A different slant on Mestia, October 2010

My English teaching colleagues and I found this lovely picnic spot above the new Mestia Airport construction site a few weeks ago.  A ruined tourism base, with amazing views of the town and - if it was cooperating - Ushba.  This is Mestia near sunset, rays through wood smoke and tower shadows, river twisting every which way - one I'm particularly proud of.

K'ubdari, Mestia, September 2010

 Also known as the Svan meat pie, with beef, spices and onions inside a dough cover, put on the top of the oven first, then inside - YUM, especially from my wife's hands

Kung-fu Fighting in Georgian...

I've seen some adverts on walls recently for something which took some time to figure out.  It turns into something quite strange when you transliterate the Georgian into English.  Hmmm, Georgian has no "f" letter or sound, so... these are ads for kung-fu lessons.  And kung-fu becomes coon poo...

Photos back onto the blog in a couple of days!  Really!

My Favourite Mathematician, Gone

Benoit Mandelbrot, 1924-2007, who coined the word fractal.  Obituary:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/oct/17/benoit-mandelbrot-obituary

Thanks to his work, I have seen everything differently since the early 1990s- in terms of structures.  I owe him a lot.

New photos will be resuming soon - Internet in Mestia has been a bit frustrating lately.

Mestia Panorama, September 2010

From the newly renovated concrete road to the ski resort, scheduled to reopen in December by Presidential Decree.  One of the best places from which to see the town, IF Mt. Ushba is cooperating and poking its twin peaks above.  Lali & Giorgi, the son of our host family, visible at far right.

Koruldi Lakes, above Mestia, 12/9/2010

It was plenty hot up there, but the last of the previous winter's snow still clung on in this place of extremes.

Koruldi Lakes, above Mestia, 12/9/2010

 Three more from that memorable walk.
Top:  dandelions in front of Mt. Tetnuldi
Middle:  Try walking up that!  "Slip slaaadin away"... but it's not as bad as it looks.
Bottom:  This, however, is every bit as good as it looks.

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No. 10

Autumn is WET, though beautiful, as the trees change colour.  But that means great mushroom-hunting, as I've shown already.

Home sweet home (Mestia), Oct. 7, 2010

Only one shot today, because it's such a good one, IMHO.
I looked out of my bedroom window at 0745 in the morning on the 7th - clear skies at last!  Mt. Ushba's not visible from there, but I took the chance that I'd see its twin peaks from the height of the new ski resort road, and it paid off.  Left home without breakfast, took a few shots, then off to school for my 0900 teaching start.  Clouds, sky, lighting and all other details had combined perfectly for me.  Happy happy.

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No. 9

There hasn't been a foreigner dying here for as long as I've been in Georgia (nearly 11 years), to the best of my knowledge.  Until Oct. 6.  That's the rumour, but I'm still awaiting confirmation from news services, online or TV.  So I'll reserve further comment until things firm up.

Ushguli Interlude 2, mid-September 2010

10/10/10 today...
(Well, the top shot is at K'ala: our driver for the day, Mamuka, on the way back down towards Mestia.)
Then, 2 of Ushguli Museum's fabulous collection of icons - I paid to take these photos!  Both early medieval, gilt on chased silver:  St. George and an Archangel.

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No. 8

Mestia is presided over by Mt. Ushba.  If you walk up the side of the mountain where the old ski resort is being renovated, and then look back down onto the town, before long you'll see what I mean.  From here, as more and more of those twin peaks come into view, they seem to glower above the town clustered in its valley below.

      And Ushba seems

       HUGE.

And you, the viewer, seem so


                 small.

Interlude: Ushguli, mid-September 2010

 3 images from the topmost of Ushguli's 7 churches, Lamaria (St. Mary's).  Top, frescoes outside the main sanctuary; middle, that sanctuary itself; and bottom, a view down the village through a window of one of the complex's two Valhalla-style great dining halls.
I took a day trip to my former English teaching haunt with 2 visiting friends, who very kindly paid my way.  It was a joyous reunion with old friends.

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No.7

UFOlogists, this seems to be the place for you - SETI surely means the acronym of the famous Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, no?  Is this magnificent town, crowned with the largest number of stone watchtowers in the world, also the headquarters of SETI?!  (And the towers perhaps line up to make... an astronomical observatory rivaling Stonehenge... an exact recreation of one of the Nazca figures... a certain constellation viewed from a certain location at a certain time in the Universe...?
Sadly, no, it seems.  Seti was a person, though I have yet to find out who he or she was.  And Seti Square is no less - and no more - than the main square of Mestia, focus of much of the town's ambitious current renovation project, as I have mentioned earlier.  Perhaps less exciting, but there it is.  I'm STILL delighted to be living here, for all my love of The X-files.

Harvest Time, Mestia, Oct. 2, 2010

 It was good timing to get these shots when I did, 2 days ago.  Since then we've had almost nonstop rain, day and night, and I'm expecting warnings for floods and mudslides.  Top, squash and (in the distance) corn; middle, corn; bottom, just a favourite view.

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No. 6

This is the 2nd street you'll find when you enter Mestia from the south, and it leads to the main Square, which also has an interesting name, as my next post in this series will demonstrate.  I do wonder, with all the renovation going on, whether Stalin St. will be changed by presidential decree - Misha had the misfortune to be born on Stalin's birthday...
The other thing is that all of the nice new street signs in the whole town are made of cut-&-stick vinyl, which I used to work with in Canada in the 1980s, instead of being screen printed.  Bad choice!  I realise that each sign must be unique, which makes them a poor choice for screen printing, which is primarily a mass-production method, as opposed to cut vinyl, which is ideally suited to this one-off need.  But there's just too much temptation to worry those letters until they come off!  And this vandalism - not to mention the ravages of a harsh summer-winter climate - is visible on many of the signs already.

'shroomin' in th' Forest, 2, Mestia, September 2010

 Some of them are almost big enough to be hats.  These were great finds - new enough not to be wormy, big enough for a whole meal.
Bottom shot - Lali picking another local item, rosehips, from which she'll make a drink.  This was the first Georgian beverage I ever tasted, in the Tbilisi Restuarant in St Petersburg, Russia, in the mid-1990s, long before I ever thought I'd live in Georgia...

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No. 6

All of Mestia's many roughly millennium-old stone watchtowers have either 2 or 3 "eyes" (windows) per side.  In other words, they're very regular.  Compare this to Ushguli, 44 km away, Europe's highest village, with slightly fewer towers (about 34 to Mestia's more than 40).  In Ushguli, you'll find:  a set of twinned towers, others with 2, 3 or 4 eyes per side, and one with 4 eyes on each of one pair of opposing sides and 5 eyes on the other pair (the Museum, in Chazhashi hamlet).  Astonishing variety.  My question is:  Were Mestia's towers made first - the 2-3-eye pattern quickly established - followed by later experimentation with the form in Ushguli; or was Ushguli the place of original play with the form until it was firmly decided and then implemented later in Mestia?  In other words, which community can claim the earlier set of towers?  And, by the way, what about the other main kind of watchtower found in the Caucasus, the one with a pyramidal roof, as in Khevsureti and the North Caucasus?  Are these older than the Svan types?  What a hornet's nest to stir up!

Forest Gems, Mestia, September 2010

 I stumbled across these dew-covered spiderwebs precariously hanging on thistles during the last mushroom forage.  Delight, wonder, many photographs, kneeling on the wet ground heedless.  (The narrow focus is intentional.)

Interesting Facts about Mestia, No. 5

I once found a fossilised plant on the walk to the Koruldi Lakes, not far from the edge of the town itself.  It now belongs to the main Museum.