Last Day in Tbilisi

Sunday was another day of chilling out and wandering around Tbilisi. We found a massive street flea market and perused a lot of old junk. Lots of ex-soviet war medals, and amongst them we even found a German WW2 medal, complete with swastika on it and everything. A bit creepy. I briefly thought about buying it just to sell it to some American radical on eBay, but then I thought against it - didn't really want to proliferate that shit. I guess I must be in Germany for a while now!

There was also an artist's market, which was basically an open air gallery, where you could buy paintings on the spot. There was a lot of nice stuff, but I'm not at the point in my life where collecting art is a priority, not to mention how would I ever get such a thing back home?









Different restaurant






That night we went out for a nice dinner at a fancy place, this time not Georgian. A small comment on that - it's a bit strange; if you want anything western style, you pay a premium for it and it's still not anything close to "back home". In these situations I think it's better to eat local stuff, but again, we weren't there all that long and perhaps after a while you just have a longing for such food. We then slept for about 3 hours before waking up and going to the airport. For the trip home.

In summary, I would recommend Georgia as a place to visit. It could be quite daunting if you don't have any contacts there and have to deal with hostelling the whole time. We were lucky in that we had friends to stay with, who could get by in Georgian in a functional sense, and basically blazed the trail for us to walk on. That of course is ideal. Fumbling around the country with a smattering of phrases is really rather difficult, and presumably easy things are never easy. Furthermore, you often have these interactions with waitresses for example, who nod and say they understand your order, then come back with something entirely different! Oh well, it's all in good fun and it's enjoyable no matter what.

The best part of the trip was when Verena and I paid about €20 for our own private bath suite, complete with the old grandma giving Verena an entire body massage. We would sit in these hot baths which just felt so amazing, but were always just a bit too hot, then you get out and stand under an ice cold shower for a few seconds, then back to the tub, etc. It was really luxurious and highly recommendable!