Whirlwind tour of Tbilisi

 Samtavro Church in Mtskheta

After my first bus ride to from Tbilisi to my city I swore I wouldn’t go back again until it was time to go back to America. Six torturous hours in an uncomfortable bus with poor ventilation made me think that there was nothing to see in Tbilisi that was worth doing that again. But since then of course, I have found better modes of transport and I’ve found myself in transit in Tbilisi 3 or 4 times since the beginning of November. While I’ve come to know the bus stations quite well because I’m always going from here to there passing through Tbilisi, I hadn’t gotten a chance to explore the city since my first week in Georgia during our orientation (and even then, I only got out into the city a few times for just a few hours).  Finally this weekend a chance to really see the city came up, my best travel mate was leaving for America. I spent the day with her and another friend exploring the city, got to say my goodbyes on Saturday night, then had one more day on Sunday to see even more. Taking night trains there and back maximized our time so we had two full days to explore.

First stop was actually to head out of Tbilisi, to the neighboring town of Mtskheta, the old capital of Georiga. Now it’s just a small pleasant city with lots of important churches. We didn’t have time to get into the mountains to find the most famous churches and monasteries, but we got to see two major sights in town, Samtavro church and Svetitskhoveli Cathedral.

 Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta

Svetitskhoveli Cathedral was the most important cathedral in Georgia during medieval times and several kings and church patriarchs have been buried here. Beautiful, original murals in here date back to the 17^th century.

Murals in Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

 Murals in Svetitskhoveli Cathedral

After roaming around Mtskheta for about 2 hours hitting up these two churches and all the souvenir stands picking up Christmas presents to bring home, we headed back to Tbilisi without any problems.

 Soviet medallions at the Dry Bridge Market

From there we went back to the Dry Bridge Market, the first place I discovered by accident in Tbilisi back after I first arrived. We all did a little shopping here, there are so many great things to buy here.

 Old photos at the Dry Bridge Market

Next it was time for lunch. Unfortunately, in Georgia, it can be hard to find a big variety of cheap eats. Generally we wind up eating some form of Khachapuri (bread with cheese) or Lobiani (bread with beans) because these are the cheapest. The selection of Khachapuris and Lobianis depend on the city and the restaurant, but here we found something we’d never tried before, Khachapuri with boiled egg inside. We were happy with the results and three of these plus three teas came to a grand total of 10 Lari ($7 USD). 

 Khachapuri filled with cheese and boiled eggs

From there it was on to Sameba, the biggest and newest cathedral in Georgia. Construction finished in just 2004, it is absolutely massive and can be spotted from afar from most places in the city. While this church is quite impressive to look at from the outside, inside it lacks the charm of the older churches and their beautiful old murals. Walls inside are mostly bare except for the various icons hanging on the walls. 

 Me at Sameba Cathedral

 After that, we spent some time with some friends of friends and then headed off for dinner. I hoped to find a place that had Georgian dancing for my buddy’s last night in Georgia, but we were unsuccessful. But, we did wind up with a nice (expensive) meal of Khinkali (Georgian dumplings) with salad and cheese in a fancy restaurant on the outskirts of town.

The next morning we leisurely got up and out of our hostel and headed to Narikala fortress. It was fun to climb the ruins of the fortress up to the top for the spectacular, bird’s eye view of the city. 

 Church in Narikala Fortress

 View from Narikala Fortress

 Side street near Didube Station

From there we headed to the market near Didube station to buy some Chorchkhela (grape and nut thing that is hard to understand until you see and taste it) for gifts. The market is fun to walk through, there’s lots to see, it’s not a touristy place at all. It really shocked some friends of mine who aren’t used to seeing markets where they come from. I’m used to it from living in Hwanghak-dong in Seoul.

 In the market at Didube Station

 Small, Medium, Large and Titanic!

Dinner was something I’ve been wanting to eat for a month. Adjaruli Khachapuri, which I personally like to call "boat Khajapuri". Traditionally it is served with cheese, egg and butter, but we tried another variation too, filled with cheese and vegetables. Really, this is the ‘small’ size for 6.80 Lari, but I think this could easily fill two hungry people. I don’t want to think how big the  ‘medium’, ‘large’ and ‘Titanic’ sizes would be…

 The expensive sulfur baths, from outside

Last stop for the night was the sulfur baths. I love going to the jjimjilbangs in Korea and I was hoping for a similar experience. There were two options. Paying (relatively) lots of money for a private bath, or going to the public bath for 2 lari. Just like in Korea you must take off all your clothes to go in, but unlike Korea, there's no baths in this bathhouse, just showers and a sauna (as far as I could find at least...)

 The cheap sulfur baths

After this, we were finished and we headed back to the train station to go back to our city. But, Tbilisi is a great place to wonder around and I look forward to my next chance to wander the city streets.

Gori Stalin Cult

 Small statue of Stalin in front of the museum. The large statue in town was removed in 2010

Gori is Stalin’s hometown and is considered something of a local hero. We thought we’d check it out for a few hours on Saturday for the next chapter in our weekend travel adventures.

 

Stalin Wine, 35 Lari (about $20 USD)

The museum dedicated to Stalin is hard to miss, it’s pretty much the biggest building and certainly the most attractive building in the city as far as we could see. It’s found at the end of Stalin Avenue and it’s got Stalin’s old house and train out front. We got there before opening, but they let us wait in the lobby until it opened at 10am. Though the building is huge, there’s really not a lot to see. Old photos with little explanation in any language (And certainly no English, fortunately I had a Russian speaker with me to translate the signage in Russian), some books published by Stalin, some paintings and portraits of the Communist leader, some things that had once been in his possession.

Stalin's death mask

Outside you can view his house and part of his personal train in which he used to travel around the country with his confidants.

 

Stalin's house. This is the only room open to the public.

All in all, the museum is quite overrated and overpriced at 10 Lari ($7 USD) for entrance to the museum and 5 Lari ($3 USD) for entrance into the house (of which you can only view one room from the outside) and the train. To put that in comparison, you can travel 6 hours by bus from my city to the capital for the same price, or first class by train with a private room with a bed for that same price. (That generally is how I decide how good a price is in this country… but judging how far I could travel on that same amount of money….). But, perhaps this might be the only chance in your life you can see a museum dedicated to preserving the legacy of one of the world’s most terrible leaders.

 

Stalin's personal train (well, part of it anyway)

While in Gori, we also had hoped to visit Upliske, a cave city located in the mountains nearby the city, but we weren’t able to find a marshutka, and with the weather being bitterly cold we decided to head back to Tbilisi after just 4 hours in Gori.

School Excursion

Written 11/28/2011

I was invited on my host family’s school field trip to see a cave near Kutaisi. I had nothing better to do on this rainy weekend so I went along for the ride. While it was raining in my city, by the time we had gotten to Kutaisi, it had turned to snow. This wasn’t a big problem, or so we thought, until we were headed up the mountains outside of Kutaisi and then I started to get a little more worried. No one else seemed concerned though, and all the moms and teachers were throwing down shots of tcha-tcha (Georgian vodka) as we went along.

The bus handled the switchbacks up the mountain well for a while until things started to get steeper. Finally there was one turn where the bus couldn’t turn and get the momentum to go up the hill at the same time. The bus stopped, and then started sliding, not rolling, backwards down the hill. It wasn’t long, maybe only for one or two seconds, but those two seconds as we slid backwards, frighteningly close to the ditch on the side of the road (but fortunately not towards the drop off the mountain on the other side of the road) seriously frightened me and I wanted off the bus. But the driver decided to give it another go. And the same thing happened. We went up, up, up, and slid back down.

After this, the driver got everyone off the bus and he tried again unsuccessfully to get up the hill. There was no other choice but to back the bus down the hill until there was a place for the bus to turn around. We on the other hand were about 30 students and another 30 adults who had been dropped off of a bus in the middle of a snowstorm. And kids from a city that sees very little snow. So, of course the inevitable happened. A giant snowball fight where both kids and teachers and students were all joining in. I was probably the only one trying to stay out of the melee, my sneakers already soaked through after 2 minutes of walking through the wet snow. 

Bus backing down the hill while students and teacher engage in a snowball fight

We had to walk about 10 minutes (probably would have been 5 minutes if it hadn’t been for the snowball fight) down the hill until the bus was able to turn around and get us out. So we changed our plans and headed to a different cave. One that didn’t involve climbing any mountains.

Perhaps it was fate that this happened because as we started our tour, someone mentioned that I was from America, and it just so happened that another worker who was off duty but just going into the cave to take some photos was the official English translator at the caves and he gave me my own personal tour while the rest of the students had their tour in Georgian.

The cave, as you can see, was beautiful. The colors around the cave come from different minerals. White from limestone, orange from clay and black from magnesium. My guide was quick to point out all the formations that looked like other things. “This one looks like a monk!” “This one looks like Simba from the Lion King!” “Here’s an elephant!”. It was quite entertaining. 

After this we went to a house in the area where every parent on the trip brought out a huge amount of food. There actually wasn’t a whole lot of variety. Everyone brought 2-3 loaves of khajapuri, then there were several boxes of cold cooked vegetables, several boxes of cold chicken, and about 3 chocolate cakes. Bottles of soda, mineral water (Georgia’s #1 export), “lemonade” (which is strangely pear flavored), and of course wine and vodka for the adult folks were also scattered about the table. After stuffing ourselves silly we warmed up and dried our wet clothes in front of the wood stove inside the house, then headed back to the bus and back home. Though the day started out a bit scarily with the snow, all in all it was a pretty good trip. 

Typical Georgian feast

Bonus: A chance to experience a bus ride with a bus full of Georgian children

Anaklia Disaster

We usually try to go somewhere every weekend, but this weekend, another weekend of rain and nastiness, we were stumped as for what to do. My friend came up to my city and spent Friday night at my house. We slept in late on Saturday morning, something we can never do since we’re usually traveling on the weekends, and leisurely ate our breakfast around noontime. We discussed various ideas of what to do but there were no good options. The best thing I could come up with was going to Anaklia, a beach town near by. Sure the weather was bad, but we’d just go for an hour, see the black sea one more time and then come back.

We asked around to a few people we knew and the consensus was that marshutkas run on the hour, every hour, from the train station. We walked all the way down there and asked a few drivers standing around. Yes, the marshutka would leave at 1:00. Where is the marshutka? Oh, over there, and they’d point in some general direction. We’d head over there and ask someone else. Where is the marshutka? Oh over there, pointing in another direction. We headed over there and asked someone else. No, there’s no marshutka from here. You have to go to another station! Come quickly! And this man led us away from the station and down the street 10 minutes away to another station. Upon arrival he asked where the marshutka was and it wasn’t a marshutka, but a bus. And it wasn’t leaving until 2:30.

We were quite angry now. If there was a 1:00 marshutka like so many people had told us, we were now never going to catch it. We walked back to the train station and waited until 2:00 in hopes of catching a marshutka. When 2:00 came around and we asked again, we were informed there was no marshutka here, go back to the other station. We walked dejectedly back to the other station and waited around until 2:30 to catch the bus.

View out the window of the bus in the rain

There’s a reason why people take marshutkas, and I think that reason is because they are fast. Buses in this country are old. And they fit a lot of people, which means they need to stop and go a lot. Crazy marshutka drivers can drive as fast as they like, and fewer passengers means fewer stops. It took an hour to arrive at the beach by bus. We walked along the beach, took some photos picked up some nice sea shells but after an hour we were ready to go home. We hoped to get a 5:00 marshutka, but upon arriving at the bus stop, we were told that no marshutka would come until 6:00.

Last view of the Georgian coast

Amazing shells on the beach

 

The time was only 4:30 and that gave us an hour and a half to kill. We went into the only restaurant that was open in the whole town. It was quite deserted except for one group of men sitting around eating and drinking Russian vodka. They didn’t really look like restaurant patrons as much as friends of the owners or something.

We were of course invited into the restaurant but it was a bit eerie. There were refrigerators that were probably full of ice cream and soda in the summer, but now in the winter there was nothing. There was no menu. We ordered tea, the only thing we could think to order and sat around waiting until 6:00. We double checked with the waitress, there will be a marshutka at 6:00? Yes, yes, it will come. We were invited to drink and eat with the men there. I refused to touch the alcohol, and I wish I hadn’t touched the food because it tasted like marinated chalk. I couldn’t get the coating of whatever it was out of my mouth until I brushed my teeth that night.

Finally at 5:55 we went out to wait for the marshutka. Around 6:10 an unlabeled marshutka drove by and we flagged it down. We asked if they were going to my city, but they shook their heads, no, no.

We went back to the bus stop and asked where the marshutka was. There’s no marshutka. Just a bus at 7:00. What??? We went back to the restaurant and asked the waitress. Yes, the marshutka is coming, just wait 5 minutes. 10 minutes later we asked again. Where is the marshutka. Well, wait until 7:00, there will be a bus.

Now we’re freaking out a bit. They said there’d be a marshutka at 6, but there wasn’t. What are the chances of being a bus at 7:00? And we’ve learned that in this country intercity transport tends to end around sunset. Maybe we caused too much of a stink in the restaurant because they brought us over to the police station across the street, telling us that maybe they could give us a ride home. That seemed a bit of a strech considering how far we were from home, but I’ve heard of stranger stories in this country. We were brought over and we got to sit with the chief of police. He made some phone calls and concurred that there would be a bus at 7:00. Do you want a taxi instead? Uh, no thanks, that would probably be about two days pay just to get us back home.

We waited patiently in the police office until 6:55 and we went to go wait outside. Where are you going? We’ll tell you when the bus is coming. Just wait. Finally at 7:20 they told us to go wait outside. Another 5 minutes later the same bus that we had taken there pulled up and we hopped on.

All this wouldn’t have been so terrible if I hadn’t told my host mother that I’d be home by 6 because we had plans to go to the grandmother’s house to learn to make yogurt and milk the cows and get fresh milk. I was really excited by this prospect, but getting home at 8:30 meant no yogurt making and no cow milking. All I got to do was take a photo of the cows.

Grandmother's Cows

Batumi

Batumi is Georgia's one really touristy, developed city. Walking around in the downtown area and coastal area of Batumi feels like walking around Europe... not like the rest of Georgia, that's for sure. There's not much to write, but I'll let the photos do the talking. We only spent less than 24 hours here, which was plenty to see everything when it's not beach weather. But, there are still some beautiful sights to check out, it's worth the trip down here. 

Signaghi

1.5 hours east of Tbilisi lies the little town of Signaghi. Located in the heart of Georgia’s wine country, the region of Kakheti, stepping into this village is like stepping out of Georgia and into some town straight out of a fairy tale. The main streets of town are cobble-stoned and all the buildings have been meticulously repaired, at least on the outside, and one really gets the feeling that you’re somewhere in Europe. No, Signaghi is not the “real Georgia”, but I get the real Georgia every day here, my weekend here was an escape to another world. 

We took the 9 am marshutka from Samgori station in Tbilisi, the capital of Georgia for 6 lari (about $4 USD). We had found the name of a well recommended guesthouse before arriving, but when we got off the marshutka at 11:30, we were met by an old woman shouting “guesthouse!” “guesthouse! 15 Lari!” (about $10 USD) so we decided to follow her to her house on the main street a few minutes away. With no heat in the room and the bathroom outside, it was clear why it was only 15 Lari a night. But, we were there and we didn’t want to waste more time looking for another guesthouse so we paid our 15 lari to stay the night. Before we went out, she took us into her wine cellar and let us taste her homemade wine and homegrown grapes. She also told us (in Georgian, of course because “guesthouse, 15 Lari” was the only English she knew) “Eating in the restaurant is very expensive. Let me make you a good lunch.” We didn’t enquire the price, but we agreed. Turns out she tried to charge us 10 lari each for a bowl of soup and a few khinkali (Georgian dumplings). When I told her that that was too much, she said, “ok, ok, you are teachers,” and she cut the price in half. 

 View from afar of St. George's Church

Then it was time to explore the town. We walked way down a road and found a gate in the fortress wall and some fantastic views. 

 View of the Caucus Mountains in the distance

We walked back and checked out St. George’s Church. I finally remembered to bring a scarf with me to cover my head as I enter the church.

 In front of St. George's Church

Then we walked the 2 km out of town to go to Bodbe monastery. Unfortunately they wouldn’t allow photos inside because it had some fantastic, old paintings on the walls and ceilings.

We hiked down to find the Holy Spring. They had a bath where you could jump in the Holy Water as well, but that looked awfully cold. 

Then we met a German guy who works for the UN here in Georgia and he gave us a ride back to town in his massive UN vehicle. I found it rather funny because he told us that he’s not allowed to ride the marshutka because it is too dangerous, but we teachers are not allowed to drive because it’s too dangerous. Personally I’d take the crazy marshutka drivers who are used to driving ok Georgia’s crazy roads over driving myself through Georgia’s crazy roads. 

Dinner was a salad at a restaurant that had wi-fi so I could finally call home for the first time in 2 weeks. The time difference between here and home does not make calling home easy and it seems whenever I actually find a good time to call home, my mother is working overtime and isn’t home to answer the phone.

After this we were kind of at a loss for what to do. My travel buddy doesn’t drink and the whole town basically closes up except for the 2 or 3 bars around. We seem to have come a little late for the tourist season as well, there was hardly a soul to be seen, especially tourists. We wound up going back to our room and going to bed at 8 pm mostly out of boredom. 

We woke up early and headed over to check out the last tourist attractions left in the town, a part of the wall with an elevated path for tourists to walk along, and St. Steven’s church. We killed the rest of our time waiting for the 11 am marshutka at a new café near our guesthouse that is operated by handicapped people. Finally we went and bought our tickets and got on the marshutka back to Tbilisi. While it was a long ride from my city, 7.5 hours of driving time, it was well worth it. It is the most beautiful town I’ve seen so far in Georgia.