More of Poti

I guess you could say that this week has been pretty quiet so far, compared to the last couple!  This past Wednesday, Ben and I went back to the nice cafe that has wi-fi, and I snapped a few more Poti shots for all of you...

The street I live on.

And the house I live in.

My school is the big red brick building.  800 students!

Thursday was a pretty spectacular day.  On Thursdays, I finish with school at 1:00, which is always pretty awesome.  I took my bike down to Kolkheti National Park and rode it all around, ending up at the Black Sea.  Unlike the area near the port, this area actually has a beach.  It would be lovely, and very cool with all the black sand, but unfortunately this was the dirtiest and most trash-filled beach I have ever seen in person.  Very sad.

Black Sea beach.  Could be a beautiful spot if Georgians stopped treating it like a dump.

My bike trail.

 

Riding through the woods was just amazing.  Before coming to Georgia, I hadn't ridden a bike in a long time because I have terrible knees unfortunately.  Bad knee genes inherited from my father (thanks Dad), and aggravated by a couple of sports injuries about seven or eight years ago.  But Poti was so flat and I was frustrated with my lack of driving ability that I thought I'd give it a try.  So far the knees have held up great, although they did start to bother me right at the tail end of this long ride. 

After the park, I rode across town to Oscar's, and met Mark and Julie.  Not long after we arrived, two drunken Georgian men swaggered up to our table and were being a nuisance.  The waitress tried to rescue us, and I'm sorry to say that things got a little ugly for a little bit there.  It ended with the police taking away the worst of the two men, and then coming back in a little bit to get a statement from the restaurant.  The three of us weren't involved in any of the unpleasantness thank goodness, just tertiary observers.  But it shook us all up enough that the Americans actually bought a small bottle of vodka for the first time since coming to this wild country...

And we bought our tiny bottle just in time to share it with two awesome people from Austria, Nora and Roman.  They were walking by and we introduced ourselves just as the shit went down... so all five of us got to take a calming vodka shot from a bottle that turned out to be just the right size.  Nora and Roman are biking around the world and had just come to Poti via a ferry from the Ukraine.  Two nicer people you'll never want to meet anywhere.  We had a great time and Mark, Julie and I were even able to teach them some emergency Georgian.  They were headed for Kutaisi tomorrow on their bikes -- we wished them luck on the roads with these insane Georgian drivers!