I slept like a rock last night once I had stumbled shivering into my new home-away-from-home at 1:30am. An excursion of 8th graders, their parents, their younger siblings and a group of teachers (including me) pulled away from the curb in front of the school at 6:00am yesterday morning. I was sitting up front with Eka.
After four hours of spectacular scenery through mountains and valleys we stopped on the side of the road by a raging river and the moms set about emptying the contents of the luggage area under the bus where they had loaded all their home-cooked food. It was spread out on a couple of blankets, all the kids running around in circles anxious to start digging in. Of course my tiny plastic plate was loaded up with a kind of quesadilla (called khatchapuri), kebab (fried or roasted - not sure - sausage), chicken (probably killed the day before), some kind of flowers marinated in vinegar (looked like bean sprouts), and finally cake... all of it incredibly delicious. If you've ever seen "Legend" with David Bowie, you'll remember how in the forest there were always flower petals or puffs of tiny cotton-like things floating through the air like snow... well... replace that with a rain of snow-like pollen & you get the picture. I ate between sneezes. By the end of the day, I had used an entire roll of toilet paper, my tissue de jour.
Back on the bus & very culinarily satisfied, we continued the journey through a sizeable town named Borjomi, left the East-West Highway and started heading south towards the border with Armenia. The highlights were a nun-monastery where we visited an ancient 12th century Orthodox chapel, lots of sneezing involved there, and the final destination, Vardzia, cave dwellings dating from the 10th century. The setting was a rock face with caves carved into it facing rolling lush green mountains... a mix of Switzerland and Cappadocia. I really can't compare the scenery of this country to anything I've ever seen before. It's pretty spectacular. It combines things I've seen in many places, and creates something completely beautiful and different... fields of red poppies, yellow, blue and purple flowers scattered in thick profusion amidst lush grass on sloping hills that sweep up to a blue sky with giant billowy clouds... everywhere I look reminds me of 18th century Romantic English art... soft, accessible and rustic with the occasional ancient stone tower at the peak of a hill or a crumbling wall along a cliff.
A lot of time was spent at the caves & I got a bit of a sunburn, taking pictures, climbing up and down steep narrow stairs, ducking through tunnels. By the time we left, I had made lots of friends of the kids, finished off half a roll of my precious and diminishing toilet roll and bought an orange Fanta.
On the way to the next stop, I decided I could learn the numbers to bide my time on the bus. Eka and I were having good conversation, but during the lulls, I might as well make use of my time. So I learned one to ten and had some little kids behind me drill me on "one plus one," "three plus five," etc. till I was pretty confident with the first ten impossible sounding numbers... just to give you an idea, the most difficult one is nine, "tsukhrha." It requires moving the neck around in a semi-circular fashion, making gutteral sounds and finishing with a flourish of the hands to get it just right. The kids caught on that I really had a tough time with that one and asked me every possible combination of addition/subtraction problem to get me to say it. I noticed at one point that moms and teachers were leaning towards the aisle to get a good look... lots of laughs.
An hour or so after that, we stopped to see a museum. Eka kept me more or less updated on the progress of our excursion... where we were, where we were going, etc. But instead of a museum, we started walking up this long hill. It was around 2pm and getting pretty hot. Up till then I had been a bit chilly since I had only worn a T-shirt. I didn't realize we were going to be in the mountains, in caves and in thick-walled, ancient churches and monasteries. After the museum, there was a bit of discussion about whether to head straight for the park to play and eat or see an 8th century monastery that was very nearby. The monastery crowd won out, and it was great, very old and set in the middle of a forest on a high mountain. The views on the way up to it were fantastic. I filled up my empty water bottle with the supposed curative water from the fountain that came straight out of the mountain. Inside the church, the teachers and kids were kissing everything. The person would kiss... say... the post of the entrance to the church, then touch their forehead to it then cross themselves. The icons in the center of the room had a short line of kids crossing themselves, kissing the glass covering the sacred picture, touching their forehead to it, then genuflecting three times. It was really something to watch.
About an hour later, we stopped on the side of the road for our next picnic. In short order everything was laid out in the middle of another big field on the side of the road, the wind blowing snowy pollen sideways, the ubiquitous sound of the river in the background. I was starving. Anything left over from the morning was laid out again, but there were several new appearances... small strips of eggplant stuffed with walnut sauce, shredded lettuce with vinegar dressing, cucumbers and tomatoes, little fried sticks stuffed with beef, sautéed mushrooms, and more cake. One mom came around filling small plastic cups with something that I thought was coffee. I had refused a drink earlier in the day thinking it was prune juice or something and almost missed out on coffee, so I didn't say no this time. It ended up being some very potent but deliciously sweet home-made walnut liquor the color of coffee. That warmed me up.
Next stop Borjomi. It was almost 10pm. The kids were so excited that they were going to this park... seems like it has a reputation of having lots of attractions for kids, long boardwalks for the adults, a fountain of curative fizzy sulphur water, a river (of course) and beautiful tall fir trees.
Well, the lights were all off. One of the kids, Nica, who had befriended me, said (via Eka's translation), "When the president visits here, I'm sure they turn on all the lights and everything is perfect. Now we have an Englishman and look at the park... in the dark!" It was pretty chilly, but the night was clear and beautiful. On the way back to the bus, along the dark walk, the kids stopped at small glowing stands selling cotton candy that was made right there on the spot, coming away with giant billowy globes of spun sugar.
The final leg of the journey was tough... I was so sleepy, my head rocking back and forth against the short back of the seat on the curvy mountain roads waking occasionally to push the two plastic plates loaded with squares of cake topped in strawberries that a mom had given me from vibrating off the little shelf between me and the driver... two hours later, trying not to think about the cold walk back to my home in the dark, I got off the bus & headed down the empty streets to my place.
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