Well it has been a whirl wind of travel and such since I last got on here. Let me catch you up. Started my travels early in the morning this past Sunday by driving with my family to the Knoxville airport for my 6 am flight. After a connecting flight in the Washington/Dulles airport i arrived in Philadelphia. After I arrived at the hotel I took an hour nap since all I slept the night before was 30 mins. Then I finally got to meet my fellow volunteers downstairs while we waited for our information session to start. There are 32 of us in total and we are from all over ranging from different ages too with 23 years old being the youngest and mid 60s being the oldest. We all seemed to bond instantly which is good since we will be each other's support group in country for the next two year. To celebrate our last night in the states, we went to a fancy sushi restaurant close to our hotel.
The next day we left the hotel around ten and took a 3 hour bus ride to JFK airport where we waited another two additional hours to check into our overnight flight. Turkish Airlines we found out is really swanky with nice house slippers to wear during your overnight flight as well as gourmet food too. I didn't get much sleep on our ten hour flight but that was kind of expected. After our flight to Istanbul we had another two hour flight that would take us to the Tbilisi airport.
Finally Made It! We were met with cheers and clapping in the airport from the older volunteers there in Georgia that came to witness our arrival. Then we had a press conference where we met Richard Norland the U.S. Ambassador for Georgia. After that we traveled to a restaurant to have our first supra complete with bread, cheese, eggplant and other thing. Still with me?....When we finished dinner we boarded our bus and were issued our official Peace Corps phones...actually kind of an upgrade from my phone in the States.. at least this phone has snake. We stopped at a store to pick up some snacks and supplies that we would need for the next three days. We arrived at our orientation camp and basically passed out from exhaustion from traveling. These past few days we have been in and out of language classes, diversity classes, Peace Corps policy classes and culture classes. Since our camp is out in the middle of the Georgian countryside and we aren't really allowed to leave the sight, I haven't seen much of urban part of Georgia...just what we drove through in Tbilisi the night we arrived. Tomorrow we leave the "compound," as we like to call it and go to Khashuri where we will meet our new host families that we will be living with for the next 3 months. It's really kind of scary because we only know maybe ten Georgian phrases and vice verse with our host families and their English skills. Oh well lots of hand gestures and laughing I guess.
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| More countryside |
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| ხაჭაპური Khachapuri, the cheesy bread stuff in the center |
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| First Supra |
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| Yay food |
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| Weird window display in front of the restaurant (kind of reminds me of the Beatles ... with Yoko to the right) |
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| Abandoned house next to our camp |
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| Cool building in Tbilisi |
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| Georgian countryside....looks a lot like East TN |
