Today I was sitting at a Georgian restaurant, having lunch with a fellow volunteer and during our conversation I brought up how my host family put me on their industrial electric scale used for making Cha Cha (Georgian homemade hard alcohol, that I find the need to write with capital letters) and weighed me the other day. He was very confused as how I could even let this happen in the first place and I explained that it had been a very silly morning full of giggles. My host dad had started it off by saying that my host brother’s backpack was too heavy and decided to see just how much it weighed. He went outside and got the scale out. The backpack came in at a whopping 6.2kg and I laughed, thinking that my bag always was so much heavier in school. Then my host dad got on the scale to see how much he weighed, then my host mom. Naturally it was my turn next. I said no at first, but I was kind of curious to see how much I had gained in the time I have been over seas. Well I got my answer and my host family got a laugh. Seriously they laughed. I on the other hand ran up to my room to get a calculator to multiply my weight in kilos, by 2.2 so I could get it in pounds. I gasped a little when I realized that I had gained about 10lbs. I am not stupid. I knew Ukraine did nothing to help me out, nights spent drinking copious amounts of vodka and apple juice, mornings sleeping off a hangover and afternoons and evenings eating hearty Eastern European food with chocolate sprinkled in whenever I felt the need. The only exercise I had on a regular basis was from bar to bar, or grocery shopping. (Honestly I do not mind the extra weight at all. I had so much fun in Ukraine. Yes it was worth it.)
Then Georgia has not helped the weight gain. There are three food groups here this time of year: bread, cheese, and meat. Oh I bet that sounds great doesn’t it? I am not kidding at all here. My daily weekday (weekends are always a toss up) food breaks down like this: breakfast is normally eggs that have been cooked with large amounts of sunflower oil, bread to soak up the oil, and cheese. Meat is also thrown in two or three times a week. Lunch is soup of some sort, that is eaten with bread always in one of your hands. If you do not eat with the bread in your hand you are questioned and given looks. Dinner is normally meat, potatoes, bread, and some other random thing like maybe picked cabbage. Coffee time happens once or twice a day and there is always cakes, biscuits, and chocolate. Fruit sometimes comes out after dinner. Add in a supra or two a week and I know exactly why wait gain is happening. On Monday I had 5 pieces of cake that day. It was people’s birthdays and you sometimes just cant say no. I also did not know at the time of eating the first pieces of cake at school that I would be going to a birthday supra that night or I would have tried to have eaten less.
Talk then turned to the fact that my male volunteer friend was perplexed as to why it seems like all the women gain weight and all of the men loose weight over here. (This does seem to be the norm. I know there are some exceptions. Lucky bitches.) He asked if we just eat all the time? When you are bored, do you just sit there thinking about how bored you are and how you should just eat to stay busy? I thought about it and concluded that, that cannot be the answer, besides some of the guys must fall into that trap too, besides I don’t think any of the girls I know really ate that much more then they do back in their homeland. Well, don’t hate me for saying this, but is it possible that girls are always on a diet or have some odd eating habit, then they get here and can’t keep it up or choose not to and let themselves go? Well, I thought, this does seem a little more probable. I mean I know a lot of people, guys and girls, who have let themselves go a bit since getting here, in one way or another. (Love not wearing make up everyday) Again this could not be the possible reason for the all around weight gain that split the genders.
Our conversation moved on to other things and naturally it came back to the topic of drinking. Georgians pride themselves on having the best wine, well as much as we would love to agree we can’t, because we don’t know. There are no wine snobs twirling glasses, smell the lush bouquets, swishing it around in their mouths and spitting it out. Oh no, here there is just chugging glass after glass on the weekends, that honestly for most of us, grossly enough, gives us the shits and makes us throw up. I don’t know who thought of it first, but we realized an important thing. Girls are not forced to drink here. We can get away with being too “delicate.” Guys cannot escape this fate (I just this moment thought of my father coming to see me in Georgia and going to a supra and being made to drink. This man never drinks in the States, except for stealing one of my PBRs ever few months. It would be hilarious for me to see. I’ve heard rumors about him being a Jack and Coke man back in the day.) Anyways guys here have to drink. In Georgia ‘no’ is a sarcastic yes. All of a sudden it clicked, the guys are made to drink, there for cleaning every single thing they have ever eaten out of them, they are literally shitting and vomiting the pounds away. Girls sometimes get to drink a little wine, but its not enough, often enough to make them turn Georgian bulimic. I would just like all of my fellow female volunteers to remember this the next time we want to kill a male volunteer for loosing weight or kiss him for that matter. He’s probably recently thrown up.
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