Day 1 up Day 3. Day 2: Tbilisi - Baku. Day 2. The bus ride into Tbilisi took about half an hour. There is a good highway connecting the airport to the capital, so at first the ride was nice enough. Then an elderly woman draped in a long shawl boarded the bus. She was muttering to herself in Russian, clutching her hands and gesticulating dramatically like she was in great distress.
Instead of sitting down, she proceeded to address each passenger in turn, moaning an incessant stream of barely intelligible Russian words. The other passengers just ignored her. I felt uncomfortable. Then she turned to me. Sensing my discomfort, she must have pegged me for an easy target, because she became very insistent, touching my hair and clothes. Finally one of the passengers gave her a pen, which she clutched like a prized object before leaving at the next stop.
Outside, we saw her rubbing her face and making praising gestures towards heaven. I felt sorry for her. But only minutes before, I had felt a lot more sorry for myself. We got out of the bus at Avlabari station, close to the Kura river and not far from the main sights.
High up on the hill, we saw Sameba Cathedral. We figured a church would be open this early in the morning, so we might as well start there. We wound our way through the small backstreets. The pavement was cracked and uneven, the houses seemed pretty run-down, all the shops were closed and the few people we met on the street looked old and defeated. Just like a lot of people on the bus. We wondered why there were mostly elderly persons about during what should have been an early morning rushhour.
Frankly, my first impression of Tbilisi was not the best. Granted, I was tired and cold, the rain drizzled down from a sky as pale as my bleary-eyed face, but the electricity cables hanging loosely from the house fronts and the hungry cats meowling at us did not help with the holiday feeling. After about ten minutes, we reached an open gate leading to a little park. The only other persons present were two or three old women, begging at strategic places in the park.
