Georgia on my Mind

Last winter I was part of an ENEMO-OSCE presidential election observation mission to the Republic of Georgia. Here I am below with our tanslator Guliko. Ironically, we were sent to a mostly Azeri area in southern Georgia where few of the locals actually knew Georgian. My Russian was better Guliko's so a few times I ended up translating for myself.

This was the polling station from hell. How many people can you pack into a precinct hallway? Apparently, a lot!

Getting out was madness. I'm amazed people were not killed.

It snowed heavily on election day, adding to the chaos. The roads were covered in a foot of snow and we had to limit our observations to populated areas outside Tiblisi.
This is Maria, my colleague from Romania. She is funny as hell. We enjoyed a huge Georgian lunch in a restaurant with little in the way of heating. Her incredible sense of humor kept me laughing the whole time. Georgian food is fantastic by the way. Khinkali would go over big time in the USA. They are a sort of massive sized meat filled dumplings. Khachapuri is the national bread with cheese melted on top. Toasting and wine are very important in Georgian culture. There is also an ancient Georgian tradition called a supra led by a tamada who tells stories and entertains while guests eat and drink. It's more complicated than that, but that's what Google is for if you are interested.
Infrustructure is rather primative, at least far more than I imagined it would be. The schools mostly had small wood or coal burning stoves. This picture brings back memories of when I lived in the USSR in 1991. In Sochi at that time they had the same kind of toilets. Not pretty stuff.

In Sochi in 1991, I came down with a horrible case of food poisoning. All we had were toilets like these, and this was a nice one by comparision. Ah memories...
A picture of election officials gathered around the stoves I mentioned earlier. Most of the population of this precinct was Azeri.

At 3:00 am we were still counting ballots. Fraud? Incompetence? Who knows, but the roads were getting totally snowed under so we had to assume the best. At 5:00 am we arrived back home in Tiblisi, after our car broke down. A long day...