Arrival

Hi! This is going to be a short blog covering my three-week stay in the Republic of Georgia. I'm here on a school trip, staying with a host family and (starting on Monday) interning at the Georgian National Museum. I'll try to update this regularly, but I'm not making any promises.

So. Georgia is a tiny country just south of Russia and next to Turkey. It was a member of the Soviet Union, and before that it was part of the Russian Empire. Today, it's mostly known internationally because of the violence in the Caucasus mountains in the north. I'm living in the capital, Tbilisi, far away from all of that.

I arrived yesterday, after a ten-hour flight from New York City to Kiev, then a three-hour flight from Kiev to Tbilisi. I... may have gotten some sleep. Possibly. I'm not sure. All I know is that I didn't get up until 1:00 in the afternoon today, and I'm still a little tired.

Another Mount Holyoke student and I are living with a Georgian family in an apartment near the city center. I just met them yesterday, and am still getting comfortable with them, but that hasn't been too difficult because they're very friendly. Both of the parents speak English reasonably well, as do many people in Georgia these days. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the main second language in Georgia has switched from Russian to English. The family also includes two daughters, neither of whom speak English, and a big black dog. The dog is very friendly- a little too friendly, if anything- but the daughters are both kind of shy at the moment, which makes sense since they just met us and we don't share a common language.

I only have a few pictures so far...

This is the street that I'm living on.

This, sketchily enough, is the entrance to my family's apartment building. The building dates from the beginning of the 1900s, so it's pretty run-down, but fortunately the apartment itself is really nice.

And this is the room that I'm sharing with the other student.











The food has been great so far, though I haven't been all that hungry since the flight. I've been too tired. They have really good bread, and I've already eaten borshch (beet soup, basically) twice since arriving. Which is a good thing. Just like the food in a lot of Eastern European countries, most Georgian food involves meat, which is making things interesting for the other student I'm living with (who's a vegetarian). I've only had three meals so far (one of which was mostly leftovers) so I don't have much to say about the food yet, but I'll have more information (and hopefully pictures) later.

The Georgian language is... interesting. And isn't related to any of the other languages I know, which is unfortunate. It is the most notable member of a small group of Indo-European languages, and has its own alphabet and (according to my host mom) a grammatical system that includes most of the complex grammar of all the other European languages combined. I'm trying to learn some words, but it's tough since it's so foreign and I can't read the alphabet. In case you were curious, it looks like this:

It looks so cool. I just wish I could read it.













Okay, I should go to bed. I have a lecture to attend tomorrow, and I should probably be awake for it.