1.5L of sprite and a small juice box that tasted as much of oranges as the picture of orange juice on the side of it.

Eventually while waiting for Bejan to give me a ride back I go outside and play in the playground. Igor comes back and they decide to give me a ride with his friends. So I tell Duri and the next thing I know I'm in the back seat of a Lada and heading up the hill. If you asked me two months ago what were the odds I would be returning from an ice cream mission in provincial Georgia nursing chipped teeth (I knew I forgot something) ice cream and wondering why this clown driving wants to slide on dirt roads near the edge of the cliff. If it's any consolation I don't think my lack of seat belts would have prevented my death should I go off the edge. But hey, it beats doing that walk home.

My teeth I cracked the night before last at dinner. There was a small pebble in the cabbage; vegetables can be dangerous. So I might need two or three fillings. I'm sure this will be great fun. I'm not sure how much it costs, if it's 35 lari per filling and there's more than three, I could need to wait till pay day. It's not sensitive to hot or cold, so I could probably brave it out until I get to Kutaisi and see captain scary dentist.

In other news Kyli is travelling alone because she's a real trooper and needs to see me/us. She's currently sneaking out like a ninja to avoid telling her host family she's travelling alone; I told her 31 is the new 16. Not that I ever had these issues, hell, we gave my friends Mum a shopping list of booze for us because we were underage. They were cool with it because we were drinking in a controlled environment. But now I'm ranting. The reason Kyli is risking life and limb is because Shannon has managed to get out of her house and get relocated to get away from her creepy brother. I make jokes with he about to make things normal for her, unlike Mary-Kate who I just give shit because she gets herself into preventable situations. Shannon sounds really happy about her new place and her new family, it seems to have ticked most of her boxes and to celebrate she is going to go pick up trash. I think it's a Californian thing. I guess she needs the time to bond with the family, which is important and I guess doing it while cleaning Kutaisi is an added bonus.

It feels weird knowing I'll be home soon, re-adjusting to my life back in NZ will be strange. For one thing I'm on my cell phone a lot here; I've talked for 27 hours on the thing already. Back home the long conversations aren't as necessary as here because you don't need the coping mechanism, but to be honest I love talking to these people, that's what I'm going to miss the most about here. I know I'll have to make an effort to visit some of these people. I think it's only 13 more weekends after this one to get out and about. Speaking of which I best be getting ready for Batumi. I think I'll leave my tripod at home, something tells me being that I have to go through Batumi to go anywhere I'll get more opportunities to photograph it.

19/9/2010

The only picture I took and it's of people you most likely don't know

Well I'm back from Batumi and have successfully used a marshooka to get from the village to the city. It's a really weird system, they told me it would be her at around 10-10:30am and we walk to the stop at 9am and I grab it and get on, as did almost every one from the local area. I think it sits 16, and I lost count after 25 people because I couldn't see who was behind the ones standing in front of me; it was like a giant clown car.

Arriving in Batumi I realised how shit our collective organisation skills were as I had no idea where to meet the people already here nor where to meet Kyli. I try to ask someone remaining on the marshooka where I should get off to be near the sea, which in hindsight is a vauge question, but I wanted to be near the beach part. She indicated I should wait and the driver will go near there, then she got off at what would of been the closest place to where I want to go. I wait and eventually the last two passengers and I got off at the last stop and I feel like I'm in the ghetto. I don't know where I should be heading and I didn't see a point of grabbing a taxi as I couldn't give directions; at this point my awesome navigation skills kicked in. I walked down some train tracks and eventually made my way down to the port, whilst calling Kyli and telling her to get near the water. My thinking being if we follow the coast we're bound to walk into each other. She couldn't find the giant blob of water on the map so we tried the landmark game; it turns out there's more than one crane, playground and park in this city and a lot of pink buildings. I asked her if she could see the big hotel or the clock tower. She told me she could see the clock tower, which is in the oppotiste direction. I told her to wait there and I'll meet her there, I get there and we establish that she thought the hotel was the clock tower because it had a clock on top of it. Eventually I double back we meet and greet and I drag her to go eat pizza with me.

The rest of the weekend was pretty average, nothing really special happened, but I like the fact I don't treat this city like a tourist who has to see everything in one go before they leave and never see it again, but rather someone who lives there and does normal things and doesn't need to see everything in one go. I know I'll probably see it with different people and over several weekends, so really there's no rush.

I didn't do anything about the dentist, I think I'll need to wait a couple of weeks for pay day as I probably just have enough to get me through the next two weeks okay, as long as I don’t do anything to expensive. One of the weekends I'm hoping to have someone over, so being out here there's nothing really to buy, so I figure as long as I don't have accommodation costs next weekend I'll be sweet.

I also got a hair shaving thing, I think I was over charged, but it's hard to match the products to the bar codes with two different languages; I thought it was 55 Lari, but it worked out to be around 69 Lari. I don't know if I was wrong or they were and after all the walking I've done over the last two days I couldn't muster the will power to try and find out using my phrase book.