Pre-Training/Training Week

I left the States on May 22nd with one final destination in mind...Tbilisi, Georgia. I decided that graduating college was a big enough achievement to warrant a trip across Europe, in which I was able to visit friends in the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Turkey, England, and Germany. My friend Hannah and I tag teamed this adventure which ended up consisting of eating raw meat sandwiches in the Netherlands (where they play the Friend's theme song in their bars), ordering Belgian waffles and Belgian beer in...you guessed it, Belgium, drinking lots of wine/eating tons of pasta and gelato in Italy, riding bikes up the islands off the coast of Istanbul, eating lots of chocolate filled croissants in England, and finally getting to try schnitzel for the first time in Germany. I then had to leave Hannah, her brother, and our newly made friends to fly out to Tbilisi. I had a layover in Kiev, Ukraine which was a hot mess for sure! To print off your boarding pass for connecting flights through Kiev, you have to wait in this MASSIVE mob of 70 people where everyone is pushing, shoving, and yelling at each other; it took me close to 3 hours to get my boarding pass (at least I got to fly business class)! I then flew to Tbilisi, arriving around 4 in the morning, where I met up with our team leader and the rest of our teaching group. We slept, woke up, and took off with our training. We were introduced, in a more in depth way, to the program and Georgian history. We took a marshutka to the Georgian National Museum where we ventured around a bit and had a lesson on all things intercultural. For the rest of the week we took classes on Georgian culture, teaching methodology, and sat in a room for 4 hours each day learning the Georgian language; there are only 14 alphabets in the entire world and Georgian is one of them (and it's basically used only in Georgia). It's a very different kind of alphabet that I hope to improve upon over time. During the week we occasionally went to the restaurant next door to drink wine (which Georgia is famous for) and we were even asked for our autographs by our waiter. Today we got to meet our summer time host families where we will be teaching English to police officers before moving again to teach school children. It was sad, all of us standing there, having our names called out one-by-one, only to get in a car with someone we had never met before who would take each of us to completely different regions of the country. I was placed in the city Gori for the summer. Gori is the birthplace of Stalin and was under attack, causing casualties, in the recent 2008 war with Russia. It's interesting, Gori, and I suspect that it will grow on me. When Georgians have guests over it's a very big deal. There were massive amounts of food, I was made to eat 3 plates full, I had a cup of coffee, a cup of mineral water, a cup of cherry juice, and a glass of wine all surrounding my plate (all the while I was being told to keep eating and not stop). The grandmother in the house is already looking for a wife for me and it was translated to me that she intends on fattening me up. Life here will be good, I can tell.