In between stuff

In between the weekends of Kazbegi and Dubai, everything was pretty much the same at school and we went to Tbilisi for a couple of weekends. I developed a stronger love for the city after realizing how much fun it is to go out at night. It’s not quite Sevilla, but it’s pretty close. At 5 in the morning the city is still very lively and the clubs are all packed on weekends.

What makes going out in Tbilisi so special is how friendly everybody is. The Georgian hospitality extends beyond visiting somebody’s house or asking for the correct marshrutka. In bars or clubs, we make friends every time we go out and people buy me drinks almost every night. Part of this is because they don’t see foreigners extremely often but more because of the culture’s emphasis on hospitality. This makes for a really fun atmosphere and as the night goes on we have our new friends taking us from place to place and often introducing us to their friends. One night we even met a Georgian guy who’s 17 and going to play water polo at UCLA next year just because we happened to run into him walking out of a club and he told us it wasn’t good.  This is what we did for a couple weekends and it was really fun.

In Surami, things were pretty normal and I got more accustomed to the village life. I learned how troubled the school system is here and that attendance is often a problem. My host brother often misses school to stay home and play computer games and that’s with my host mother being a teacher. My co-teacher said that in her 10^th grade class there are about 30 kids and every time I have taught the class only about 10 are present. They key problem is that they don’t have the same incentives here that we have in America. I’m told that even the students that don’t do anything can still attend university, and it seems like many of them don’t go to university because they will end up staying in the village even if they did get a college education.

There is also an unfortunate macho culture here in which the boys becoming too cool for studying as they hit around grade 8 or 9. Many of the boys in the older grades can’t count to 20 while many girls are close to fluent. I think that this is one of the benefits of starting to teach the children at a younger age because students will have much more English experience by the time they hit this stage in their life. If a student is pretty good at English by the time they get to the eighth grade, they will probably be more likely to pay attention in class since they will have already had seven years of English instruction before entering the teenage years. It is also easier for students to pick up languages at an early age. So even though it seems like the students in the first couple grades are retaining nothing, I still think the new initiative to begin in the 1^st grade instead of 5^th is a good idea.

I’m really missing the food and being able to exercise easily back home but besides that everything is awesome. On the weekends I’ve been eating McDonalds and Texas Chicken because I really need a break from the constant bread and potatoes I’m served in the host family. Yes, I am losing weight, but being hungry most of the day is not fun and this is definitely what I miss most about home. If I lived in Tbilisi and could eat normal food and play basketball everyday I don’t think I’d want to leave this country. Next up comes Dubai.