Kutaisi

Day 386 (July 19, 2019) – Kutaisi, Georgia

Kutaisi was the last stop on our Georgia trip. We arrived by marshrutka from Batumi. We had another typical Georgian apartment for us which was characterized by the building exterior looking dilapidated and seemingly about to fall down, but the inside being surprisingly nice and comfortable. Kutaisi is Georgia’s third largest city, after Tbilisi and Batumi. There weren’t that many sites to see, but it was a really nice town to spend a few days in. I call it a town because it really didn’t seem big enough to call it a city. We could get everywhere on foot.

It was probably a good thing that there wasn’t too much to do because our lack of future travel plans was catching up to us. However, by the time our few days in Kutaisi were up, we had a rough plan of where we wanted to go in Europe over the coming months. We had also finalized our travel and accommodation arrangements for the next couple weeks, so at least we didn’t have to worry about that for a while.

The view from our apartment up to Bagrati Cathedral.

Looking over Kutaisi.

Most of our explorations around town were focused on finding our favorite Georgian foods. We had finally narrowed down to our favorite type of khachapuri. There are so many different kinds, but we tended to gravitate to the imeruli khachapuri. It’s essentially the best cheesy bread ever invented. It’s a perfectly cooked, very thin round of bread with a layer of gooey cheese in the middle. It’s not so gooey that it’s stringy and hard to eat. It’s a perfect level gooey that just melts in the mouth, surrounded by a slightly crispy, lightly oiled bread. It’s like a grilled cheese from heaven.

A lunch of imeruli khachapuri, eggplant with walnut paste, and potatoes and mushrooms.

Walking around Kutaisi.

We’d usually get a host of vegetables to accompany an imeruli khachapuri. The simple salads were always outstanding. We often ordered eggplant with walnuts or potatoes with mushrooms. All these are often topped with a few pomegranate seeds. Another favorite was simply called beans in a clay pot. It sounds simple but it was delectable. If we did get a meat dish, it was usually a stew. They were always good.

I loved that we could get a salad at every meal.

The Rioni River circles around Kutaisi's downtown area.

We would usually share a bottle of wine at dinner too. It was so inexpensive and we had learned which Georgian wines we preferred. Most of the Georgian wine varietals were previously unknown to us (saperavi and rkatsiteli being the main ones) but our trip through Sighnaghi and Telavi taught us a lot about them. Our go-to grape became the red saperavi. I don’t think we ever had a glass we didn’t like. Occasionally, we’d spring for a bottle of saperavi made in kvevri, the traditional underground clay pots, but they would be more expensive than their European-style prepared equivalents.

The Bagrati Cathedral is on top of a hill and visible from most places around town.

A dinner of Khinkali. They can be a bit messy to eat if you're not careful.

One of my other favorite dishes was khinkali, Georgian dumplings. They could be filled with all sorts of things. We often got the mushroom or cheese ones but, frankly, they were never as good as the ones with meat in them, usually pork and/or beef. They were always delivered to the table steaming hot. Too hot to touch for a few minutes. You grab them by the little twisted end like a handle, take a bite and suck out all the juice before it has a chance to run down your face. Then you can finish them off, leaving the twisted end back on the plate (it’s too dense to enjoy and usually undercooked in the center). Eating khinkali was always a little bit messy but entirely worth it.

A bottle of saperavi made in kvevri.

Kutaisi was our last stop in Georgia and we were going to miss all this food for sure. Georgia was such an interesting country to visit and it turned out to be very suitable for slowing down and catching our breath after our challenging trip through China and our whirlwind trip through Japan. And we now had a plan for the rest of Europe, still with missing parts that had to be connected, but we would pull it together in time. On our last day in Georgia, we took a taxi to the Kutaisi airport to catch a flight to Poland, our first stop in Europe proper.