Vladimir Putin is an ugly and bad man

This wisdom was served to me by one of my beginner students. Their homework was to write sentences using the basic adjectives they had learned the previous lesson. I'm seriously impressed!

Today I, for the first time since coming here, got a sense of actually being in a conflict zone, or at least close to a hotly contested border. When you're just wandering around in Zugdidi it's very difficult to imagine that just two years ago, Russian tanks were standing on the street corners here and people were afraid to go out - not because the Russian soldiers were randomly seizing people or anything, but obviously one wouldn't feel entirely comfortable going for a leisurely stroll in the park when foreign and heavily armed soldiers are patrolling the streets. But these days, Zugdidi is like any other small Georgian town. Most of my travel guides are from 2008 (before the war), and they all advise against staying in Zugdidi for any longer period of time. Now, it's difficult to see why they would do that. Certainly, unemployment is a huge problem here, and unemployed men like to get really drunk in bars. But they usually only have arguments with other drunk unemployed men, and as long as you stay out of their way and just assume the normal precautions, you're fine.

However, today I went with Imedi to a village very near the Abkhazian border. You have to cross the Enguri to get there, and the area is apparently contested - the Abkhaz claim it belongs to Abkhazia, the Georgians claim it's Georgian. Fighting took place there in the early 90s, but it wasn't touched by the August war. However, because it's so close to Abkhazia, and so contested, the Georgian military has a small base there and when crossing the bridge, every driver has their documents inspected and the registration number of the car is noted, in case there should be a problem. The soldiers at the checkpoint jokingly told us not to cross over to Abkhazia. During the meeting in the village we also had a Russian military helicopter fly over us at very low altitude - deafening noise. Apparently it's pretty common. I can imagine that living there, one doesn't forget about the war so easily...

This village is also used as an illegal crossing point for the Abkhaz who want to visit Georgia (and they do quite regularly; many have some sort of work or other involvement here). It's not easy to cross at the only "official" crossing point, the Enguri bridge, so many cross at the many illegal points, often at great risk. I was at a EUMM meeting the other week, where they informed us of some of the cases of detention of illegal crossers that had come to light in the latest month. One that stuck with me was a case of three cousins that tried to cross. They were arrested and one of them subsequently died in custody. I think it's safe to assume it wasn't from natural causes. Because the EUMM doesn't have access to Abkhazia, they couldn't tell us who's responsible for such violations, and there are conflicting reports - some say the Abkhaz soldiers are the most difficult to deal with, some say the Russians. Most of the people at meeting today are regularly going between the Abkhazian and the Georgian side, and they said the Russians were the biggest problem - usually because they are drunk and irritable. Some of the women present had been arrested after random searches of buses. Those with Abkhazian or Russian papers were fine, those with Georgian papers were arrested. Anyway, there seem to be regular problems with the actions of (usually drunken) Russian soldiers in Abkhazia - not long after I came to Georgia there was one much publicised incident of murder. Unfortunately, I can't seem to find the news articles about that event now...

On a final note, you know that a road is bad when it's actually a smoother ride to drive on the side of it instead of on it.