week away

Last week I was fortunate enough to spend 9 days away from site. I spent a few days with the old host family in Borjomi, and then headed to Bazaleti for an All Volunteer conference. The first few days were language training, (ah...6 hours of Azeri and Russian can really leave me tired) and then some other training sessions followed. It all culminated in a great early Thanksgiving dinner, which was cooked by a small group of volunteers apart from the turkeys which were kindly donated by the Radisson chef. So, lets imagine this for a moment. Thanksgiving is hard to cook for in the states, but multiply your family numbers until you get to 80 people, one of which is the ambassador from the United States. Then add in the fact that you don't have a Safeway within thousands of miles of your kitchen and you have to make everything from scratch. Real scratch. Buying pumpkins, cooking them, gutting them, mixing them, making pie out of them scratch. It was definitely an undertaking, and it turned out amazingly well. The good thing about it is that out of 80 people, a few actually know how to cook well, so the food was great!

here's some more blogging about it:
http://seanandmckinze.com/2010/11/09/thankful/

After that I headed to Mtskheta for a night to see some sights. It is a town near Tbilisi which is known for its old churches. We were fortunate enough to be treated to a drive out into the mountains to watch the sunset from a monastery chapel. The thing about chapels and churches in this country is that they are set up on high mountains, which are sometimes a little perilous to get to, and this hike included crawling on hands and knees so as not to plunge off of the cliff. But it was worth it:

also more pictures have been posted from the last few months, so check them out.
 Pictures!!