Preparations...

Gamarjoba!

Lately I have been getting used to hearing Georgian all the time in the streets. Although I do not understand much there are a few words that appear more often and I even know what they mean, so if somebody is on the phone and talks about what to cook for dinner I mostly understand what they will have as we studied all possible words that have to do with food (because it is just the most important thing!!). Besides my usual schedule there are some more preparations going on at the moment.

Next week a project about leadership and planning activities will start at the Scout Centre and together with the other Scout Centre volunteers we help our coordinator to plan the programme for these 6 days. After our first brainstorming on what to do I did not have any worries that we will not have enough ideas to fill the time, but when really planning everything with the concrete times I shortly had my doubts. We are still not completely ready but it is in progress and I am sure we are going to make it on time and I really hope the Georgian youngsters will like their programme.

Another project in preparations is a Christmas concert we will have at the school in New Rustavi where I go to teach German...at least that German part was the plan at the beginning. Now it is more about singing German Christmas songs while the sun is shining outside but that still has something to do with learning the language as there is a lot of new vocabulary in the songs and I think the students like it as well. But because it would be unfair to just let them sing in a foreign language I decided to learn a Georgian Christmas song as well. This is harder than I had hoped because remembering words you never heard before is not the easiest thing even though I have the translation but of course having the translation does not automatically mean that I can pronounce everything correctly. I already copied the lyrics twice to keep them in mind and I will do it again so hopefully I will be able to remember all the words by next week, because there is still the melody. Of course you have to know the lyrics to sing a song...but without the right melody... There we have the next problem. I visit the school once a week so they can teach me the melody once a week but we also have some other things to practice as we want to have a diverse programme to prevent having bored or annoyed people in the audience in December. In theory the consequence for me would have been to search for the song on YouTube and listen to it non-stop until I know the melody inside out...too bad that I could not find the song on the internet...I think I will just have to ask one of the girls to meet me and practice as soon as the other songs are ready to be presented, but luckily there is still enough time left.

Also very exciting for me at the moment is preparing my first big trip. At the end of November I plan to go to Armenia with two other volunteers and we started talking about what to do. But going to Armenia does not only mean visiting another nice country but also seeing my friend again who lives in Yerevan. We met two years ago on a student exchange of our schools. In September 2017 they came to Germany and in April 2018 we went to Armenia. So knowing that I will see her again soon makes me really happy. In addition to this trip we also plan a few smaller trips, for example on Sunday we want to go to the hill over Rustavi with the green cross on top that is always illuminated in the dark. During my first weeks in Georgia it turned out to be really helpful for my orientation and it still is but by now I can also use other things to recognize where I am^^

Tomorrow we will have a new French volunteer in Rustavi and all of us are planning a dinner together...speaking of cooking dinner together...today my two former flatmates will come to our flat so the four of us will make Lasagne together or at least try to...Erika is sick so she said she will not touch anything while cooking because she does not want to spread the bacteria everywhere and Mikio has some work to do so Goda and me will probably have to deal with the cooking part alone but maybe that is not too bad because our kitchen is great, but very small so we always bump into each other when somebody is cooking and the other one wants to get something out of the fridge :)

All the time I try to write everything down in my little notebook when there is new stuff happening and collect as much information as possible. At the beginning I did not really know why, I just did it because I thought it could be useful for me not to get lost in all those different events but now I found something else to use it for. On Monday I bought white paper with nice ornaments on the side and a ton of envelopes so I can write a letter to my grandparents at least every month. I already wrote a letter to both of them before and I have to admit that it felt really good to just write all that stuff in German. Back in Germany I always thought I would be so happy to speak in a different language every day and that I could never get enough of it...well, within the last month I realized that I really do enjoy speaking in English all the time and learning new languages on top but that it is also very nice to just write without having to think about whether I use the right vocabulary, which word is the most suitable one to express what I want to say and if it is spelled correctly or not.

When coming here I knew that it was a big thing to have this chance of living abroad and I knew from others that it could help me a lot to grow, but that was only the theory. Now that I am really here preparing all those things I guess I start to slowly understand how much I can learn here every day and the variety of opportunities given to me is just amazing.