Me not guest, me family!

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I wake up to my first full day in my new home feeling apprehensive to say the least. I’m not sure what the showering situation is so I get up and get dressed as quietly as possible prepared to face my first day without a shower since I last went to festival . I also have quite a lot of washing (that’s laundry to all you Americans out there) to do but I also don’t know what the situation is there either. I know the English are notorious for not wishing to offend people but I take it to the absolute extreme. I am constantly terrified of doing something wrong. Anyway, we have breakfast and Eka tells me we’re going into Zugdidi. I’m eager to see the town but first let me tell you a little more about my housing situation. Our house is all on one floor (unless you count a storage shed on the roof that’s accessed by a ladder which I haven’t had the opportunity to explore yet. Mostly because I haven’t had the guts to ask if I can go up there and partly because there’s always somebody here so I haven’t had the chance to have a sneaky snoop around). The house is actually fairly large, and very comfortable, it’s just that it’s not split up into many rooms. There’s a big living room in the centre of the house and everything leads off from that. Eka and Gala’s bedroom is through one door and is huge, almost as big as the living room. My little room is off the other side and is tiny but really cosy. Then another door leads into a little corridor which leads into the kitchen. From here there’s a door that leads out to the front of the house and a fourth door leading off the living room to the back garden. There’s an outhouse with a western toilet a little way from the house and a big modern shower room. This is attached to the house but can only be accessed by going out of the living room into the garden and then through the door into the bathroom. I think the house was probably originally one big space split into a couple of rooms and extensions have been added over the years. Out the back there’s also a large storage shed about the size of a garage that I also haven’t been able to explore yet. I’m not sure I’d say we live on a farm as such, more of a small holding. As the day goes on I discover we have more and more animals. So far I’ve counted two cows (Fanta and Pepsi), two calves (currently nameless but I’ve suggested to Eka she call them Anna and Jason, Jason being the previous TLG volunteer they had at Koki school), two pigs, four chickens (at last count), about 10 chicks, a cat, a dog and a cockerel with some serious body clock issues. I’m not kidding, this guy crows at four in the morning, 10 o’clock at night and five in the afternoon. Or, to put it another way, whenever he damn well feels like it. We have quite a lot of land around the house with fruit and nut trees and grape vines (as I write this I’m sitting at a table outside in the sun and my deda has just brought me a plate of fruit picked from our own trees). To put it simply, it’s rather idyllic. After breakfast we drive into Zugdidi and Eka takes me to the Daniani Palace museum where one of Napoleon’s three death masks is kept, along with some art pieces and crockery, glassware etc. from Georgia’s history. Eka tells me that in all the years she’s lived in Koki she has never been to the museum which makes me smile because it wasn’t until last year that I went to the museum in my own home town. On the way into town we drop Gio off outside a block of flats and I ask Eka where he’s going. She says he has an English lesson. I give her a quizzical look and she laughs and says he does not want to be taught by her (or me it seems). After exhausting the museum (which took about six minutes) we wander over to the fountain in the grounds. It’s really sunny and a beautiful rainbow has formed over the water so we start to take some photos together but their battery dies. Mine has also died a tragic death. Unfortunately it appears I’ve left the charger back in England and my camera takes the only cable in the world that nobody has ever seen before so I’m fast abandoning any hope of finding a replacement and am resigned to buying a new one. We then take a walk in the botanical gardens beside the museum which are lovely and very peaceful. We bump into Gio outside the gardens and go to a restaurant where we eat Khinkali and drink beer for lunch. My mama (host father) tells me through Eka that he once ate 25 khinkali and drank three litres of beer and I am suitably impressed and strangely proud. I also manage to have an argument with Levani about his choice in football team (Chelsea!) and feel like we’ve bonded somewhat. Half way through the journey home Gala stops the car and swaps places with Gio who drives us the rest of the way home. Crazy fucking country. I spend the rest of the day sitting under the grape vines in the sun writing until it gets too dark and I go inside. Eka tells me the water is hot if I want to shower (mystery solved) so now I am getting used to taking my shower in the evenings – probably for the best since it’s roasting at the moment so I always seem to come in hot, dusty and sweaty. I’m still feeling my way around but I’m also starting to realise how lucky I am to be here. Later I bond with the family around the computer, looking at each other’s Facebook accounts and family photos. The house has internet but only on their computer in Eka and Gala’s bedroom so I don’t see me using it too much. While we’re hanging out in the bedroom we hear a lot of shouting coming from outside and Levan mimes drinking and fighting – small village means everyone can hear everything. Ally calls me later and tells me that he and Ara are going to Kutaisi the following day and I can’t resist going to see them so I ask Eka if she has any plans for me and when she says no I ask if it is ok for me to go to Kutaisi to meet my friends. I really don’t want to appear rude but at the same time I haven’t seen those guys for a massive 36 hours so needs must. I notice a certain reluctance on Eka’s part but I don’t know if this is because she doesn’t want me to go or because she’s simply worried about me. She asks me what time I want to go and I say I’m not sure and she says that Gala can take me on his way to work if I don’t mind leaving at 8.30am. I tell her that’s perfect. However, she also tells me that the last marshrutka leaves from Zugdidi to my village at 6pm so I had better be back by then. Fine. I figure to be on the safe side I will leave Kutaisi around 4pm and this will give me plenty of time to get back. Idiot. I am desperately trying to be independent in Georgia but this is the first time I have been in a country where nobody speaks a word of English. Luckily Gala not only drives me to where the marshrutka leaves from but waits with me until it arrives, tells them where I want to go, informs everyone that I’m English and safely installs me on the bus before leaving for work. Gala has driven me all the way to the next town where he works (Senaki) so it only takes me an hour to get to Kutaisi. The bus drops me off outside McDonalds (first one I’ve personally seen in Georgia, although I’ve heard there are a few in Tbilisi) and, like the ignorant westerner I am, I home in on it and ask for directions. I’m told that the place I need to get to isn’t even on the map I have which I find slightly worrying and that I should cross the road and get a number one bus. At least, that’s what I think they said. They also seemed to be saying that I could go in either direction and it would take me to the right place. Call me cynical but that doesn’t sound right to me. I feel I should point out at this stage that I’m normally fiercely independent and have no qualms about negotiating strange cities by myself. But when you throw in the Georgian stares the experience does become a little less than comfortable. But I decide to follow what I think was their advice, cross the road and wait until a number one bus arrives. I try to look out for signs for Rustaveli (every town seems to have a Rustaveli Avenue, it just means main street from what I can tell), even in Georgian because I rather optimistically think I will recognise it if I see it but there are none to be seen. However, after about 15 minutes we cross a big bridge over a river. I have a vague recollection of Ally saying something about meeting on a bridge so I get off the bus and there in front of me, like a shining beacon of hope, is a door with the word ‘brewery’ on it so I go straight inside and find a large bar/restaurant. I’m the only customer and I sort of forget it’s 11am and order a beer. So, by 11 o’clock I am sitting on the balcony of this restaurant in the sunshine beside the river in the centre of Kutaisi reading my book and drinking a beer and feeling, I must say, slightly smug. The boys, on the other hand, are fucking useless. They had to travel half the distance, with Ara who can speak pretty fluent Russian, and I still had to sit there and wait for them for two hours. At one point I called Ara to find out where they were and he tells me they’re on a bus to Batumi, but it’s ok cos they’re ‘fairly sure’ it stops at Kutaisi on the way! They finally walk in at about 1pm looking, in their defence, suitably sheepish and mumbling something about drinking cha cha the night before. This wouldn’t be a problem except that I have to leave at about 3pm to get back to the bus station. So I sulk for about 30 seconds until they order me another beer and everything is right with the world again. We eat some food and decide to go exploring. We spot a cable car that goes over the river up to the top of this big hill that appears to have a ferris wheel at the top so obviously we’re determined to head up there but we’re also waiting for a girl called Elizabeth from Brooklyn to join us so, in the meantime, we take a walk around the city and we’re rather taken with it. Ally and I play poo sticks on the bridge but the current simply takes them round in circles. Eventually Elizabeth turns up but by this point it’s almost 3pm so I have to start thinking about leaving. I can’t resist the cable car though so we find the base of it and buy our tickets (0.5 Lari). The only word to accurately describe this thing is ‘terrifying’. The door’s open the whole time and the Georgian guy and Georgian kid behind us start squabbling and play fighting. Then we discover the kid speaks a little English. He can say ‘Fuck you very much.’ Charming. We have fun at the top. We bump into another volunteer who’s on an excursion with her students (how she’s managed this before we’ve even started school I don’t know.) The boys spot some little go carts and get all excited. I sulk at having to play the role of the little lady, holding the camera while they race but then it transpires only one of them is working so they have to go round one at a time anyway. They get exactly two laps for their 1 Lari but they look happy. We ride the ferris wheel which is, again, terrifying, and some Georgian girls come over and ask to have their picture taken with us so we feel like minor celebrities. Then the Georgian guy who’s in charge of the Drop Zone (clue’s in the title – you rise up to the top and then drop back down to the bottom…about twenty times in this case) calls us over and tells us to go on the ride. We ask how much and he says we can ride it for free so we think, ‘why not?’ In hindsight I can now think of several reasons why not, not least of all that we all felt fucking terrible afterwards. By this point it really is getting pretty late so I head off back to the bus station and find myself a marshrutka. And we sit there and wait. And wait and wait. The lady sitting next to me tries to talk to me in Georgian and I have no fucking idea what she’s saying. She does tell me I’m beautiful though so it’s not all bad. Then she starts banging on about god so I take my book out and read until she takes the hint and shuts up. We finally set off at about 4.15pm and I’m already pretty sure I’m going to miss the last bus home. I figure if I have that expectation than maybe by some miracle I’ll make it and everything will be ok but no such luck. The bus takes forever and I finally get into Zugdidi at about 6.20pm. All this time though my main concern isn’t that I won’t be able to get home, it’s that I told Eka I’d be home by 6.30pm and I don’t want to be late. But I figure nothing runs on time anyway so I’ll jump in a cab and no one will be any the wiser. Why is it that nothing ever goes to plan in Georgia? My logic when it came to the potential taxi fare went something like this: It’s about twice as far to my village from Zugdidi as it was from our hotel in Tbilisi to the city centre (I can tell you now this is already flawed logic – it’s about six times as far). On average it cost us 4 Lari to get a taxi into Tbilisi from the hotel, but that’s in the capital. I’m in the country so everything should be cheaper right? The result of all these snippets of logic is that I’m expecting to pay six to eight Lari for my taxi home. But the first problem is that no one seems to understand where I live. My village is so remote that even the taxi drivers haven’t heard of it. I finally get one that I think understands where I want to go and he holds up two fingers and I think, ‘Blimey, two Lari?’ That’s even cheaper than I thought! But I try to give him the money and it transpires he meant 20 Lari, which is an obscene amount to pay for a taxi. I genuinely assume that he thinks I want to go somewhere else, very far away so I tell him to stop and get out of the cab. Then I walk down to the bazaar and try again. By this point I’m hot, tired and stressed out about getting home late. I can’t make any of the taxi drivers understand where I want to go so in the end I give in and call Eka and pass her over to the taxi driver to whom she explains my desired location. The problem with my phone and Eka’s phone is that they hate each other. When I call her or she calls me I can barely hear what she’s saying and if I text her she gets it, on average, about two hours later. So I shout something about being home soon and ask the taxi driver how much to Koki. He tells me 20 Lari. Again. Now I’m starting to think that, whilst this is a lot for a taxi fare, it’s unlikely that both drivers simply plucked it out of the air. And by this point I’m past caring so I just agree and get in. And then I throw a little strop in the car. I sent Ally something eloquent via text along the lines of, ‘Fucking thieving Georgian scum’ and then sit in the back brooding and thinking that I hate all Georgians and want to go home. This lasts for about three minutes until I calm down, grow up, realise the taxi driver is just trying to make a living and stop sulking. Unfortunately, whilst I don’t think they were specifically waiting for me, most of my family is standing out on the street with some neighbours when I get back. So there’s me cruising into town in my taxi like the fucking queen (I’m sure Her Majesty takes grotty, beaten up old cabs all the time) and half the village is outside to greet me. Eka and Levan find out how much I’m paying for the taxi and start arguing with the driver but it does no good, he’s sticking to his guns so I give him a well-deserved glare as I get out of his car, That’ll teach him. Tell you what though, after what turned out to be a pretty shit ending to the afternoon it was actually really nice to come home. I was met with sympathy and interest about my day. I showered and put on clean clothes and was fed. Then Levan came out and said he had a gift for me and gave me a top and a dress. Eka explained they came from the shop he used to work at in Turkey. I am deeply touched. The only problem now was that I felt like I’d completely failed in my first excursion without the family and would never be allowed out on my own again. Also, one of the reasons I was so upset on the way home was that I suddenly realised just how isolated I am. I wasn’t thrilled that the last bus home was at 6pm but up until that point I’d been thinking it didn’t really matter cos if I wanted a night out in Zugdidi with my friends I’d just grab a taxi home – not at 20 Lari a pop! Anyway, I was all clean and warm and sitting in the living room reading, wondering how early was too early to go to bed when Levan comes in and asks if I want to drink wine. I swear you’ve never seen anyone move so fast. I go into the kitchen and Levan is there with five of his friends sitting around the table, drinking homemade wine one of the boys has brought round. How one village the size of Koki can have six young men in their 20s is beyond me but there you go. Eka, god bless her, has put out food for all of them and they’ve got their laptop out playing music. I’m handed a glass of wine and, once again feeling a childish need to prove myself, down it in one after the first toast is made. The boys drink to me and my country and tell me they are sad that they cannot talk to me in English. Because seriously, not a word between them. They ask me to make a toast so we drink to ‘new friends’. Levan tells me it was two of these guys who were fighting the night before and now they’re sitting there best of friends. Blame the booze! Whenever I try to help with anything they never let me and I protest the only way I know how – ‘Me not guest, me family!’ Mostly they’re playing dance music and I’m not really paying much attention but then somebody puts Bryan Adams, Everything I do on and I can’t help smiling cos I have a real soft spot for that song. So they turn it up and I pick up the lighter and show them how we wave them above out heads when slow/emotional songs are playing at concerts. They intimate that they do the same thing but we only have one lighter between us. We do, however, have a box of matches. So a couple of minutes later I’m sitting around a table in a Georgian kitchen in a tiny Georgian village with the lights off, listening to Bryan Adams while a bunch of us wave lit matches in the air. It’s one of those proper, ‘If you’d asked me six months ago where I’d be bow I didn’t think I’d be doing this!’ moments. Then again here in Georgia you tend to have one of those moments at least once a day. Later, after more wine, one of Levan’s friends gets up to show us some Georgian dancing and Eka joins in which is lovely. Then he pulls out some Michael Jackson moves which are fairly impressive. I stop after five glasses of wine as I’m conscious that tomorrow is my first day at school. Actually, I stop and run away to bed when one of the lads goes back to his house to pick up another five litre bottle because I know if I’m there when he comes back with it I’ll never stop. Eka later tells me they stayed up drinking til 4am. Levan did not look well the next day, and I still made him practise his alphabet. Me not family, me evil English teacher.

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