random thpughts upon leaving georgia

Paul and I are waiting in the bus station, we think were waiting for a bus to take us to armenia, but as usual its unclear exactly what's going on. We shall see where we end up tonight.
After a very short seeming stay of about 9 days I can say that I'm a huge fan of georgian food and their mountains however their driving and crumbling infrastructure are quite frightening.
Georgians were super locavores, everything appears to be very fresh, locally grown and unprocessed. We were lucky enough to arrive during tomato season and the georgians seem to have hundreds of recipes to make best use of their abundance- tomato,cucumber and onion salad (a staple), tomato with eggplant (aburgiene- which I've suddenly started to dig) and onion, tomato sauce with egg and other veggies, katsup etc. Last night we were treated to georgian bbq (shlakisvili?) And it was exceptionally yummy. Like americans, they take great pride in cooking meat over a fire, though their bbq grill is much smaller, basicaLly a metal pan with a metal rack over it. Also we got a taste of that crafty homade liquor that you mention mike, they call it cha cha and its made with the skin of grapes (or the version we had was anyway) it burns and that's about all I can report about the cha cha.
On to the crumbling infrastructure and buildings...it seems as though georgias architecture, roads, electricity, water system is stuck between the days of old and days of older. The highway is litterally falling off of hillsides and the bridges are beyond questionable. And yet everyone drives on. Soviet architecture is everywhere screaming function!function!function! But the majority of the oversized, out of context buildings are completely abandoned, windows broken, grafiti everywhere. The soviets built a 500 room hotel on a hillside overlooking and overshadowing the tiny village of kazbegi. Now its abandoned of course but the blight remains, a giant monolith building overlooking a mtn town that hardly has running water. Dude!
All I will say about the driving is that despite paul and my skittishness about moving vehicles sometimes its warranted. we saw a horrible accident yesterday and a dead man laying on the road. Makho, our host and driver, did a lot less manical passing after that. It was really sad.
Next report ARMENIA! That is if we get there!