Snowball Fight

The week after my birthday was a fun week. It snowed my birthday night and there was about a foot of snow on the ground when I got up in the morning. I spent a bit of time recovering from the night before, and around noon I went to Sopho’s house, where my friends David and Cody were staying. When I got there we played bat gammon and ate lunch. David and Cody both had to go into town to catch marshutkas back to their villages so they left early, around 3. I decided to stay at Sopho’s…mainly because I had just gotten dry from the walk there and I didn’t want to go back out into the snow yet. I ended up staying until dusk, and decided at that point to spend the night so that I didn’t have to walk home in the dark.

Sopho, Kote, Kote’s sister Tamuna, his father and mother, and I had a nice evening filled with supper, wine, and a lot of singing. Around 10 the power went off but we all decided that it was OK since Valentine’s Day was the next day. It seemed appropriate to continue eating by candle light. It snowed all night and we woke up to about 2 feet of new snow Monday morning, taking the total amount to about 3 feet. I was ecstatic about this!

At 10 AM Sopho called Ia, our principle, to see if anyone was at the school. Keep in mind school is supposed to start at 9:30. Ia didn’t have an answer, because she hadn’t gone in yet. Around 10:30 Ramazi called me to ask if I was going to go into school that day. I said yes and Sopho and I left her house around 11. When we got to school, about a third of the teachers were there, and the only students were some of the twelfth graders and an eleventh grader or two. Needless to say there weren’t any classes. When I walked in to the staff room everyone, student and teachers, were huddled around the fire. They all got up when I came in and told me they wanted to have a snowball fight. We spent the next hour or so tackling each other in the snow. Once everyone was soaking wet, we went back into the school, attempted to get dry, and ate the leftovers from my birthday supra. A second snowball fight followed lunch, and after that I went back to Ramazi’s house. It was a fun day.

Oh and one other thing. One of the teachers brought her daughter who is in her first year of college in Tbilisi to school that day. I was encouraged to spend my time around her while we were out in the snow and also to sit next to her during lunch. This was fine by me since she is gorgeous. Good times, good times.