Tuesday 8 February 2011

Arrival in Tbilisi and Hotel

Wednesday 19th January, 1.14am

So this is the first blog I’ve written since I’ve arrived in Georgia. In short, it’s been a whirlwind of a few days.  There’s a lot to get through but I’ll do my best to keep it in chronological order.

The rest of the plane journey to Tbilisi was fine. Got a bit bored by the end though. We landed in Baku and the majority of the passengers got off, including those in first class, but I didn’t even think to cheekily ask if I could move forward to that part of the plane. We were on the ground for about 40 minutes in total which wasn’t too bad, and arrived in Tbilisi almost 7 hours after leaving Heathrow. Despite being delayed in taking off from Heathrow initially, we made up time due to the weather (the wind pretty much blew us to Georgia). Upon leaving the plane I met another guy taking part on the TLG programme (Alex) so we went through the customs bit with him. As it was around 1am in the morning the airport was pretty much dead aside from members of staff moving around. There wasn’t a problem getting through the security bit and I now have a Georgia stamp on my passport, possibly the first one of many?

We continued through the airport and were greeted by about three or four TLG staff. They greeted us formally and gave us nametags to wear for our orientation week. We were told to change $100 into Lari (Georgia’s currency which has considerably lower value than that of the pound and Euro). The main TLG guys left us in the hands with our driver who would be taking us to a hotel which would be our home for the week. I aim to post a blog solely on that of the state of driving in Georgia so look out for that somewhere down the line, people think British drivers are bad but really they have seen nothing yet...

The driver, despite not speaking much English, looked courteous and gave us a pat on the back after arriving at the hotel. A warm smile helped and eased my initial nerves of being taken around a foreign country with a guy who I’ve never met before.

We arrived at the hotel after a short ride. The hotel, called the Bazaleti, looked huge from the outside, and inside it was no different. As you walk through the front door there is a huge leisure area filled with comfy sofas to relax and from there you can view the beautiful scenery of the mountains overlooking the hotel. Continuing on through the hotel is the reception, followed by yet another huge leisure area, this time with even more comfy seats and sofas, a bar and a fancy piano. From this area it is possible to get to most of the rooms are on both floors overlooking the area.

 We checked in at reception, and the receptionist took photocopies of our passports to keep us on their file. Myself and Alex were taken to our room by a porter. The hotel room had three beds which would mean we would be getting another flatmate later on in the night (it turned out we were one of the first people there). The room was very spacious with plenty of floor space. A fridge occupied one of the corners containing around ten bottles of water which would get filled every day. It’s not widely recommended to drink Georgian tap water, particularly since we’ve been used to UK water for years, so this ensured we would be less likely to suffer from any dodgy stomachs from drinking from the tap. I’m not sure if I really expected a difference but our hotel room really is just like any other UK, America-style of hotel room.  

Anyway, the third roommate (Timothy) arrived around 4am and we spent an hour or so just chatting before eventually crashing out. Overall, it was a long but enjoyable day. It’s not often you can say you’ve been in four different countries in one day (Scotland, England, Azerbaijan and Georgia of course...).
More to come in my next blog entry.

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