Six days in Tbilisi

Our Georgian journey began in the capital Tbilisi, a lovely little place with a population of about 1 million. It's a fairly compact city with hills all around and we all liked it a lot.

We stayed in the old city, in a little guesthouse which from the outside looks like it's about to fall down but was furnished with modern furniture and had a friendly and helpful (and talkative!) host, Irakli. He gave us some good food and sights recommendations and helped guide our stay, which after a day of wandering around we decided to extend from the four nights we'd originally planned to six.

The city has a lot of grand but faded buildings, houses and apartment blocks which evidently nobody can afford to quite renovate but live in anyway. The style includes beautiful balconies everywhere, in the old part of town at least.

There are a couple of grand avenues, notably Rustaveli Avenue with a lot of large 19th-century buildings including the wonderfully stripy Opera House and the Georgian National Museum. We've been very impressed with the museums here - clear, detailed exhibits which are well-curated. The national museum's Treasury was particularly good with a gorgeous selection of jewellery and artefacts unearthed from burial sites. Georgia has a long rich history and they keep finding stuff from the Bronze Age and on which is really spectacular.

Bank of Georgia HQ

Otherwise the old architecture is interspersed with a selection of crazy modern buildings. The Peace Bridge, spanning the river below the old town, is really quite nice - an undulating glass curve with the stars of Europe on top (they light up at night). Opposite the bridge there's a concert hall and exhibition centre of two glass and steel tubes, as yet unused, which is pretty cool. Other architectural gems we visited included the 1970s building which is now the Bank of Georgia headquarters, a set of boxes stacked on top of each other in a location which is miles from anything useful except a couple of the university campuses.

The city is also filled with churches of all sizes, from very small to very large. Georgian Orthodox churches are quite different to Western European churches - they're generally square-ish inside, and empty of furniture. The walls are hung with gilded icons and people wander in to pray at all times of the day. Often there's a priest chanting too.

Tbilisi's main cathedral is fairly new, consecrated only in 2004. Inside it's still plain plaster although they're beginning to paint frescoes at the altar end. It's huge and lofty and rather lovely. We got there about an hour before sunset and the sun on the golden sandstone turned the building the most gorgeous colour; inside, we listened as four very ordinary blokes just out of work sang prayers in harmony as a priest chanted.

We also visited the museum of ethnography, which was a little disappointing as not many of the houses from around Georgia were actually open. The ones which were had guides to tell you about the culture of the people who had lived in them. We liked our first guide best, a young lady wearing semi-traditional dress who was happy to chat and answer questions. We discovered that the traditional Georgian nappy involved strapping your baby into a cot and positioning a pipe (different shapes for boys and girls) strategically to catch urine and funnel it into a pot!

Ethnographic museum

The best bit was probably our trip to the market, where we wandered for ages looking at the produce on sale and trying to have conversations with the stallholders in our limited Georgian/Russian (hello! thank you! English!) and their limited English. They seemed genuinely thrilled to have three Brits stopping by and we scored a number of free samples.

A lady checking beans in the market

On our last day in Tbilisi we caught a marshrutka (basically a minibus) to the nearby town of Mtskheta, a UNESCO World Heritage site, where there's a stunning old cathedral decorated heavily inside, and a church on a hill overlooking the town. Normally you pay a taxi driver to drive you up to the hill but, being us, we decided to walk. The tourist information office was helpful in giving us instructions, although Julie had found instructions online too which suggested that the best way to cross the highway below the hill was through an underpass. So we duly trotted along to the underpass, which is by a gravel pit, only to find that the gravel works was guarded by at least four aggressive dogs. Backing off we decided to cross the road at road-level instead, which actually wasn't too bad. Coming back was much easier and far more direct!

We ended our Tbilisi stay with a trip to the public baths, which was if nothing else an experience. Tbilisi has a hot spring running off the hills into the river and they have a number of bathhouses where you can soak in mineral-rich water. Julie had researched online and thought she'd found one where you didn't have to book but there were hot pools to soak in; only we turned up and it was expensive, reservation-only.

Instead we went to one of the other public bath options, where the women's baths were only showers. But it was cheap and we soaked for a while under steaming hot water smelling slightly of eggs. We tried to get a massage or a back scrub but, through the medium of miming mainly as our Russian is not great (well, mine's non-existent, Julie knows a little) and the attendants' English was worse, we ascertained that this wasn't going to happen. We also had to borrow some flip-flops after a lady had a go at us for being bare-footed.

We came out and discovered that Andrew had had a far different experience on the men's side, with a pool and a massage. Typical.

Overall Tbilisi was great - it's still not too touristy, and British tourists especially are few and far between. It's easy to get around (the metro is cheap and reliable) and seems pretty safe. Definitely a good spot for a city break, or, as for us, the starting point to a tour around Georgia.