Greetings from Georgia!
We have finally made it to the Caucasus and are here in Tbilisi on our orientation training. Our flight was good, we flew to Kiev in the Ukraine from Prague where it was -14! Then from Kiev to Tbilisi and arrived in the early hours of Monday morning. We are staying in the best hotel which has all been paid for by TLG as well as our flights and 3 meals a day.
After living in hostels for a month, joe and I have been enjoying the luxuries of a hotel including a huge comfy bed, hot power shower, clean towels everyday, 4 bottles of water each a day, English TV, I could go on! So, for this reason we stayed at the hotel on our 'free' day on Monday, plus it was snowing outside and we really just wanted to rest!
We met some fellow volunteers, mostly Americans, but there are also Canadians, South Africans and a few Brits. There are 37 of us in total and we are group number 32.
Over the past couple of days we have had our medical exams, many Georgian language lessons, health and safety training, intercultural training, advice on living with our host families, safety and transport information, we have been given mobile phones and been shown where to top them up, and we still have 3 days left! The company have been extremely organised and I'm sure there is nothing we won't know about Georgia by the time the training is over!
Over the next few days we have more Georgian classes, more intercultural training and advice on how to teach in the schools with our co teachers. Our days start at 8 for breakfast then lessons start at 9 until 7 with a lunch break and several coffee breaks in between!
We haven't had too much time to ourselves in the evening as we have been chatting with other volunteers, we also haven't taken any photos as we haven't left the hotel! We are hoping to come back to Tbilisi one weekend when it gets warmer but right now we don't really have any free time and when we do we are too tired!
We are in the process of changing our blog! We have found another website where it is much easier to upload photos and there are no limits with photos, diaries etc. we will post the web address when we've finished transferring everything and it is fairly similar to this one.
In the mean time, we hope all our followers are well...and nakhvamdis for now!