Georgia Day 2

Sunday 14th August 2022

The castle fortress and Stanislav

We woke up and had an amazing breakfast, the aubergines were excellent! I also had eggs and spicy peppers with different cheeses. This is pomegranate country, so we had pomegranate juice too.

First thing was to take a castle to the fortress. The taxi driver's name was also Dato. It was so hot that day. We reached the ruins and found an Orthodox church built right in the centre of the ruins. We explored the ruins a little when the priests started chanting and singing and one of them started to ring a bell.

The bird incident

A short walk away and Stanislav was approached by two guys, he took his phone and put a parrot on one arm, and a peacock on the other and started taking lots of photos. Then he transferred the birds to my arm, the peacock was very heavy! He charged us 60 lari for the experience, and as I still was not very familiar with the money, I handed over 100, he then asked for 120 as it was for two people. I had given him 200 at this stage. We walked a bit further before I realised that that I had given them 71 euros. We returned, and after a lot of yelling in English and Bosnian I got a 100 lari back. I stopped there, though I could have reacted much worse.

Mother Georgia

We walked on to towards the mother Georgia statue, then down towards the river where we bought postcards and t-shirts. We then found a café where we wrote the postcards and I had an excellent white wine while the police were using a megaphone to try to convince a Russian car to move along. Not really working though.

Stanislav and Mustafa

After the wine and the postcards, we walked towards the bridge and joined a boat trip, more wine. We befriended a biochemist from Somalia who was working in Saudi Arabia. When the trip ended I asked for more wine in Georgian and we sat down and chatted. We then moved across the road to a café which was actually an old tram. I ordered chaha and red wine which was served in very ornate glasses. We said goodbye to Mustafa and we walked across this fancy glass bridge towards our hotel We stopped at the wine bar close to our hotel and ordered fist amber wine, then red wine and chatted to the server from Czechia.

Georgian money

I rested for a bit in the hotel and we arranged to meet Dato my language teacher at "our restaurant". He was a bit late, so we explored a little bit and I ended up buying a cookbook in Georgian.

Me and Dato

In the restaurant I ordered an entire bottle of red wine, but Dato only had a little as he was driving. For food I had sulguni cheese and khachapuri. It was really excellent. Dato explained how he was treated badly in Russia because of his dark complexion, he spent part of his youth there and was taunted as the "little black kid". It turns out he has Kurdish ancestors which explains why he was learning the language. The conversation got very deep.

In a word #ბედნიერი

#georgia #tbilisi #საქართველო #თბილისი