Day 7: Tbilisi, Georgia

Today is the last day of the year. In order not to make a rush, I decided to stay at Tbilisi today with K and T. Actually, they got an email from a Japanese friend Zeki, whom they had met on the way in Central Asia, and they were told that he happened to be in Tbilisi, too. Hence, Zeki invited them to go to the food market together, and I also tagged along.

Zeki does travel for living, and he has been traveling around Central Asia for a really long time. Apparently he is working for some travel magazine in Japan, which makes many people including me feel jealous. You are paid to go travel, what's better than this life style?

When we left the hostel to the market, we also got to meet Zeki's hostel friend Yusuke, who also comes from Japan and is currently traveling around the world. In the past summer, he did visit Hong Kong. Interestingly, he told me that he felt so hot one day and decided to go to swim in the middle of the day. Lastly, he went to the public swimming pool in Kowloon Park. I was surprised that I had never thought the public swimming pool could be an interesting place to see in Hong Kong either. He told me that the visit to the swimming pool could immediately wash the heat away. Maybe I should recommend people to go for a swim, if they cannot stand the heat in Hong Kong in the future.

The market of non-food items

Bookstore's owner

Until now, I still have no idea where the market is located. In fact, we 4 just followed Zeki to lead us. However, he seemingly did not know that there was a metro station beside the Freedom Square. And we ended up walking very very very far away just to go to the metro station.

The market we went today is so much bigger than the one in Didube, this one is divided into 2 parts: food items and non-food items. The food market is like the wet market in Hong Kong. There are fruits, vegetables, cheeses and snacks. It feels so much like we were shopping in the wet market during Chinese New Year. Similarly, there are many people and many stores, it's very bustling.

Zeki took us to this market is owing to the fact that he wanted to cook us dinner for tonight. Therefore, he was the one who selected all the ingredients and we served as his assistants.

Antiques

Candy stores, like the one during Chinese New Year

Food market

Cheese store

Cheese sellers

A dead piggy

Tomato store only sold tomatoes

Golden fishes

After the food were bought, we went to look for something also very important to the dinner - the famous Georgian homemade alcohol. We went all the way to the other side of the market. Most of the stores there were either closed or had no signboard. If the local people didn't show us to this direction, I could have never guessed these mediocre looking stores were actually the wine stores. The homemade wines were filled in the reused plastic bottles. The look of them may not be so appealing, but the alcohol is actually very strong. There was even wine-tasting session in front of each store, that we could choose which served best with our dinner.

Me in the market

Local wine stores

Wine tasting

Later in the afternoon, we all went back to the hostel. Zeki was preparing for the dinner while I was chatting with Yusuke on the bar table. At first, I thought Zeki was preparing something in Japanese style, yet I was totally wrong. As he has stayed in Central Asia for such a long period of time, he was actually making us Central Asian cuisine for tonight's dinner. The taste was not bad, the chicken breast was very strong flavored with onion sauce. Its taste was similar to Russian food, maybe because he added some dills on top. It was actually a very exotic dinner.

Dinner cooked by Zeki the chef

After dinner, we were hanging in the living room again. The new hostel mate Alex just arrived at in the early morning today, yet he also had a traumatic experience on the flight. The little girl who sat beside him threw everything up on the floor and he was so busy to help the flight crews to clean up the mess. Then he got rewarded of one bottle of red wine and one bottle of bubbly. So he shared these bottles with us, when we were chatting merrily in the hostel.

The meat for tonight's supper

Before midnight, K, T, Alex and I went out to Freedom Square to count down for New Year. Actually, I didn't want to go outside, instead I wanted to count down with the people in the hostel. But I was convinced to go out in the end.

The New Year's Even atmosphere in Tbilisi was superb, it did not have less fun than in Barcelona (where I actually had a very terrible NYE) and it was way better than the NYE I spent on an overnight train from Krakow to Budapest. When we counted to 1, there were even fireworks playing on top of our heads.

Nevertheless, didn't know if it's too cold outside or I had drunk too much, my body did not feel very well. By the time I went back to the hostel, my face and lips were turned pale. I couldn't wait for the barbecue meat owner R was making but took a medicine and went to bed quietly. This was apparently the end of my 2010.....