Tbilisi (again)

We loved this city so much the first time around, we decided to rejig our plans to squeeze in another four days here 🙌 (the big bath in our apartment may have also been a decision factor)

It's been a relaxed stop, with plenty of reading, writing, bathing, and forcing inordinate amounts of Georgian cheese down our gullets. Dan's birthday was this week, so Chelsea bought some candles to do a surprise dessert at dinner. Unfortunately, he had already stuffed himself with five plates of food in the main course, so we've had to postpone the cake celebration.

We took a daytrip to the small town of Gori, which is mainly famous for being the birthplace of Georgian national icon, Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (aka Joseph Stalin). We walked along Stalin Street, through Stalin Park, to the Stalin Museum. As you can imagine, it was a very balanced and unbiased exhibition. Surely we're not the first people to note the irony of a mass murderer coming from a town called Gori?

After this, we caught a terrifying taxi piloted by a Deep Purple super-fan to Uplistsikhe, an ancient town carved into a hillside. None of the tourist maps made any sense, so we were mostly just pottering around climbing into holes and caves. But this is admittedly quite fun even without a history lesson.

The streets in Georgia (like all the Caucasus countries) are chock-a-block with cats and dogs. You'll see lots of photos in this post. We have to give a special shout-out to the resident dog at our apartment though: an extremely chunky boi of near-spherical proportions called Bobby, who we nicknamed Blobby. This naturally led to Blobby Williams, Blobber Baron, Blobster Thermidor, etc. Comment below with further options 👇Read more