A showering of good luck

Well it’s not like this past week was that great, but it was the first full week out of school and an awesome one for sleep. I did manage to sleep rather well this past week but most of that was due to the fact that I stayed at a friend’s house for the early part of the week where it is nice and quiet and there are no animals or host-families making noise at the crack of dawn.

Basically Monday and Tuesday were spent hanging around and doing not a whole lot other than reading and playing cards. Wednesday two other volunteers and I went into Tbilisi to fill out a Peace Corps wide survey on their computers (no need to use up my Internet bandwidth) and then went for lunch and a shower. I went home to find my host-dad ready to drink and then went to bed soon after dinner. Thursday four other volunteers and I went to the Peace Corps office to help clean out and reorganize our garage there. Lots of boxes of books that needed to be sorted through and packed away. A lot of trash then needed to be thrown out. My favorite was one box from some volunteer in 2005 that just packed up all their old manuals and other loose papers and put them in a box for Peace Corps to deal with. I dealt with it by promptly moving it to the trash pile. But, after a few hot hours of moving stuff, I took a shower and headed out for a night with my friends. We watched the Netherlands v. Cameroon match at a bar and had dinner then called it a night. Friday we swung back by the office to use the computers before heading home and I grabbed another quick shower.

Saturday was ‘do nothing day’ for me. I was tired and spent most of the day either napping or just reading in my hammock up on our porch. Nice day. Then the US played Ghana and I stayed up till almost 2am watching them blow it in extratime. Boooooo!!! Oh well, four more years of waiting for a good US team to make a deep run at the World Cup.

Sunday was a different story. As soon as the whole family was up, we started cleaning out our 7x7 “fish pond.” (See MTV below for visuals). Basically the morning started with me and my host-dad setting up the water pump and running 3 or 4 hoses out to the back of our garden. We then started the pumping process and it was my job to help my youngest host-brother scrub the crap off the sides as the water went down. This was not made easy since a frog appeared and my two host-nephews were running around the sides trying to catch it. Eventually I snagged it, threw it out of the water and they ran off to torture the thing. Once the water got low enough, my job was over and my host-brother and nephews had to get down in the sludge to catch the two remaining fish, all the scrap metal, buckets, rods, ropes and all the other crap that had sunk to the bottom. Once they finished pumping out all the water and scrubbing down the bottom, me and my host-dad just set up hoses to start filling it back up again. He says that we’re going to swim in it, but somehow I doubt that since the water we were pumping in wasn’t the cleanest.

After lunch, my real job of the day started. I had 'agreed' to give the dog a bath since he’s gotten fleas and they want him to not be scratching all the time. My family had bought some special shampoo and asked if I knew how to wash dogs. “Of course I know how to wash a dog,” I said. Well I didn’t know that I had agreed to actually do it. It wasn’t too big of a deal since me and the one dog have become buds and he trusts me. Took me about a half an hour and I was glad for the shower afterwards. The other dog though is mean as hell and was having none of my attempts to wash him. Oh well. One flee free dog is good enough I guess.

Today I had to come into Tbilisi to get all my forms and things done so that I can get ready for my trip to Baku next week. I’m off to the capital of Azerbaijan for a week or so with my middle host-brother to see the city and visit some of our relatives there. Since I had to go to the office anyway, I thought I’d take a shower and do some e-mailing. So, if you’re counting, that’s 5 showers in the last 6 days! More than I had for the whole month of December.

Anyway, I have to come back in on Wednesday in order to go to the Azeri embassy and get my $131 visa. (Another shower maybe?) Kind of expensive, but I figure I’m traveling with the host-brother, staying for free and eating a lot at their house, so my expenses for this trip shouldn’t be too much. I’m trying to save so I can have good money for my trip to the Ukraine in August.

So that was the week that was. Enjoy a few short episodes of MTV below and stay save people. Peace!