I was told I look a little more like a tennis player than a bell ringer here....  

This is called a wishing tree. You tie something of yours or from your body on the tree and make a wish.  

I want to live in a cave. 

Lovely weather on the Vardzia trip. 

prettyness 

Big rock  

the cows... he bowed for me. 

more prettyness. 

Giga looking a little like a soccer player, but a little more like Elvis on the kid's field outside my school. 

Church in Tbilisi.. pretty huh? 

Playing in the caves. 

Some teacher trainers and me. I am so short.... 

Spring is here! 

artsy?  

cave living.. isn't it grand? 

Don't know what we were going for there. 

Vardzia.. big... cool... big.... come visit me and I can take you there! 

teachers being trained.... 

Me being all teacher-like at teacher training. (note: amazing pictionary skills DO come in handy) 

Some pictures!

Look at this, I discovered a way easier way to post pictures. I have no idea why I haven't been doing it this way the whole time... there must be a reason. Okay, time for my usual apology for not posting. My life isn't always so exciting here. I went horseback riding recently and it was really fun. There is a national park about 15 minutes away from me (the largest in Eastern Europe I think) and you can rent horses for about 13 bucks a day and ride them around. It was cool except for the fact that these horses looked like they might die any minute. My horse had her colt with her and flipped out anytime we moved out of eyesight of the colt, so it was a slow slow ride. My friend’s horse just sat down while he was on it. Also our horses often just refused to move, preferring to eat (understandably since they looked seriously malnourished) instead of going anywhere. Here you say Achoo to make a horse go, and Brrrrr to make it stop… I felt like a fool yelling Achoo at my horse and getting no response. He probably thought I just wouldn’t stop sneezing.

I had a teacher training at my school recently held by Peace Corps volunteers. We had 7 volunteers and 16 teachers come out for two days. It went really well and a lot of teachers left with some information they sounded enthusiastic to use in their classrooms.

I also went to a place called Vardzia, which is a cave city built in the 11th-12th centuries. It used to have about 500 rooms I think, and housed a huge city, and later a monastery, and even now a few monks still live there. You can see pictures below. It was really interesting and whats amazing about going to things like that in Georgia is that there are no rules. No bars to stand behind, no no pictures rules. We could just run all over the place and cause problems. I am sure it wont last as long as it would if they had some of those rules, but nonetheless fun for us!