Survival In Georgia Part II

Hey guys hope you all are doing good. In my previous blog entry I stopped at th level of language as an important barrier for survival in Georgia. Today I would continue the next thing that matters the most for survival in a foreign land like me in Georgia. Let's begin friends.

2] Food

Food is a thing without which a person can't live without and what matters most in scenarios of students studying in foreign countries is their home food. Although most of us may philosophically think that there are millions of people who die without food and you on the other hand sit in a foreign land and wish for home food. This may be true theoretically but practically its really difficult to adapt yourself for other foods. To explain it with an example lets take this scenario, you and a group of friends move into a chinese restaurant in your homeland and eat tummy full. You may say that the chinese soups and fried rice are delecious but how about if you were left all alone in China. You would have to sacrifice the taste of the food that you had ate from your childhood and start getting adapted to this foreign taste. Believe me it is really difficult to do so from my own experience especially in a country where you find language by itself to be a barrier, Imagine how would you go to a shop and ask what kind of foods are they serving and how much does things cost. Its terrible because first you may have to find a vendor who can understand what you say and then get something that your gut says that it will be good. A question may arise like why don't you cook your own food? Yeah thats really a nice question and I would appreciate that but in reality self cooking in the first few days of arrival is unimaginable, even if it happens the result would be a total mess. Here the problem is again with the first hinderance of survival that makes your social life really difficult. ie, the language. Even if you manage to peep into a supermarket and get some stuffs followed by a vegetable market to get some vieggies that you need to cook you may not get all the essential items that are needed as they have their own name here and pople who work as labours don't know English. On the first day of arrival in Georgia I had a good dinner and then from the next morning the tragedy started. Due to the long journey we were really tired and we were actually starving therefore visited a near by super market. There we were not able to find anything that we thought would be useful to us. As it was our first day we didn't have any kind of vegetables, oil or anything not even salt and therefore we bought few packets of biscuits and some roll cakes. Heading back to our home we had these sweets fot our breakfast, this is something totally new to us as we never used to have sweets for breakfast. It was a cold winter season and there would be no shops for buying some breads or other bakery products. Even during the summers most shops will open at 10am only. One of the most delicious food that revived our tongue's is Shaurma which is actually a Turkish dish that is modified according to Georgian taste and in some places original Turkish Shaurma's are available. We found it out because the shop was located very close to the universityl As days passed we began to adapt to some of the common foods that are available in the street shop which however didn't fulfill our desires in having an Indian meal. We took a courageous decision and brought some chicken from a nearby supermarket, onions,all other vegetables, oil, salt etc but we missed an important thing which is none other than the spicy Indian masala which no one of us carrried. However the cooking went on well and finally we had something that atleast looked like an Indian meal. As days passed we began to master the city and got to know some worlwide famous restauraunts like Macdonalds, Texas Chicken, Elvis etc. Those restauraunts were quite costly for students but food mattered much more than to it. Our final struggle for food came to an end when we got to know some little basics of Georgian language. We also then heard a pleasant message that there is an Indian restauraunt in Tbilisi and we were like really really surprised and went in there the cost of food almost equalized the flight expenses for direct import  of these foods from India but they were so yummy and delecious.  From these you would have well understood that how language and food twisted our lives as a tornado and finally made us steady where we still remain. The continuation of Survival I'll post my next blog entry till then cheers :)