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— Tbilisi, Georgia

Tbilisi in November

Three days in Georgia's old town

The flight from Vienna touches down just after midnight. Outside the airport the air is sharp and smells faintly of wood smoke. A taxi — a battered Opel with no seatbelts — rattles into the city along a highway lined with half-finished apartment blocks and Soviet-era billboards repurposed for mobile phone ads.

Old town rooftops from the Narikala fortress Morning light over Betlemi Street

By morning the city looks entirely different. From the balcony of a guesthouse on Betlemi Street the old town unfolds in layers: crooked wooden houses with carved balconies lean against each other, their corrugated iron roofs rusting in shades of brown and orange. Below, a church bell rings in no discernible pattern.

The Sulfur Baths

The baths sit in a low valley at the eastern edge of the old town. You can smell them before you see them — the rotten-egg scent of sulfur drifts up the cobblestone streets. The domed brick buildings look almost Ottoman. Inside, the water is hot enough to make you gasp, and the masseuse — a large woman who speaks no English — scrubs your skin with a rough cloth until it turns pink.

Afterward, drinking tea in the cool anteroom, everything feels slower. This is the pace Tbilisi runs on.

Dry Bridge Market

Vendors at Dry Bridge Market Dry Bridge Market, Saturday morning

On Saturday morning, the Dry Bridge Market sprawls across a park near the river. Soviet medals, oil paintings, chipped enamel pots, broken cameras, hand-knitted socks — everything is laid out on blankets or hung from tree branches. An old man sells nothing but doorknobs. Another has a table of antique dental instruments.

The trick is to go early, before the tourist buses arrive. By noon the prices double and the interesting sellers have packed up.

Notes to Self

A few practical things worth recording: pay in lari, not euros. The Bolt app works everywhere. Don’t take a taxi from the airport without agreeing on a price — 40 GEL to the centre is fair, anything above 60 GEL means you’re being taken for a ride in both senses.

# Currency exchange
# 1 EUR ≈ 2.95 GEL (Nov 2025)
# ATMs dispense lari; Visa widely accepted in centre

# Getting around
# Bolt works everywhere
# Metro is 1 GEL per ride, buy a Metromoney card

“Tbilisi is a city that hasn’t decided what it wants to be. That’s what makes it interesting.” — A bartender on Leselidze Street

Leaving

The Mtkvari river at dawn from Narikala fortress The city at first light

On the last morning I walk up to the Narikala fortress at dawn. The city is still asleep. A few stray dogs follow me up the path, then lose interest. From the top, the Mtkvari river catches the first light, and for a moment the whole city looks golden.

I’ll come back. There’s a monastery two hours north that a taxi driver told me about, and the wine region to the east, and a night train to Batumi on the Black Sea coast. Three days is enough to know you need more.