The rest of the TLG orientation

Due to the lack of internet at my home, I will be writing posts and posting them later. This post was written on 10/8/2011.

For the last two full days of orientation we mixed up the rhythm a bit, but it was still quite a full schedule. Georgian classes in the morning and information sessions and methodology in the afternoons. My Georgian language is progressing a little, but unfortunately, my listening comprehension, even in class is pretty bad. I think I've got 3/4 of the alphabet down, at least so that I can recognize them, but it will be a while before I'm able to write them on my own. Not to mention distinguish between similar letters.

One thing I really wish we had done on this orientation is have a group excursion and actually see Georgia. I've only been more than 100 meters away from the hotel 3 times in the past 7 days and each time only about 4 hours each. Fortunately, last night, one of the other volunteers asked our teacher where a good place to go to see some Georgian culture was and got the name of a restaurant. All we knew was that there was Georgian food and wine there, but about 30 of us jumped into a bunch of taxis lined up in front of the hotel and zoomed over there. 

The restaurant was small and nice but we knew we had picked the right place once the music started. From the little I've seen, it seems that Georgians love to sing and love four part harmonies. There was a variety of acapella music and other singing. 

Then the dancers came out. There wasn't a whole lot of dancing, but we got to see a few numbers. It was not what I was expecting at all, but it was fabulous. The music and dancing here is so lively and interesting. I can't really compare it to anything I've witnessed before. 

Thursday evening, the last evening of training, we were finally given our assignments. I was told that I was placed in a city in the Samgrelo province. I’m not sure if I’m going to disclose the city name on the blog or not for privacy reasons. If I had been placed in a village, I wasn’t going to since I would probably be the only foreign teacher in the area and it would be impossible to keep my identity and my host family’s identity private. But, as I will be in a city, it may not be as big of a deal. There are two other teachers from TLG placed in my city and there are others that are already there as well. I will see how things go. I may give more information on my location as the time passes.

Friday morning we went out for our last jaunt around Tbilisi. Many main streets downtown near Freedom square were closed off to traffic and there were police everywhere. It’s because the president of France is in town this week. Street cleaners were working hard to make the city center look beautiful.

We came back to check out of our hotel and the host families and school representatives had all arrived to pick us up to bring us to our respective cities, towns and villages. They had a quick meeting and then it was time for us to meet our family and go out into the real Georgia. We were placed on either side of the room and they announced the names one by one and we clapped for each person when they found their family/ school representative. 

I was picked up by another teacher at my school who happens to be the sister in law of my host family and lives with us. I am really lucky because she speaks some English. In fact, her English is quite good, she’s just never spoken with native speakers much before and her listening skills are not yet up to par. Don’t read this as a complaint, though, I’m quite happy to have someone to translate for me because the rest of my family doesn’t speak much English at all. The host mother only can say yes and no, the host father seems to know about as much English as I do Georgian, but he communicates quite well with these 10 words.  More on that later.

From the hotel, she took me by taxi to Tibilisi Central a bus and train station in Tibilisi. We found the bus to my region and loaded it up with all my things. There were about 5 or 6 other TLG folks on my bus as well with their respective families/ school reps. After loading everything on, my host went and bought our tickets and came back to announce that the bus was scheduled to leave at 4. It wasn’t even 2 o’clock at this point. Fortunately, we were both hungry, so we went off in search of a restaurant. It took us a while, but we found a good one and she ordered lots of yummy stuff. 

We made it back to the bus just in time to hop on. Six hours or so later we were in my city and meeting my host family at the bus drop off point. In my next post, I’ll write more about my first few days with my host family.

TLG Orientation Days 2-4

Well, our orientation has gotten much less exciting since my last post. We have very little free time during the day due to the... orientation. Our first three days have gone like this:

8-9: Breakfast
9-10: Orientation
10-12: Intercultural Training
12-12:15: Coffee Break
12:15-2: Intercultural Training
2-3:30: Lunch/ Break
3:30-5:30- Georgian Class
5:30-5:45- Coffee Break
5:45-7:15- Georgian Class
7:15- Dinner and free time
12:00 - curfew

If you're wondering how my Georgian is coming along, I suppose I speak as well as anyone who's been here for four days can. We've learned quite a few phrases and I'm trying to keep track of them in a small notebook that I can carry around with me. It is helping me to speak, but not really helping me remember the phrases. I've probably got about half the alphabet down, but learning the Georgian alphabet is much more challenging than learning Hangul was. There are way more letters and it's more like Roman letters in that there is no real rhyme or reason for their shape. They all just look like squiggly lines to me.  Fortunately there are no capital letters or then I'd really be in trouble.

We're all jet lagged and in information overload.  By the time our free time comes we're not all that excited about exploring. Finally, last night, we made our way out of the hotel and into town for the first time since Saturday. We wondered around without much purpose, we had no idea where we were or what we wanted to do. But we happened to get out of the Marshutka (minibuses/vans that serve the city, no large buses like other cities) in a rather hip looking (but deserted) area which seemed to be a rather international district. We wandered into a restaurant without knowing what it was and found out it was Uzbeki food. But, it was delicious and not very expensive (though quite a bit more expensive than Georgian food) and then we moved on to a Moroccan hookah bar down the street. It seemed a bit overpriced at 30 lari ($18 USD) for the hookah, but we split it between 4 people so it wasn't too bad. We could never have afforded to eat there though, most of the dishes on the menu were the same price as the hookah! In a country where a giant meat filled dumpling costs $0.35 USD at a nice restaurant, it seems a bit exorbitant.

 Statue at the end of the hip, international street

We still don't know where we're going to be placed in Georgia, though we've been told that the greatest need is in rural parts of the western side of the country, so many of us may wind up there. I'm not to concerned about it now. I'll be concerned once I figure out where I'm actually staying. With my luck I'd freak out and wind up in a perfectly normal place. 

Uzbek dumplings and Georgian Beer

TLG Orientation Day 1

 Our hotel and home during orientation

This is my first week in Georgia, and we have a one week orientation before we are sent to a school to teach. We got to our hotel in Tbilisi last night around 5 pm and I was able to call home and tell everyone I had arrived safely. Just 2 hours later we had our first orientation meeting. We were late, too, because we had no idea what time it was and we thought we were an hour behind the actual time.

At our first orientation meeting we learned all about transportation and safety here. We’ve been told to beware of driving in taxis alone, crossing streets, stray dogs and gypsies. Overall, though, they tell us that the crime rate is not very high here and it’s fairly safe to go around town. Today we went out for a few hours, my roommate at the hotel and I, and we certainly noticed police and security everywhere around the city. We also found that there are many underground passes to cross the streets since it seems a little suicidal to cross the streets in some places.

TLG (Teach and Learn Georgia, the program I’m with) takes in volunteers every two weeks but this group starting with me is the biggest they’ve had yet, 102 of us. It’s a little hard to get to know 102 people. We’re all here alone and want to meet friends, but it’s hard to get to know people when there’s so many of us. Fortunately, on our flight there were only 6 of us and we’ve more or less been sticking together.

First thing was our medical check. This was super easy. Despite the austere appearance of the clinic on the first floor of an old apartment building, it still had little touches of modernity/ cleanliness that I did not have for my medical checks in Korea. Like covers for the urine sample and a real toilet instead of a squat toilet… Though the vials of blood taken didn’t have covers on them. I guess they’re not exactly going to get contaminated with HIV or Hep from the air… Just would hate to be the one who drops that test tube rack by accident…

Freedom Square

Then, after we got back from the clinic, two of us went out to explore the town for a few hours. First we decided to walk, but after a while we realized that the sidewalk sort of disappeared and the street looked more and more highway like. So, all we could do was to get into a taxi. But, though we had decided we were going to Freedom Square (the only landmark we had heard of) we had no idea what this was in Georgian. Serendipitously, on a street sign just in front of us, there was a sign, written in both English and Georgian that pointed the way to the square. I tried my best to copy it as it looked on to paper before getting into a cab. We got into the cab and showed him the paper… the taxi driver scratched his head a bit and asked… “airport?”. Oh boy, looking at it again, I realized that I had miscopied the first letter since the sign had been far away. I fixed the letter and he said.. “ahh! Hfjojveoxozdjo” or something else we couldn’t understand, but we figured that was probably better than the airport, so we said yes, and all of a sudden he drove off. We almost took off before asking the price, but we remembered and I busted out the only Georgian I learned before leaving “sami?” (three). And he kind of laughed and took off. I assumed that meant OK.

We got there in one piece, driving in Georgia is a bit interesting, since things like lanes and rules and respect for other drivers don’t seem too important. We were also looking for a speed limit sign, but couldn’t find one of those either. They must have a speed limit.. right?

Singers at the festival

Once in the square, we didn’t really know what we were going to do. But after walking around for a few minutes, we found a crowd of people and went over to check out what was going on. Apparently it was some kind of music performance. We stuck around for a few songs and we were impressed with the singers and it was interesting to get a taste of Georgian music… or at least what we assume is Georgian music.

Beautiful, crumbling house

From there we walked around and saw a bakery where we proceeded to pick up a few snacks. One baklava and one cream puff later, we continued on our aimless journey and found a church, a park and eventually an outdoor flea market.

 

Cream Puff and Baklava from local bakery

 Statue in the park

The flea market was tons of fun. For those of you who read the blog, you must know I’m a sucker for markets and old things. Everything from dishes, cameras, war metals, Persian rugs, and swords were there on sale, and the market just continued from one road down the next on both sides of the street. Then when we thought we had found the end of the market, we discovered that the park on the other side had been converted into a giant art market and we went out and checked out all the beautiful art for sale as well. I'll make a separate post with photos for this, since I took quite a few.

 

Flea Market

After that it was time to head back to the hotel for lunch. The meal times are rather interesting. Breakfast is served at our hotel from 8-11, then lunch from 3-5 then dinner from 8-10. I’m not sure yet if this is just a hotel thing or a Georgian thing but I guess we’ll find out. Every meal so far has included bread and cheese along with another dish. We’ve had pasta three times now in four meals, including for breakfast. They also offered breakfast cereals with dinner, but not with lunch. It’s hard to say if these are normal yet, or if they are trying to be accommodating for us westerners or what, but they are certainly interesting. 

Finally it was time for our evening meeting. We learned a bit more about the program and we got our cell phones, which are provided by TLG and are free to use if you're calling someone else from TLG. We're now all sporting Nokia 1280s which are basically a newer model of the super basic Nokias everyone used to walk around with in 2000. I even had to manually set the time and date.

Nokia 1280, our phone

Tomorrow, the real orientation begins, first with an info session for an hour in the morning, followed by 2 hours of a Georgian language class followed by lunch then intercultural training and finally dinner at 8:00 in the evening. Not much time for play and we've been banned from drinking for the entire orientation week (seemingly because of people who have caused problems in the past). Not that they can really enforce this rule, but we aren't quite ready to test them yet.