Georgia's notable attributes buzz around my head in an unruly, friendly swarm. It is, Sarah and I have decided, the Land of Cats. Nearly every home we visited featured an iconic cat. There was the mamma cat with her tiny, mewling brood at Tina's homestay in Tbilisi. There was Margo, the crazy cat in heat living with Anthony and Nino, some great folks we couchsurfed with. In the mountain border town of Kazbegi, our hosts' cat slept on our dining chair for an afternoon. The dozen deeply loved, scruffy cats living in one of the 60 reconstructed homes at the Georgian folk architecture museum had a colorful owner who spoke great english owing to a few years spent in New Orleans: "Yes, I was the paid conservator at this museum, but they fired me. I think it was because of the cats." He's since been rehired as a guide, for less pay, and is incensed that the buildings are falling apart without him. "The Georgian people do not like cats so much. I think it is because of the thing that is said, that a cat once said, 'I am waiting until my owner dies, then I will eat his nose.' This is a false thing to say. There are two problems with this! First, cats do not eat dead flesh; they are not carrion eaters. Second, cats do not speak. Which cat told them this? There must be some misunderstanding."

The national street snack is sunflower seeds. Georgians are champion seed eaters. Seed-and-cigarette sellers, who hold about the same position in Georgian city society as drum-playing buskers do in NYC, abound on the corners. Groups of wisecracking kids and pairs of whispering matrons won't be seen in the open without their paper cones full of seeds, rising through their peeling fingers to their crunching chompers. It is with great enthusiasm that the Georgian masses deplete the avian food supply.

Georgian voracity is certainly not limited to seeds, though. Georgians feast on a grander scale and a more regular basis than any people I've ever heard of. Day after day, when we were guests at one or another homestay, we would be expected to tuck in the untuckable, with a tremendous spread before us, as Georgian guests around us nonchalantly dug in, telling us this was how it was done every day. Our longest feast, clocking in at five hours, was on the occasion of the impromptu visit of a family member's boss and some coworkers to David Zandarashvilis's homestay in Sighnaghi. We ate homemade cheese and yogurt, home-cured pork, baked beans, beef stew, cole slaw, sauteed scallions, sprigs of tarragon and parsley, and braised spinach, along with oodles of puri, the standard, banjo-shaped bread that's eaten with every meal. And there was toasting throughout. Before coming to Georgia, I never realized how inexhaustible the subjects of toastable cheer really were. But there must have been thirty toasts that night, none of them ever descending to the dull specificity we prefer in America. There was a toast to Georgia, of course, as well as toasts Success, to Family, to Brothers, to Women, to Friends, to The Future, and so on. Twelve people consumed twenty liters of homemade wine that night. Sarah and I have sworn that, at least on the more important days of each month, we will fete our friends and family with a shadow of that tremendous hospitality.

Georgians automatically cross themselves three times when they pass a church, whether they're in a bus or walking on the street. It is, I'm given to understand, not always an expression of religious sentiment, much of which died out under the many years of atheist soviet rule. Instead, it's a kind of compulsory hocus pocus. But Georgians, who have the second-oldest organized Christianity in the world, are going back to church. Right now, it's a country with a lot of reverence for the trappings of the faith, and younger people are attending church in greater and greater numbers. Visiting fifth and sixth century churches, I was interested to see seven year olds who already had a routine dictating which icons they kissed, which they bowed to, and which ones they knelt before, lighting a candle. But I wasn't only playing the spectator. Having grown up Episcopalian, visiting Georgia was the first time on this trip that I felt welcome to participate in a religious service, and the first time that I felt a real resonance with my own spirituality. This is not to say that other holy sites we've visited were meaningless to me, but the Georgian church felt more accessible.

I want to thank the Georgian friends of ours who are reading this for showing us such a special time, and I want to encourage my friends who are visiting Europe to include Georgia. We'll put a lot of pictures of Georgia up on our Flickr site (the link is on the wandery homepage) soon.