Oct. 12 - Hazelnut Strings and Other Things

Co-teach was not at school today, so the woman who used to teach English was helping me with my classes. It was nice to have backup, but I didn’t really need it. The kids were really good. I don’t know if it was the novelty of the situation, or if it was because the desks were in rows and not groups (I gave 2 tests today) but they were attentive.

We also played hangman for the first time. It’s kind of perfect. The kids like it because it’s a game, and I like it because it forces them to practice vocabulary and saying the letter names. In Georgian letters are named for the sound they make. If you want the sound "luh" you write the letter called "luh", so they don’t really get that a letter called "b-ee" makes a "b-uh" sound.
After school, I walked home in the 5 minutes of sun we had between showers. There were some pretty spectacular skies, because from my mountain vantage point, while we had sun, I could see the clouds moving (and raining) over other peaks. Then when we were in rain again, I could still see the sun in the distance.

When I got home, I ate, as usual and retreated to my room for internet time. It wasn’t long, though before Bebia called me. She was in the winter kitchen in the basement. It was here that I finally got to see the culmination of the hazlenut project. Hung over 2 beams were strings and strings of roasted hazelnuts and on the stove was a giant pot filled with grape-pudding-type-stuff (I can’t remember what it’s actually called). They dipped each string in the pot and completely coated the nuts with the grape stuff before re-hanging them over the beams. I took pictures of the whole process.

This is the same grape stuff that they put on plates and serve as pudding (which is what they did with the left overs, once the nuts were finished). This paste is made of grape juice (literally from crushed grapes), water, sugar and flour. It’s pretty good, but almost too sweet for me. I haven’t had a chance to try the nuts, yet, but I’m excited.

I ate dinner with the family and retreated to my room pretty early. I read a book on my computer, because I like to save the battery in my Kobo for when the power is out. Which it was a couple of times tonight. Luckily, the longest outage happened while the sun was still shining, so I had light to read by, though one time I did have to resort to the flashlight on my cell phone.