We sent Jackson Greathouse Fall to Tbilisi as part of our GEORGIA EDITION to go deep on the spaces, places, and ways of living that make Georgia feel so LINEAR. In case you missed them, here’s PART I and PART II:
THE TBILISI FIELD GUIDE
Words by Jackson Greathouse Fall
When I came to Tbilisi for a long weekend in June, I don’t think I expected to still be here in August. This is the third and last piece I’ll write for LINEAR about this city, and it’s the practical one that I’m struggling with the most — it’s easy to write a piece about the mythological hospitality culture or the post-Soviet development boom. Writing a list of places I’d recommend to someone visiting is hard because it’s making me reflect on all the things that I didn’t do as well as everything that I have come to love doing so much it’s become routine.
I want this list to be short– here’s why:
I finally took the cable car up to Mtatsminda Park a while back, having avoided it because I have a real thing about dangling from heights. Sharing the gondola were Sashka and Tekla, twenty, high school sweethearts who I started conversation with when I blurted out halfway up that I was scared of heights. By the time we got to the top they’d told me I had to try ponchiki at a restaurant up there, so as we were getting off the gondola I asked if they wanted to join me.
They agreed and we ate ponchiki together: hot custard-filled doughnuts, totally ruinous, and I’d send anybody up there for them. Besides the doughnuts, picture Mtatsminda as a year-round Soviet state fair type vibe complete with rides and games and stuff at the top of a mountain. From the ferris wheel, you can see for miles.
None of this came off a list, though. I ended up staying more than 10 minutes at the top of the mountain and going back down because I swallowed my fear of cable cars and talked to strangers in a gondola.
That’s the whole thing, here or anywhere. Everything good I’ve found traveling came to me that way. You can’t put it all in a guide. So I’ve kept this deliberately short. Use it for your first couple of days — get your bearings, eat well, don’t waste a meal. Then put it away and go talk to people. If you follow this or any list of must-see spots too closely you’ll never have the trip only you could have: the one off your own beaten path.
Everything that follows is somewhere I’ve been, often more than once, with one glaring exception that I had to throw in towards the bottom.
Here’s the FIELD GUIDE.
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