When You're on Vacation

I went on vacation over Christmas.  To Tbilisi, the capital of the Caucasian country of Georgia.  (So there, left no room for stupid jokes, comments, or quips about the US state).

Tbilisi is a beautiful capital city with an old town and a rich history.  It was the center of East Armenian culture before the founding of the modern country of Armenia shortly after World War I.

We walked just about everywhere we went in the city, with a few places in mind (McDonald's, this classy bar I'd been to before but couldn't remember how to get to), but really we walked around, saw some place nearby, or in the distance and said, hey, let's go there.

With so few specific plans we just explored and made it up as we go along.  On our way to find X we stumbled on Y, then decided to head for Z, giving up on ever finding X, only to find X a day later, completely by accident.

Everywhere we went, if I had to order food, or do something rather automatic, I found myself trying to constantly use my Armenian, without even realizing it.  My brain was just trying to grasp for anything foreign and it just found the most readily available language, just not the right one.  In McDonald's one of the cashiers actually knew Armenian, and after I apologized and used English we had a short conversation, which was nice, and a bit of surprise.

When you're on vacation one of the things I love to do is cancel plans.  I'm on vacation!  There is nothing I have to do.  Everything is optional, and for instance, our one trip outside of the city entailed going to the birthplace of Joseph Stalin and the museum that is now there.  Stalin was from Georgia and so statues are not uncommon of him there, and while I can't comment on attitudes today, historically Georgians have had a favorable view towards him as one of their own, hence, his own museum.

So that was about 45 minutes away from the capital, and we had planned on doing it, and we decided, ya know, we don't have to go.  We all sortof agreed and that was that.  We explored more parts of Tbilisi and even got to go on top of a fortress that overlooks the city.  A really cool place.  And pretty much nothing was off limits, so we climbed all around  this abandoned fortress that was now a tourist attraction.  I'd post pictures but I'll have to steal them from a friend because I didn't bring my camera for any of this!  Amot Inz (Shame on me.)