Tbilisi

Day 370 (July 3, 2019) – Tbilisi, Georgia

Landing in Tbilisi was a shock. I had spent the last five months being a foot taller than everyone around me and now, suddenly, I felt small. Compared to the typical Asian, the average person in Georgia had a good foot in height and at least 50 pounds in weight over them. At first glance, Tbilisi looked a bit dilapidated. The entrance to our apartment building was made mostly of concrete, but it looked like someone had taken a sledgehammer to it in places and never bothered to repair it. But despite it's initial sketchiness, we soon came to realized that Tbilisi was actually a very cool city.

The streets around our Tbilisi apartment.

Our arrival in Tbilisi also marked an important milestone for our trip. We had officially been traveling for just over a year. I think we had been feeling it too. I desperately wanted to do absolutely nothing for a week. I was so sick of making travel arrangements and all sorts of travel-related decisions. How do we get from here to here? How many days do we spent in this place? Where do we want to go next? Where is dinner coming from? Is is safe to take a taxi? How far behind are we on this blog? What is the currency conversion rate here? Hell, what even is the currency here? I don’t know anymore! I was feeling so tired of it…

Fortunately, Tbilisi was a good place to at least try to decompress a little. Despite the creepy external appearance of our apartment building, the apartment itself was gorgeous and spacious. It was a good place to buckle up and continue making our necessary travel arrangements. We had arrived in Georgia with a handful of ideas for things we wanted to see and do, but we hadn't made any bookings yet and we were still trying to figure out how to get between places. And the greater challenge was that this was the start of our time in Europe and we had to figure out what that time was going to look like. We also knew that heading back home was somewhere on our distant horizon, but at this point it was too unclear to see when and how that would happen. I can say that despite my resistance we did accomplish a lot of planning in our Tbilisi apartment. We devised a plan for getting around Georgia, including all our transportation and accommodations, and we also purchased some flights to take us into Europe proper.

Georgia is usually considered to be a part of Asia, but you could have fooled me. Georgia is bordered on the north by Russia and on the south by Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. It’s roughly the same land area as the state of Main or South Carolina. Georgia has their own language with a unique alphabet, but many people we talked to knew both Russian and English in addition to Georgian. And sometimes even more languages, like Polish. There was clearly a lot of Russian influence, which isn’t surprising considering Georgia was a former Soviet Union state, although tension between Georgia and Russia is quite high. There were anti-Russian demonstrations the entire week we were in Tbilisi. Given all this, Georgia felt far more like Europe than the Asia we had previously experienced. There were even town squares, cobblestone streets, and churches. Meals revolved around the staples of wine, bread, and cheese. Despite the continental ambiguity, we were counting Georgia as the official start of our European travels.

We were surprised to find Dunkin' Donuts everywhere. You can also see the cool Georgian letters in their signage.

Walking across the ultra-modern Bridge of Peace.

Tbilisi was such a bizarre mishmash of architectural styles. Most of the buildings felt properly European in character, while others were simply utilitarian, and yet others looked like futuristic structures carved of steel and glass. Tbilisi architecture embraced the eclectic.

The view across Tbilisi from the top of Narikala Fortress.

The Georgian food was really exciting for us. After having rice and noodles for the past five months we were elated to find copious amounts of bread and cheese everywhere. We even overdid it one night. We both ended up with intestinal problems one night, and I’m pretty sure it was from overindulging in too many dairy products, which had been all but eliminated from our diet while in Asia.

We quickly learned about an important Georgian staple: khachapuri. There are many different kinds. They can be eaten any time of day. They work as a snack or an entire meal. Perhaps the most iconic is the adjarian khachapuri, which is a bread bowl containing an enormous quantity of melted cheese topped with a hunk of butter and an egg yolk. It’s undeniably terrible for you but when done right it’s absolutely delicious. The other type we encountered in Tbilisi was royal khachapuri, which is essentially a sauce-less cheese pizza topped with even more cheese. As if these two types of cheesy bread weren't enough already, we would discover yet other types of khachapuri later in our trip.

Two Georgian staples. Adjarian khachapuri on the right and (partly eaten) khinkhali, Georgian dumplings, on the left. 

Eggplant with walnut paste. 

The Georgian cuisine wasn’t just limited to bread and cheese. There was also wine. It was insanely cheap and surprisingly good. A glass of house red was only $1 at most restaurants and it was almost always a great choice. An entire liter of wine was only $4, but we only had to get that once to realize it was too much wine for only the two of us. They also loved their vegetables and their salads, which we were thrilled about. They especially loved eggplant and spinach. We often got dishes of one or the other mixed with walnuts. Pkhali were typically made of spinach, pureed with walnuts and spices and formed into small patties topped with bright red pomegranate seeds. A similar dish called badrijani was made from strips of eggplant wrapped around a walnut and garlic paste. Baked mushrooms were also popular, but naturally, they too were often filled with cheese.

Too much wine and a royal khachapuri for dinner one night.

Baked mushrooms with cheese.

In the end, Tbilisi was not the week off that I wanted, but we were able to plan out the rest of our three-week Georgia trip, giving us some breathing room to relax and enjoy our future experiences. There were always going to be details to figure out but the big things, like where we were staying and how we were getting there, were planned and out of the way. Tbilisi had also more than piqued our interest and made us look forward to what else Georgia had in store.

As much as I didn't want to, we did get a lot of trip planning done. I was in this couch one morning searching for flights around Europe.