Georgia on my mind

Did you Americans know that, in addition to the state of Georgia, there is a country called Georgia? Does anyone know that? Crossing over from Yerevan several days ago, I passed to the difficult to spell and pronounce capital city of Tbilisi on one of the worst international "highways" I've ever seen. There were few people on the bus, and I found it very hard to change Armenian "dram" for Georgian "lari" once in the city, so I reckon there isn't much intercourse between the two countries, so to speak. But the Georgians noticeably loosened up once we were over the border, beckoning me over to their little group, offering me a mug of paint thinner they referred to as "vodka." Though I was still a tad hungover from the mandatory turning-30 birthday celebrations the previous night (Tom made me a cake! Teny sang for me in Armenian!), I could not turn down their hospitality, nor the opportunity to mug for the foreigners upon drinking their strong local distillant. Actually, there's a lot of drinking-for-leisure here in ex-U.S.S.R. (surprised?), so I feel like I've been hungover for a week... hence the dearth of posts, though the lack of Internet cafes contributes. I'm staying now with Dion, an English woman, and she has kindly brought me along to her office today so I could finally do some updating. There may not be any more, again, for a little while. Can I tell you readers anything interesting? There's been rain almost every day, it's cold, and I've mostly been drinking coffee and admiring the pretty, historic, European-esque buildings and drinking more coffee (by day...). I did visit a Turkish bath for the first time, where the full treatment "massage" consisted of me lying on a hard, marble slab while a bulky, cigarette-smoking Georgian man scoured, in two courses, all the dead (and some of the living) skin off my delicate body, pounded me a bit, and repeatedly dumped buckets of scalding water over my head without warning, all while a roomful of naked, uncircumcised men looked on. Don't you love, readers, my humerous use--to full effect in this post--of quotation marks?