The Great Escape: Warsaw Choresaw..

Well seeing as Kevo is still uploading photografias from our roadtrip I guess I'll wait until I have those and skip ahead to the past week of the latest adventure! I ended up landing a teaching job through a recruiting organization called Greenheart Travel (look 'em up, they're awesome!) in the Republic of Georgia for a semester and just landed here this week!

I still can't believe that this is actually happening to me seeing as this has been, quite easily, the epitome of the phrase "too good to be true". Not only did the Ministry of Education in Georgia set up and pay for my flights, but they arranged all of us future teacher's health insurance, host families, school placements, cell phones, Georgian language classes, methodology classes, hotel rooms, food.. the whole shabaam! This past week has been absolutely amazing getting to know all my fellow teachers in "Phase 45" of the English teaching initiative called "Teach and Learn with Georgia" aka TLG.

Old Town Warsaw

The flight information was sent to us the week before we left and I was initially somewhat put off by the 12 hour layover in Warsaw, but then I realized that I had a 12 hour layover Warsaw.. winning! I was lucky enough to meet up with a few other people from my group that had layovers in Chicago and flying with me the rest of the way to T'bilisi so we all had quite the time in Poland. We were able to take the metro from the airport, check our bags in at the train station and then just go wander freely around the city. We got to see everything from monuments, to the Old Town area, to the old Ghetto wall and also your casual transvestite running around on more drugs then you could count. All the while, Max was not enjoying Warsaw as much as the rest of us and came up with little slogans such as "it's a Choresaw; Boresaw; Eurgaysia; Snoregia; I want some Moregia" which made the day a bit more entertaining.

Part of the old Ghetto wall

Coucous and perogies! (Please note Max's face... priceless)

After exploring the city we made it back to the airport in plenty of time and just hung out and slept on the floor until it was time to head out. We were a little weary at first seeing as the plane was over an hour late and in order to get on the plane everyone had to hop on one bus to the tamarack to board, but we arrived safe and sound at about 4am after 26hrs of traveling.

When we got to the airport TLG was waiting to help us with our bags and exchanging our monies and then they shipped us off to the hotel. I got lucky and Carly who was with me from the Chicago flight was my roomie and we're basically two pickles in a jar. We've spent the last week doing some intensive orientation and methodology classes as well as working on our qartuli (georgian) language.. which has a lot less rules than English I might add. We've also had lots of time to explore the city though and have just had the time of our lives thus far and I'm so so excited for this next semester!

Although we're all getting split up tomorrow, I've met some amazing people from literally all walks of life with all different experiences and I feel so fortunate to be able to surround myself with such inspiring and dazzling individuals. For some people this is their first time out of the country, others have spent the past few months backpacking across Europe or Russia, some just finished teaching in Japan and South Korea, and some are just looking for a change of pace. It still hasn't quite hit me that this is real life yet but I just can't wait to meet my host family and get started in the schools!