May 2025. Tbilisi. Georgia.
We started and ended our Georgian week in the capital, a place best known in the UK as the home of the Russian team that routed the Reds in ’79. Press PLAY;
Dynamo Tbilisi were every 14 year old boy’s favourite Soviet soccer team back then. Not much love for the Russians on evidence today.
Our visit coincided with Independence Day (26 May) during a period of protests against a Russian supporting government seemingly backtracking on accession to the European Union.
And we felt slightly nervy as fighter jets flew over a Liberty Square filling up with tanks and military, before remembering we’d survived a night in Maidenhead. Compared to that, this was NOTHING.
Genuinely, Georgia felt safe and relaxed, as Duncan wrote in 2013. The only challenge for Mrs RM was negotiating the hills, particularly the one behind our Lado Asatiani Street apartment,
to the Mother of Georgia,
a climb rewarded by views and a cable car back down.
It took a while to warm to Tbilisi, its scruffy Old Town appealing more to the connoisseur of beauty behind dereliction, I guess.
If you visit, the MUST see is actually 5 miles north. We nearly missed the astonishing Chronicles of Georgia sculptures by the giant reservoir.
Most tourists head for the apparently ancient clock tower,
actually built by a puppet theatre; his creations emerge from the window to promote the puppet shows on the hour.
If you like the scruffier bits of Manchester’s Northern Quarter you’ll love Tbilisi Old Town.
Great art infused with humour,
much celebrating the apparent obsession with cats.
OK, you’ll not find the cheap curry cafes of Ancoats (or Athens) here, but a portion of dumplings in a fiver, and you’ll not find Holt Bitter on handpump.
But you will find beer, underneath that gaze of old George.
retiredmartin 
I’m impressed that you managed to keep the existence of the cable car from Christine’s knowledge until *after* you’d climbed the hill.
We’ll discuss “why” in a less public forum later.
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Obviously he wanted to keep her too disorientated to notice the barrel aged imperial stout only bar at the summit.
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There are dozens of football clubs in Eastern Europe called Dynamo, all of them once associated with the security agencies of the former Communist states there, which might explain the success they enjoyed in the seventies and eighties.
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So you didn’t have a quick daytrip to South Ossetia then?
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