A Walk in the Park

On the second day I woke up early, at 5 am. My father was still asleep and I escaped. When I looked at my clothes selection I picked my one dress that looks like a village dress, the others were too fancy for the first day out, I thought, and put it on quickly, brushed my teeth and walked out quietly with my phone and my lap top so I can Skype with my boyfriend. My apartment had no internet and I really wanted to talk to him.

My cousin was going to work and he invited me to come with him. There is a small park where you can go on horse rides, jump on trampolines with the bungy ropes, ride on quadracycles, and go up on an elevator that travels along a conveyor belt from the bottom to the top of the mountain. I quickly changed into pants and a shirt for the horse ride and trampoline. We first walked down the entire little town part where all the tourists like to hang out. I didn't take any pictures then, but I will later and post them. I took some pictures of the flowers that were near by instead.

The park itself is called "rosha", which in Russian translates into a "small forest". But it's funny because the park is actually a small clearing in the midst of a large forest. When I tried to explain this to my cousin he didn't understand why I told him that rosha is not actually a rosha at all and he kept telling me, "no, it's rosha, that's what it is." He didn't understand because he speaks Russian, Armenian, Georgian and Turkish. Russian is not his main language and so he doesn't know the finer nuances of words such as rosha which is a variation of the word for forest because it means a small forest in the middle of a clearing, rather than a regular forest. I thought it was funny that they would call a clearing in the middle of a forest a rosha when it means the exact opposite. My uncle later explained that the word stuck for the park from the Romanov's family. Perhaps during that time it was the small portion of the forest that they would walk into and that's probably why they called it that.

This is the tiny little strawberry that I always thought tasted like a thousand strawberries in one little one, but now that I've been eating them I found their taste is very different from strawberries, although they are very flavorful. It's hard to find the really ripe ones. They grow everywhere, along the sides of the road, in the park, in our yard at home and in the forest. The only ones that are good to eat are in the forest because that's where they're clean. They like to grow in the sunny spots of a clearing and along paths through the forest.

This is the path through the park. I wish parks in Tucson look like this:

This is the small river that runs through Abastumani. Otskhe is the name of the river, it meets another river called Mtkvari farther away from Abastumani in a place called Pareha, which is also a village. Mtkvari has a Russian translation "Koora" which is also the word for chicken. It's illegal to catch the trout that lives in this river, it's the royal red spotted trout (that's what they call it in Russian, in English it's the rainbow trout), it's small and very tasty. 

And then I took some photos of the flowers that grow along Otskhe.

The picture below is of a flower called koorinaya slepota which translates into chicken blindness from Russian. I don't know why they called it that, I always wondered if chickens would go blind if they stared at it for too long.

I took some pictures of the clover next to Otskhe, and then I walked up the mountain with my father and saw some GIANT clover, I didn't ever know it got that big. It's extremely aromatic here and tastes very sweet.

I took a picture of the grass below because I just thought it's really pretty even though it's not a flower.

I caught a ladybug on camera!

Below is one of the houses that faces the park. I took just this one picture but later I will walk through on my own and photograph all the old houses. They were built during the Romanov's reign by the workers that came to build their resort for them. I will tell the story of these houses in a later entry.

This is my very sweet cousin. In Russian we say "dvayurodnyi brat", which translates into "my twice removed brother". I just call him brother. I always wanted an older brother when I was small because I wanted to dance ballet with him. When I grew up I realized that I'm already born and can't have an older brother, and that there was no guarantee that he would dance ballet with me even if I had one. I'm really happy now to have Georgi as my brother. I decided to call him Gosha. He says "you're the older sister, so I do what you say we do" and he takes me on horse rides and trampoline jumping, carries buckets of water for me and helps me wash my hands. I love him.