The upshot is, the people are nice, food and beer are delicious, our apartment is comfortable, and the city is friendly and the things I need are easy to find—I think I’m going to have a good time here.
I got here at midnight on Friday night after a fairly uneventful but long trip from Atlanta to Chicago (with a stop at the Berghoff in the airport- the site of Charles’ and my mistake of missing our flight to Maine last summer spending too much time watching the World Cup—for old times sake) to London to Tbilisi. Fortunately my classmate Rob and “our driver” (yes we have a driver) Giorgi were there to pick me up despite the fact that my flight was 2 hours late. Poor Rob then went to have a beer and returned to the airport to pick up classmates Gabe and Julian at 2:30 am, only to come back at 5 am without them, to find out later that they left Istanbul on June 2 but arrived on June 3. We claimed them successfully last night.
My first day was fantastic. I slept well, and then Rob and I went to meet up with his friend Giorgi. (Rob likes to say that 50% of Georgian are named one of three names, one of those being Giorgi—so this is a different Giorgi than our driver.) Giorgi is, obviously, Georgian, but he went to Emory undergrad, where he was the president of his frat, and lived in India for 11 years. An interesting guy. Giorgi took us to a traditional restaurant where I got to sample many of the Georgian staples: Natakhtali beer (delicious), dumplings filled with beef and spices called kinkali (really delicious!), veal barbeque, bread filled with sharp cheese called hachipuri, and my favorite, eggplant with a spicy walnut paste, whose name I forget. The kinkali require a special method of eating them that involves holding it by the stalk, biting a small hole in the bottom, and sucking out the juice, kind of a broth, from the dumpling before eating the rest. It takes some practice, but I’m definitely not going to go hungry here.
I got here at midnight on Friday night after a fairly uneventful but long trip from Atlanta to Chicago (with a stop at the Berghoff in the airport- the site of Charles’ and my mistake of missing our flight to Maine last summer spending too much time watching the World Cup—for old times sake) to London to Tbilisi. Fortunately my classmate Rob and “our driver” (yes we have a driver) Giorgi were there to pick me up despite the fact that my flight was 2 hours late. Poor Rob then went to have a beer and returned to the airport to pick up classmates Gabe and Julian at 2:30 am, only to come back at 5 am without them, to find out later that they left Istanbul on June 2 but arrived on June 3. We claimed them successfully last night.
My first day was fantastic. I slept well, and then Rob and I went to meet up with his friend Giorgi. (Rob likes to say that 50% of Georgian are named one of three names, one of those being Giorgi—so this is a different Giorgi than our driver.) Giorgi is, obviously, Georgian, but he went to Emory undergrad, where he was the president of his frat, and lived in India for 11 years. An interesting guy. Giorgi took us to a traditional restaurant where I got to sample many of the Georgian staples: Natakhtali beer (delicious), dumplings filled with beef and spices called kinkali (really delicious!), veal barbeque, bread filled with sharp cheese called hachipuri, and my favorite, eggplant with a spicy walnut paste, whose name I forget. The kinkali require a special method of eating them that involves holding it by the stalk, biting a small hole in the bottom, and sucking out the juice, kind of a broth, from the dumpling before eating the rest. It takes some practice, but I’m definitely not going to go hungry here.
Then we walked up the street to a brewery of the other major beer of Georgia, Kazbegi, where they will fill a container that you bring with fresh cold beer. Most often these containers are 5 liter bottles. One way the locals pass an afternoon is to fill up your bottle, get some nuts and dried, salted fish, and take it to the river and drink it in the shade. It makes me happy that I can go to the other side of the world and share a common love, drinking beer by or in a river. Giorgi warned that that this was a very manly and not a particularly classy thing to do, but I of course didn’t mind. Sure enough, I was the only woman I saw around doing this for a couple of hours until Rob pointed out a very, very old woman in mourning clothes- black dress and veil- drinking with some guys.
From there we walked up to the “Old City” for a very brief tour and a stop in a couple of galleries that Giorgi picked out. It’s now a very trendy place to go out at night. After stopping back at the apartment briefly, we went to Giorgi’s apartment and watched the Georgian soccer team lose to Lithuania- not a very exciting game. In that time we managed to get in big arguments about the two most important issues in the world: AIDS and soccer. (If Americans put their minds to it and loved soccer as much as the rest of the world, could they dominate?) Then out again to a bar with another friend of Rob’s and her sister for more beer and some hachipuri to fill the time until we went back to the airport to give Gabe and Julian a slightly drunken welcome. We got home very very late and in an unprecedented move, I slept until 1 pm today.
I know my parents are saying something like, leave it to Jessica to go to a very foreign country and spend her first day drinking beer for 12 hours. What can I say but it wasn’t even my idea- but I surely didn’t say no.
First impressions of Georgia: the city is not what I expected. It’s very European without any of the Asian or Middle Eastern flavor I had predicted. The architecture is not very ornate, very Soviet-era and functional, big and block-like. But I feel very comfortable here. Although there don’t seem to be too many foreigners, we don’t attract very much attention, so I feel like I can go about my business without feeling threatened.
Tomorrow I start work. Looking forward to it.
I have lots of pictures to illustrate the goings-on, but I can't make this computer recognize my camera yet.
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