Georgia on My Mind : A Taste of Tbilisi

Taking a 3-hour red eye flight on budget airline Fly Dubai, we arrived in Tbilisi early, at 5am on a Thursday morning, a big tour group of 11, all Filipinos except for one Dutch guy. Tbilisi Airport was a quaint little efficient airport in a middle of a sleepy town.

With hardly any line at the immigration, our shiny 1-week tourist visas were issued quickly upon paying 50Lari (around 120dhs) which we took happily, considering how pretty it looked on our passports.

The door going out had a huge sign saying “Tbilisi Loves You” and from that moment on, I somehow sort of knew that this was gonna be a good trip.

Taxi drivers were waiting outside, speaking in broken English and a mix of Russian, and Georgian,  we negotiated a fair price based on what we were told – which was around 25-30 Lari per car, which can hold a maximum of 4 people, going to Rustaveli Avenue, Tbilis's main avenue, and where our hostel was located.

The trip to the hostel took less than 10 minutes, while we buckled up on the backseat thinking Tbilisi Drivers must have been retired Formula One racers.  Soon we had our first experience of the Georgian highway and got acquainted with their speed limits or lack thereof. 

BHM hostel was a nice decent place right across the grand Marriot Hotel along the famous Rustaveli.  Bahman the Iranian owner and operator was nice guy who helped us settle in, gave us tips on where to go, how much to pay, what to try and arranged for the next day’s road trip.

Across our hostel, the Rustaveli Theatre, the largest and one of the oldest Theatres in Georgia. 

There was a bookstore below the hostel, and it was just perfect.

As Neil Gaiman writes - Cities are not people. But, like people, cities have their own personalities. 

As for me, every city I've been to has its own unique smell.  The crisp old-world smell of Tbilisi's  Rustaveli Avenue on that bright Thursday morning was exhilarating to me like the smell of an old book being opened. It was love at first sight. It was my kind of place, a thousand-year old city, charming, brimming with culture and history, and best of all -  non-mainstream.

We were most probably the only Filipino tourist at the time, as we kept on getting stared at and asked if we were Chinese. Anonymity is freedom and frankly a great retreat from  the  condescending cosmopolitan Dubai.

Dobre Utra! Read all about it. 

The tourist / hipster Cafe.

Gorgeous Georgian women. 

Our neighbors whispering about us. 

We spent the morning wandering around, as I soaked in the old architecture and the lovely little pieces of sculpture and street art that lurks at almost every corner.

I'm not a big grocery fan, meaning I don't really like grocery shopping, but I have to admit, Groceries in foreign places are the best way to take a crash course on its people and culture.  Two minutes in a Tbilisi grocery and I discovered the great Georgian spirit, (or spirits)  -

All kinds of Alcohol. Name it and they have it, 2 Liters of beer is only 4dhs, ut the best ones are homemade.

This and pork. Its truly a piece of heaven for deprived pork & beer fans like us coming from Dubai.
History has it that Georgian's discovered wine and that Tbilisi's landmark statue, the Mother of Georgia overlooking the city holds a bowl of wine in her right hand to welcome friends and a sword to ward off enemies.

At this point, I was ready. I was ready to embrace Mother Georgia (ok, and maybe the hot Georgian men)  and drink from her sweet bowl.  Jeff Buckley's version of Lilac wine plays on my mind as I learned one very useful and important Georgian word that came handy in many later situations : Gaumarjos!

(to be continued..)
Up next, the Ancient Capital, Mtskheta...

Island in the Sun

Summertime always make me think of home - the roadtrips with friends, the weekends out-of-town, sand, surf, barbeques, mangoes, fresh air, fishballs, corn cobs, the dirty ice cream in the street, drinking coke out of plastic bags,  sipping fresh buko juice or eating halo halo on a hot summer day.

These flood of memories makes me yearn to be back in the Philippines, to be embraced warmly by its familiar, welcoming shores, to leave the cruel indifferent desert-concrete jungle of Dubai and once again be treated as a golden island senorita. Yes these are the stuff of my summer daydreams.

When people, foreigners, ask me about the Philippines, I always ask them back "Do you like the beach?" If they say yes, I immediately brighten up and become a little miss unofficial tourism ambassador, happy to go on talking about the places I loved the most, Boracay, Palawan, Batanes, Pagudpud. The list goes on. If they say no, well there's always San Miguel Beer, Sisig, Balut and Karaoke.

There are usually so many good things to say, that sometimes I wonder why some Filipinos choose to brood over or highlight the bad things. 

I think of home in the summertime and I hear a song in my head that goes – On an Island in the sun, we’ll be playing having fun, and it makes me feel so fine, I can’t control my brain…