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Published: June 26th 2017
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Geo: 43.0456, 42.7297
1046 Hours: Thursday 17th Batumi Beach. The sun is shining, the sky is blue and the Hillmans are on their annual trip to the beach! Rather like "flying ant day" it is predictable and only lasts a short time......usually a about 1 hour......today it was 45 minutes. Fortunately, our wings didn't fall off when it was all over...........!
We were then bored...even after playing the game of eye spy and being rude about the local inhabitants swim wear. Off we went in search of activity!
1130 Hours: Batumi Beach Esplanade. We have just hired a double trishaws and are merrily pedalling up and down the sea front like a couple kids at Blackpool Beach. All we need now is a stick of rock and some candy floss.......one hour is enough as they seem to have been made for very very tiny legs hailing from shores much further East!........China is my guess by the instructions. We must have been an hilarious sight!
The last 48 hours has been a superb antidote to 10 days of hard travel. This City is a 1 horse 3 donkey 1 flea Town and is located on the Eastern shores of the Black Sea some 16km North of
The Turkish Border. This is not our first encounter with a resort of this type having visited Odessa and also Yalta in The Crimea. These places are a fascinating blend of hugger mugger residential living and bustling street life. The architecture is a wonderful mixture of ultra modern, tumbledown a Soviet and classical Turkish/Russian dating from before WW1. Batumi is set along a beautiful coast line and has a majestic mountainous backdrop....
FOOD ALERT!
Every restaurant serves the exactly the same menu.......kebabs, pork or chicken shaslic, stuffed aubergines and rather good cucumber and tomato salad. They also have identical interiors....the "rustic hunters cabin look"......each with tasteful brown fake wood booths and colourful pictures of yet more kebabs and various Georgian specialities such as guess what.....kebabs and shaslic........they also specialise in well known dishes such as:-
Hen Guts
Fried brain with mushroom
The ever popular "Goat Fish".......?!
Pluck with nuts...
and of course "Pig Gun on the frying pan Ketsi"
However, these establishments have absolutely no concept of the correct order of serving the dishes expected by conventions in Western Europe. The other night we cheerfully ordered....guess what 2 portions of Shaslic and Chips plus the usual salad. Two huge portion of chips arrived within seconds but we had
to wait over 45 minutes for only one of the Shaslics to arrive. Cathy suddenly had that "face" which installs fear into the hearts of all waiters. She heads for the kebab grill and has a stand up row with the waiter ....keeping at a helpful and discrete distance all I could hear was......GIVE ME THE BILL! ......I don't care.....FEED THE SHASLIC TO CAT THEN!
We beat a retreat and have had avoid the whole area since!
UNEMPLOYMENT
We hear that unemployment in Georgia is running at over 60%. This is evidenced by all the cafes being occupied with loads of young people all day long. To the casual observer, this seems like a life of luxury but upon closer examination, many of the occupants are not drinking or eating at all! They sit gazing into old fashioned mobile phones or smoking the occasional roll up. Last night we got chatting to a friend local chap in his 30's. In this broken English he made it clear that having no money made his generation "crazy" or drove them to drink. He was a great lengths to express his fear that Russia would soon take back Georgia....rather like the Crimea.....
GROUP RENDEVOUZ
The main group
returns from the mountains tonight at 1900hrs after some 2 full days travelling......more to follow
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