Word: mountains
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first learned this 45 years ago when, while bicycling, I turned to stick out my tongue at a girl and crashed into a pole. I totaled my three-speed and nearly my body. Since then, I have broken both legs--one skiing, the other playing football. I tried mountain-biking a few years ago and took an epic spill on my first downhill...
...Down a heavily potholed road, in some places splashed by mountain streams, the abandoned village of Eredvi comes into view. Populated by ethnic Georgians before the 2008 war, the village is now empty. Every house has been demolished and the villagers have all fled to Georgia. Plants grow between the heaps of bricks and stone. The school, which had been recently repaired before the war, today stands faded pink and windowless. Looters, whom locals claim do not exist, have stripped the place - even digging the wiring out of the walls. They have taken everything but the Georgian-language textbooks...
...This week the Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Grigory Karasin said the Kremlin would station around 3,000 troops in South Ossetia and Abkhazia by the end of the year. The Russian army has already built three bases in this scrubby mountain territory, and is building a fourth. Tskhinvali, which remains pockmarked and burnt from the five days of heavy fighting despite loans and pledges from Russia that the city would be rebuilt, is now host to a pristine Russian army base surrounded by high walls and barbed wire. (See pictures of Russia celebrating Victory...
...pick our way down the steps carved into the mountain. Where the mist floats away reveals bushy trees and long blades, green carpeting the slope. Without the hush-hum of insects, with fewer travelers passing this way, it’s quiet. In the distance we can see the orange and white bus we’ll take back to the city...
...birthday I got a new iPhone. Computers and GPS devices are what we have today instead of Etch A Sketches and Erector Sets and Morse-code telegraph kits. Adults of my parents' generation did not bicycle, roller-skate, or play army; adults today spend whole weekends mountain-biking, snowboarding, and dressing up in camouflage gear to fire paint balls at each other...