Georgia on my mind

So I'm in Georgia. No left lugage and no sleep made for a day of hard work in Tbilisi with walking around and taking in the sites, finished off in style with a night of drinking and eating the local specialties. And man, did we sleep in that night train.

Batumi, once the stone in the crown of soviet black sea resorts, had a surprise for us. The 20 degrees and sunshine predictions didn't realize. Everything was covered in a thick layer of snow instead. And it rained. Since the main point of a visit to the town was the famed board walks and and 7 am really is a bit early to start with the Wodka again, we went to Gonio, the Byzantine last stand, after they lost Constantinople to the Turks.

The fort was impressively big and hard to enter, whether you were a Turk looking to stamp out Christianity in the area or a tourist looking for a culture fix, especially since the main gate was locked. When asked about it, a local mimed that the official who looked after the fort, was still in bed, which was possibly related to the amount of drinking he'd done the night before, pointing vaguely in the direction of the near by village.

The nearby village consisted mainly of two crumbling appartment buildings once housing the proud workers of the soviet union, now also used for rearing goats. One of the guys hanging around took it upon him to wake the gate keeper and ten minutes later we were walking inside of the fort, which looked remarkably like the outside, except for the orange trees. Orange trees in the snow against a background of a Byzantine fortress is an unusual sight.

Anyway, tomorrow we're off to a ski resort. May be we'll get some sunbathing there.