It's been a long couple of days.

I haven't quite been in Georgia for 48 hours but it has been pretty amazing. Before getting here Kenneth and I stopped over in Istanbul for a couple of hours. It was pretty cool. We spent time in the tourist area around the Blue Mosque. Ate some street food. Went inside the mosque. Very awesome. 4.5 hours isn't nearly enough time to truly see Istanbul but I liked everything I saw and I can now say that I've been to Turkey.

I'm staying at a hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia for the next week. We have lots of training to do and lots of things to learn and discuss. 

Training started today. We go all day from 9am - 7:30pm. We get little breaks every two hours or so. And an hour and a half for lunch. We start the say off with Teaching orientation, then we do two sessions of Georgian language, lunch, then two sessions of intercultural training. It is a crazy busy day but I'm learning a lot about Georgia or as I should say sakartvelo. I can now introduce myself in Georgian and ask people how they are doing. I also know 15 of the 33 letters to the alphabet. Here is a wiki link to Georgian language. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_language. Pretty cool stuff. It looks way more complicated than it is. Once you learn the letters you can pronounce anything because it sounds like it is spelled. In my opinion those are the best languages.

After class today I went out to dinner with some of the other teachers. We traveled down to Rustaveli Avenue found a restaurant that serves Georgian cuisine. Delicious food. Khatchapuri(cheese bread), khinkali(dumplings), veal kebab, tripe soup(yes I tried the tripe, no I don't ever have a desire to do that again), garlic chicken. SO much delicious food.

After dinner we walked around town for a bit. We found this really cool garden that had a musical fountain show. There was even a projection inside of the water. It was next to a very modern glass bridge with lights all over it. We all decided that we needed to go back during the day to really take everything in. But unfortunately with our training schedules we don't have much time for that. Hopefully I'll make it back out into Tbilisi before we leave but if not then I'll definitely have to make a weekend trip back to the city with my host family.