Tbilisi Day 1: Churches, chacha and crumbling grandeur

So we spent our first day in Georgia exploring Tbilisi's many churches, eating lots of cheesy bread, (khachapuri) and getting acquainted with the local firewater called "chacha". We started with some khachapuri for breakfast before heading off on foot across the city towards Liberty Square for a free walking tour. 


We noticed several interesting things about Tbilisi just on that first lazy stroll to the centre. One of the first things was that, despite Tbilisi's relatively small size (the population is only about 1 million people), the city seemed very big on art. There was interesting stencilled graffiti everywhere we looked. The other things we noticed were that there seemed to be building works going on all over the place, there were lots of people begging (mainly Romany kids and wizened old Georgians) and there were churches of varying sizes everywhere you looked. 

One of the many pieces of stencilled graffiti we saw all over Tbilisi. 

After hunting around for Liberty Square for the free tour we eventually realised that in Georgia public squares are not the same as in England. They are not pedestrianised areas adorned with benches and maybe a few trees. In Georgia they are for traffic not people and more closely resemble a British roundabout. Having found the "square" we spotted the tour guide, a Latvian guy wearing a bright identifying yellow t-shirt as promised on the advert in our hostel. The first thing he told us was that the column in Liberty Square with the statue of St. George slaying a dragon top had been made using 250kg of gold.  Serious state spending bling!

Liberty Square with the statue of St. George in the centre. The whole square is for traffic now though in Soviet times it used to be pedestrianised. At least the USSR got one thing right!

Detail of the St. George statue on its column in Liberty Sqaure.

Liberty Square Metro station written in Georgian script. The Tbilisi metro is cheap and fairly easy to use. Most of the stations are deep underground like many of Moscow's. The escalators move really quickly and seem to go on forever. I think they built them deep to act as emergency bomb shelters.

One of Tbilisi's many Orthodox christian churches. Georgia was the second country in the world to adopt Christianity as its state religion and it is very proud of that fact. We've found Georgia to be a very religious country where people cross themselves just when they're passing a church, let alone when they go inside. Many Georgian churches have strict rules about what you must wear in church, especially if you're female.

An old roadside inn/trading post or "caravan serai" that was from the times when Tbilisi was a branching point on the Silk Road. Traders from the East would arrive on camels and horses that would be tethered underneath the building in a basement. Shops were on the next level of the building with sleeping quarters above. 

An antique shop we saw while on the tour. Note the samovars in front and several portraits of Stalin, mass murderer extraordinaire and Georgia's most famous son. More on Georgia's strange relationship with him later. 

We continued on the walking tour around town taking in the more obvious sights and plenty of less well known ones and some interesting neighbourhoods that the guide was fond of. We visited a park where Georgian men always take their girlfriends when they want to show they are serious about them and a tiny, old church with a 2000 year old  (supposedly!) image of Christ on a cloth that was supposedly transferred onto the material from his sweat - gross! It actually rained for a short time while we were on the tour which was quite nice given the heat. We also got aggressively hassled by the Romany beggars trying to grab our drinks and throwing themselves on our legs. They were mostly just young kids in filthy clothes and we felt so sorry for them. Apparently there's hardly any begging in the rest of the country just Tbilisi, but it really is everywhere here.

We saw a lot of different neighbourhoods in Tbilisi on the tour including smarter looking ones like this with balconies and old world charm.

We also saw plenty of extremely run down looking neighbourhoods with crumbling facades, rotting balconies and even, in this case, severe earthquake damage. Georgia is in a seismically active area, in fact there was an earthquake here just the other day but we didn't even notice as it was so small.

This is the Peace Bridge, probably one of Tbilisi's most modern looking constructions and built with EU money. Locals joked it was built to link the President in his palace with the parliament on the opposite side of the river. Locals have nicknamed the bridge the winged sanitary pad because of its shape.

View of the Kura River which flows through Tbilisi.

Tbilisi's presidential palace (on the left here) looks quite like Germany's Reichstag.

Another Georgian church in typical style.

Religious fresco on a church wall showing three figures over an outline of Georgia.

Weird Georgian sweets made from strings of nuts dipped in fruit juices like a candle.

A traditional Georgian bakery in a cellar. They make good bread here!

Glass plinths in front of the Parliament Building commemorating 20 people who were killed in a peaceful protest that was brutally put down by the Soviet Army on April 9 1989. Most of the victims were young women. and the glass plinths have been laid where they fell.

After the tour, our friendly guide took us to a local foreigner friendly bar and we were give complimentary shots of the local firewater called chacha, a strong, clear spirit made from leftover grape juice left after making wine. It was strong as hell and tasted quite like tequila. I definitely wasn't a fan.

Shots of chacha with slices of lemon to suck afterwards to remove the horrible taste!

Rowan with beard attempt, our Latvian tour guide in his yellow t-shirt and a couple of guys from the tour group.

We ended up staying in the bar, called Canudos, for a few more beers and met some a couple of Dutch guys in bright orange Holland t-shirts. They ended up selling us their Armenian money so we figured we would have to visit there next even though it hadn't originally been on our itinerary. Oh the joys of being unemployed for the summer and having nothing to rush back for!