Training, training and more training

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Today is when the fun really starts. From Sunday to the following Thursday we have eight hours of classes a day, four of Georgian language and four of intercultural training. I find the language lessons both useful and entertaining but, whilst I really like our intercultural trainer and she does give us some useful information, I can’t help feeling that what she tells us in four hours could be covered in about 30 minutes. Still, our classes are made infinitely more entertaining by one of the other volunteers, who shall remain nameless, who just comes out with the funniest shit. I don’t have the time or the space to give you all the examples but my personal favourite so far came during our second language lesson during which he asked the teacher, ‘Will we be given a phrase book? Because it seems to me as though this language is based on the meaning of its words.’ Honestly, how are you supposed to concentrate when someone’s constantly coming out with gems like that? To be honest I think that four hours of language lessons is a little counterproductive. I find that for the first two hours I’m doing ok, taking it in etc. Then we have a break and go back and after that it’s in one ear and out the other.
We’ve been expressly told by Tamara that we are not to drink during the training week, but we’ve decided to take that more as a guideline than an actual rule (shamelessly ripping off Pirates of the Caribbean there). I think that, most of us at least, are adults and are going to do the sensible thing. I find it hard enough to sit through four hours of lessons; if I had to do it with a hangover I’d probably throw up on my own shoes. We’ve also been given a curfew of midnight to be back at the hotel. We stick to it for the most part and are never back after 1am but I know there are groups of volunteers who have come in at 4am completely off their tits. Good luck to them, I’m too old for that shit when I have training the next day! So for the most part we’re pretty good. You find yourself meeting new people every day and people come and go but we have a fairly consistent core group by this point. We headed into Tbilisi one night and have a few beers with a Georgian guy who was a friend of a friend of one of the volunteers. What we didn’t realise was that he’d paid the bill before we even had a chance to pay ask for it. This is fairly typical in Georgia. They don’t tend to split the bill; one person always pays it and it’s usually a man. One night I actually force myself to stay in the hotel because I need to finish the lesson plan I have to submit along with my application for South Korea. I’ve just about finished and I’m thinking of getting an early night when one of the volunteers comes and joins me and then another and another and the next thing I know it’s four in the morning. It’s almost impossible to leave the bar once you’re there cos there’s just so much conversation going on and so many people to talk to. The first person to come over is Rachel. She’s American but I can’t remember exactly where she’s from (sorry Rachel!) Her and her boyfriend have imaginatively been labelled ‘the Vegans’, as in, “Does anyone know where the Vegans are?” Our conversation is a perfect illustration of why I occasionally feel like the Americans are speaking a different language. She was telling me a story about when her laptop was stolen which went something like this – Rachel: ‘Patrick and I were in a thrift store…’ Me: “You mean charity shop? We call them charity shops.” Rachel: “Sure. So we were in this ‘charity shop’ and I didn’t realise that Patrick had put my laptop in the cart...” Me: “Cart? I think that’s what my people call trolleys.” Rachel: “Ok, so what do you call trolleys?” Me: “Hang on, what are trolleys where you come from?” No wonder it took me so long to get to bed!
The following night there’s talk of going into town to see some live music but when we get there it turns out to be an Italian restaurant smack bang in the middle of the tourist area (as much as there is one in Tbilisi). Ally and I decide that we didn’t come to Georgia to sit in an Italian restaurant but I don’t want to make a fuss and make everyone think they have to leave as well so we ‘go to buy cigarettes’ and go wandering instead. We walk across the Bridge of Peace to the new park which is just the weirdest thing ever. You can stand in it and look around at the city and see three or four beautiful ancient churches lit up by soft lamps on the hill sides and then look at your immediate vicinity and there’s the Bridge of Peace looking like a giant sanitary towel, a giant model piano and, on another hillside, the TV tower lit up like a Christmas tree. It’s surreal. There’s a small outdoor theatre in the park so we try to practise some Shakespeare before realising that neither of us know more than a few lines from any one play (sorry dad). We go for another walk and find ourselves at the beginning of Rustaveli Avenue. I’ve never walked down it before but I’ve heard there’s an English book shop called Propero’s on it somewhere and I want to see where it is so we walk, and walk and walk and never find it. We eventually stop at a bar for a drink. Neither of us can remember how to say cheers so we decide to make complete twats of ourselves by taking our drinks up to the bar, miming clinking them together than then saying, ‘Gam….gam?’ ‘cos we know that’s how it starts. Ally thinks the girl behind the bar finds us charming. I’m fairly sure she finds us idiotic. We pay a measly sum for our drinks and go wandering around the back streets off Rustaveli, not looking for anything in particular. We are heading back towards the centre when, by some bazaar coincidence, we bump into the guys we’d left earlier on some side street. They’d come looking for a bakery (an actual wholesale bakery as opposed to a shop) that they’d found in the middle of the night a couple of days before. We find it a few streets over and sit on the pavement eating fresh bread. It’s a good way to end the night and we walk back to the hotel along the river. It’s lit up at night and makes for a beautiful walk home.
Two days left of training and things change slightly. We continue to have Georgian lessons but our intercultural lessons have been replaced by methodology lessons. This is where it all starts to go wrong for me. I appreciate the need for methodology lessons and I’m sure under other circumstances I would have found them useful, but our methodology teacher is a fucking moron, not to mention a complete dickhead. It’s as if she thinks that if she lets someone finish a sentence the world will implode. It’s funny for the first five minutes and then starts to get really fucking irritating. The only part of those four hours that was remotely worthwhile was that every now and again one of the other volunteers would mention something they’d used in a lesson and you’d think, ‘Yeah, I could use that.’ Anyway, I’m not going to talk about it anymore, except to say that I came out of her lesson actually angry and with a raging desire to get drunk for the first time since I got here. About twenty to thirty of us went to a Georgian restaurant not too far from the hotel. We ate good food, drank good wine and watched some traditional Georgian dancing which was incredibly impressive. But I still couldn’t shake my bad mood. We paid, again a meagre sum for our food and drinks, and then half the group disappeared so a few of us walked back to the hotel. It wasn’t until the others came back later with a bottle of vodka that I started to cheer up. I got into an argument with Ally’s roommate about the literary merits, or lack thereof, of Harry Potter. He argued the books are poison; I argued that anything that gets kids reading these days is fine by me. This somehow descended from an intelligent, albeit slightly drunk, literary debate into an arm wrestling contest. But it’s ok ‘cos I destroyed him, mwah ha ha.
Our last day of training was essentially a write-off for me. I slept through the Georgian classes, which I actually regret because they are really useful. I got up and had a coffee with Ally after lunch but I point blank refused to step foot in the same room as our methodology teacher so Jane and I spent the afternoon in our room chatting with other volunteers as and when they dropped by. Nobody particularly wanted to feel like shit when meeting their host families the next day so a quiet one was planned for the evening. Our last meeting of the day was when they finally told us where we were to be placed. I had my heart set on a city but basically wasn’t too fussed either way. Until , that is, I found out that Ally, Jane and Ara had all been placed in or around the same city and I was in a different region altogether. I have been placed in a small village called Koki about 12km outside of the city of Zugdidi which is the capital city of the Samegrelo region. I make a half-hearted attempt to swap with somebody in the same region as them but, with about twelve hours to go before we left, I knew it was hopeless so I decided to abandon myself to my fate. We go over to the restaurant next door for dinner and drinks. By this point my hangover has reared its ugly head so I’m dying for a drink. We eat some yummy Georgian food (don’t ask me what’s actually in any of it, I just know it’s good) and drink some Georgian wine but it’s pretty subdued, no crazy Georgian dancing for us that night! I go back to the hotel and have a couple of beers in the bar with some other volunteers but it’s pretty quiet so I head to bed early. Apparently everybody came back from their respective nights out later and were up in the bar ‘til around 6am. I was sorry to have missed it but at the same time kind of relieved – tomorrow we step into the unknown.

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