The Other Georgia

This year I have had so many opportunities for fun blog titles, like "Eating Turkey in Turkey." And I seriously considered naming this one "A Georgian Goes to Georgia."  It makes me smile.  It's the little things in life. :)

Anyway, for our spring retreat this year we met our Field Director, Jeffrey, in Tblisi, Georgia for a long weekend.  It was amazing- so refreshing and encouraging.  The city itself is quite beautiful, with lots of old architecture and random, extremely modern additions.  Take, for example, this glass and metal walking bridge right in the middle of the oldest part of town:

 

 

I fell in love with Georgian food when I moved to Kazakhstan the first time, and we were all quite excited to try the real thing.  It didn't disappoint.  We ordered hachipuri (a kind of pastry stuffed with cheese) pretty much everywhere we went- we couldn't get enough of it!  While there, however, we discovered a new obsession: flavored lemonades.  Pear, apple, cherry, mint, even tarragon (really?) flavored lemonades were everywhere, and they were delicious. Except, possibly, the tarragon.

 



 

Starting from those lemonade bottles, I made it my goal for the few days we were there to figure out the Georgian alphabet.  It is completely different from anything we've ever seen, and it was disorienting not being able to even sound out the words on signs.  So I started noting every instance where a word was written in Georgian and again in Latin letters (not translated, though), and I made pretty good progress.  By the end I could sound out most of the signs we saw, although I still didn't get the meaning.  I'll save that for our next trip! ;)

 

We took a day trip out to a smaller town to visit a famous monastery there. The countryside was just beautiful, and we got a lot of great pictures.

 



 

Covering our heads to go into the Orthodox church

 

 

 

The first restaurant we went to, I noticed that they had different symbols to mark the men's and women's restrooms, so I took pictures.  I assumed it was a gimmicky thing for that particular place, until I saw the same signs everywhere. The men's one kind of makes sense to me, but I would really love to know why it is universally acknowledged in Georgia that an umbrella represents women.  Surely there is a story there somewhere!

Men's restroom...

..and Women's.  Obviously

 

Some more fun/random pictures:

 



I'm not sure what we're celebrating, but we sure are happy about it!

In an old fortress on the mountain

In addition to the natural beauty, the old and new architecture, and the delicious food, one of our favorite things in Tblisi was the graffiti! It was randomly quite hilarious.  Everywhere we went we saw graffiti in English, but instead of the usual slew of foul language it was everything from quotes and profound (or hilarious) thoughts on life to stenciled portraits of famous people and even questions!

 



"Sorry, where is the Contemporary Art Museum?"

Xachapuri is the cheese pastry I mentioned earlier

Me and Charlie, just chillin'

There were so many others, but I didn't get pictures of them all, more's the pity. But the moral of the story is this: for delicious food, lovely people, and hilarious graffiti, I absolutely recommend Georgia as your next vacation destination!  I know I can't wait to go back. :)