FOLEY IN GEORGIA

Steven Foley, who is just back from a trip to Tbilisi, reports:

Having been studying the Georgian language in one way or another since I was in middle school, it’d been high time for me to actually visit the place it’s spoken. And I finally got my excuse this summer, when I had a paper accepted to the 11th Tbilisi Symposium on Logic, Language, and Cognition (TbiLLC). I arrived in the capital city two weeks before the conference to see some of the country I’ve been interested in for so long — and Georgia did not disappoint. It’s a land of rugged beauty, delicious cheap food, intimidating hospitality, and (of course) linguistic richness. Tbilisi itself is quite charming, if you manage to avoid being run over by speeding taxis. Just around the corner from one another are ancient churches, stark Soviet monuments, and modern homes of new oligarchs. I also got a few chances to trek outside the city. One such excursion was to Vardzia, an 11th century cave city hewn into a mountainside. Oh, and the conference was pretty fun. I presented in a workshop on obligatoriness organized by UMass’s Rajesh Bhatt & Vincent Homer. Also on the TbiLLC program were some enlightening tutorials on semantic fieldwork by UBC’s Lisa Matthewson, a presentation on a syntactically- & morphologically-annotated Georgian corpus I’m itching to use, and some logic talks. But undoubtedly the best part of my trip was the food. I gorged myself daily on exquisite produce, hearty fist-sized dumplings, eggplant slathered with walnut paste, tarragon soda, fried garlicky chicken, tannic orange wines fermented in clay pots, and all manner of cheese-filled breads. After a 20-hour blur of travel it’s hard to believe I’m already back in Santa Cruz. It sure took me a while to finally get to Georgia, but I don’t think it’ll be long before I’m there again.