You know, I can’t read a word of Georgian.

Lost in Translation

There are some fourteen unique alphabets in the world, and Georgian is one of them. Unfortunately, I can’t even make out a single letter of it. You can stick my two favorite words in front of me, gamahrjobat (transliteration, meaning “hello”) and didi modloba (trans: “thank you very much”)—words I repeat frequently as they represent the extent of my Georgian vocabulary—and tell me that it was my street address and I wouldn’t know any better. I am completely illiterate! And it is frustrating to no end!

Struggling with this, I realized that one of my normal coping strategies while traveling abroad is to look for cognates and transliterations whenever possible. In France, for example, I just sounded out the words. In India, the Hindi signs were usually subtitled with English transliterations. Good stuff, real helpful…unfortunately, signs here are subtitled with Russian transliterations. And my Russian is even worse than my Georgian! READ MORE

This South Ossetia man was displaced by the recent war in the Republic of Georgia. He and his family are now living with his mother-in-law in Gori.

Our arrival into Georgia happened to coincide with Independence Day here, and the opposition parties planned a day of protests against the incumbent Saakashvili government. While dramatic, these protests, which have been going on for most of the spring, have been relatively peaceful and well organized. Given that the opposition planned an escalation of their ongoing actions for that Tuesday, however, our hosts felt that the best possible thing for us to do was to take the day and spend it as tourists outside of Tbilisi.

Tuesday morning, we were picked up at our flat and whisked off on a whirlwind tour of the historical sites in the communities surrounding Tbilisi, including several ancient Christian churches and the ruins of a town that was carved out of a sandstone cliff. The highlight of the tour READ MORE