My Trip to Vrastan

3 things I wanted to accomplish in Georgia

1. Get a picture next to a statue/bust of Stalin.

2. Go to Mcdonald's

3. KGbs

I was able to get a picture, with a statue that was, at least Stalin-esque. I'm pretty sure he was Stalin. Stalin was Georgian and from what I've read viewed positively in Georgia. I didn't ask if that was indeed the case from the Georgians I did meet, so I can't say for sure.

And speaking of the people, I stayed at a friend of a friend's place in the old town close to the city center. Our first night there was a birthday party for these two twin Georgian guys, two really cool guys, and then a lot of people from all over as well. Georgia has a legion of English teachers (and other languages as well) brought from abroad by the government as part of a program to focus less on Russian and more on English and other EU languages.

The lack of Russian there was also striking, as compared to Armenia. In Armenia you will see signs with Armenian, Russian, and occasionally English. I actually read the signs in Russian because I've learned the Cyrillic alphabet while studying Ukrainian, and Serbo-Croatian. I actually still find it harder to read signs in Armenian, than it is to read them in Cyrillic. I think the main reason is that Armenian has upper- and lowercase letters, whereas Cyrillic only has one set. Armenian is also vastly different from any Latin-based alphabet. English has some strange uppercase and lowercase letters as well, but I just wanted to give you some examples of letters and their two forms, going from lowercase, to uppercase:

ց Ց /ts/

հ Հ /h/

շ Շ /sh/

չ Չ /ch/

տ Տ /t/

Signs will often be written in all uppercase letters and makes it quite hard to read. The h-looking letter is indeed a /h/ sound, though those other ones are not the same. And i posted a most of the letters that are the same to certain letters in English. Whereas Cyrillic might look just as strange to someone who has never studied either alphabet and knows a Latin-based one (highly doubtful, though) it only has one set of letters.

Okay so enough about this language stuff, I know I'm boring you. Actually one more thing, which was the point of that whole tangent: You can read many signs in Russian in Armenia, but in Georgia, at least in the center of Tbilisi, the signs are all in Georgian or English. There is no Russian in sight. One example is a bank next to my apartment building. In Armenia it's called: ВТБ using the Russian abbreviation (I assume it's a Russian bank, but I could be wrong). In Georgia, I saw the same bank but it was called VTB, the English equivalent for the Russian sounds. You can still speak and use Russian there, and anyone of the older generation will be able to communicate with you, but it has been largely eradicated from the public signs.

It was cold and raining the weekend I was in Tbilisi, but it was amazing anyways. It is very different from Yerevan. Yerevan is one of the oldest, continuously inhabited places in the world. It's at the beginning of the Silk Road, but it was never a major city. So while you can say Yerevan is an old place, the actual city aspects of it were all built during the Soviet era. So all the streets, all the buildings in Yerevan are mainly soviet style apartment complexes and streets.

Tbilisi on the other hand, has been a large city for a much longer time than Yerevan, and so had more European-style aspects to its old city. It still has some of the Soviet-style architecture, but that is largely relegated to suburbs outside of Tbilisi and the actual city center has a lot of smaller streets, paved with bricks.

I would highly recommend anyone visiting the area to visit Tbilisi if they have time.

p.s. I did go to McDonald's, I barely go there in the US, but I need to go, and it was amazing, and we passed by, but didn't go in to KGB's. I should explain, KGB's is an ironic, sorta hipster-esque cafe in Tbilisi that has the motto "We're still watching you."