Notes from a long weekend in Tbilisi

By Jackson Greathouse Fall

"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." — Mary Oliver

My airport routine: check bag, security, waltz through the duty free to spritz myself with a specific brand of perfume that I secretly love and refuse to ever buy a bottle of. I have these little routines that I've always genuinely enjoyed -- waiting in line for security is one of them -- along with looking for the wind sock when we taxi for takeoff and watching the wingflaps come up on landing.

At thirty years of age I still call my parents before every flight I board, usually after clearing security. Okay -- fine -- I text them. Ever since I've been living in the world and traveling full time for the last two-ish years, that's gotten harder and harder with ever-extending time zones stretching outward and away from Central Standard. I've started forwarding just my flight-tracker app's generated little itinerary texts to mom and dad with the track-my-flight feature to make up for not being able to checkin in real time.

The day before my flight, I got a text from Dad. He'd been making conversation with his New Jersey diner waitress who, it turns out, was from Tbilisi originally. As such, the first real advice I got-- even indirectly-- from any Georgian was: "even if he doesn't drink wine he is going to come back very heavy!" She went on to show him pictures of Khinkali dumplings (the twisty bready kind filled with spiced meat and hot broth that don't look unlike the swirly onion domes of some orthodox churches around the Old Town and further to the north of us) and of Kachapuri, which is just baked bread filled with perfect gooey salty cheese.

The last message he forwarded to me from the waitress before my two hour flight due east from Istanbul took off was: "If he needs anything let me know, I will call my police cousins."

It's my first time in Tbilisi; my first time in Georgia. My first time in any post-soviet country. I want to eat, and I want to make friends. I've been on the ground for five minutes and my phone is dinging with tips and advice from friends who have been here before me.

"It's a hospitality culture" — everyone keeps telling me that. But what does that mean?

After a few days in town, I've only just started to piece together the general vibe of the people and the culture. I think dad's waitress might have been serious.

I've been told this about a lot of places -- this focus on hospitality seems to only pop up more and more the further east you move. Before I left for Tangier last April I made a solemn oath to myself that I would never refuse tea, if offered. As such I've had sweet glasses packed with mint on the floors of shops in souks and paper dixie cups of wood-fired bedouin red tea with lemongrass and sage on the dunes of the Sahara. Most of the map, really, from the Atlas mountains, over the Sahara, up through and across the mighty Bosphorus, these are all hospitality cultures. My hunch has always been that this is had religious undertones -- and specifically Islamic undertones. I lean in when I hear about hospitality culture. It means the people are warm, food portions are large and recurrent, and there's often an archetypal or actual grandmother involved.

I think I know by now what it isn't. In America, "hospitality" is a marketing word that rebranded "service". Americans are extremely good at service. It's a line item on you receipt, though. You tip on service. You buy it, and it's everywhere. Hospitality isn't something you rate out of five stars on Tripadvisor or Uber. What I've found in Tbilisi in a few short days is clear indication that there's a broader kind of reverence for other people -- for The Guest -- that is plainly evident all around when you look outside of the individualistic bubble that we've built for ourselves in the west.

You can only tell so much about a city before you're actually on the ground. Tbilisi is no exception -- but it's tiny. On the map, it doesn't look that big because it isn't. From the Google Maps Perspective, it's a flat scatter of streets along a river; a left and right bank that seems even a bit Parisian from above, just without the kaleidoscopic geometry of Hausmanian bulldozing and Grands Boulevards.

The first indication you get that Tbilisi might have a few tricks up its sleeve is in the flight in, on descent into Rustaveli int'l. If you were sitting like I was, (an aisle seat on a 3-3 configuration A320) you would notice that you can glimpse windows on both your right and left side of the plane. You can feel that you're not making any sort of dramatic banking on approach. That's to say -- our plane was level and coming in hot -- and yet, out of my left eye I could see mountains and terrain, and out of my right eye I could see nothing but sky and clouds. I didn't realize the topography at play here.

Driving in to town from the airport takes you a breezy 20 minutes. Thanks to some inventive import/export laws and heavy EV credits from the state, you'll be picked up in a Tesla or, if you're lucky, one of those infuriatingly sleek and zippy Chinese ones that are illegal in the states.