Everything happens twice: Hiking and goodbyes.

SURPRISE!!!! Whoops, did I skeeer ya? Bet you weren't actually expecting to hear from me again, ever. Truth to be told, I'm no longer in the land of the Kartveli, but I am forever a White Crow, whether I like it or not. More on that later.
I never actually covered the trip to Svaneti, other than a meager post on Stalkernet with an urge for you to Wikipedia the place to see how beautiful it is. Now you can do the same, but with pictures from yours truly!
I'm also thinking about making this a more regular thing, although as I transition, I should probably create a new blog, and maybe even try to make a living blogging and choose a focus that will actually be interesting to a wide variety of people, not related to me.
But there's still some unfinished business from Georgia coupled with all my culture shock. So, instead of doing things purely chronologically (numbers are my wolfsbane [or, you know, this], and time's wicked hours are no exception), I'll completely ignore my post-service jaunt in the UAE and Thailand with the lovely Cara Bragg and do a rundown on my thoughts on two things: hiking and saying goodbyes.

Hiking/traveling in general.

Mestia, Svaneti vs. St. Mary, Glacier National Park, MT
Observations:

• Things don't always turn out as you plan them. Helicopter flights can be postponed and cancelled in a moment's notice, and the cheap, long way home may turn out to be the more reliable one.
• Certain old Megrelian women need to learn a) what a line/queue is, b) what people standing in front of her look like, and c) how not to mouth off to people when questioned about their blatant disregard for both a) and b).
• My dad is not the conversationalist on topics of my/PCV and guests' interests such as how cool glaciers look, stressing about landing a job, what love means, or bowel movements, but I did learn about how polyethelyne is made and what his favorite car he ever owned is (and how to revive failing pistons). The man also hiked 10 hours with me on 13+ miles of trail, over trees and glaciers and shit (literally-- there was bear scat). Not only did he keep up, he hiked about 3/4 of the way back with a toe the color of Barney blushing and a blister the size of South Dakota. He deserves heaps of street cred. Props to my pa.
• Hiking up to and on glaciers is sweet. It's a lot easier with proper gear. (Thanks, online shopping. But, by the same token, it's hard not to feel like a dork-in-snob's-clothing when you're wearing something with THE NORTH FACE promulgating its superiority from your chest.
• 1500 mL of water is not enough to take for oneself, when one's hiking companion has only brought 1/3 that amount. Thanks, Peace Corps issued potable water tablets.
• Waterfalls are pretty.

Conclusion:

• Even though I didn't grow up doing it, (Iowa?) hiking's rad.
• I'm going back to Glacier. Look out, Cracker Lake, there's a storm comin'.

Saying goodbyes

Observations:

• -Easier when you just don't let thoughts like, "I'll probably never see you again, and if I do it won't be the same," creep in.
• That said, leaving my host family was probably the hardest thing I've done. Some waterfalls are pretty, some are disconsolately sad.
• Drinking large quantities of alcohol and toasting one another can bring "closure", but it can also be dangerous territory for emotions of all kinds.
• When you have time to prepare for goodbyes, you have to deal with the whole impending thing for weeks/months where people get all passive aggressive toward one another to make parting easier, even though it's a dumb solution. When goodbye's unexpected, you have to deal with the whole pain-like-a-battle-axe-hack-at-your-heart thing.

Conclusion:

• Goodbyes hurt.
• If all else fails, take my bidzashvilishvili (first-cousin-once-removed) Paul's lead: Hug the people you think are nice, but refuse to speak to or look at the person you think is coolest in the hour of parting. Remember, if you don't say goodbye, they don't leave.

Bonus!  Blathering philosophical metaphor about life!!!!!!!!11111!!

The time, love, memories, life I've shared with those I met in Georgia can't be undone-- until I become senile or get hypnotherapy, of course. Part of them lives in me, and I live in part of them. It's like if I had been living in the same, clay-ridden soil my whole life, and I shoveled my sprouts into a pot and took them to Georgia, and the people I met had other things-- good peat moss, exotic sand used to growing different types of plants, apathetic rocks, and smelly but kinda useful manure, and it got all mixed up in my little mound. Some of them threw some seeds in there that I'd never seen before, some of them showed me alternative sources of light, some treated me more like a chamber pot. I tried my best to cultivate love, but sometimes I was just too tired and sick of the the scratchy plants and the sun beating down on me.

I know I need to get back to tending my little bit of earth, though. The time I spent in Georgia will nourish me in the future in ways I can't see, and most of all, I hope desperately that I've done something that's mattered, that's good to other people's garden's, too. I just hope it don't get raked away or burned up.

Because everyone else is doing it.

First off, I totally believe in doing things because everyone else is.  It's a great authenticator and makes you feel good about yourself afterward, especially if the crowd mentality persuaded you to do something against your guiding principles or even just something you didn't really want to do.

From a Spanish soap: "Paula is not a happy person, she is a depressive person." D :  And I thought there was no truth in these stupid things!

Although I'm working for change.  Little by little.  I keep thinking about how our habits really are who we are, because if we do something enough times, we and others abstract it into a permanent personality trait.  Continuity of self is an interesting concept, but I don't quite buy it.  Thus, it's a hard battle to change who I have been, because the more something has been built into me, the more likely I am to do it in the future.  In other words, the more times in the past I get frustrated and put myself in a foul mood and don't enjoy a day, the harder it is to simply tell myself to be in a good mood, because it's probably not a big deal anyway, and people don't actually find me annoying (except when I'm in a bad mood.  oops.).

Also, it's hard not to worry about the future when you don't know what you enjoy doing most of all.  Hm.  Even thinking about it makes me want to curl up into a ball and ignore the rest of the world for the rest of my life.

Maybe I can get paid for being a Renaissance Woman.  Alex, that totally has already worked out for you, right?  <_<


In current events, I got to be in the same room as the Secretary of State yesterday for like 15 minutes after being locked in that same room for like an hour and being free to move between that room and the hall for about 2.  WIN!

Also, it was 50 degrees Celsius yesterday.  For those of you too lazy to get out your converters, that's 122 degrees Fahrenheit.  On top of that, we didn't have water for a couple days.  Fun.  And good smelling!

At least the Fourth was filled with fun and freedom. I got to watch the Georgian girls softball team play some 'mericans.  Others have better accounts of how intense this was, but let me say they're the only softball team in the country.  And the victory was an easy one.  About as easy as learning how to conjugate the verb "bring" in Georgian, taking into account giver, receiver, tense, and whether the object being brought is alive or not.  After the game was delish salad and Turkish coffee and Hearts at the Bavarian place.

Much traveling has been going down to Borjomi and back again these past few weeks, one of which included a stay at an "orphanage," many which included walks in Borjomi Spring Park, and all of which made me want to stay there in the relatively cool temperatures and mosquitoless nights.  One also included a four-hour train ride from Borjomi to Tbilisi, after which I tried to meet up with partiers celebrating a volunteer's birthday.  When I got off the metro, feeling pretty low after anticlimactic events of the weekend, I pulled out my phone to ask about the location of the bar everyone was at that I'd never been to and didn't remember the name of, only to discover that it had died.  Fantastic.  I walked around in a tizzy, weighing the option of going back to the hostel before the public transportation stopped going for the night, and finally asked the clerk at the local Populi supermarket if they had a charging station (found at some of them).  Failing that, she arranged for her coworker to charge it on her personal charger for five minutes while I waited at a table with a sketchy Georgian dude.  I finally met up with the others, and went for a stress-shwarma run.  There, when I ranted to a curious young Georgian couple about the ludicrousness of conjugating the verb "to call", they bought me my shwarma!  Win!  Also hanging out with the birthday girl was pretty sweet.

With a cross-Georgian and Czech Republic trek with the parents coming up, it's pretty safe to say I'm PUMPED.  Can't wait to see you, mommy and daddy. <3  Modit!!!

Okay, off to do my second attempt at yoga at the stadium.  First time, last week: no constituents, so I left.  This time, I'm doin' it, whether other people are interested or not.  Gotta keep my weird American status, somehow ya know?

Peace!