Days in Tibilisi.

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I spent a week in Tibilisi at Irena's homestay and this was the highlight of my time in Georgia. The rest was a disappointment. The country is very much an ex-soviet nation. The older people are still in a kind of shock. The younger generation and the old communists, who managed to grab all they could lay their hands on, are in transition to capitalism, specifically the second hand Mercedes for the less well off and the new 4x4 for the ex-communists and hangers-on. They drive their cars at pedestrians with horns blaring. Indeed for these rather fat unshaven men in black coats and black leather flat caps the car horn is more important than their own private parts. They would certainly surrender the latter rather than their car horn.
I cannot believe that the word courtesy exist in their language.
I would wave and smile as I have done all the way through Europe and Turkey but in Georgia I have been met with blank incomprehension or sulleness. The only laughter I heard was vodka fuelled as men only groups slapped each others backs between endless toasts served of course by women.
Georgia is famed, so I am told, for its hospitality, but it is a hospitality done to you rather than with you as you are plied with copious quantities of alcohol and food where to politely decline is taken as an offence.
Georgia has expressed the wish to join the EU but that is decades away and will not happen until they take down the obscene memorial museum to that infamous Georgian, Stalin, and replace it with a mumorial to the thousands, no tens of millions who died in his camps.
Tobacco consumption is enormous and with alcoholism gives a sallow doe eyed appearance to the men. The women just look sad.
I visited Armenian and Orthodox churches full of women (with very few men) crossing themselves again and again as if their life and happiness depended on it. It clearly gave them solace. The women of Georgia clearly need it.
Georgia is one of the most disappointing countries that I have visited since Soviet Russia in the 1980's.

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Photos

Tibilisi old town
Armenian Church

Family with whom I stayed in Qazax.
Daughter and her cousin

Tea drinking companians on the road
Just before Kurdamir

Maiden's Tower in Baku
Lower part is probably Zaroastrian dating from the 7 century BC

Looking east over the Caspian.
127 steps to the top of the Maidens Tower gives this view of the city of Baku.

Looking west.
This shows the coast which I cycled along still covered in mist.

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