By Laura

Dear All,
I can't remember for the life of me what I wrote in my last email and this computer is majorly sketchy...randomly shutting down and the internet is slow so yeah, apologies for any repeat information/boring stories...if you find yourself reading this thinking--why am I wasting my time? I have some paper to write or some french guys to chill with or something else more fulfilling---but alas I suspect if you are reading then you don't at that exact moment have something distinctly more pressing to do otherwise you would be doing it, but you may read it all then go ahead and assign some value judgement like...ok so why did I bother reading that after all cause it just wasn't worth it. But then what is pointless and , but these are the things one thinks about...at least I seem to be. hm maybe it is peace corps...

So I went to Ukraine for a vacation which was really cool cause I travelled all around western Ukraine in the Carpathians and I went with four other peace corps volunteers and one guy spoke Russian fluently so we didn't have any language troubles but it was a total bitch for him...cause he always had to order us coffee.
But Georgia didn't seem to want to let us leave for the trip in the first place...we all arrived promptly an hour ahead of our scheduled departure time walked around expecting to find some place to check in luggage and get boarding cards, I mean that seems like the type of thing one does at airports but we couldn't find anyplace to do this...so we asked at the information booth and they told us that we could check in an hour at some desk. So we waited the hour and asked again and they said that we should wait another hour....so we did and around that time an announcement told us that our flight was delayed another hour...so we sat around somemore and ate some khajchapuri (cheesy bread--georgian equivalent of fastfood) and had some instant coffee and read some books and pretended to wait patiently and then the hour was over and we had another announcement telling us to wait another hour. This went on for a while and we all felt suspiciously like this was just some ploy and we weren't really at an airport and we weren't really going to ever go anywhere...finally seven hours later they let us line up to checkin our luggage. When I pulled out my nicely labelled ticket with the travel agencies receipt and inventory of our five names and our separate credit card receipts and our organized itinerary and handed it to the guy he wrote down my name as Mrs John A....well John is the fortysomething tall bearded man travelling in our group...(refer to picture)...puzzled I think:
I am not married.
My name is not John A.
Where is John?
Should I try to pass myself off as Mrs John A?
Does John's ticket say Mr. Laura L.?
Alas no, John has a ticket that says "John Appling"...hmmm... There were two tickets for John Appling and none for Laura Linderman...we were told to wait while they "fixed" the problem. Everyone else checked in and went to the gate...we waited and waited...the check in area was deserted--it was late, we were tired--
Finally, the Ukrainian airways guy came up and said "Es tsudia, dzalian dzalian tsudia" translated as: this is bad, this is very very bad. Our response to his proclamation:
He continued...Georgian airways is allowed to purchase ten tickets on Ukrainian airways flights and you have five of these such tickets and being that this is a Ukrainian airways flight we can't change your name. Georgian airways also can't change the name on the ticket because the flight is operated by Ukrainian airways. Your only option is to buy another ticket at this exact moment and hope that the travel agency will refund your ticket. It seemed sketchy to me--so first I tried imploring my feminine aspects by crying and insisting I have no money and I am a scared foreigner...but then I gave up, sensing that it wouldn't work and decided: whatever, at least I can dispute the credit card charge if I never end up with a refund from the the travel agency (which we couldn't call and ask because it was ten at night)
So I finally made it through check in....the we got to passport control....I made it through but Yuta (refer to photo above) had a bit more trouble. When we first arrived in Georgia the government required visas, which we all have...since then they've changed the rule and no Americans need visas at all. The guard looked at Yuta's visa and just decided to start messing with him. He didn't like how the visa was hand written, he didn't like how it was pasted in, he didn't like the signature from the embassy. Yuta pointed out that first he didn't even need a visa to be here, and if the guard would look at the other four of our visas (Matt's, mine, Rebecca's and John's...refer to photo below) they are all identical, all from the same place, all have the same signatures and we all made it through passport control with no problem. Yuta kept arguing, after twenty more minutes the guard got bored and finally just let him through...
The rest of the trip was charming and all that and I learned alot and spent alot of time looking at things that I am sure are important and staring out windows and looking at the countryside and snow.

I have more photos of the trip on facebook, which I would put in this email but the internet is too slow.
Life otherwise is great in Georgia. I love the Georgian language because it is so impossible to learn and it sounds cool and there are 5 k sounds and 2 t sounds and 2 p sounds and 2 sounds for the letters "t and s" put together and the script looks cool and curly (check out google.ge). It is 114th most spoken language in the world, the 113th being the 3rd most common tribal language of Somalia--so it super useful for me to spend my time learning it.
When I am not learning Georgian, my other major hobby is drinking coffee with the old ladies who sit in the college and discussing important issues--like the price of cheese and socks.

Lets see I don't think I have anything else I really want to write right now, but if you ask me questions I will respond at some point in the future. I think (if I can find a computer)
Hope all is well and don't work too hard.
Lots of thoughts,
Laura