In brief: A sad farewell to Tbilisi but a fond look back.
We left Tbilisi earlier than expected due to the revived political turmoil in the capital and other major cities in the country. Night after night, we witnessed the brave street demonstrations by citizens of all ages.
Otherwise, life had been muted there, as protests spread and the government responded more and more harshly. So many events had been cancelled. Even the Christmas/New Year’s season – reportedly the most social and brilliant time to be in Tbilisi – was pallid and dispirited, according to our Georgian friends.
But, to finish, we’re posting photos of some of the locals who made daily life here brighter for us; they stand in for so many others we just forgot to photograph. Our wish for them all is joy and peace in the coming year.
Saying goodbye to our favorite fruit and veg man, in his little street shop. He spoke no English, and we just five words of Georgian, but we learned how to communicate.
Saying goodbye to our favorite cook in the neighborhood, whose five-year old son patiently let her cook for us.
A sign of hope? Seasonal lights in Vake, Tbilisi.
Typical Georgian encounters
We’ve done many posts about visits across Georgia, filled with exciting things we saw and experiences as well. Click here for all the posts. We’re including here some other stories and backstories that stayed on our minds.
The least likely help helps
Round about Midnight. Connecting the power cord to my phone late at night gave a startling alarm and a warning to disconnect due to moisture or blockage in the phone’s connector. A search showed that the nearest brand-authorized repair place was far off.
Instead we found three places a lot closer, each with good reviews. One claimed to open at 10am, but was still shut the next morning when we went early. A second was now a dusty, empty interior despite the signage and the promise to open at noon; oddly it seemed to be open weeks later. A third, yet to open, appeared to service iphones only.
Toggling power and apps to preserve the charge, I searched again. Despite the dwindling power on my phone, an alternative suddenly showed up down a short stair to a basement nearly across the street from our apartment.
Unlike so many tech stores that gleam like an operating room with protective covers lining the walls, this basement looked like the other stereotype of techies. Darkly lit, the room seemed a nest of cords and boards scattered across the five or six desks. An older man, hunched over a desk in the far corner with headphones on, greeted me. We established a kind of multilingual rapport with the use of translate until a younger man showed up with good English. He said they could look at it, with the aid of a nearby specialist, and let me know. With not much to lose, I agreed. Within hours, the shop had replaced the USB connector/charger, fixed another problem of a damaged speaker, all for a total cost of 70 USD.
Better yet, the three fellows operating the shop invited us back the next night for a sampling of home-made food, their own home-made Georgian wine (in a tradition around here of making your own brew in a personal marani, or wine cellar), and general good cheer. We all became good friends.
Embraced by others
We’d been delayed in seeing the apartment that we would eventually choose. Our agent kept saying that it was the one for us, as was the neighborhood near Vake Park. So how about an afternoon stop at a Wine Boutique for an early sampling of those famed Georgian wines?
We walked a few blocks, but were stopped at an unprepossessing array of tables at the sidewalk by three women swirling away at several wine bottles. They invited us to join them. Chairs shuffled, more glasses appeared from inside the shop, and we sampled several wines with them. Quick friendship followed as we readily connected wiith one of them, a Ukrainian now busy at several other enterprises as well in town, intrigued by our nomadic travels. Wanted to introduce us to the town. Oh, you must see Georgian dance, she advised promising to find us tickets. No, no, she insisted when we tried to pay. You are our guests for today.
On a second visit after we moved in to that apartment, we found her there again with a Kazakh native and her daughter. This time we paid, but found the same kind of connection with the second woman, who became an even richer friend.
World touring on local chests
T-shirts in the Caucasus can make for a pretty good tour of real and the fanciful sites in the US, just with t-shirts
- Eastern Texas University (non-existent)
- Miami (desire to be warmer?)
- Manhattan (just right on a local guide)
- NY caps (the Yankees baseball insignia) – ubiquitous
Turd world
Throughout the Caucasus, in the major towns or the roads, cows wander and drop pies everywhere – on the streets and even the highways, where trucks and buses and others like us need to slow carefully when the cows are present – and ease past them.
After a while, you know how to do it. You just wiggle in the open spaces among them if they’re not moving, or find the spaces they leave behind as they move predictable and slowly ahead. If they form a blockade, the horn is the usual option, but waving them off with hands from the car window seems to work even better.
They especially seem to like gathering and dumping on bridges, oddly as there is nothing to eat there, which are often stained brown from the pressure of tires on the leavings. You see similar historical traces in the towns, with the most recent leavings easy to avoid – large and smelly. The less recent car-flattened and dried remains are a bit more difficult to evade on foot.
In the heart of major cities, like Tbilisi or Kutaisi central, there are no cows, but they designate the free-range dogs as their pooping emissaries. Dogs are accepted as neighborhood pets and let to wander; many people and cafes leave water for them. The city has vigorously neutered and tagged most of the ones we see, but failed to educate the dogs on how to clean up after themselves.
You must always watch where you are walking in the towns or the cities.
Why we came
We’ve long wanted to go to the Caucasus and the Stans, but the annoying bureaucracy of Portugal gave us an incentive to come here for six months, with the opportunity to visit Armenia and Azerbaijan as well. In Portugal, residency renewals are hung up in a horrendous backlog of (reportedly) 400,000 hopefuls – and that’s just renewals. The government workaround was to automatically extend residencies till June 2025. Meanwhile our application for citizenship, which should only have required a year to approve, seems to require a second year so it can gather dust on some desk.
That meant we were legal in Portugal, but not strictly legal in the rest of Schengen. Screw it, we said. Let’s get out of Schengen for a while and reset our privileges. The new “Russian” law in Georgia and the protests began after we had decided to come to Tbilisi, but expats and locals assured us that the protests would subside until the elections anyway. And we all had some hope of positive change. Our other concern was that the US would impose restrictions which would effectively keep us from staying. A very limited financial cutoff by the US didn’t do that. So, we came.
As predicted, all street protests, etc. had ceased by the time we arrived. Many expected a resurgence before the election in October (just stay away from the Parliament building, we’re told). And that prediction also turned out to be chillingly accurate, while somewhat comforting regarding personal safety.
We found in Tbilisi much evidence of support for EU membership, dislike of Putin, and brotherhood with Ukraine as a country at risk like Georgia could be.
In the countryside, as is typical in so many other countries, sympathies can run the other way, with nostalgia for the good old days of Soviet life and the loss of religious fervor for the Georgian Orthodox Church. Sadly, even people who ardently dislike the current billionaire-funded Georgia Dream leadership are so distrustful that they may not even vote in October. Venezuela redux?
In the backdrop, that other big power is very evident here. We’ve already bumped into two major Belt and Road projects within the country, where the Chinese involvement is pretty obvious. One is the main east-west highway from Tbilisi to the Black Sea. The other is a tunnel project to speed commercial traffic between Russia (yes, that Russia) and Armenia. We stayed in the Caucasus Mountains near the northern border with Russia along the old Georgia Military Highway and estimated 1000 trucks per day hauling goods to landlocked Armenia on the southern border. We later crossed that southern border on a driving trip through Armenia!
Non-politically, Tbilisi and other large towns are very European now. You see a mix of crumbling old infrastructure and new developments (which we think have slowed quite a bit since the foreign agents act passed). The norm also is horrible traffic and bad pollution with many new fancy cars along with beaters. Plus locals and visitors alike can enjoy international cuisine and high-end stores/malls with countless small shops as well.
The countryside is divine, especially the mountainous regions and wine country to the east, with superb food and plentiful good wine (oddly more expensive than in Portugal). As you can read from our other posts, we’re glad we came.
(To enlarge any picture above, click on it. Also, for more pictures from Georgia, CLICK HERE to view the slideshow at the end of the itinerary page.)
