New Years

Georgians are all about fireworks and firecrackers on New Years. The whole week leading up to it there are bangs going off everywhere. My host brother would always light them off and throw them right next to his grandmother, without her knowing. It was pretty funny. On New Years Eve we had a late lunch and about 9PM went into Terjola, the town next to my village. The city square was all lit up and decorated, and there was a concert of some local artists singing Georgian songs and mouthing the words to American songs. The best part was that I was able to meet up with one of the other American teachers in my area. There was a raffle around 11, which we stayed for (but didn’t win) and we headed back to the house after it was over. We then ate supper and watched the New Years program on TV until midnight. At midnight, we went outside and lit off fireworks. Then back in to finish dinner and drink more wine. It was a very nice evening.

On special evenings, like New Years or a birthday party, special glasses for drinking wine are brought out. On a normal day small juice glasses are used, but on these special days the host uses either a horn, an actual wineglass, or a bell turned upside down to drink the wine out of. Some of these are only used for certain toasts, while others can be used for any. For example, the bell is used when toasting to those that have died, and after you drink the wine out of it you turn it over and ring the bell as a symbol of remembrance of their life.

My family also put up a Christmas tree the day before New Years. I helped decorate it. Also, they don’t have tree stands here so we tied it up to the wall. This made me laugh.

Last night I was correcting an English paper of a student who is entering into a contest in Terjola for writing and speaking about contemporary problem. They chose the topic of smoking. I was reading it and very impressed with how well it was written…until I got to a part that mentioned that smoking can lead to erectile dysfunction. Keep in mind that this was a 9^th grade girl. It became quite clear at this point that she had more or less copied everything from a wikipeda page. I tried to explain that this was plagiarism to my teacher, and that in a university in America you would be kicked out for doing this, but I’m not sure she understood what I was saying. O well. It was a good laugh when I explained to my co-teacher what erectile dysfunction was.

I’m going to try and set my co-teacher up on facebook now. We’ll see how that goes as she has very little experience with computers.