Round Tbilisi

It has only now just come to my attention that I haven't yet put together a single coherent sentence about my time in Georgia.  That is what this place does.  It has such a wonderful aura to it that I can't actually remember what I did or in what order.  I seem to remember arriving just before a massive thunderstorm (which happened every night) and staying at a pretty great hostel/the only hostel in Tbilisi at the time.  Or one of two, but the second one was impossible to find.

Perhaps a series of photos will tell a better story of my time and experiences in Tbilisi and will shed some light on this engima wrapped inside a riddle shrouded in mystery.

Rustaveli Blvd was basically the heart of the city, and if you want to buy authentic Georgian goods, like hats and coats that rich Georgians in history wore on ceremonial occasions then this is where to go.  If you want to dress like the average, contemporary Georgian there are some great markets that sell tracksuits that have sprung up around the suburban metro stations.

I don't think I can stress enough to you just how much this city is on the brink of total collapse.  Everything is so beautiful but it is built on some sort of cliffs with natural springs coming out of them and so underneath the city water is pouring out and the entire structural integrity of the place has been compromised.  I was afraid to lean or put my weight on anything.

Nevertheless they are still building massive cathedrals way up on top of everything and it's kind of good they are because I took this picture totally by fluke and was not expecting such a successful result.

Absolute brink of total collapse.  I suggest you go see it now because there won't be much Tbilisi left.

While most Georgians make around $2,000/year there seems to be enough money in the pot to build brand new enormous government palaces for the current administration.

This is the entrance to the Chardin district, which has some sort of French connection.  All I could tell from it is that the cafes are overpriced and embarrassed about being in Georgia.

I can't imagine why anyone would be embarrassed about being in Georgia.  It might be the best country I have ever been to.  The only problem I have with the Caucasus is that no one can accurately create a map of it without upsetting some group.  And I can think of a couple of things wrong with this one here. 

Did you know that there is hardly a grade running from the Black Sea to the Caspian?  Tbilisi is the only place where things narrow considerable so by default everything moving trans-Caucasian must pass through it.  What a strategic location.  Aside from the lack of stable surfaces to build on.

In Kiev there is a similar stature called "Tin Tits" and if there is one thing I respect and admire about centrally planned economies it is that no matter what sort of war is on, no matter how many people do not have enough working dishwashers or if they need to truck cobalt in from Siberia to be processed in Latvia and then manufactured into something that they need processed cobalt for in Tashkent to then be distributed in Moscow, there is always enough steel that can be procured to build an enormous statue to look over all the republican capitals.  Or at least three of them.  I have only seen three of these things, and trust me, I would remember seeing more.

This seems to be some sort of transport pod that I found outside the Ministry of Transport in Tbilisi.

Loan me $5,000 and I will turn this into the nicest set of luxury condos Tbilisi has ever seen.

Things to Do on Chavchavadze Blvd: Get a Visa to Azerbaijan

If there is one thing worse than lining up to get into Azerbaijan, surely it is lining up at the Azeri embassy to get a visa to allow you to line up to get into Azerbaijan. And would you believe it, the people I had to line up with were absolutely atrocious.

But as it would seem I decided that the best way to spend my time in Tbilisi, instead of in the fantastic Chardin district paying too much money for beer, Chinese food, and coffee, was to be sitting on the pavement outside the Azeri embassy in direct sunlight with grumpy foreigners and with people who I can only describe as having a poorly-conceived notion of queuing.

A visa to Azerbaijan costs $63. If you're Canadian. If you're from the US you're assumedly richer and can fork out $126. Australians pay $58 or so, and the British somewhere around $80-100. This is at least what I heard. I have no idea if any of it aside from what I actually paid is true.

I wish I had needed to get a visa to the Czech Republic instead because this place looks nice and I am sure they treat you like a human being when you present your application.

In order to get the visa I had to wait to be received by the consul('s assistant probably) and then make my way to some very unofficial-looking Azeri Development Bank to make a deposit in cash and pay a $2 depositing fee. I believe the bank was right next to a bridge at Marjanishvili metro station, which you may reconise as მარჯანიშვილი.

This isn't Marjanishvili but who on earth would know that?  Everything ends with "ishvili" and this doesn't even look like a thing.

I also took this opportunity to visit the Dry Bridge where everyone is selling everything. Markets are always a favourite place for me, mainly because I live for raw capitalism, but it can become pretty disheartening when you're in Korce, Albania and your guide is telling you that this is the market; this was the crossroads of the known worlds and people travelled from far and wide to find such a rich array of goods and then you notice that you can get the same crappy Made-in-China shoes in the markets of Chisinau, Tunis, Tbilisi or Dushanbe. One thing that can truly be defined as an universal inalienable right is unlimited access to really poorly-made and ugly shit from China.  

But back to the Dry Bridge: there were so many used goods for sale. This is where I bought that great Hello! book, several postcards of Tbilisi during sunnier days, and where I regretted not buying a great cartoon map of the Georgian Military Highway, not having yet read A Hero of Our Time its Wikipedia page at the time. I also did not pick up a meat grinder or a engine for a Lada for lack of space. In fact, this place was my Orchard Park (for Kelowna enthusiasts), so you'd think I would have actually taken a picture of it but I didn't because I have been meaning to buy a new camera for several years and it takes about three minutes to actually turn on and then take a picture. 

Reviews: the Tbilisi Metro

If there is one thing I was too afraid to take a picture of, it was was the Tbilisi metro.  In retrospect I am sure this would not have been a problem but after getting surrounded by large Ukrainians in camo-gear and physically forced to delete the picture I took of my dad and sister in the Kiev metro from my camera I was in a natural state of caution with regards to taking pictures of the stations.  What each country defines as "militarily sensitive" is up to them, as long as I don't get fined or arrested.

Payment method: big 10!  The Tbilisi metro is very advanced in terms of payment and ranks much higher than Vancouver in terms of almost everything.  In fact, you can't just randomly wander onto the Tbilisi metro with no intention of paying and almost always evade any consequences.  What a concept that seems to foreign to the SkyTrain's sieve-like control system.  In Tbilisi you have the option of buying small plastic coins, much like anywhere else in the Po-So, or buying a card that you can top up for repeated use.  The only thing I would appreciate is if it would tell me how much I had left instead of hurriedly flashing my card and then clotheslining myself into the closed gate because I was out of money.

Decor: 7.  Every metro station in the former Soviet Union is perfect and looks like they were designed by grade 6 art classes.  They are like living dioramas.  It's really too bad I've never been allowed to take pictures in the (except for, *spoiler alert*, Minsk of all places) because they are really beautiful and thoughtful and you can see all the raw materials used to build them (like paper mache and hand-painted everything).  The reason I am giving Tbilisi a lower ranking is because they are trying to drop all this by painting roses everywhere and putting TVs with advertisements everywhere to make it look more Western.

Cars: 6.  The older ones were exactly the same as the ones in Budapest, though they had painted them up to look more Georgian and modern.  This repainting of history doesn't always go over well with me because it's not nice to bite the hand that feeds.  This is why I am happy that Budapest has not made a single effort to update or repaint or even clean the cars that they got from the Leningrad Metro Manufaktura in 1960.  Tbilisi also seems to have new ones with flashy lights which I can only assume were built by Bombardier.  So they get some points in trying to be more like Bucharest but then they also get fewer points because they are trying to be like Bucharest.

User-Friendly Interface: 2. Tbilisi metro ranks pretty low in terms of user-friendly interface.  When you get dropped off at the Dudide station at the end of the line at dusk and you know no idea where the centre is on the metro map and therefore where to get off, it can be a bit frustrating.  Trying to the decipher the map was a disaster.  There was a map, so they get the two points for that.  But the only language on it was Georgian so instead of looking like actual place names it looked like a collage of someone's curly hair trimmings superimposed onto a electrical grid schematic.  You may think that the one point of interchange is probably in the centre but I would recommend not taking that chance and getting off here.  Unless you need to get your shoes shined immediately outside.  Or wait in line for 6 hours to find out if a train actually leaves for Azerbaijan at the nearby train station.  The station now has a mall attached to it and there is a nice market nearby, but by no means is this the centre.  In any case, all you need to do is get off at every station and then beg hopelessly from the attendants to tell you where the centre is.  Since they will all have their own opinions, trust no one.

Station placement: 5.  Freedom Square and Avlarbari are really far apart so don't think you can just get off at Freedom Square and then walk to Avlabari, especially if you arrive at 10pm.  You won't get there until midnight because you'll probably get lost.

In all, a great metro and I would love to see it again.

Caucasian Invasion!*

Tbilisi was a pretty unexpected sight.  I suppose it’s actually pretty hard for me to explain what I was expecting from Tbilisi, because surprisingly I hadn’t thought much about it in the past.  This I find strange because not only do I have a brother who lives in neighbouring Azerbaijan, but it’s also part of the former Soviet Union and quite possibly the only thing I can truthfully list as one of my “interests” on Facebook is reading about the former Soviet republics on Wikipedia.  Georgia should also have held a higher place in my imagination as well, seeing as it was the central to Russia’s 2008 Caucasian War and because I have a cookbook on Caucasian cooking that has a recipe for sour cherry soup.  So I really don’t have an excuse for the range of shock and awe I was feeling when I stood on one of the bridges at 9pm on my way to find the hostel and looked out over a well-lit and vibrant city.  No amount of Google-imaging could have prepared me for this.

As it turned out, getting from the Vale border crossing to Tbilisi proved no real problem.   But only as it turned out.  At the time things seemed a bit more dire.  After crossing from Turkey to Georgia and putting my bags through a fairly intense x-ray scanner, I realised there was not a bustling metropolis full of marshrutkas ready to take me to Tbilisi.  Apparently that metropolis, Akhaltsikhe, was 15-20km away from the border.  What there was, however, were sketchy gingers in all-tinted Mercedes who slowly crept up beside me, rolled down the windows and asked if I needed a taxi.  And fat men emerging from behind abandoned gas stations and starting totheir slow rumble of, “Taxi!?  Change money!?”  Everything was a bit unsettling, so I decided to continue walking and assume everything would work out for the best.

It was hot.  So hot, in fact, that I realised almost immediately that the people working in the fields had discarded most of their clothing and were pitching hay outside their brick Doukhobor homes in the nude (or rather near-nude, but certainly nude enough for my Victorian sensibilities).  As juxtaposed with eastern Turkey where the men were wearing long black pants and long-sleeved shirts with black leather shoes, these overweight Georgian peasants in my mind were decidedly European.

After rejecting several would-be taxis, I decided to accept the offer of a driver of a BP truck, because I figured after the whole Gulf oil spill fiasco they kind of owed me.  We drove through a couple of villages that looked remarkably like my own hometown in Canada.  This is perfectly logical, because 2/3s of my hometown is descended from Russian immigrants who were originally settled in this exact area.  So crossing the border to Georgia was a pleasant and cozy experience for me, and Tbilisi was a welcome, if imposing and unexpected site. 

*Caucasian as in from the Caucasus, not outdated racial theory