All Was Not Lost, It Just Didn't Go As Planned

The past few days have been nonstop. It all started on Tuesday when the plan was for me to travel over to Kutaisi, a town about 2.5 hours away, to go with two of my colleagues to a meet-and-greet with some children at an elementary school.  One colleague lives in Kutaisi and the other was planning on traveling 2.5 hours to meet us at this event from Batumi, a town in western Georgia along the Black Sea. He pulled out Tuesday morning due to water issues at his flat. I was fortunate enough to have been offered an embassy escort, so for me, the travel was a snap (which was a bit of a relief because the roads were snowy and icy). After the event, my Kutaisi colleague and I were planning on hopping on a marshrutka to travel down to Batumi to meet with our other colleague to go over the finer details of our first teacher training workshop.

On arrival at the school, I was greeted by a wall of teachers, parents, and children. I met with some of the kids and listened to their book reports and then my colleague and I were ushered into a gymnasium where we listened to a band play Beatles songs; watched the children put on a play; listened to acapella Georgian singing; watched a powerpoint presentation; participated in the singing of a Coldplay song and were generally entertained.

And then our plan started to fall apart.

We were starting to get a little worried about the time and were making plans to gracefully extricate ourselves from what was turning into a much longer event than we’d anticipated when the woman who had attended from the embassy pulled us aside and explained that we had to go to the luncheon immediately following the event. We had to and there was absolutely no way out of it. If we didn’t go, it would be seen as offensive and, anyways, there would be plenty of food and it would be an enjoyable experience. We hemmed and hawed, but we saw that we had to go so we went.

Of course, she was right. There was fantastic food and dancing and general merriment. We sat with a group of about 30 teachers at one table, and a long table of students and parents were seated right behind us. At the beginning, we thought we could still be on our way to Batumi by a reasonable hour, but then the plan started to fall apart even more. 

Now, generally speaking, I hate being pegged to specific gender roles. However, on this occasion, I was so glad to be female because otherwise it would have been virtually impossible to refuse drinking copious amounts of wine (which happened to be a white from the Kutaisi region). Every time there was a toast, wine glasses were drained and refilled. I tried so hard not to overdo it because of the impending 2.5 hour marshrutka ride we were still planning on taking, but I wasn’t nearly as staid as I should have been. Needless to say, I imbibed my fair share, ate lots of great food, danced with the kids, and met some great people.  At the end of the luncheon (which couldn’t have been any later than 6pm), we were whisked out of the restaurant and deposited back at my colleague’s apartment.

We took one good look at each other and laughed. There was to be no travel to Batumi. Neither of us thought squishing into a bouncy minivan for the 2.5 hour ride seemed like a very good idea. Instead we opted to rest for a bit then go out to explore the town once our heads stopped spinning. After a little down time, we had an enjoyable night walking around Kutaisi and having a light dinner at the Brewery Mirzaani. We had a bit of a late start in the morning, but after coffee and fresh lobiani (think refried beans wrapped up in a blanket of bread, all steaming hot) we were ready to head out the door. Destination: Batumi.

The marshrutka system is the way to travel around Georgia. I had not yet been on one, and initially I found the whole scheme to be pretty daunting because I have no language abilities in either Georgian or Russian. Luckily, my colleague speaks Russian but it was so easy to find a marshrutka heading to Batumi, I could have figured it out had I been by myself. We crawled into the van and took two seats in the very back corner where we sat squeezed together for nearly 3 hours.  I had a window, a leaky window that got my pants all wet, so I could at least see out, but the roads were slushy in parts and icy in others so I mostly tried to relax and sleep, which didn’t end up working very well. We maintained a pretty good humor about it, though, and right when I'd about had enough of it, we arrived.

Batumi….a seaside resort town on the Black Sea. I’d imagined warmer weather (maybe in the 50’s) and sunshine. Instead, when we hopped off the marshrutka, we were greeted with wet snow, flooded streets, torn up sidewalks, slushy gutters, and very, very, very large puddles everywhere.  We eventually found our Batumi colleague (after figuring out the bus system, totally overshooting the right stop, and being dolts and not seeing the very obvious Sheraton Hotel building) and then we were suddenly back-on-track.

To be continued…