Last weekend, Friday to be exact, was the first weekend I ventured outside of Keda and headed back to the big city of Tbilisi for an excursion with friends. Friday morning, I departed Keda in the pouring rain and headed for Batumi, where I would catch a marshrutka that would take me all the way to Tbilisi. While on this drive through the mountains, I counted no less than thirty waterfalls of varying sizes cascading down the slopes - all on one side of the road.
Six hours and only one near head on collision later, I made it to Tbilisi. The marshrutka pulled into the "station" which is a really generous word for what was actually there. It was a bazaar and there were marshrutkas left and right offering to take you to any and all places within Georgia and beyond, plus taxi drivers with no concept of personal space. I hadn't even stepped out of the marshrutka when a taxi driver popped out of nowhere and stood within eight inches of my face, asking me if I needed a taxi. I ignored him, feigning the ill-advised foreigner who knew nothing, and went in search of the metro instead. It was not too hard to find, and pretty soon, I was back in Old Town crashing at fellow Fulbrighter Nathan's awesome apartment. He has great views of Tbilisi, including President Ivanishvili's ridiculous spaceship of a mansion up on the mountain above Old Town. When Fulbrighters Destinee and Shawn arrived, the four of us went out to a restaurant that served delicious food but had hardly any of the items available that were on the menu.
The next morning, we headed out to meet up with a couple of Georgian students who intern at the US Embassy and with several of their friends. We were going to the Gvtaeba Monastery in Martqopi east of Tbilisi. Before we could get there (in our own private marshrutka), however, we stopped at least five times picking up food for a feast to follow our excursion. The monastery itself was beautiful - I had not heard of it until one of my Georgian friends suggested that we go there, it is not in any guide book and does not even have a Wikipedia page. That's okay, though. While in one of the churches, a monk told us about the power of love and I had a chance to contemplate what love meant to me. After the relative protection of the church walls, we embarked on a hike to the top of a mountain where a church tower was located. It was much colder than I (or any of on this trip) had expected it to be, and on this hike, our fingers all just about froze. The girls in the group ended up huddling together in a circle, our hands intertwined, trying to stay warm - I think it actually worked. The best remedy, though, was getting off of that beautiful, wind stripped summit. Some of the people in the group would disagree with me and instead say that the best remedy would be vodka...we certainly bought lots of it.
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| The tower at the top of the mountain, above the Martqopi Monastery. |
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| View of the Martqopi Monastery from the tower. |
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| Photo-op! The Fulbrighters and our Georgian friends. |
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| Forests around this mountain. |
Then came our supra/picnic. The very first thing we did after parking the marshrutka was start a fire - well, the driver lit the fire, we just retrieved the sticks. We made "hamburgers" ("hamboorgours") which were really buns slapped around coldcut ham with ketchup and mayonnaise. Kebabs and khachapuri were cooked over the fire. What would a Georgian feast be without toasting? The answer, it wouldn't be a Georgian feast. That afternoon, we all took turns toasting; toasting to friendship, to American-Georgian relations, to happiness, to the cold, to the moment...to the marshrutka driver (without whom none of the day would have been possible). After we ran out of games to play and it was getting dark and we were all sufficiently frozen, we decided to leave - and leave we did, singing all the way back to Tbilisi.
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| Tengo preparing to make a toast. |
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| Toasting. |
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