Tuesday, September 10
Our flight to Tbilisi left Athens as scheduled at 12:30am. It got there shortly after 4am. I don’t know what it is about transport in these countries all being in the middle of the night. Our return flight will be stupid, too. We were met by a hotel shuttle, and taken to Hotel Anata, a basic hotel some distance away from the center. Our room wasn’t available, but “a better one” was, and we ultimately decided to stay in it since it wasn’t much more expensive. We got a little bit more sleep before the guide and driver for the tour we’d arranged showed up around 10am, along with the manager of the tour company. We made the rest of the payment for the tour with all of our Euro cash, plus a few dollars more. They gave us a gift of a bottle of Georgian wine. It became our mission to drink it as soon as possible so we didn’t have to carry it around, but that ended up not happening until we got to Romania.
Our first experience of a uniform practice at hotels in Georgia came today: when we got to the front desk, the owners asked us to cancel our reservations and get the same room. Saved them a booking fee from the online places. How long before this is noticed?
We drove off to the station to buy train tickets for our train to Baku a week hence, and to the post office to buy stamps. Our guide, Tatia, was very helpful at translating for the agents. Her English was pretty good, and she was very friendly and knowledgeable. We drove on to the center, where we had a walking tour of the city. We saw Trinity Cathedral, a small closed church with a large statue of King David the Builder on a horse. Then we took the cable car to the top of the hill overlooking the city. At the top, a raft of Iranian tourists wished to speak with us.
We saw mosques as we walked down; the thermal baths as we walked further down; Anchiskhati Basilica, an ancient church; the marionette theater, a little tower where a wooden puppet comes out to ring a bell every hour. Hundreds of tourists watch in picturesque rapture.
For me, the high point was a basement, where Sabir’s old teahouse was hanging on. Sabir died. His family continues. Old men play dominoes. Tea is the only item on offer, as mentioned in the guidebooks. It wasn’t overwhelmed with Chinese groups. It wasn’t overwhelmed by anyone. 6 lari for us all. Pictures from the early 20th century. They were in living memory until Sabir died. It was peaceful. Drinking tea is peaceful.
Tatia told us, in the course of touring squares and buildings, that in the old days, concrete was made with egg yolks and sand. The Internet says it was egg whites, but who would think to ask? We tourists are so centered in our own time.
Tatia left us at a good local restaurant. You can tell it was good because veal and tarragon was off the menu because tarragon season had passed. Tarragon is an herb popular in Georgia. It forms the basis of a god-awful artificial soft drink, and it is served in little pickled sprigs. You can tell what people like by what they fake, as with Americans and freedom. We had one form of khachapuri, bread with greens inside, and “vegetable pate”.
Tatia had set me up with a taxi app we could use to get taxis Uber-style. Unfortunately it required a phone number, and the SIM card I was using was data-only: I just didn’t have a number. So when it was time to go home we found a cab on the street and overpaid, $7 instead of $3.50.
While we were negotiating with taxis, a family wanted to take a photo with us. In this case, a girl in her early teens. Are we comic? I can sense the comedic motive, from tipsy boy gangs. But it isn’t what is happening with the families. If we are an example, what of?
Wednesday, September 11
Our trip to Georgia was planned as day trips followed by an overnight trip. Today was the first day trip.
We took a road trip to the north, almost to the Russian border. The Caucasus mountains get very high along the border; the highest is over 5400 meters. We stopped at Ananuri Fortress, and its various shops; drove past the Gudauri ski resort; saw the Friendship Monument celebrating various degrees of friendship between Georgia and Russia (located quite close to the Russian border).
The whole existence of the friendship monument as a tourist spot is ironic. The guides play it straight, but the history of Russian-Georgian relations since the Middle Ages has been that of invasion and rebellion. At the current moment, Russia has sponsored two breakaway regions which will be annexed to Russia, in due time. The monument is a grand half-Stonehenge looking out over a valley, which was entirely obscured by fog when we got there; the visibility was about 30 meters so all you saw was gray when you looked over the railings. It was covered with mosaics illustrating the couple of dozen times in the last five hundred years when certain Russians and certain Georgians were not trying to kill each other, and had taken a tile selfie to remember it by.
There were also tourists there who wanted to see what we were up to: the beards make them think we are remarkable in some way. (Have you all read “How To Talk Dirty And Influence People” by Lenny Bruce? Honey Bruce, his wife, had long hair, and was always being approached by women who said that they used to have hair just like that, but they only cut it last week. This is also the case with beards. It’s about 60% girlfriends and 40% jobs that made them shave, or pass over their chins with some modern scruff-generating tool. I don’t know why a girl would go with a man if she didn’t like secondary sexual characteristics, like violent bombast. There are other choices.)
There was friendship food, too. Roast corn on the cob. A family with two crying baby girls wanted a photo, also an Azerbaijani and an Iranian. Arabic was the lingua franca of the corn stand.
On the trip, we received another liquid gift: chacha. It is the Georgian version of grappa, homemade by the driver. This we were able to take little sips of frequently over the next couple weeks, before leaving the rest in Romania; grappa is better omiyage than beverage.
Once again, an additional charge for something that was a planned part of the tour manifested itself: the driver wasn’t allowed to drive us up a little hill to the Gergeti Trinity Church, and we had to pay one of the locals to do that instead. It was like $16, but was just a bit annoying. The church had great views, and had a monk living there. The van, and many others in town, was right hand drive. I think this is another case of Japanese unloading their old cars, just as in Palau.
On the way back, we had an early dinner at Pasanauri, featuring the Georgian dumpling Khinkali (one order came with 15 of them between three of us) where we were instructed on the proper way to eat it (be sure to drink all the juice); incredibly delicious barbecued lamb and pork; tarragon soda pop (I think I’ll stick to tarragon leaves); and pickled vegetables, of which the weird one was Jonjoli. Look it up. The Georgian workers eat a lot but Americans are still fatter.
Note to Self: I heard a Nokia Ringtone (measures 13 through 16 of Gran Vals by Francisco Tárrega) today. I’ve been making notes, as one of these will end up being the last time I hear it.
Thursday, September 12
Traveling around, it’s obvious why global warming. Every country we go to is growing like the US in the 1950’s. New buildings, loads of cars. But instead of bootstrapping 120 million people, 8 billion.
We took a road trip to the east. We stopped for coffee at a little hut on Gombori Pass with a very entertaining host. There were bills of all currencies stuck to the ceiling, and two donation boxes, one for guests encouraging him to get married, and another for guests encouraging him to have fun.
The itinerary says we went to a palace/wine cellar, but I don’t remember that. What I do remember is the tour and wine tasting at Shumi winery, which is where we learned about the large underground clay pots called qvevris, and the Georgian style of winemaking which lets wine sit in them along with the skins and seeds. Most of their wines are still made using European methods, but several of them are made in the qvevris. We tasted both, and the qvevri versions were much more flavorful and interesting. The white qvevri wine was actually tannic, not something you often find. And orange. There was a bit of bread and cheese to have along with the wine.
The official tourist bit of local color about qvevri maintenance, is that when the workers dropped themselves down inside to clean them, they were expected to sing continuously. When their diving buddies up at the top thought their singing was getting too slurred, they would haul them out. It was their version of a radiation badge for alcohol intoxication.
We stopped at another fortress, and then went to the Khareba winery. This one was located in tunnels bored deep into the mountain, and we had a very enthusiastic high school student who had just completed Junior Year Abroad in the US conducting the tasting. Once again, the qvevri wines were better. Unfortunately, we never saw them on the menus, and the gift wine we’d gotten wasn’t one of them.
It was a big problem for Giorgi, the Junior Year Abroad, to upsell inside the cave. Endless paperwork and discouragement. Giorgi said he couldn’t just take five euros and give us wine because of video cameras. “It’s a prison,” I said. “There are video cameras in prison?” he said.
We returned to town, and got dropped off at Tiflis, another restaurant in the center of town. They didn’t speak English well, but we finally managed to order more pickles; Imretian khachapuri, pizza bread with cheese inside; and Megrelian kupati, a sausage. The last was taking forever to arrive, and I reminded them about it. I assume they forgot, but boy, was it delicious and spicy once we got it! The courses were cut like early Jim Jarmusch films: A plate. Nothing. A plate. Most tables had either nothing or one thing at them. I made a note on my phone that next time, we should come with a gun, a hostage, and a chess clock, to encourage faster service.
We found another taxi, and were overcharged less.
Friday, September 13
We checked out of Hotel Anata, and headed west towards Gori. We began at the post office, again a long-winded affair because there are so many pretty stamps to choose from and they sum with only great Diaphantine difficulty to useful values for post cards. The post cards I had ready for mailing, she cancelled in front of me. I enjoy watching postal people cancelling stamps. None has ever matched the old guy in Venice, California, in 1979. It’s too bad you can’t all share my memories.
On the freeway driving north to the monastery complex, we passed a statue of a man and a lion engaged in mortal combat. Tatia told us the story: the man and the lion killed each other, the man’s mother came to claim his body, and ended up weeping together with the mother of the lion. It isn’t often you see statues based on anti-war mythology.
There is also an ambitiously ugly bank, built during the Soviet era. It has holes in it, like brutalist lacework.
We visited the Jvari Monastery a short distance out of town which has a wonderful view of the valley; then descended to the Svetitskhoveli Cathedral in Mtskheta (a six-letter word: M ts kh e t a). Tatia baptized her daughter there. The font used to be reserved for kings, but the Soviets democratized things.
All the statues aren’t inspirational here. Far up on the wall of the cathedral is a bas-relief of a severed hand holding a chisel. It is one of the earliest surviving examples of the arm-and-hammer meme (which now adorns baking soda) and the story is, that the architect Arsukidze had his hand cut off so he could never create another cathedral as beautiful as this one. Copy protection, I guess you would say. If this reminds you of the statue of Silvius Brabo in Antwerp, so be it.
The highlight of the day was the Stalin Museum in Gori, which is where he was born. He really didn’t seem to hang around Gori very long, though — he hooked up with all his communist friends and started making trouble everywhere. The museum was built around the site of the house he grew up in, likely clearing quite a bit of space around it to build the museum and monuments. There was also the bulletproof railroad car he would use to travel long distances. It was a bit difficult to understand the thick accent of the museum guide, but I contented myself with reading English captions of the displays.
Then we went out to the Uplistshkhe cave city, an archeological site with rocks into which caves had been carved, as a kind of anthropogenic tafoni. I think I would have rather spent more time at the Stalin museum; there are a lot of cave cities in that part of the world and we saw a much more spectacular one two days later.
We had dinner at a restaurant which most reviewers didn’t like. Some reviewers accused the restaurant of cheating on prices when the bill came, causing us to watch that they charged us the same prices that we’d seen on the menu. They saw us, perhaps, taking snapshots of the menu. Their specialty was french fries and burgers. Gori is a small town not noted for cuisine.
We stayed in a very cute Airbnb in Gori, inside an older couple’s home. They had a washing machine, which we made good use of.
Saturday, September 14
The road to Kutaisi is like a U.S. Highway of the 1950’s — lots of shops with their wares out in the parking lot — but the Chinese Silk Road engineers are working to fix that. They’ve already fixed the goods offered. There are massive amounts of wicker for sale in addition to native pottery. Soon it will all be a freeway, four hours to Turkey, and the government will wonder where all the unemployed people came from.
We visited two churches in the Kutaisi area. Bagrati Cathedral was one of many of the World Heritage sites we were seeing on the trip. While we were there, there was a wedding ceremony. Fortunately, Georgian ceremonies are much shorter than Romanian ones, and we were ultimately able to go in and look at the church.
There are always two beggars crouching like nats before the gate of a church. Well, maybe 15, but you notice the ones that look most like architecture. Often musicians, too. We were accosted by musicians.
Gelati Cathedral had been a World Heritage site, but a fellow named Andrea Bruno did some modern reconstruction of it, and that caused it to be removed from the list. Architecture schools need to shut up about new buildings communicating with old ones in the view of self-satisfied vandals. The Louvre is only the most prominent victim. The few success stories involve buildings that weren’t great to begin with: the shot tower mall in Melbourne, for example, or even the Stalin Museum. In most cases, aesthetically coherent modification of old buildings can best be accomplished by artillery bombardment. Not even kidding — compare the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gedächtniskirche ruin with its 1963 belfry, a scaled-up Eierlikör gift box from the mall down the block.
Remembering the quotation unaccountably in a restaurant in Arequipa: “Restaurer un édifice, ce n’est pas l’entretenir, le réparer ou le refaire, c’est le rétablir dans un état complet qui peut n’avoir jamais existé à un moment donné.”
Wikipedia says that Andrea Bruno actually consults for UNESCO. As what, a bad example? Jamais existé indeed. The photos of Bargati that you see on the web are all taken from the unreconstructed side; Bruno’s work is hidden like Stalin’s left arm and Roosevelt’s wheelchair.
Notre Dame is in great danger. The French are creative. Come back in 20 years and you’ll think it has been bit into by an aluminum and glass velociraptor generating tension between modernist and classical lines, or whatever https://www.artybollocks.com/generator.html tells you to say.
Some other guys wearing traditional shirts with ammo across the chest sang for us, and then passed the hat. Ammunition belts in church, it’s like you never left Texas. Tatia, our guide, said, after we were pursued at some length by the itinerant singers, that it was impolite in Georgia to say “no” when an elderly man wants to talk to you. I expect that is leveraged to what Americans would think of as male privilege.
Kutaisi is a nice place, and we would definitely go there again. We found a very cute restaurant for dinner called Sisters. Their “vegetable pate”, called phkali, was orders of magnitude better than what we’d had in Tbilisi. It’s made largely with walnut paste, but there were three different kinds that were delicious. We also had chicken with a pomegranate sauce with plums. Also an Imeretian khachapuri, their answer to naan. We should have skipped dessert, which was a large bowl of cream of wheat. We had a glass of white and a glass of red. They let us do some tasting to make better choices. Our hotel was about 15 minutes away from the center, giving us an opportunity to see more of the city as we walked downtown and back.
The “Gay or Eurotrash” of Georgia is: Khinkali or white ceramic salt shaker in the larger-than-life form of garlic?
Sunday, September 15
In the morning, we walked to the nearby Sataplia nature reserve, which had fossils of some very old dinosaur footprints, two of which were of a very large dinosaur, and the rest of which were of a much smaller reptile. It also had a cave to walk through, with many drip stones. Unfortunately, they were lit with colored lights; it might have been more interesting to see their true colors. I suppose they were all gray. But total points for naming one of the stalagmites “the heart”. I was prepared for a valentine, but it’s a meaty heart larger than a person.
The best roadside attraction in Georgia is on the way to Akhaltsikhe. Old ladies sell a delicious sweet bread called “nazuki”, made only in that area. It has cinnamon and raisins, and is baked in a clay oven. There are recipes online, but you can’t match the handed-through-a-car-window experience.
In Akhaltsikhe, we visited Rabati Castle, a large complex with a museum, a mosque, a hotel, a fortress, and several reflecting pools.
The castle was so reconstructed that it might as well have been new. I would say that this country leans toward the Rebuild As It Might Have Been theory of archaeology and tourism, as opposed to the Leave It On The Ground school (Hattusas in 1999 at least) and the Thousand Footnotes approach of which the Hildesheim Cathedral is a good example: all blank walls unless they are dead sure that the fragment they found in the ground was exactly there.
We found a restaurant near our hotel which was well-liked by the Internet. It seemed somewhat ordinary to us; we had some traditional dish which was a chicken boiled in milk. It was an entire chicken, but mercifully, it was a very small one, constituting probably half an American chicken. We also had a nice grilled trout.
Monday, September 16
We drove to the Vardzia cave complex. The road from Akhaltsikhe to Vardzia was only paved this summer. Before that it was gravel and the trip took two hours each way. Now it is one hour ten minutes. Mediterranean scenery still, leaning toward the Nevada.
Vardzia is a cliff into which hundreds of caves had been carved, and in which Queen Tamar lived in the 12th century. You reach it on a shuttle bus from the parking lot, with a voice activated tour guide responding to keywords. It isn’t a language thing, either. Something of the culture of Intourist has persisted as an ideal here. Plunging forward resolutely against the threat of historical unanswerability.
Queen Tamar lived in several of the rooms so the invaders would never know where she was. A church, with the usual cross floor plan and arches and domes, was also carved into the rock. The passages and cliffside trails go on and on and on. It is hot on the cliffside. Two intrepid tourists from Poland took no notice of the difficulties, including their eleven month old papoose. I really respect the trouble that people go to, in traveling. No matter where you are, there are people who worked so much harder to get there.
We then drove back to Tbilisi, stopping for a late lunch on the way. We arrived at Vinotel, our luxury hotel for the last night, and went on a little walk to Culinarium, where we had a light dinner.
Tuesday, September 17
Vinotel had a somewhat world-class breakfast buffet, but annoyingly had live molto rubato piano for half an hour. She played “Over The Rainbow”. Many extra notes and no discernable rhythm sense. The phrasing was nonsensical. It turns out to be important to know the words of a song, even if you are playing it without a singer. And also to know the chords.
The waiters poured champagne. Vinotel cost 3 1/2 times as much as the other hotels where we stayed in Georgia. Was it 3 1/2 times as good?
We were driven to the National Museum, and saw exhibits of taxidermy, ancient treasures, religious art, and the Soviet occupation.
We then went to the “open air ethnography museum”, in which characteristic houses from all over the country had been transported to this large park at the edge of town. (Characteristic for each region, but seemingly houses for moderately wealthy people. Ethnography is mostly about the moderately wealthy. Poor people and rich people are more similar.) As we walked into the first house, the sky opened up and started pouring rain, also characteristic of the region. We waited inside for the storm to subside, and then explored a bit more; we didn’t really feel like getting too far from the car.
Tbilisi has a large reservoir nearby called the “Tbilisi Sea”. A large monument looks a bit like a Modern Movement Stonehenge, with large slabs covered with carvings of Bible scenes tending toward the glorious. We talked there to some Iranian immigrants to Georgia. We had dinner at a fancy fish restaurant on the lake which was mostly empty because of the early hour, and then got on the sleeper train to Baku.