I suppose you would like to know what I’ve been up to since late December. In the almost-but-not-quite month break we had from school, I did a little bit of traveling. Where to, you might ask? GHANA! Also, ISTANBUL! You can read all about it** in a guest post I did on Katharyn’s blog here.

As for life in my little mountain town? Cold, with a side of business as usual. After ten months in Georgia and eight at my permanent site, my life has become a strange mixture of Things I’ve Learned and Things I Still Have To Figure Out.

Things I’ve Learned (the slightly abridged version):

-How to speak and understand Russian in ways that aren’t frustratingly incompetent for everyone I interact with. As a teacher at a school where the language of instruction is Russian***, I often try to explain how to grammar works in Russian. While my success rate is probably somewhere around 50/50, that rate has vastly improved since when I first landed at site. Most days include both boosters and downers about my confidence in my Russian abilities–in the same class period I will have students tell me “Mr. Christopher, please just say in English, I don’t understand your Russian” and “Wow, your Russian is so much better than before! We can actually talk to you now.” I get a lot more compliments on my “pure/clean” accent now than I did when I first came to Georgia, but that is compounded with the many times I still don’t understand what my students are trying to say until my counterpart translates for me.

-Check how tight the lid is on your soda before you put it back in the fridge. This caused quite the incident in my house a few weeks ago, as I didn’t tighten the lid enough on my 2-liter Coke bottle before laying it on the top rack of the fridge. The result? Coke EVERYWHERE, including a nice little Coke bath for all the cheese, carrots, and garlic sitting in the bottom drawers. Whoops. I offered to both clean the fridge and help make new cheese, but was waved off by my host Mom, who muttered something akin to “You’ve done enough already.”

-I actually do make a difference in my English teaching, even if those changes are small and seem insignificant. This semester, due to a gamut of Ministry and schedule changes, I ended up dropping a few of the classes I had been teaching last semester and picking up a few I hadn’t taught before. My 9th grade class was doubled in size, combining a section I hadn’t taught with one that I had. And while that class isn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, I can see a difference in the speaking skills between the two classes–even from the students who spend most of their time playing with things that I eventually take away. Even if the only tangible improvement of their English skills over last semester is their ability to respond to me when I say “How are you? What did you do yesterday?”, I have to hold on to progress any way I can.

Things I Still Have To Figure Out (the extremely abridged version):

-How the washing machine at my house works. All of the settings are in Russian, and I’ve been warned several times by host Mom that one of the settings will make the thing barf water all over the bathroom. These two factors, compounded with the fact that host Mom willingly does the wash for me, mean I am still afraid to tackle the monster on my own. I’ve seen the number of steps it takes to coax the beast into actually working (one of which includes moving a barrel of water in front of the machine, for reasons that are still unknown to me) and have been hesitant to learn, but I swear I will… eventually.

-How to toast in Georgian. Those of you who have read anything about Georgia should know that Georgians are famous for their long, flowery, long toasts during supras. Although my own host family is Georgian, nearly all of our houseguests are Armenian, especially the men. As a result, I’ve become accustomed to the Armenian style of toasting, which is more typically just a stating of theme and then the drink–”To our meeting”, “To our friendship”, “To good people”, etc. My host dad usually says these toast themes in Georgian too; as a result, I’ve learned all the themes that Georgians usually toast to, but not how to properly expound on them after that declaration of theme.

* = Those times when it won’t win? The brief window of summer that lasts in Ninotsminda sometime between mid-June and late-August. But then, of course, blogging has all sorts of competitors: fishing, eating watermelon, picking raspberries… it doesn’t look good for you, my faithful readers, during the summer either.

** = The post is only about my Ghanaian travels, not my Turkish ones. Suffice it to say that my time is Istanbul was also totally awesome, worth it, etc. If you ask me nicely I may even tell you about it. Actually, that’s a lie. If you show any smidgen of interest whatsoever I will probably talk about it until you leave, and probably a little bit after that too.

*** = Although Russian is the official language of instruction at my school, the actual languages I hear throughout a given day at school differ significantly. In the teacher’s cabinet, the language spoken is almost always Armenian. Exceptions include when the few Georgians who teach at the school show up, when people try to talk to me, or when official school business is being discussed by the Director or Deputy Director. In the lessons themselves, the students almost always speak Armenian amongst themselves, in Russian or (sometimes) English to me, and in Russian to my Counterparts. Exceptions to that include when they don’t understand something in Russian, when my Counterparts are forced to explain in Armenian, or that moment during every lesson when students ask me how much Georgian and Armenian I know.

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.

Some things: if you really want to know what’s going on with me, you should e-mail me. Most of the information you want to know about my life can be found there. Don’t know my e-mail? Well, fair readers, just mosey on over to the “About Me” section. It’s that easy.

The short version of what I did over PST:
-Learned some Georgian
-Re-learned my Russian
-Attempted learning Armenian, with emphasis on the “attempted”
-Had a bitchin’ time

I know, I know. I’m a veritable fountain of hilarious, heart-warming, and otherwise diverting stories from the land of wine and cognac. I’m still trying to find what role this blog will play in my life, as the “preserve memories” function has been mostly superseded by e-mail. I think probably the best function that can be served by this is as a reflecting pool of my life in Georgia, rather than a place for amusing side stories and adventures. E-mail never really seems like the right place to talk about more in-depth discussion of what my life is all about here. Disappointed? You shouldn’t be. You can still get those other stories–just let me know, damnit.

When I first got my invitation back on Black Friday (a day that seems so distant now that I may as well have been shopping with a Utahraptor), it came in a big, blue, imposing folder with velcro clasps and too many sub-folders. Most of these sub-folders were filled with imposing, bureaucratic-type papers that the anti-adult in my immediately ignored. The folder sat alone, unloved, in the corner of my room for the better part of a couple months. A few days ago I received an e-mail with staging (PC’s term for the one-day orientation I will get before going to Georgia) information. Included in the e-mail was a note that I needed to bring all of the forms that came in the folder, completed, or I wouldn’t be going to Georgia. I had already packed my car at this point and realized that I hadn’t actually remebered seeing it. Cue about 40 minutes of panicked unpacking and repacking, throwing pillowcases and mugs and cat food containers unceremoniously onto my lawn, frantic calls to Serena followed by similarly frantic calls to my cousins and aunts in an attempt to canvass every area where the folder might be. Thoughts of “Oh god I already quit my job can I get it back?” and “How do I tell everyone in my life I missed out on Peace Corps because I lost some stupid papers?” flashed unpleasantly through my brain with alarming ferocity. Eventually I made a last-ditch, desperate call to Mom, asking her if she had seen it. Apparently, in my infinite wisdom and foresight, I had brought the folder home over Christmas break and told her to safekeep it until I came home in April. I just wish I had a memory of the same caliber to go with that foresight.

My nerves assuaged, I started off. The first leg of the journey was mildly exciting for me because, with all the times I have gone to and driven through Washington, I had never actually seen the I-5 corridor south of Tacoma. The few times that I had driven through there (once when I first moved to Washington, the other when I went to Salem with Brambles), it was dark enough that I couldn’t discern anything about the area that yes, there is a sky, and yes, there are trees (maybe). SPOILER ALERT: Washington on I-5 between Tacoma and Vancouver looks pretty much exactly the same as the rest of Washington on I-5.

I will let the photos I took of the rest of the drive speak for themselves (when I put them up, eventually), but be assured that it was COMPLETELY GORGEOUS. I spent most of the drive being amused by roadsigns, as I often am. On this particular drive, I was most amused by signs that did not say the typical “WATCH FOR FALLING ROCKS” or “DANGER ROCK SLIDE AREA”, but instead simply stated what was in the area: “ROCKS”, “BLOWING DUST”, “WATERWAY”, etc. I’ve always felt that signs that warned you about dangers were mightily presumptuous. Most rocks in mountainous areas are more interested in being part of the mountain than being part of the road; who are we to paint all rocks as dangerous hooligans hell-bent on attacking cars when most of them just want to hang out? They might as well say things like “ROCK AREA, WATCH OUT BECAUSE I THINK THEY ARE DOUCHEBAG-Y”. I much prefer signs that just tell me what’s going on to ones that try to tell me how to feel about it.

Eventually, I ended up in La Grande, where Brambles currently lives. I met with her and her friend Cody in the park, where we waited for Amanda’s mom to deliver a fantastic present to me (a necklace of St. Christopher). We spent the rest of the night doing what people do in La Grande: drinking at the bars, drinking in the room, sleeping (eventually). It was a fantastic night with a fantastic (former) roommate. I only got about two hours of sleep, though, which made Day 2 even more interesting than it already was (stay tuned!)

I AM GOING ON A ROADTRIP FOR A FUCKING MONTH IN ABOUT FOUR DAYS, HELL. YES.

Okay, freakout over. But seriously, I have been anticipating this roadtrip for quite a while now. My final itinerary will cover the following stops, in order: Seattle WA, La Grande OR, Davis CA, San Francisco CA, Las Vegas NV, Grand Canyon National Park AZ, Camp Verde AZ, Austin TX, New Orleans LA, Savannah GA, Washington DC, St Louis MO, Kirksville MO, Des Moines IA, Springfield IL.

The mileage by the end of the trip will probably total somewhere around 6,800. The number of states I will go through will be 22. The people I will be staying with/visiting will be an interesting mix of family, high school friends, college friends, and Peace Corps friends. In a word: awesome. As you can tell from the insanely ambitious number of stops I’ll be making, I’m definitely going more for travel breadth than depth. My reasons for doing it that way are numerous, and I won’t bore you with the details here. To keep things brief (or, rather, as brief as I can manage): I want this trip, I need this trip, and damnit, I’m going to take it.

Here are a few of the things I will be doing while on this trip (which I will post on here later! Hello, relevance!):
-Taking pictures of myself at state welcome signs where I find them.
-Taking pictures of Mosi when she least expects them. (yes, Mosi will be with me the entire trip. How many roadtrip friends can legally climb into your lap or poop without making you pull the car over?)
-Making a list of ridiculous things I see.
-Making a list of everything else, probably.
-Writing a new blog post every day every couple of days! (See how I’ve scaled back my plans already from my previous post? You guys will probably be lucky to get one post out of me through the whole trip.)

Enough of this boring “what-I’ll-be-doing-in-the-future” shit. You are all dying to know what I’ve been up to the past month, I’m sure. To make it more fun for me AND you, let’s play a variation of “two truths and a lie” I like to call “two things I actually did and five that I should have done instead.” I’m not giving you any hints as to which is which, though.
-Studied the Georgian alphabet, learned all of it.
-Got the swine flu shot that is required before you can go to Georgia.
-Studied basic Georgian words and phrases, can communicate slightly more than an old shoe.
-Finished sorting out which clothes to take and to leave and fully packed the ones that are going to Georgia.
-Went to a comic book convention in Seattle.
-Ate and slept a disgustingly high amount.
-Wrote a blog post a week.

Anyone who can guess the two correctly will receive a lifetime supply of mild respect for having become literate. I will post again, later, when I have at least a modicum of faux-wit about me.

Fortunately for you guys, some legitimately interesting things have happened since my last post! The most terrifying of those events was an interview I had with a PC Georgia Staff Member. Now, I can see you there, scratching your head. “But Christopher”, you say, “you did wonderfully on your first PC interview, and that one actually had a factor of whether you were doing PC at all!” Well, this interview was especially terrifying because it was in Russian. Russian, a language I have a minor in from Truman but haven’t spoken properly in over a year a half. The initial e-mail I got from PC Georgia set off every guilt-induced alarm my brain has. “Remember when you brought back your Russian textbooks from Illinois for the express purpose of re-learning Russian?” Yes, brain, I do remember doing that. “Now, remember all those times when you said you were going to study Russian, but instead decided to watch MST3K, or play with Mosi, or go to a music show?” Well, I don’t remember all of those times exactly, but it sounds like something I would do, brain. “And now, NOW you’re going to expect me to access those Russian synapses with relative competency? I’ll do it, sure. But I won’t be happy. In fact, I will forget really simple things just to spite you. Like how to say how old you are.”

Luckily, I wasn’t asked how old I was. And, in true Me fashion, the interview lasted 10 minutes longer than it should have because of my amazing ability to talk even when my linguistic competency is equal to that of a spectacularly intelligent Black Lab. “My house is big. It is also white. It has three apartments.”* Regardless, the interview was primarily to assess whether I had any Russian at all; in that respect, I passed with flying colors, even if the Russian I had to show was an almost incomprehensible mish-mash of mis-declined nouns with particular contempt for any verbs not conjugated for the past tense. What does this all mean? Well, those G10s who are coming in with a Russian background and who are crazy enough to sign up for learning not one but two new languages will very probably be placed in minority communities.

In Georgia, “minority” communities are typically made up of either Armenians or Azeris, who speak, unsurprisingly, Armenian and Azeri. Nearly all of the Aremenians and Azeris in Georgia live in Qvemo Qartli or Kaxeti (which border–SURPRISE!–Armenia and Azerbaijan. These guys aren’t anything if consistent), which is where all of the G9s are currently stationed. This probably means a few things**:

-I will probably do my actual service out east, near Tbilisi.

-Because most of the other G10s are going to be placed in the southwesternmost provinces of Georgia, I will be very far away from most of them.

-It is almost guaranteed that I will not have a sitemate during my service, although I will probably have another PCV within reasonable ‘let’s-get-together-and-be-obnoxiously-American’ distance.

I don’t know if any non-minority volunteers*** from the G10 class will be placed in the East. I sincerely hope so. I will have to learn to strike a happy balance between my G10 friends, who will be in Georgia my entire service but who will mostly be really far away, and my G9 friends, who will be nearby but will also leave a year into my service. Of course, this is merely one of a plethora of things I will have to learn to strike a happy balance with. I have already come into contact with some mind-bogglingly awesome people from both groups (I’m looking at you, S, J, L, and P), and with all the other frustrations and hardships I will eventually run into, having too many fabulous friends will certainly be one of the happier issues to deal with.

While we’re on the topic of Georgian-related issues, let me tell you the dark and dreary tale of my poor Georgian alphabet flash cards. I carried these intrepid squares of paper around everywhere with me for a good three weeks, and despite their best efforts, I still only know about half the alphabet. My studies have fallen into despairingly poor neglect recently, although I hope to restart the program soon (ha, right). In the meantime, the following has happened to my flashcards since I made them:

-A glob of snow fell off a diner roof in Leavenworth, WA, ruining a few with all of its half-melted glory.

-Mosi has taken to stealing them one by one and hiding them throughout the house. So far, places I have found them include: inside the Christmas tree that we still have up despite it being February, in my blankets, in my pillows, in my socks, in my shoes, in the toilet, behind the couch in the living room, and–perhaps most impressively–inside a laptop’s optical drive. Although I’m not entirely sure the last one can be entirely attributed to Mosi, I’ll give her credit for it anyway.

-I lost one letter at the Space Needle coming back from a music show.

-I lost another letter off the side of the ferry between Kingston and Edmonds that I take to get my grandparent’s house on the peninsula.

At this point, I have probably written about 2 1/2 alphabets worth of Georgian flash cards, and I will probably write another full set before April comes.

Speaking of hilariously bad and awkward transitions to another part of the post, I have informed my job that my last day of work will be the last day of March. Really, I would like to take March and April off entirely, but I say that more out of my increasingly nagging sense of wanderlust than any productive good I think I could do with the extra time. As it stands now, I will have the entire month of April to do whatever the hell I want. And what did I decide to do? A ridiculously extensive, trans-national roadtrip, of course. Except, this time, it will be a true trans-national meandering; none of that “starting in the middle of the country” bullshit I’ve done the other times I’ve done similar roadtrips.****

So far, the confirmed***** stops include: Lagrande OR, San Francisco CA, Las Vegas NV, Grand Canyon NP, Camp Verde AZ, Austin TX, Savannah GA, Washington DC, St Louis MO, Kirksville MO, and Springfield IL.

Stops I am strongly considering include: Davis CA, New Orleans LA, Huntington WV, Des Moines IA.

I am planning on blogging every day of my almost-monthlong trip, although I might not be able to post every day (you will all soon know the beauty that is backdating posts). I also have a super secret project associated with these posts that is under development. It’s so secret it doesn’t even have a codename. Aren’t you intrigued? You should be. It’s going to be awesome.

And now, dear readers, I have crossed the 1400-word threshold of this post, otherwise known as the “holy-fucking-god-will-you-stop-talking-already” line. Your homework is to think of amusing and witty things to say in the millions of letters you are now, having read this sentence, legally obligated to mail me. And don’t think I won’t come to collect my dues if you don’t pay up.

*I actually said this during the interview, because I confused квартира, the Russian word for ‘apartment’, with комнатa, the Russian word for ‘room’.

**Keep in mind that this is mostly all WILD CONJECTURE, and I should not be held responsible if it turns out every last bit is completely false. However, I believe it is based on mostly accurate information.

***I use the term ‘minority volunteer’ somewhat idiosyncratically to mean ‘a volunteer serving in a minority community’, not ‘a volunteer who is a racial minority’.

****To give you some idea of just how much I love long roadtrips, here is a list of trips I have done since two summers ago: Springfield IL–>Savannah GA (with Mom), Springfield IL–>Hersey PA (with Katharyn), Kirksville MO–>Red Bluff CA (with Erin), Springfield IL–>Seattle WA (alone).

*****’Confirmed’ here is used very, very loosely. I am going to stay with either family or friends the entire trip, and while I haven’t contacted most of them yet, I’m pretty confident I will have a place to stay with them.

დ – Currently my favorite letter. Every time I see it, I am reminded of a fish I had a brief obsession with when I was a sophomore in college: the Footballfish. (Google image search that, I dare you. It’s TERRIFYING.) It’s an easy letter to pronounce, too: /d/, like in the English dog.

წ – My second most favorite letter right now. As an unaspirated “ts” (like the beginning of “tsar”, but that ‘ts’ is aspirated) it is one of those letters that is more difficult to say correctly, but certainly not impossibly difficult. Mostly I like it because it reminds me of Luxo Jr., the intrepid mascot of Pixar.

ყ – Currently my least favorite letter. I mean, first of all, it looks just like ‘y’. Way to be a copycat, ყ (and no, I don’t care if ყ actually came before y). Not only is it lamely unoriginal, it is also the hardest letter to pronounce. The first time I tried, my throat began to itch and Mosi attacked my feet. My pronunciation notes for ყ on my flashcards say “postvelar, glottalized”, but it might as well say “the devil”. I can tell that me and ყ will have a long, contentious relationship with each other. Prime example: it’s the first sound in the Georgian word for “coffee”. Touche, ყ, touche.

ნ – My second least favorite letter so far. It’s not hard to pronounce at all (it’s /n/, like the English “nancy”), but it’s one of the letters I have been having the most trouble remembering because of its resemblance to the Russian “b”, б. Once I get over trying to make it the /b/ sound, we’ll be fine.

I anticipate that I will be able to recognize the whole alphabet by the end of the week, by which time I can move onto learning the list I have been adding to off and on for about a month:

Georgian Phrases That Will Save My Life (or at least make it a little less awkward).

So far on this list, I have:

-I am American. (Bonus credit, if needed: I am not Russian or Ukrainian.)

-I’m hungry. (Bonus credit: Do you have food?)

-I would like some soda/beer/water/coffee.

-I’m tired. (Bonus credit: Where can I sleep without being arrested for vagrancy?)

-I am single. (Bonus credit, if the Georgian asking is persistent: I have a wife waiting for me in America.)

-I like Georgia, it is very beautiful.

-I like Georgians, they are a nice people.

-I would like to take a marshutka to X city. Where should I go? (Bonus credit: I don’t know directions yet in Georgian. Can you just point?)

-My wallet is in my left pocket. Please leave my passport. (For use in extreme circumstances. From all that I hear, Georgia is a relatively safe place to be unless you do something stupid, which I plan on not doing. Better safe than sorry, however.)

and, finally:

-I am a poor American. I can give you half of the price you asked for [service/product]. (Haggling abilities to be expanded upon once I learn things like numbers.)

Once I master these useful phrases, I will move onto actually learning the language, and not set chunks of sounds. (Any PCV currently reading this, feel free to add any phrases you think I should know before going.)

Although the things that excite me about going to Georgia change on a daily basis, the #1 thing recently is the size of the Georgian PC program. The class to come before the one I’ll be in, the G9s, had about 30 people. The class I’m in, the G10, will probably have the same number of people. At least in terms of PC programs, that’s mostly on the small end of things (for the people I know in PC right now, Katharyn’s country has about 160 PCVs, Kristen’s has about 120, and Dillon’s has about 70).

This is due at least in part to the war that took place in Summer 2008 between Georgia and Russia, but also due to the fact that it’s a fairly small country geographically as well (about the size of South Carolina, although that’s deceptive because South Carolina doesn’t have the Rockys smack in the middle of it). This is exciting for me because it means that I will probably get to know all of the Georgian PCVs pretty well, or at least better than I would be able to in another, larger program.

I know that Peace Corps is first and foremost about the country you’re serving in, not only in providing cheap, skilled, motivated labor but also for cultural exposure, to show the host nationals that the US is actually a pretty sweet place. BUT. That doesn’t mean I’m not excited to get to know all the American Peace Corps people that will be serving with me. There’s something wonderful about being thrown into a stressful situation with 30-ish other people you know almost nothing about and getting to know them at a rate that you can’t really find in “normal” life. (In this way, at least, I think Peace Corps will mirror JBA a lot. For those of you who don’t know what JBA is, it’s a gifted academic camp Truman puts on that I have worked at for the past three summers, supervising about 200 middle school students day and night for a month while they take the equivalent of a semesterlong college course. In a strange twist of fate, there were usually between 25-30 people on staff at JBA too.)

In talking to Katharyn and Kristen about their Peace Corps experiences, they both mentioned that one vital PCV bonding experience is media-sharing, especially music. It makes sense; when you get that many people together from such different parts of the country, there is bound to be a healthy plethora of musical tastes.

(Edit: Now that I’ve written this little mini-history about my music life story, I realized that most of you probably don’t care about it. Future co-Georgia PCVs, you can go ahead and skip down to the next bolded “edit” in this post.) In a tangent that I promise actually relates to the rest of the post (I tried for a good 15 minutes to come up with a transition better than that one, but you guys will just have to deal), I have been a mix CD creating machine in the past few months. Okay, let’s backtrack a little. I didn’t really start listening to music until 8th grade. I didn’t start listening to non-”Weird Al” Yankovic music until I was a sophomore in high school. I know, music lovers. You are aghast. You are appalled. You are probably wondering why you ever even considered being friends with me. I don’t know why I never really got into music until that late other than my parents don’t really listen to music all that often either. Mostly, at home, we watch TV (not surprisingly, I LOVELOVELOVE TV, even though I refuse to pay for cable on my own). Even when I did start listening to music in high school, other than one particularly angsty couple of months where I listened to KoRn nonstop (Don’t judge. You listened to shitty music when you were a sophomore, too), music was mostly an ‘in-the-car’ thing. This continued until, well, I was a sophomore in college. Don’t get me wrong–I did start listening to music more, and I even went to a music show or two. But other than studying or driving to and from college, I never really listened to music. This was due largely to the fact that I didn’t want to spend money on an iPod. Thanks to an iPod purchase when I was a sophomore in college, and an upgrade to a car that could play music when I was a junior, I started to listen to music more. But it was still mostly in the car. Katharyn, who makes excellent mix CDs, used to be frustrated with me because I wouldn’t listen to her CDs for months after she had given them to me. Usually, our conversations went something like this:

Katharyn: Hey, friend, have you listened to [name of mix CD she had most recently given to me] yet?*

Me: No. I haven’t had a chance to yet.

Katharyn: It’s November. I gave you that CD in September. What. The. Heck.

Me: What? I haven’t gone home since then! I swear, next time I’m in a car, I will listen to it.

Katharyn: You DO have a computer. That, you know, plays music. Use it. (Dramatic flourish of arms followed by stomping off in other direction)**

ANYWAY. That changed dramatically when I moved to Seattle. Partially, the main pipeline I had had for exposure to new music was in another continent, but also I wanted to make the most of my time in Seattle, and I knew beforehand that Seattle has a pretty hoppin’ Indie/Experimental Rock scene going on, and I knew that those are two genres I am a big fan of. So I started *ahem* acquiring a LOT of indie/rock/folk/anti-folk music. I needed some motivation to get through all the stuff I had collected, so I decided to start making Katharyn mix CDs.

(Edit: Welcome back to the relavent-to-people-who-aren’t-named-Christopher-Stone part of the post, people.) I would be lying if I said the motivation to collect the favorite bits of my new music was just for Katharyn’s benefit (sorry, Katharyn). It has the added benefit of ready-made playlists for the PCVs I will meet in Georgia. Currently, the plan is to organize my music collection (which currently stands at around 50gigs, although I am always adding to that) into three large-ish playlists: Tier 1 music (or, ‘You can totally judge me as a person based on the quality of the music here, if that’s the kind of thing you do’), Tier 2 music (or, ‘Music I secretly enjoy, I won’t tell you I enjoy it until I know you won’t hate me for it’), and Tier 3 music (or, ‘Okay, I know this shitty music by any objective standard, and every criticism you have of it is totally legitimate, but damnit, I love it anyway’). So, future co-Volunteers, get excited (especially if you like anything pop-y/rock-y/folk-y), because I am hard at work creating awesome playlists for you.

* = She really does talk like this, using the vocative ‘friend’.

** = She doesn’t talk like this. That’s totally my phraseology there. She also doesn’t, as a rule, dramatically flourish her arms, or stomp off in any direction. Those were gross embellishments on my part.

Now, Georgian isn’t your normal kind of language. Or, at least, not a language I’m sure anyone who is reading this blog is used to. Georgian is special for a couple reasons, including:

1) It has its own alphabet. Okay, sure, it’s relatively painless in that it is, at least, an alphabet, and only has 33 characters, rather than the many thousand I would have to learn if I were going to a country that used a syllabary/ideograph system. But still, people! A new alphabet! I will openly admit that I have already written my name out in this new script, and it looks pretty cool. But even writing the word “poop” would look pretty cool… probably. (Edit: it does.)

2) Georgian is a linguistic isolate! Kinda. Unlike Spanish, Latin, Russian, German, French, Portuguese, or pretty much any other European-ish language you probably learned in high school or college, Georgian is not related to any other Indo-European language. Or, if it is, it’s so far back that linguists can’t really tell the difference.  It DOES have some blood relations, though, in a tight-knit little group called “South Caucasian Languages”. But of the approximately 5 million people who speak a South Caucasian language natively, about 4 million of those speak Georgian, so Georgian is far and above the big, burly, possibly-steroid-abusing brother of the group. This excites the linguist in me because I’ve always wanted to learn a non-Indo-European language that wasn’t Mandarin or Japanese. This absolutely terrifies the rest of me because none of the languages I’ve studied before (Russian, German, Spanish) help me in any way other than “study skills”.

3) So far the scariest thing about Georgian I’ve learned so far is that aspiration is phonemic. For you non-linguists, ‘aspiration’ is a little extra puff of air you give to a consonant. English does it, although it’s not meaningful. You can feel it in your chest if you say the words “pot” and “stop” back-to-back; the p in pot is aspirated, while the p in stop is not. If you’re really curious about it, you can find a good explanation of what aspiration is in this article: http://www.chumashlanguage.com/pronun/pronun-07-tx.html

Although I haven’t really started studying in earnest, I have run into some frustrations. These are almost entirely due to the language material Peace Corps sent and the fact that I’m a linguistics major. For example: “most linguists nowadays consider that Georgian is a unique Caucasian language that is not related to Indo-European or Semantic languages”. Semantic isn’t a language family; Semitic is. Semantics in linguistics is the study of word meaning. It may seem like I’m just being semantic (ha!), but it kind of surprised me to find an error like that in material they send to you as the first introduction to the language you’ll probably be speaking for the next two years. I guess it’s particularly surprising given the overwhelming professionalism of all of my other dealings with the Peace Corps. Given other odd-sounding phrases in the introduction to Georgian, I’m fairly certain it wasn’t written by a native English speaker… which makes sense, but it seems like someone would/should have edited it afterwards. That concern, however, isn’t frustrating so much as bemusing and doesn’t actually interfere with learning Georgian. More frustrating, from a learning-Georgian perspective, is the fact that there are multiple different pronunciation guides floating around. At first glance, it seems like they use a modified version of IPA (the International Phonetic Alphabet), but the symbols they use aren’t exactly consistent with what the speaker says on the mp3s they provide… and the speaker isn’t consistent, either; it kind of flips between a few different pronunciations, which wouldn’t be an issue except the material pretends that it’s all the same pronunciation. The linguist in me wants to know why the pronunciation changes. Is it the speaker on the tape’s own weird quirk? Is there some kind of phonetic free variation going on that we should know about? Is it a regional dialect issue? The fact that the packet is clearly not done by someone with a linguistics background prompted me to pick up the books I mentioned at the beginning of this post, and they are both wonderful in the establishing-a-transliteration-system-and-sticking-with-it department.

ANYWAY, something I’ve learned since I established a study schedule for myself on Saturday: studying sucks. A lot. I mean, I knew that before, having been to college and all, but as soon as I got my diploma I pushed all those memories of going to the library for hours and hours, falling asleep in the comfy chairs on the third floor, trying to write papers but facebooking instead, etc., to a dark corner of my brain. Part of the problem is that I have never been able to study in my place of residence with any sort of regularity; there are too many distractions. At Truman it was easy to find a building (library or otherwise) where mostly-distraction-free studying could be had. In Seattle, not so much luck. Coffeehouses are where I’ve decided most of my learning will happen, and I’ve already picked a few of my favorites out for study-spot convenience (The Blue Saucer on Roosevelt, the crepe place 35th, etc.). But, sadly, most coffeehouses close before I get off work during the week, so I will have be mostly a weekend warrior when it comes to studying.

In other news (because this post wasn’t long enough already!), I talked to Katharyn for an hour today during my lunch break (note to self: while sacrificing your lunch break to talk to your BFFLz in Ghana sounds like a good idea at the time, it also creates an army of discontents in your stomach). While talking to Katharyn is always the highlight of my day, doing so made me have my first mini-freakout over doing Peace Corps. Even though I spend most of my time thinking, reading, talking, or writing about what my life will be like in Georgia, it hasn’t really settled in that I’ll be there for two years. TWO WHOLE YEARS. That includes the entire year of 2011. And while that fact is ridiculously awesome, it is also ridiculously scary. What, I’ll be almost 25 when I get back you said? Shit, dog.

Dec 24-26: Prescott, KS (with immediate family members Mom/Dad/Katie & other family members Janice/Bascom/James).

Dec 26-31: Springfield, IL (with immediate family members again)

Dec 31-Jan 1: Chicago, IL (with Dustin, Jeremey, and Jeffy, with guest-stars Dustin’s Dad and Dustin’s Dad’ s friend Lou)

Jan 1-Jan 3: St. Louis, MO (with Hannah, with guest-star Stephanie)

Jan 3-Jan 5: Independence, MO (with Alice, who just happened to be god-awful sick and thus spent the entirety of my visit vomiting on the couch)

‘But sir!’ you protest, ‘This is not in any way related to Peace Corps!’ Oh, dear reader, you are wrong, and kind of rude for objecting to the content of my blog. Much of my time in Springfield was spent continuing my bout of self-indulgence, particularly with regards to cold-weather gear. After reading many-a Georgian PCV blog and the nearly universal comments about losing power and heat, especially at the schools, I decided that my cold weather gear needed an upgrade. Although I’m from the Midwest, and not exactly unaccustomed to ‘holy-fuck-that’s-cold’ temperature (the outside temp as I write this is a solid 2F), my winter wardrobe is more built for what I call the ‘Midwest Dash’–that 30 seconds outside you spend while running from your house to the car, and again from the car to wherever you were driving to.

My solution: buy things that can deal with cold on a more marathon-type basis, mostly by way of long underwear and form-fitting tops (also: an awesome pair of gloves to compliment the so-so pair that I already own). The upshot of being in the bitterly-cold Midwest is I get to test out my new purchases in a way that I can’t really do in Seattle, where any temperature below 40 is (just) cause for complaint. So far, things have been performing admirably, although sadly I didn’t bring my recently-purchased used down jacket.

In other news, I’m trying to come up with cheap things I can do/buy that will make my life and job in Georgia easier. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

–A picturebook of sorts of photos I’ve taken of the United States. This has the double benefit of me showing Georgians the geographic and economic diversity of the US while also allowing me to reminisce about the awesome places I’ve seen. Regions that will be emphasized: rural Midwest, forest-y Washington, urban California, rural Utah.

–Children’s books for use as translation exercises. I haven’t actually gotten any of these yet, but I will keep a lookout for library sales in Seattle over the coming months. I don’t know if the Seattle library district has the same awesome ‘$5 for a grocery bag of whatever you can fit’ deals that the Chatham Public Library used to do, but children’s books are usually significantly cheaper than normal ones. Plus, they are much lighter than normal books so I can reasonably take a bunch of them and not have to care about them being lost/stolen/destroyed.

–That’s really all I’ve got for now. I’ll be doing a lot of sitting an traveling tomorrow, so maybe I can try to think of more

Edit: So I conveniently forgot to mention the ‘rumors’ part of the title. I read on a current Georgian PCV’s blog (although I forget which one) that the those of us coming in April will be stationed in a more Western part of Georgia, as it has just recently been cleared security-wise for PCVs to go into on a more permanent basis. I don’t know how accurate this is, and I won’t know for sure where my service is until about halfway through training (or maybe even later than that? I don’t remember exactly when that happens, it might actually be more near the end too). Anyway, if there’s any truth to it, I’m excited, because closer to the Black Sea = somewhat warmer, unless you happen to be in the mountains, which I guess I might be. But anyway, Western Georgia has one of the world’s few temperate rain forests (another of those few being a few hours away from Seattle!), so that’s pretty flippin’ awesome. Of course, even if I end up being placed in a colder area, I’m still super-excited about going… just maybe slightly less during the months between September and April.