Mom

About a week after my last blog post, my mother died.  She had cancer.

I don't have any eloquent words about cancer and what it means or doesn't mean.  I only have faith that my mother is with God, looking out for her children and grandchildren as she did while she was on earth.

We miss her.

ХРИСТОС ВОСКРЕСЕ!

Pascha is here again.  We celebrated as we always do - with lots of church during Holy Week, the baking of kulich, dyeing of eggs, taking the kids to church at midnight, Easter baskets and our annual Pascha party.  I did not do a great job of getting photos of most of these events this year, but here is what I have.

Cooling kulich in "vintage" coffee cans and new Moscow-purchased specialty pans.

Bleary-eyed kiddos getting ready to head to church at midnight.

Breaking the fast with kulich, paskha, prosciutto and cheese after church.

Morning Easter baskets.

Staycation, continued

Our staycation is long since over, but I still have some photos to post. 

We spent a few mornings exploring parts of the town we hadn't seen yet.  On my list was this church, that sits on a ridge to the south above the Old Town. 

We didn't know what it was called, nor how to get there, but we were able to use our GPS to find it when we were in the vicinity.  Turned out it is a small monastery, and there was a service going on. I did not take photos inside the church, which was lovely.

The view was fantastic.

We next went to the Metekhi Church, which stands on a cliff on the left bank of the Mtkvari River.

The statue of King Vakhtang Gorgasali in front of the church is very often photographed from the north, but the sun was in the wrong place at the time we were there, so here he is from the back.



Tbilisi really is a beautiful city.

 

It was a very windy day - check out the water fountain.

After all that touring, we were hungry.  We went down to the Turkish restaurant row in the Marjanishvili district and checked out the Ankara cafeteria.  The food was great, with lots of Lenten options (and some really yummy looking meat dishes that we will check out after Pascha).

Kid birthday, Georgian-style

Last Thursday, when I picked the girls up from school, one of the teachers handed me an invitation to a classmate's birthday party.  For the next evening.  Starting at 8 p.m.

Yes, 8 p.m.

I had heard of these late-night kid birthday parties before, for they are the stuff of legend around the Embassy.

"Can you believe it?  My kids are in bed at 8 p.m.!"

"My daughter's Georgian classmate doesn't go to bed until midnight."

Etc.

I did not want to go.  J didn't want to go either.  I think I've mentioned justafewtimes how sick this house has been over the last few months. We are tired, people.  I'd been getting to bed before 9 myself most nights lately. 

But the girls were dying to go and I figured it would be good for them to socialize with their classmates outside of school.  So we went, and they had a blast.



There were princesses.

And Hello Kitty and clowns and dancing.

And bubbles.

And Roman candles - shooting out of the cake, and later out of the dance floor!

We closed the place down (at 10 p.m.). The kids obliged by sleeping in an extra hour until 8:30 the next morning.

I should note that this was not a typical Georgian birthday party - it was a typical wealthy Georgian birthday party.  The mother of the birthday girl (who made her entrance in a fur shrug and ball-gown tutu, though sadly I missed that photo opportunity) was wearing Christian Louboutin platform heels.

This is one of the odd things that Foreign Service kids encounter overseas in developing countries.  Many of the locals who can afford private school tend to be very wealthy.  This means that, as the kids get older, it is likely that they will have classmates who have personal drivers, designer clothing, extravagant allowances, and often a minimum of parental supervision.  I went to school with kids like that in junior high school in Tel Aviv, and my siblings encountered the same in junior and high school in Tashkent and Kyiv.

As I pare down for the move and try to get my kids into the mood to do the same, I'm finding that there are lessons both in their classmates who "have everything," and in the gypsy kids on the street who have nothing.

Staycation

I was lucky to grow up in a family that vacationed most years - sometimes twice.  Whenever we were living in the U.S., we took a summer vacation - either to the beach or the mountains - and sometimes a winter cross-country ski vacation.  When overseas, we always used our R&R tickets to travel home and spend quality time with the grandparents.  In the days before Skype and Youtube, and when McDonalds was only found in the United States, my father felt that yearly trips home were important for his children to stay in touch with their American roots.

In the global age, the latter point isn't such a concern for families anymore, and since we are moving back to the States this summer, we had actually planned to take an R&R to Israel in late March or early April of this year.  But due to some unforeseen circumstances at work for J, he ended up taking last week off.  Our family has been thoroughly beaten with the sick stick this winter, and we couldn't even contemplate packing up the kids and dragging them somewhere (even by car) for more than a day trip.  Seriously, I feel like my entire house is covered in snot.  And other stuff.

So a staycation it was.

We kicked off our staycation with a planned day trip to Stepantsminda. 

That line at the top of the map is the Georgian/Russian border.  Stepantsminda is the nearest town to Mount Kazbeg, which is the highest mountain in Georgia.  There is a famous and oft-photographed church there which we were hoping to see.

It is worth noting that we took this trip the day after we worked in the garden without our jackets on.  I remember hearing stories of life in Beirut's glory days, when you could swim in the morning and ski in the afternoon.  Georgia sometimes feels like that.  There is a lot of varied weather within a short radius of Tbilisi.

Gudauri, a ski resort on the way to Stepantsminda, had gotten a fair dumping of snow that morning, with total accumulation of 12-18" forecast for the day.

Not long after we passed through Gudauri, we were stopped.  The pass between Gudauri and Stepantsminda was closed for plowing.  The first officer we spoke to said it would not reopen until 7 p.m. (we arrived at 11 a.m.). The next officer told us it would reopen sooner, but he wasn't sure.  We waited for about 40 minutes.

After the Tinkerbell movie had ended (in-car DVD players are the best!), we decided to cut our losses and head for home. 

Day trip fail.

We arrived home pretty tired; I think I went to bed at 8 that night.  The rest of the week we sent the kids to school and were much more low-key. 

Stay tuned for more exciting staycation adventures.