Food
Georgian cuisine is not one of the lightest and simplest: cheese, butter and eggs can be found in every dish, and your dietician cannot be happy about that. Among the most characteristic dishes there is khachapuri with its different variants: Adjaruli, which is shaped like a ship and filled with cheese, butter and raw eggs, or Imeruli, which is more like a savoury cake filled with cheese. I dare you not to order one of these at every meal in Georgia! Then there's khinkali, huge dumplings with various possible fillings: Meat, mushrooms, potatoes and cheese (of course). Tradition says that you eat them with the small part while you eat the rest. Do not worry, you will not be expelled immediately if you use a knife and fork. It is also interesting to see how many different ways the meat is prepared: It can be cooked on an iron bar or grilled directly over the fire. It is then wrapped in bread and roasted with vegetables and spices. The strangest sweet I had was Churchkela, which is a line of walnuts dipped in wine. The result is a jelly snack that was used by the soldiers as a fast snack during the battles.
Animals
It's really challenging to find a street without a sleeping dog or a cat that is trying to climb a wall. Nothing compared to our ideas of stray animals: everyone of them has a chip, and it never occurred to me to be disturbed or attacked by one of them. This pure relationship between animals and humans brought me back to when I was a child and every animal around me was a potential friend.
People
Georgians are some of the friendliest people I've ever met, and I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I'm a particularly warm-hearted and occasionally filter-less person. The language barrier is short-lived; it just takes a few minutes for people to comprehend one another through signs or just by grinning and laughing. There is one person I will never forget among the several people I spoke with and who gave me a glimpse into their past. In the Georgian wine region of Kakheti, in Telavi, Giorgi is the proprietor of a tiny wineyard, or Marani as they are known there. He produces up to 8000 bottles of wine annually, and he exports a tiny amount of it to a few European nations. The best way to describe him is to compare it to the effect a tsunami would have on you: you get run over by his laughter and his stories. He is the type of person who could easily speak to a rock and convince it to drink his wine. It's uncommon for anything like this to happen when you first meet someone, but our friendship developed to the point where he asked me to help him harvest the wine.
This concludes my stories about Georgia, a fascinating place I will always hold close to my heart.
Add comment
Comments