Monday, October 27, 2014

Georgia On My Mind

A few weeks ago we needed to leave the country in order to renew Raye's visa. So we made a reservation on airbnb.com, bought some bus tickets, packed our bags (2 duffles and a pack-n-play...not too shabby for five people for two weeks!), and headed on an adventure! For the record, Georgia made country number seven for Lane at 4.5 years old, number five for Noel at 2.5 years old, and number three for Raye at 5 months old.


Adventuring!

Eight hours after leaving we arrived in Tbilisi. Some friends of ours met us at the bus station and took us to our apartment. We ate fast food chicken for dinner and were all (yes, me and Shannon, too!) in bed by 8:30. The road in Georgia was very, very windy and Lane and I were not feeling well for the last half of the trip. Raye was a trooper and took a few naps, and even Noel fell asleep in Daddy's lap for a few minutes. But we were all exhausted and crashed early.




Family photo in Tbilisi.

On Saturday we ate traditional Georgian food for lunch and then went to Carrefour, a big grocery store. It was so strange to see the mixture of products I'm familiar with from living here or in Turkey...a combination of Russian and English and Georgian on the boxes, and so on. It's always still strange to me that I understand as much as I do but am frequently confused as to which language it is, unless it's English.


A perfect example of the mixture of languages...Turkish on the cup, Georgian on the tray liner, and Ukrainian on the burger wrapper.

Sunday we spent filling out our paperwork for new visas, and Monday we got Raye's photo taken for her visa application, got the applications turned in, spent some time at a park, and hit the sack, ready to just enjoy our time in Tbilisi while we waited for our visas.





We went to the zoo, and while it was not the cleanest or the most modern zoo, it only cost five lari for admission, or about $3. They had good animals and the girls enjoyed themselves.


My favorite sign at the zoo.



We rode the Metro a few times and walked around the Old Town area a bit.





We ate McDonald's and Wendy's, as well as American pizza, real Indian food, and Turkish food.




Raye slept through a lot of our excursions.

We found lots of fun parks for the girls. We attended an International Church one Sunday, spent some time with old acquaintances of Shannon's (and their five kids, three of whom were girls right at our girls' ages) a couple of nights, and took the gondola to the top of a hill for a walk around an old fortress.




Tbilisi is an interesting combination of OLD architecture, modern architecture, and Soviet architecture. This is the Bridge of Peace.


On the gondola. The girls loved it.



We survived a week in our 2-bedroom apartment with hardly any hot water, and the whole time with only a stovetop and a handleless pan and two pots for cooking. It was definitely not the most comfortable situation in the kitchen so we ate a lot of sandwiches and noodles with butter and cheese. So when we picked up our new visas on a Wednesday evening we were ever so glad to buy return bus tickets for Saturday. And Saturday evening as we were tucking the girls into bed they kept saying, "It's so good to be home."

And it is. 

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