I can’t believe I’m sitting here, in such place, writing this post; yes, because from the very beginning, everything seemed to be going to be terrible – a sort of attempt by the destiny to avoid our trip to Tbilisi.

Philarmonia's square in Tbilisi

It was long ago when me and my friend Anna decided to spend some time in my favorite country, sharing a flat and an experience which was new for her; and it was when everything was planned in our minds that things began to be bad. Each time you laugh while reading the Murphy’s Law – anything that can go wrong will go wrong – you should think twice: it was on the exact day we decided to book online the tickets that the webmaster of the bank’s site decided it was time to make some maintenance.

With no idea how to put the necessary amount of money on the credit card – those awful rechargeable ones – we tried all the possible links, with no luck, until I had the brilliant idea to check if the Bancomat could help us in such a complicated mission. After a little walk to this magic device, able to give you money by simply writing a numeric code, we found out that yes, it was allowed to move money on the credit card: bingo.

If you think the before-flight problems are over when you got a ticket, you don’t know how in Georgia renting a flat works, since the best way to have a cheap, nice and comfortable one is basically fond on 2 rules:

• having a friend;
• having a friend of this friend with a house to rent

We were already happy we found and booked a nice apartment, quite noisy but in the downtown and for a very interesting price, when we were informed that the people currently living there decided suddently to delay their leaving: it was less than a week before the flight. Without finding a way to solve this situation – which means logically that the owner had to tell them to go away, since we had already booked the flat – we begun to search on many georgian real estate websites to find out another place where to stay. But I forgot the above law: again it came out to be right, since we got a great apartment in the downtown, for the same price, by a friend of my friend Nana.

Time goes fast, or slow depending on your vision of the Life, Universe and Everything, but finally the time to flight came: we reached the airport quite in advance, and we begun to be worried about the weight of our baggages. Since the maximum allowed was 20kg, we were scared they could be very strict on this rule and asking us (much) money to check-in our suitcases. Remembering again mr. Edward Aloysius Murphy and his funny and true law, we had issues about this as well. In the very beginning, everything seemed to be fine, even if her suitcase was about 4kg more than the allowed weight; but it was when the man in the check-in desk saw Anna’s hand baggage and asked her to check the weight that he started to be bothering, saying it was too heavy and the plane was full.

Now, I wonder why if I pay 9 euro for each extra kilogram the problem magically disappears; thanks God, anyway, he decided to be kind and leave us bringing that terribly huge hand baggage in the cabin; and wonderful, he didn’t ask to check mine, which had some extra kilos as well. The problems didn’t finish, because he asked me to show him the credit card I used to pay for the tickets: I already knew we would have had to discuss again. Thanks to the ingenious system of virtual credit card, I could not provide the one with the same number they had on their screen – since it basically exists only in some hard drive around the World. As living in the middle age, this man had to call God-knows-whom and make us lose again time to find out that it was possible to do such amazing things with the modern technology.

With our boarding pass finally in our hands, we could go to take the flight; which, of course, was one hour late. During the first flight I believed Turkish Airlines began to hire people who loves roller coaster as pilots for their planes; and he also seemed to love very much the beautiful view of Istanbul at night, since we turned around the city, up and down, for about 20 minutes before finally landing, with one hour and an half of late; it was time to run to the second flight.

Run was faster when we saw in the monitor “Tbilisi: last call“. We arrived at the right gate and we saw it closed. Nobody was there, except a queue of people and different flights written on top of the gate, included ours. We asked to someone where they were going to go and we found out the call for Tbilisi’s flight was not started yet: full of tireness, we had finally a nice talking with those people, Alexander and Diana, and spent another half hour waiting for the second, late flight to our destination.

It was 4am when we finally landed in Georgia and the first thought when we exit the door was that the night was terribly cold. Nobody was supposed to come to the airport except some Anna’s friends, who were not sure and were not there, and Alexander, the man we met just couple of hours before, offered us a lift home by car; in twenty minutes we finally arrived home, in a very nice road in Tbilisi’s downtown, where my friend Mzia and her lovely little sister Maya were waiting for us (a.k.a. sleeping in our comfortably beds).

The first impression entering the house was marvellous: we just let the 2 ladies go back home, without seeing the whole house yet, and we decided to have a little walk out to buy some drink and food; there are several 24h markets close to the house: everyone was looking at us, buying things at 5am and talking in another language, but we could manage to come back home and take a better look to the new flat.

If the first impression abut the house was gorgeous, the second was even better: having a grand piano in the living room, considering there also are 3 living rooms, it’s simply fantastic. A bathroom, a second toilet, a big kitchen and two bedrooms completed the flat: we didn’t expect this house at all, since we were just informed that the place was “good, you will like it“. With finally a smile in our faces, we get ready and had the first long sleep in our new palace.