Useful Things to Know
Everybody knows everybody. Really. Airline lose your luggage? Want to get a reservation at the perpetually-booked Café Littéra? Want to visit a 5th century BC archaeological site under excavation or a remote Soviet-era observatory in the mountains? You could try formal channels, of course, but in a country where everybody seems to be somebody’s best friend’s cousin’s sister, the best way to go about getting anything accomplished is to ask the one or two Georgians you know. This will set off a chain reaction of rapid phone calls and texts that, in some cases, will get you all the way to the President or Prime Minister himself.
Don’t expect dinner to be a quick affair. Loaves of khachapuri. A formal toast. A table so covered in small plates of eggplant with walnut, pureed spinach, chicken in nut sauce, and fried trout that you can’t see the supra, or tablecloth. Welcome to the supra feast: named for the tablecloth so obscured by dishes and food, it’s a traditional banquet-meets-dinner party that might celebrate a wedding, a death, a visit, or nothing in particular. These wine-rich occasions, fueled by centuries of tradition, are the foundation of Georgian social life. You’ll be expected to eat everything (in abundance) and, more importantly, to down your glass repeatedly. Supras revolve around elaborate toasts; the rules are complex and legion. More than one drunken foreigner of my acquaintance has earned himself a punch by failing to respect them. During any dinner-party, the tamada—or toastmaster—will propose a quasi-formal series of toasts: to guests, to Georgia itself, to women, to men, to the Virgin Mary and St. George. If it’s a very formal one Respond with “gaumarjos” (roughly, “cheers”), and you finish your glass (or horn) of wine or chacha. It’s acceptable to eat during these elaborate toasts.
Eating khinkhali makes you a man. Making them makes you a woman. Georgian food culture is a microcosm of the culture as whole. Nowhere is that more evident than in the eating of khinkali dumplings: a soupy blend of beef and pork with caraway and black pepper. Men show off their masculinity by eating as many as possible (any fewer than 10 is suspiciously effete). As for the ladies, the traditional sign that a Georgian woman is ready for marriage (and the domestic intensity that comes with it) is when she’s able to delicately fold the accordion dough of the dumpling at least 15 times before twisting the floury “knot” and popping it in the water.
You won’t be needing vowels. Interested in visiting one of Georgia’s holiest religious sites? Head to Svetiskhoveli Cathedral, near Jvari Monastery, in the small city of Mtskheta. Or, if you’d like to visit the cave cities at Vardzia, be prepared to ask for the marshrutka, or minibus, to the city of Akhaltsikhe in the province of Samtskhe-Javakheti. If you’re trying to speak Georgian, be mindful that minor pronunciation mistakes may make you unintelligible: best case you might end up getting a blank looks. The Georgian language uses a unique alphabet of 38 letters. Outside of Tbilisi, most signs and way-markers are written in Georgian only, and even within Tbilisi only the directional signs on the subway and along the roadside are transliterated in the Latin alphabet. English is growing in popularity as a second language with the young, and Russian is still spoken by most elderly people, but don’t count on finding speakers of either when you most need them. Learning the Georgian alphabet and a few choice phrases will help you get the most out of your trip.
All the cool cafés are unmarked. Tbilisi’s hipster scene is one of the coolest in Eastern Europe, if not the world, if coolness is measured by hanging out in impossible-to-find bars. Tourists tend to diffuse towards the overpriced hookah bars on Chardini Street or the plasticine-pastel restaurants on Erekle Street, but Georgians in the know usually hang out in bars that are almost impossible to find, if you don’t know where to look. O Moda Moda–a nineteenth-century townhouse turned bar/restaurant/vintage clothing store–is marked only by some subtle Georgian script on what looks like a residential door; Sophia Melnikova’s Fantastic Douqan is hidden in the courtyard of the city’s Literature Museum; and Shavi Lomi (Black Lion) is denoted only by what looks like graffiti of the titular beast.
No doesn’t always mean no. Whether you’re refusing food, refusing drink, or—more troublingly—refusing contact (if you are a women), the first few times you say ‘no’ are roundly ignored. In the first two cases, this can be a minor inconvenience: men in particular are rarely allowed to stop drinking. In the latter it can be downright dangerous. Tbilisi, and Georgia more generally, are very safe, but non-Georgian women—presumably not subject to local virginity taboos—are often considered promiscuous, and a negative response is often understood as a token display of resistance, rather than an outright refusal. In some cases, what other cultures might consider ‘stalking’ (finding out the phone number of a strange girl you like and calling her at 5 am every night for a week) is considered a chivalric display of interest.
Georgia uses its own currency, the Lari, which is closed – meaning that the only place to exchange your currency for or from Lari is Georgia itself. Exchange kiosks in major train stations and airports generally give better rates than the local banks. Bring major foreign currencies like euros or, preferably, U.S. dollars, since you’ll have less trouble exchanging these.
What’s the highest mountain range in Europe? The Alps? Wrong. It is the Caucasus Mountains marking the border between Georgia and Russia. While the highest peak is in Russia, Georgia lays claim to the second highest, Shkara, which at 5,193m (17,040 ft) beats Mont Blanc by nearly 400m (1,312 ft). These dramatic mountains, with their terrifying hairpin roads and hidden villages cut off at winter, are the stuff of legend. In Greek mythology they were one of the pillars holding up the world. And it was here that Zeus tied up Prometheus, to have his liver eaten by eagles. Today they are increasingly becoming a destination for climbers, walkers or skiers looking for adventure