An Epic Blog of Georgia!

Seriously, folks! This is it! This is the shit! This is the first real blog post from my awesome trip to Georgia! I took no less than 1457 pictures, and I WILL POST THEM ALL, DAMMIT! OK, I will not post them all, but DAMMIT, I WILL POST SOME OF THEM!

Anyway! I went to Georgia to see my very good friend Georgie, who, appropriately, is from Georgia!

This is Georgie, with a "Hey kid, want some candy?" look that would scare the living bejeesus out of me if I didn't know him fairly well. No seriously, he is a great dude, and not a sex offender, at least that I know of.

My first day there, we went on a road trip! And first stop - the Ministry of Transportation!

Alright, we didn't actually stop there. See, a colleague of mine had been there on vacation last year, and insisted that I visited the - and I quote liberally here - "coolest freakin' building in Tbilisi". And that was this building. I've gotta give it to him - it's a pretty cool building.


So, first stop on our awesome roadtrip was Mtskheta (I kid you not, that is how you spell it. I love how most Georgian words start with like five consonants. How to pronounce it, you ask? Try to swallow something of generous proportions, while you laugh at a lame joke and sneeze at the same time. If a friend punches you liberally in the stomach-region at the precise right moment, you've got it), an area known for its large number of old churches and fortresses.

So first we visited this monastery on top of a hill, built on a site where an old wooden cross once stood, visible to a huge surrounding area.

We went there with a bunch of Georgie's friends, notably Nati and Georgie (Apparently, 9 out of 10 Georgian men are in fact named Georgie, an example of a pre-democratic lack of creativity. A common trick in the Tbilisi airport - which by the way was very nice and modern even though one could buy duty-free swords (!) in the tax-free store - is for cab drivers to walk up to you and say "Hello, friend! Georgie sent me to meet you!" and then drive off with you and then probably sell you to some, I dunno, farm or TV-station or something. Seriously, I have no idea what they would do after that, it would have to be just awkward as fuck.)

This is Georgie and a priest, two things that I suspect are not a particularly often seen together.

Either way, the view from the place was amazing. In the middle of the little town on the right riverbank is the church we visited on our next stop on the trip. Oh, I should mention that it was like 105 degrees during essentially my entire stay in Georgia (Except, conveniently, the day we actually went to the beach, when mother nature generously dispensed upon us from her refreshing supply of sleet and fog. More about that later, though!)

The ruins were full of creepy creatures, such as these. Eh, guess you had to be there to see the humor in this, but I assure you, it was a funny moment.

Linguistic side-note: The Georgian language is completely different from any other language, both spoken and written. In fact, on the tree of different languages, Georgian is its very own branch, comparable to, say, Latin and proto-bantu (!) languages. To learn more (I bet everyone will click this link, freakin' EVERYONE!), here is a wikipedia entry on Proto-language. Alright, I promise not to have any other linguistic side-notes ever again.

OK, I probably will.

Anywho, back to our roadtrip! Here are our two heroes, the one on the right wearing a funky hat, and the one on the left cursing himself for going to bed with wet hair.

This is from the church down in the little town we could see from the overview picture above (wow, worst sentence ever.) As all the other ones, it was spectacularly beautiful, thankfully not hurt too much by (almost) a century of communism.

..As opposed to this car, which I just had to take a picture of. Yeah, Borat could definitely have been filmed in some of these towns, but to be fair, Georgia on the whole is just spectacularly beautiful, as you shall see later on.

From there, we went to another monastery. The last church was where all the kings were buried, and this place was where all the queens were, well, also buried, I guess. Apparently, there is a "separate but equal" policy when it comes to royal burial traditions in Georgia. No busing, though.

Our next stop was a fabulous fortress, that oversaw the other churches. This was the first non-church building we visited, and, well, very much so: It was built as a fortress to which an old nobleman could bring hunky young dudes for, uhm, board games and other completely wholesome activities. And by board games I mean crazy weird sex, or at least weird enough that one would want to hide it from society at large by building a freakin' castle.

It was a pretty cool place, though, and was also occupied by a bunch of "archaeologists" who were "excavating". Seriously, that is what they were doing.

And they even had a puppy! Georgia was full of stray dogs, but this one was fairly domesticated, I think.

Even this castle had a pretty good view - nothing is better than having a great view when one is poun .. uhm, nevermind - and this also shows a pretty cool post-soviet phenomenon: So, to explain, here is a short and mostly incorrect history lesson:

After communism drew its final fucked-up breath and died once and for all (except for in China and some other weirdo countries, but those dog-eaters will have their day too, just you wait), a mostly benevolent but kind of dull President Edward Shevardnadze took over. He had made a stellar career in the Kremlin, and was first in line to take over back in the early 90s. He wasn't exactly a bad guy, but kind of old, however, and when his wife died, he kind of, well, gave up on life and stopped caring too much about running the country.

That attitude doesn't really get you anywhere in a democracy, so in 2003, a peaceful and non-violent revolution known as the Rose Revolution ousted the old dude and ta-dah! Enter the new President Saakashvili.

Columbia-educated, hot Dutch wife, western oriented, U.S.-friendly (The main highway to the airport is aptly named the "George W. Bush Highway")(In VERY LARGE LETTERS too.) and full of energy and desire to reform the country. He was and still is popular as hell, and has changed Georgia from a backwards weirdo country to a pretty modern society, much to the dismay, I'm sure, of followers of the old "If you rape it, it's yours!" tradition.

One of things that has been reformed is living conditions. As such, please compare the new, or at least refurbished, apartment buildings above, with the old, Kruschev style ones below:

Anyway, although there is considerable poverty in Georgia, the economy is exploding. There is construction freakin' EVERYWHERE in Tbilisi, and foreign investors are flocking in, partly fueled (oh, dude, I am the king of puns!) by an oil pipeline (get it? FUELED by an OIL PIPELINE?? Genius, I tell you!) that snakes its way through the country with oil fro mthe Caspian sea to tanker terminals at the Bosporus. Also, Georgia is orienting itself more against the EU and the U.S., and away from its traditional ally/oppressor, Russia.

Efforts to join the EU and NATO have so far been unfruitful, but I suspect that at least the latter one is not too far off. (The U.S., by the way, is building a MASSIVE embassy compound outside of Tbilisi, even large enough for air strips and such. I dunno, sounds like a good place to for start an invasion of Iran!)

This also causes significant irritation with Kremlin, which acts tough and drops bombs and such (They dropped a huge bomb that thankfully but probably not coincidentally did not explode outside of Tbilisi, just a couple of hours after I had left the country. Just to show that, hey, we're here too! Fear our slavic wrath!)

Anyway! Enough with this blabbering about politics! Who cares about that stuff! Back on the road, we stopped for some crazy Georgian food (I guess I was not convinced, but will not go into details as to why), and that is also where I leave this blogging session for now (Huh! I'm hungry too! How appropriate! I'll make some dinner and fold some laundry.)

Haha, alright, I just have to show the table of our restaurant .. Just very .. post-soviet, I guess.

Don't worry, though: I will blog more - much more! - about this trip later, and hope you have a great weekend, everyone! I'm going to see a Norwegian film, and then go to the beach on Sunday, which will be delightful!