Jgurag (St George's) Church, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Top 2:  Some of the church's many St George icons; I especially like the style of the top one

Bottom 2:  details of the carved wooden door, a masterpiece - I must find out how old it is

Jgurag (St George's) Church, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Never know what you'll find in church.

Altar

Sheep and goat heads with their all-important drinking horns

A stick with marks down its length which I THINK are  recorded answers to prayer

Wonderful old carved wooden door - details to follow

Scrabble In Georgian!, Ushguli

Top:  Bebia (Grabdmother) Tsiala carding wool.  Lots of work still ahead:  spinning it into yarn on a thing which looks like a wooden spinning top, then knitting socks or  sweater from it - I have a set of each of these, treasured things from her

Bottom 3:  Attention Attention!  On February 23, 2009 the first ever Georgian-language game of Scrabble as far as I know) was played, right here in the Ratianis' guesthouse in Ushguli.  To prepare for it we made a count of letters from a sample of text, to determine their order from most common to rarest and assign inverse values to the letters.  Then we cut out paper squares and wrote proportionally correct amounts of the letters on them, along with their assigned point values.  We used the existing tablecloth, the grid pattern for which had given me the idea in the first place.  Somewhat relaxed rules - our letters not hidden from other players, and a simpler crossword layout as well, for this first stab at the game, which seems to have been quite successful.  Why all the bother?  We were without electricity again, and I was desperate for something to do to entertain the family.  "Alas", the power came back the next day, and TV & soap operas with it, ruling force in this part of the world.  But Scrabble will have its next day yet!

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Top 2:  What a men's prayer breakfast looks like in Ushguli - pass the moonshine, khachapuri (cheese bread), leg of beef and liver too; watch out for falling snow, and take your hat off as briefly as possible when it's this cold

Bottom 2:  Birthday party for one of my colleagues from the school and her daughter - lots of great food, plates on top of plates as usual in Georgia, toasts made either by the glass or by drinking-horn

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Queen Tamar's Summer (left) & Winter (right) towers; at least that's who tradition says ordered their building, though the timing, about7  centuries ago, is about right

Snow ageing gracefully on rock

Lichen doing the same

Smoke&Mirrors2, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

More wild things from steam off boiling water backlit by the morning sun, images then copied & flipped into themselves in PhotoShop

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Textural contrasts

Some of my youngest English group putting together 3-letter words and pictures, racing the other half of the class

Partially snow-covered cave on the bank of the river

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

NB The calm appearance of these posts every morning (my time) belies the struggles Ushguli's having with its electricity in winter.  I post batches with future dates whenever there's power.  More on the details of this soon.

... Couldn't believe it, she was still sitting there on his back when I returned with my camera, hoping against hope!

Fence zen

Icicles' delicate gravity-defying superstrength

New Letterhead!

I changed the letterhead as soon as this was ready.  I'd been waiting for the sky to have just the right amount of cloud - none = boring; too much = , well, too much.  Took a few hours' PhotoShopping to get it from 11 digital frames, shot from my secret location, to one panorama, then add text and tweak it.  The original is over 80 MPixels in size, and likely the first 360-degree panorama ever taken of Ushguli.  Here (in this post, above) is a larger version if you want to save it - click once on it and you can.

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

View down to Chazhashi and Murqmeli hamlets from the main church of the former

Icicles from the roof of the same church

Snow doing its thing, persuaded by wind and sun

Smoke&Mirrors, Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

... something completely different.

I had noticed the steam rising from coffee, tea or soup catching the backlighting of the morning sun, and decided to try capturing it.   These are some of the  more than 200 results - not very sharp, but interesting in themselves.  Then I went wild and copied the images on top of themselves in PhotoShop, reflecting them into all four 90-degree symmetries.  Suddenly they took on whole new lives. Here are 2 pairs, the original and its symmetrical version.

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

Local goats and tower

View down from near my hosts' house

Tower catching the sun

Lock of the inner door of St Barbara's Church, lowest of Ushguli's 7 churches

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

More from Feb. 12's busy shooting.

Old snow - so much more interesting after the wind and sun have got hold of it for a few days

Queen Tamar's Summer (upper left) and Winter Tower complexes (right) and some more nicely windswept old snow

View down the village from the entrance way of the church at Chazhashi hamlet

Ushguli, Svaneti, Georgia

All in a day's work, February 12 in this case.

This scene, all too familiar to me as a resident of Ushguli, needs something new and dramatic to complete it.  Is Shkhara, Georgia's highest mountain, visible? (Below the main cloud at left.  Lamaria, at right, only looks bigger because it's much closer; Shkhara is 7 km  (c. 5 miles) away in the distance, air clear as a bell.)  Does the sky have something interesting about it?  (Cloud in the perfect position.)  We know that those are houses; but how about a person walking through the scene to give perfect scale to everything?  (There she is, one of my colleagues at the school, bottom right.)  Right place, right time, take the shot!

Me after a hard slog through snow up to mid-thigh deep, all for photos' sake

Abstract snowscape

Cracked paint, chaos obeying rules