Peace, Love, Sakartvelo

Now that I've adapted to my village routine in Adjara, I really never think to tell y'all about it. Any "news" worth telling is whatever I've been up to in Tbilisi recently. But I realized that I've been neglecting to give you a good idea of what my daily life is like. I'm sure I've mentioned that it's pretty boring. But boring can be good... And sometimes my host fam slaughters a calf and we get to have a bunch of supras! The supra is the traditional Georgian celebration and involving: at least 3 times more food than those present could possibly eat during the 6 hours at the table, lots of wine, and complicated toasts to things like peace, love, Sakartvelo, parents, siblings, women, young children, health, Americans, Georgians, friendships between Americans and Georgians, and occasionally Ronald Reagan. And, if your (un)lucky, there's singing. I carried on Matt's Caucasian cultural exchange by singing "I've Been Working on the Railroad" with friends at a recent supra. The leader toasts is called the tamada, but often the toast travels around the table and is elaborated upon by all participants before drinking. I passed a cultural milestone the other week by successfully, but not-so-eloquently, adding my two cents to all the toasts. I can speak the Georgian! Sort of.
Speaking of which, I know you know Georgian is an impossible language, but I thought I'd give you some examples of my daily frustrations. It starts with pronunciation. Aside from the ever-present consonant clusters in words like varskvlavi (stars) and namskvari (cake), there's always the guttural K lurking in the shadows. The K-bomb requires you to make a choking sound in the middle of words, important words like water and the verb "to be." Beyond pronunciation, there is the fact that Georgians tell time 'backwards' so that seven seventeen becomes seventeen minutes into the eight hour, and they count by twenties. Ridiculous, no? Then when you really get into it, you learn that there are no patterns for verb tenses, and you conjugate the verb based on the subject and the object. People, come on!
An update on school: nothing has changed. Just kidding. I had a conference with my Georgian counterpart this week in Tbilisi and we went to sessions on things like "the communicative method" and "classroom management" and "point-based grading systems." Hopefully it will be easier to make changes now that the ministry of education's goals have been better explained to her. Who knows... My English club is fun. I taught them some christmas songs. I didn't think to teach 'em some songs from James Brown's Funky Christmas. Next week.
The weather is still pretty warm, so I haven't had to buy any firewood. Hoping it will stay that way. I'm about to be kicked out of the PC lounge. Here are some photos. No time for captions. My beautiful village, supra shots of host fam, preparing cow head jello, austin with my clementines (I eat them till I'm sick. Jim can't stop me now!), and my English club at school (in one of the nicer rooms):