Arrival in Georgia

Wow what a whirl wind of activity that I've gone through in the past 4 days, it seems like forever ago that I was actually in the United States.

First, on april 28th, I celebrated my 30th birthday by going out to dinner with my mom and dad. It was really good food, but I have found out that it's hard to compare anything to the food that they have here.

On April 30th i flew from Raleigh to Philadelphia to participate in a brief orientation. That's where i got to meet the other volunteers for the first time. Just to show what a small world it is, I walked into the conference room and was greeted by my old roommate MaKayla Oster, with whom I lived while in oregon back in 2009. We got along fine when we lived together, so it was actually kinda nice to see a familiar face. We had a brief orientation about what the peace corps was about and some basic do's and don'ts. The demographics are interesting, I seem to be right at the median age, it seems to be about 40/60 male/female ratio, and I found that my 17 month waiting period was about average, with some volunteers waiting 3 years for this opportunity.  Finally it was time for dinner. Many people in the group had never been to Philadelphia before, so I thought it would be neat to take them to Joe's Philly cheese steaks, which is a place that is often frequented by the likes of Kobe Bryant, Will Smith, and Dr. J. It was good, and I think everyone enjoyed the experience.

The next morning we loaded onto a bus (which I was 5 minutes away from missing due to getting coffee), and then we made the drive to JFK, where we were to catch the plane to T'Bilisi at 5:05pm. While I was there I had the good fortune of having lunch with my childhood friend Ryan Walder, who moved to NYC in 2010. It was a good way to leave the country.

The flight could have been better; I ended up in the back of the plane right in front of 2 screaming babies. two Nyquil PM's and two Tylenol PM's weren't enough to overcome that volume, so I didn't get too much rest. We landed in Istanbul, and boarded the flight to georgia. I got a window seat on the left side of the plane, so I got to see a lot of the black sea, but then when we got closer to Georgia I got a great view of the Northern Caucus Mountain range shooting up above the clouds, and I tried to get a good picture of it.

Finally we landed in out host country where we were met with US Embassy officials, Peace corps officials, Georgian Gov't Officials, the media, and a whole mess of interested Georgians. We posed for pictures and were then escorted to the bus where we made a short trip to a restaurant to have our first georgian dinner.

(T'bilisi Airport terminal, about the size of GSO airport)

The place was actually pretty nice (as most of T'bilisi seems) and the amount of food that the Georgians eat is truly staggering. It was fun because we had no idea when the appetizers ended and the main dish began, so it was tough to try and pace ourselves. With great relief I found that I liked everything that was served, but the best thing was a dish called Khatchipuri, which is bread with a lot of cheese baked in. Fantastic! The place had some interesting folk art too, and a thatched roof, which I tried to capture in this picture 

From there we went to a store where I accidentally indicated to a tending merchant that I was interested in dating her (which in this country only requires you smiling at them, which is going to be hard to adjust to since in america I would smile and say hello to most and passing stranger), and then we traveled into a very remote region northeast of T'Bilisi for our orientation. Today was teh first full day of orientation, and it consisted of our first language class (I'm very glad I studied before I left), explaination of peace corps policies, receiving our medical kit, and initial interviews with the people that will be supervising us once our 11 week training is over. 

On Saturday I'll be headed with the group to some TBD village where I will live with my first host family for the next 10 weeks. from there language and culture training will continue, and I'll probably not have access to the internet as reliably as I do at the orientation site (which is an old Soviet Union Barracks that Free University converted into a conference center). 

So far, so good.