Georgia

January 31 — February 3, 2002

Tbilisi

There isn’t much advertising in the city (which is a good thing). The ads you do see are mostly for mobile telephony, cigarettes, wine, and “Coca Cola” with a localised logo.

Refugees currently reside at the Iveria hotel. The tsar and his people:

Firewood for sale — right there in the city centre. There isn’t any central heating; people use potbellied stoves in their flats.

The inner courtyard of the hotel located on the main street turned out to be rather picturesque.

Police patrol.

Obscene riches sit side by side with obscene poverty.

There’s one metro train every ten minutes. The train is made up of four carriages. It’s pretty deserted, so the escalator monitor can sleep unperturbed.

Noo leening:

Tbilisi used to have a working cable car. You could take it up to the top of the hill with the TV tower and a Parthenon-like building on it. The latter used to be the hottest restaurant in town, but has now been taken to pieces; everything was looted, right down to the marble slabs. Upon closer inspection the TV tower looks like a scene from a film about an abandoned planet:

The locals were concerned by the fact that we’d come here in winter instead of summer. The reason being that in the summertime there’s lush greenery everywhere, so the place looks less destoyed.

I didn’t manage to go without wine for a single day on this trip. I learnt half of the letters of the Georgian alphabet and by the end of my journey I could already read waitresses’ name tags.

Address signs.

Postbox.

Payphones.

Underpass.

There are TV antennae made out of old hard drives on every house.

Veggie store.

Typical courtyard.

At night the city is lit up by the headlights of passing cars. Although you do see signs of bygone splendour everywhere.

And the city’s bygone beauty is still there.

Borjomi

The plant is in a sorry state, but production lines are more or less up and running.

I checked and the mineral water is indeed abstracted from the subsoil as advertised, then bottled right then and there.

The plastic bottles are no less real the glass ones.

I looked around the park depicted on the “Borjomi” label, but it turns out that there’s nothing left. The fountain was demolished a long time ago and the house isn’t there either.

They haven’t had central heating for a long time. The power gets switched off constantly (or rather gets switched on from time to time). Lots of people have installed potbellied stoves in their homes. The stovepipes point out the window because the houses weren’t designed to accommodate this kind of heating system.

* * *

Out of all the former Soviet republics I’ve been to Georgia is the most destroyed.