The Journey

Wow… what an interesting couple weeks this has been. I figured since I have more free time than I’ve ever had in my life I should definitely take the time to document these experiences and not be lazy like I was in Sevilla.

The trip began when I met James at SFO. Needless to say, we were both feeling pretty strange pre-departure because there were an incredible amount of unknowns ahead of us. In a couple hours we would be flying to the country of Georgia to teach English– without knowing a word of Georgian or a letter of their alphabet, where in the country we would be living, who we would be living with, what the people in our program would be like…or how to teach English.

The night before the trip I stayed up until 4 am to try to prepare myself for the time difference in Georgia. This allowed me to sleep for the whole flight to Chicago. Once we arrived about 45 minutes late in Chicago, our supposed 1 hour 55 min layover seemed a lot smaller. Knowing that we had to make our way through this massive airport to the international terminal and re-enter security, we sprinted through the airport. As our tickets to Istanbul were being printed at the Turkish Airlines counter, the flight was already boarding and the employees were making it seem that we may not make our flight. I was feeling a little worried that we would miss our flight (which would have been a huge disaster), but of course we eventually got on the plane with time to spare. It didn’t take long to realize that there were a ton of fellow teachers on our flight to Istanbul and weirdly enough one of our best friends here (Chasen from Nashville) happened to be seated in the same 4-person row as us. We also quickly found out that Turkish Airlines is the best airline we’ve ever flown. Half of this is because of the massive Kobe billboard hanging over the 405 in LA, the awesome Hedo Turkoglu ad at the Istanbul airport, bright turquoise seats, and their hilariously awful/repetitive song “We are Turkish Airlines, We are globally yours.” The other half is because they supply you with free alcoholic drinks, earplugs, a sleeping mask, a toothbrush, toothpaste, a massive supply of movies/tv shows/games on your personal TV, and three decent meals over the course of the 10-hour flight.

After a long snooze we landed in Istanbul. We decided not to leave the airport because we both agreed that it wasn’t a good idea due to too much hassle and money and not enough time. We waited there for a while and then hopped on the short flight to Tbilisi with a bunch of other teachers. After finally landing in Georgia at 3:30 AM we got our first introduction to the strange Georgian hospitality as we went through customs. The customs officers looked like the least happy people I’d ever seen in my life, but we were given a free bottle of Georgian wine after getting our passports stamped. (This would foreshadow what is to come and I will explain later) After going through customs, we met with the group, exchanged dollars for lari, and hopped on the bus to the hotel.