That’s right, folks, it’s the most important day in Georgia: As samotsoba!

What’s that, Georgia PCVs (and possibly Georgian nationals who may be reading this)? You’ve never heard of As samotsoba?

Well, according to the internet (which is, as we know, wholly reliable), it’s been a good 160 days since my last post. It’s been so long that I (as well as all of you, probably) had given it up for dead. Cue the lovely Danielle Roe, a fellow Georgia PCV who said today she enjoyed my writing and was sad to see it gone–just the motivation I need to throw up another post (take note, everyone else.)

I will say that there is nothing I could write here that would both succinctly and accurately recount the 5-months-and-1-week that have elapsed since I last wrote here. So instead you’ll get the Peace Corps version of the highlight reels, which includes far fewer dunks and half-court shots than you would expect (sorry). To make it more interesting, let’s do it in interview form.

Q: So, Christopher, tell us what kinds of things you’ve managed to confiscate from your students this semester.

A: Most of the items I’ve taken from my students are what I would call “American Standard”. These include cell phones, cameras, pens hollowed out to be spit balls, papers folded into noise-making devices, sheets of paper being used to pass notes, etc. Other items may not be quite standard “let’s-disrupt-the-classroom” equipment in America, but they’re still not what I would call weird: lighters, matches, calculators that make piercing beeping noises when they calculate, sheets of paper being used to play Battleship, etc. There’s a third category of items, however, that I just like to call “What.” In this wonderful little category I would include things like: a sock completely filled with chalk*, parts of the radiators in every classroom that keep shit warm, parts of desks that have been torn off, a mini globe of the world, a ruler sawed off to look like a knife, a used bullet casing (this was actually just an attempted confiscation, but that’s another story for another day), €4500 worth of fake souvenir Euros, and 1.5 kilos of magnets (literally–I weighed it). I will say one thing to my town’s credit, however: I have yet to confiscate any explosives (i.e., fireworks), which makes my little volcanic plateau school a relative rarity this time of year.

Q: Christopher, what are some of the more interesting marshutka adventures you’ve had?

A: Ah, marshutkas. Simultaneously one of my favorite and least favorite parts of Georgia. For those of you having trouble picturing just exactly what a marshutka looks like, look at this. Except for slight variations in color, ceiling height, and mechanical fortitude, that’s pretty much what they are. The marshutka from Tbilisi to my town serves as one of the few lifelines between the ethnic Armenians that dominate my region and the economic benefits that serve as one of the few reasons most Armenians would visit Georgian-speaking Georgia. As a result, the past few times I’ve taken the marshutka back, the ratio of “things I bought in the bazaar” to people was significantly higher than most marshutkas. As someone who is not only foreign (and therefore, clearly, filthy rich, even though I’m taking a marshutka), but also young, handsome, and male, I usually get stuck somewhere in the back of the marshutka. This means I often get to play the game of “what goods are going to become dislodged from the precariously stacked piles in the back and hit me in the head?” every time we hit a pot hole or take a curve slightly too fast. So far, this list has been a relatively tame one: only bags of produce (5lbs of lemons) and dufflebags filled with skinned chickens (with their feet still sticking out) have been so brazen as to attack me. Those sitting next to me, however, haven’t been quite so lucky: I’ve seen people hit with falling boxes of remote-controlled cars, 10 lbs bags of hazelnuts, and (my favorite) a round of sheep cheese. Taking out the “I’ve just been assaulted by a bag of dead chickens” stories, however, it might just be easier to give you a list of some of the reasons marshutka rides have taken me longer than they should have so far in Georgia:

-stopping to buy fresh trout from a roadside fish hatchery,

-so the driver could throw trash into the yard of some guy he had a feud with,

-funeral processions,

-wedding processions,

-so all the male passengers (plus one female French tourist) could drink chacha in a shed off the road,

-flat tire/busted hubcap,

-so passengers could puke on the side of the road**,

-for a roadside hug (seriously–we stopped so a passenger could hug someone. That was it.),

-so passengers could shop at a supermarket,

-a transmission/clutch that would slip out of gear every 10-20 miles or any time the marsh stopped (whichever came first), requiring a restart,

-so the driver could increase the size of his collection of clay pots,

-white out blizzard conditions,

-and, of course, the almost ubiquitous herds of obstinate cows, sheep, or goats that decide that the grass is actually greener in the middle of the highway.

I think two questions just about does it.

* = At my school, chalk is kind of a big deal. We went a full two weeks under a “chalk emergency” and another week under “extreme chalk rationing”, although I’m not sure what either of those mean, as they didn’t actually change the way people used chalk. Chalk is only distributed from the teacher’s cabinet on the second floor, and if a given classroom runs out of chalk, they have to send out a kid to go retrieve some (it should be noted that in Georgia, the teachers move around while each grade stays in one classroom the whole day). Most classes take advantage of this by hoarding chalk in cubbyholes throughout the school; I’ve found chalk in matchboxes under floorboards, inside the school radiators, wedged between windows, etc. The idea is that if a given teacher runs out of chalk that the students actually like, they run to their cubbyhole and get the chalk they saved so they don’t have to waste time. If they don’t like the teacher, students will instead steal all the chalk leftover from the previous lesson so the first 5 or 10 minutes are wasted while one of them goes on their chalk-retrieval missions. Hence the sock filled with chalk: that class isn’t too fond of learning English.

** = This is what I like to call the “Akhalqalaqi cycle”. The road between Akhalqalaqi and Akhaltsikhe, which I often travel on, is one of the twistiest, turniest roads you will ever drive on. Add in the fact that you’re sitting on seats that are barely bolted to the floor, in a van that is in most cases at least 15 years old, and just about every marshutka’s desire to get to their destination AS QUICKLY AS MECHANICALLY POSSIBLE, and you’ve got your recipe for a little puking. The cycle comes in when the marshutka driver, annoyed that he had to wait however many minutes to wait for the puking passanger, decides the only way to make up time is to driver even faster and more recklessly than he was already. This, of course, doesn’t sit all that well with those who have already demonstrated the relatively weakness of their constitutions. This cycle repeats endlessly, with progressively faster driving and more puking, until you reach Akhaltsikhe.