Our last day in Tbilisi. A chance to get to the Internet Café…a small room down a dark alley with one computer. The keyboard has been so over-used that all of the markings on the keys have rubbed off. How a Georgian can manage to access the Internet with an English language keyboard with no readable keys is beyond me—especially since they use a completely different alphabet and would have no visible clues to the letters.
We stopped at the National Museum and had a lovely guide to the Treasury, filled with magnificent and intricate gold jewelry from 3000 BC to 400 AD.
Lunch had to be at a typical Georgian restaurant… our last chance for cheese bread (that low calorie concoction of bread stuffed with cheese and topped with melted butter while cooking) and their rubbery flat bread while listening to a Run DMC song in Georgian.
It was time to head to the airport for our Yak 40 flight to Baku. The flight was filled with Westerners- Scottish petroleum engineers and Jehovah’s Witnesses. It was a typical Yak flight- packed, hot, with luggage piled in the back. When the plane landed, the luggage had fallen from the racks in the back and pinned the door shut so all the passengers had to climb over the luggage to exit the plane.
The customs process in Azerbaijan was pandemonium. As we exited the plane, they took all of the passports and herded us to a small room with two guys sitting at a table. There were no instructions or explanations while they handed out forms in Russian to be filled out prior to getting checked in. We fortunately had a few English speakers with experience to help. As we filled out the forms, the final customs checker was throwing passports around and yelling. It was mass confusion. We finally got our forms and passports stamped and headed out of the “VIP” area of the airport, looking for our airport transfer, which was nowhere to be found. We finally grabbed a taxi (well, a kid with a Lada willing to take us to the hotel for $10 US) and headed into town.
We arrived at the same time as the Jehovah’s Witnesses to the Hotel Absheron. The JoWit’s spoke fluent Russian, so we tagged along hoping to benefit from their experience. The “reception” directed us to the 11th floor where we were quoted a room rate of $60, including breakfast. Since our original reservation through the travel company in Georgia was at $95, we gladly took the reduced rate. We did have to cough up $2 for the reservation fee from the ground floor “reception”. The hotel was bizarre. Each floor is run by a different company, so each floor has different pricing, different states of renovation and different policies.
We headed to the roof top bar to get a beer and check out the view of the city and then topped it off with biscuits and a snickers bar. When we got back to our floor, the woman from the floor where we had our original reservations was waiting for us. She was furious that we hadn’t checked in on her floor (she had been “waiting all day” for us) and we explained calmly that we had already paid for 3 nights in advance and were quite happy with our accommodations. Welcome to the ex-Soviet system.
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