First Impressions from Gudauri

I stumbled across the border into Georgia without a clue what I was getting myself into or how to even get to Gudauri, the resort town in the Caucasus Mountains in northeast Georgia, where I was going to be a ski instructor for the winter. I’m not talking about Atlanta, I’m talking about the former Soviet Georgia, the unique country that bridges Eastern Europe and Western Asia; a country with a language, culture, alphabet, cuisine, and landscape nothing quite like anywhere else in the world.

 

 

My Georgian experience began as I boarded my flight from London to Istanbul. The guy sitting next to me was from Georgia, and, during our 4 hour layover in Istanbul, he invited me to an all-you-can-drink airport bar with some of his friends. This was my first experience of the never-ending-drinking-marathon that seems to happen every time a Georgian meets a foreigner traveling in their country.

 

 

It was 3:30 in the morning when my flight from Istanbul landed in Kutaisi, Georgia’s second biggest city and cheapest place to fly to. I stumbled out of the plane to be greeted with a bottle of wine as a gift from the border police. I found a van going to Tbilisi and the driver, ignoring the bungee cords in the trunk, used twine to tie my skis to the roof rack. Having seen on the map that the capital city is only 230 km away, I assumed it would be about a 2 hour drive, but I had far overestimated the quality of the roads. The official speed limit was 50 km/h, but what made people actually drive 50 km/h was the abundance of potholes, sharp curves, steep hills, and slow trucks. Including the stop so the driver could buy cigarettes and eat a meal in a restaurant while the rest of us sat in the car, the drive took about 5 hours. Once in Tbilisi, I had to fend off a hoard of taxi drivers while trying to avoid hitting people in the head with my skis and find a marshrutka (mini bus) going to Gudauri. The janky old buses don’t seem to run on a well-defined schedule, so while I waited for it to fill up, I had my first taste of Georgia’s most famous food, thin baked bread filled with cheese called khachapuri. Being a dedicated cheese lover and a sucker for anything fresh from a bakery, I immediately knew this would become a staple of my diet.

 

Two bumpy hours later, the marshrutka dropped me off at the ski school in Gudauri where I would be working for the next few months. Earlier in the year I had sent out emails to roughly 20 ski areas and ski schools around Eastern Europe asking for a job, and this was the one that replied, so here I was. I walked in, met the directors, one of whom is the Georgian Olympic team coach and the other competed in the Sochi Olympics, and met the other instructors who all seemed like awesome people. After getting to know everybody, I was given a ride to my new home, a large house owned by the father of one of the ski school directors, where 8 instructors, the wife and child of an instructor, and the house owner all live [edit: I’m actually unsure who lives here. More people keep showing up. There’s something between 12 and 18 people]. The other instructors are almost all Ukrainian and Russian with varying levels of English, so being the only non-Russian speaker, I’ve been doing my best to learn Russian as quickly as possible. It’s not easy sober, but vodka definitely helps. 

 

My first day on the job went surprisingly well. Without any training whatsoever and with absolutely no clue how to teach someone to ski, I was told that I had my first client in ten minutes. So I went out to the bunny hill and just winged it. Somehow it worked, and within the two-hour lesson, the guy learned how to stand on skis, control his speed with the pizza stop, and zigzag across the hill with his skis mostly parallel. I even got a 50 lari ($20) tip at the end of the lesson, doubling my salary for the two hours. Since then, lessons have been going really well. With much more experience under my belt, I’ve learned to identify and correct problems with ski form, and I’ve learned which aspects to focus on and what I can ignore. It’s easy to tell within the first couple minutes whether someone will actually learn how to ski or not, and it has more to do with their motivation and willingness to face their fear and keep trying than anything else. I’ve found that my biggest role as an instructor is keeping my clients happy and motivated so that they want to keep trying even when they’re doing everything wrong. A few jokes and high fives and a constant smile usually does the trick, and working on one small aspect of the technique at a time helps a lot so that they can feel themselves improving. Several of our clients are from tropical countries and are here seeing snow for the first time, and when they see the experienced skiers make it look so easy, they want to try skiing too. Quickly they realize that sitting at a desk for the last 20 years hasn’t helped their balance. It can be pretty entertaining to watch 250-pound men hurdle down the bunny hill, shoulders hunched over as they try their hardest to make a pizza stop until they hit a bump and fall backwards and can’t get up again. Others are the opposite, though, and sometimes the most seemingly unlikely people surprise me and are ready to go up the lifts within the first two-hour lesson. I’ve found that the easiest people to teach are athletic and fearless 20-somethings and happy kids, and the most difficult are nonathletic 40+ year olds and kids who cry a lot.

 

 

Apart from teaching, my life consists of a lot of eating, skiing, sleeping, struggling to understand Russian, and occasionally partying. I can normally be found speaking really slowly with a hint of a Russian/Ukrainian accent that’s starting to rub off on me. Since New Years it’s been snowing almost constantly, with a 1-day break for a nice sunny powder day. The resort, though small, has some nice in-bounds terrain, accessible by one high-speed lift, one gondola, and 4 horribly slow lifts, but the best part is the ease of access to amazing free riding terrain. The only out-of-bounds run I’ve done so far is Chrdili, and it got me totally stoked to explore the whole area. A wide open slope with nothing but knee deep powder, no rocks, no trees, just like floating down a fluffy, sunny cloud that sprays you in the face if you make a hard turn. And it’s only a 20 minute hike from the top of the gondola.

 

 

 

 

 

Things I’ve noticed in my first few weeks in Gudauri:

 

1. I have to put my food in the fridge to keep it warm. Otherwise it freezes in the pantry.
2. Showering comes with the trade-off between high water pressure/lukewarm water or low pressure/hot water. Both are pretty miserable in the sub-Arctic temperatures of the bathroom which has no heater. But showering isn’t really that necessary, is it?
3. The snow cat drivers at the ski resort make one lap to groom the runs in the morning and then go to the bar because the resort won’t pay for their gas to keep grooming throughout the day.

   

4. Khachapuri is delicious

   

5. So is Khinkali. It’s meat dumplings that you have to bite, suck the juice out of, usually burn your mouth, and then eat everything but the little notch on the bottom of the doughy part. It’s in the picture of the feast at the beginning of this post. 
6. Home made wine is often horrible, but people who make their own wine will insist that you drink it rather than wine from a vineyard (which is really amazingly delicious here).
7. Nothing is organized and nowhere is prepared for the huge influx of Russian New Years/Christmas tourists.
8. Service is generally terrible everywhere by American standards. You have to be really pushy to get waiters/waitresses/grocery store clerks/etc. to help you. It doesn’t bother me since I can’t speak their language anyways, it’s the same in most countries, and I’m too poor to eat at restaurants often, but a lot of my clients are always whining about the bad service.
9. Georgians don’t do lines. This causes a lot of frustration to the tourists, who try to sneakily nudge their way forward in the grocery store line, but then a local guy just blatantly cuts everyone and gets away with it.
10. People who are seeing snow for the first time really like to take selfies. It’s hilarious to imagine how ridiculous the Facebook profiles of half of Dubai must look now (we have tons of tourists from Dubai).
11. You put your used toilet paper in the garbage can because the toilet pipes can’t handle the cardboard that they call toilet paper.

    

12. Georgians are incredibly helpful and incredibly hospitable when you are their guest.
13. Home-cooked Georgian food might be the best food in the world.
14. You’ll never go hungry in Georgia.
15. You’ll never go sober either.
16. You don’t stop drinking until all of the alcohol is finished. If you think all of the alcohol is finished, you’re likely to be proven wrong when someone pulls out a reused coke bottle full of homemade liquor or wine.
17. It seems that there are as many Ukrainians living in Gudauri as Georgians.
18. You can tell within the first 5 minutes of a ski lesson whether someone will actually learn to ski or not. Often within the first 5 seconds.
19. I’ve never seen so many drunk people on a ski mountain. Or so little ski patrol. I think it’s best to avoid the pistes altogether on crowded days and just stick to the back country.
20. Nobody understands that it’s possible to ride on a lift with your snowboard still attached to your foot

    

21. There are no rules on the road. Or anywhere really.
22. There are no sidewalks. Or if there are, they’re buried under the snow. Because who wouldn’t want to walk on an icy semi-plowed road with crazy drivers who don’t see the point in tire chains? Hitchhiking in 4WD vehicles or skiing are probably the safest methods to get anywhere around here.
23. When somebody says something will happen tomorrow, give them at least a month to make it happen.
24. My spoken English is getting significantly worse and I’m picking up a Russian/Ukrainian accent since the majority of people I interact with are Ukrainians and Russians. I keep noticing myself speaking only in present tense and saying the direct translations of Russian phrases like “I want eat” instead of “I’m hungry” (я хочу есть), or “very big snow” instead of “a lot of snow” (большой снег). I started subconsciously rolling my r’s when speaking to people who do the same.