Vintage Part 2

There are a few things I hate to hear at 8am on a Saturday. One of them is, “Hey, hey wake up hurry hurry we go!” Now I’ve never been a morning person and waking me up early on a Saturday after a crazy week to commands to hurry is not a good way to get a positive response. However, I knew that it was going to be my job to help my host-father go collect grapes today, so up and out I went despite the fact that he had told me the night before we wouldn’t be leaving till 9.

Here we don’t have a vineyard, but rather my family goes to the next district, famous for its grapes, and buys grapes to bring home and make wine. After about a 45 minute drive we got to this vineyard to find three women collecting grapes in buckets and one old man who is a friend of my host-father. So while my host-father and the old man chatted about whatever it is that they chat about, I hauled buckets full of grapes down the rows back to the truck, put them in these large bags and then returned with the empty buckets to the women. This process was repeated for about three and a half hours. Once we had what my host-father considered “enough” the old man brought out a scale. About this time four other guys showed up and all six of them began debating over the scale’s accuracy. Debate finished we weighed the grapes and put them in the back of the truck. All said I moved 825 pounds of grapes this morning. And boy are my arms tired… Thank you, I’ll be here all week.

After the truck was loaded the women prepared some lunch while all seven of us men stood around and talked about a whole lot of nothing. Once we were called over to the large plastic sheet that was laid out for us to eat on we all squatted on empty buckets and tore into some bread and tomatoes. Wine was poured and toasts were said. Then one of the old women came over with this huge bowl of chicken and one of the guys reached up and took it from her. She stared yelling at him in Georgian telling him that I had done the most work that day and therefore deserved to eat first. This sort of made me laugh a little but the guy was visibly embarrassed and immediately handed me the bowl. I wasn’t even all that hungry, but took a few small pieces, plopped them into my little bowl and then passed the dish on. Over lunch all the guys started in on the usual line of question for a foreign guest and between the 7 of us we took down a 2-liter bottle of wine with no problem.

Another 45 minute drive home and then we set up the grinding machine. I was unaware that it would also be my job to grind up and smash all 825 pounds as well. My host-brother was in charge of emptying the bags and then dumping the buckets into the top of the grinder. This whole process only took about an hour but by the end of it I felt like my right arm was about to fall off. The machine was set up in such a way that using my left arm was impossible. I was amazed at how little 825 pounds of grapes becomes after you squish them down. Kind of disappointing. After this we started clipping all the grapes that are growing at our house and I assume that we’ll add those in tomorrow since right now they are all just sitting in these large bowls. Maybe not though, maybe we’ll just eat those.

The rest of the day was basically spent laying around and eating grapes. I feel nasty as hell though right now after sweating for most of the day and bath night is still a good 24 hours away. And, if you’re ready for this, we didn’t have our normal mid-week bath night this week thanks to my host mom using up all the hot water doing laundry for the army that lives here. But was my laundry part of that… Noooo. I have to do mine tomorrow when the hot water gets turned back on. But, at least I’ll have clean clothes and a clean me.

Other than this one exhausting Saturday, there is not much else going on here. Only one piece of the ceiling fell at school this week and I took my first kid to the principles office. It worked well, when I returned to the class it was full of angles and all was quite. That lasted till the next day. My school is chaos from 9am to 4pm every day. I have no way of really describing it.

This week though I do start my full schedule. I’m starting my English classes for the community which I printed up flyers for and hung on all the shops in town (4). I’m doing a beginner’s class on Monday nights and an Intermediate class on Wednesday nights. This is in addition to the Georgian lessons that I take on Tuesdays and my Azeri lessons on Fridays both of which I started this past week. So in spite of all the craziness at my school, there might actually be some learning going on in Muganlo. We’ll see…