Davide Cassenti

Gentleman and Scholar Software Engineer

Posts Tagged ‘trips’

Visiting Davit Gareji

Sunday, October 18, 2009

The day is started in the most awful way: trip planned and stomach ache cannot be room mates; bot me and Mzia were feeling bad in the morning, but we didn’t want to miss a nice trip: thanks to the holy medicines, we decided to face our destiny and go anyway, destination Davit Gareji. The monastery is a complex situated in the Kakheti region, on the border with Azerbaijan.

The first step of our trip is the big bus station, or marshutka station to be more precise, called Samgori, inside the capital: here we found a nice – at least we thought so – black marshutka that was going to go to Sagarejo, a town one hour far from our destination. From there, we would have taken a taxi to go to the monastery.

Our Black Marshutka

After a fast walk around the station-market to buy some food and water for the trip, we found our seats on the minibus and at 11am we started our trip. Now, I know I often complain about georgian driving, but it really seems that they find the drivers as a surprise in the Happy Meal®. They use to say that math can explain everything, but I really can’t understand how that marshutka was still alive. The life of a marshutka, as other car, depends on the use: if you hit a hole in the street, the life of your car becomes shorter. Let’s use some math:

Suppose:

h: holes in the street where the marshutka entered

K: a costant

L: life of marshutka in days

We will have, considering the number of holes tends to infinite in a georgian road and the driver was hitting ALL of them:

L = ^lim_h→∞ ^K/_h

As far as I remember from my study, despite the value of K, the result is always 0; but the marshutka, even if slow and driven without any ability to choose the right gear, did its job perfectly. I am amazed. During the trip, also, Natia managed to get the drivier to bring us to the monastery, wait for us and take us back to Tbilisi for just 70 lari (we were 5): things begun to turn in the right direction.

The marshutka, that was a public transport ’till Sagarejo, was quite full of people, but after we left that town, it was all for us – with another friend who joined us there and in about one hour we reached Davit Gareji. The road to go there is really beautiful: the street is surrounded by hills, without trees and in beautiful autumn colors; they call it a desert and it really seems.

Panorama of Sagarejo

Davit Gareji is a complex built in the rocks, founded in 6th Century. The place was crowded, with many school children and their teacher explaining them everything about the place. It was really a surprise, after several kilometers without anything, to suddently see the monastery and so many people having fun and watching be beauty of the complex. We had a nice day there, visiting the monastery, then we went back to Sagarejo, where we decided to have a lunch.

Panorama from Davit Gareji

Having lunch there was a terrible idea: we ordered some mtsvadi, the tasty meat prepared in Georgia, and some Megruli Khachapuri and they both were awful. Definetly, I would not suggest anyone to visit that place, unless for the funny translations in english they had on the menu: we were wondering why a pig was sucking, as well as what kind of cigarettes does a smoking sulguni like. But we didn’t investigate to much: at 5pm our black marshutka took us back to Tbilisi. Of course, without avoiding again all the holes in the streets.

Smoking sulguni

Tags: davit gareji, georgia, trips
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A day at the lake

Saturday, October 10, 2009

Tbilisi has been little cold in the previous days, but yesterday the sun was going to come back in the sky; waking up quite late in the morning, without any plan in our minds, we decided to have a walk in the market to buy something. Not far from our house is Machakhela, probably the best place where you can eat good georgian food for very few lari and, since I didn’t have breakfast and it was already lunch time, we had a stop there for a fast snack.

We asked informations about how to reach the Lilo Market, which seems to be the bigger and less expansive ever, but we realized we needed more than half an hour to get there, so we opted for the always nice one in Vagzlis Moedani. We didn’t find anything special there, except couple of presents, so we went back home with just few stuffs.

In the afternoon, Natia came to meet us at our house: thinking where we could go, I suggested to have a walk to the Turtle Lake, a small lake over one of the hills that surround the city. There are two ways to get there: a long, boring road with a bus or a more interesting funicular that starts from the city and goes up in few minutes; we decided to take the second, for just 50 tetri (less than 0.25 €).

Tbilisi's Funicular

Despite the uglyness of the funicular, Natia informed us that, after it falled down once, they decided to check it every month; no need to write our last wishes then, the trip was much less scary than you can imagine before the ride: in less than 5 minutes we arrived at our destination. The view up there is simply fantastic, as usual when you go up around Tbilisi.

Panorama from Turtles' Lake

We were feeling some more cold than down in the city: the place is anyway very beautiful, nice views and few pubs where you can spend some time with your friends. Just for information, be careful when you ask to add some milk to the tea, since it costs more than the tea itself. We had to go back to the city before 7pm, when the funicolar stops working: however it was already dark and I decided to make another panoramic photo of Tbilisi before getting on the cabin.

Panorama from Turtles' Lake at night

Me and Anna spent the rest of the evening in a nice restaurant in Vake, taking some food we liked and trying something else we never heard before: we discovered it was a very good plate of meat and potatoes, really delicious. Too much food, however, which turned into a terrible stomach ache who made me sleep very badly at night and didn’t allow me to go out of the town as I planned today.

Tags: georgia, tbilisi, trips, turtle lake
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A new trip to Tbilisi

Saturday, October 3, 2009

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.

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Tags: georgia, tbilisi, trips
Posted in Trips and events | No Comments »