‘Rebecca, sit. Rebecca, eat. Rebecca, drink.’ His English may have been limited, but his hospitality – in true Georgian style – was not.
Tbilisi, Georgia’s capital city
The houses stood, they perched on top of each other, they sprawled. New, old, and falling apart. Nearly all had a balcony – in whatever colour they fancied. And then there were the streets: steep and twisting, turning, getting lost between the houses.
I would have got lost, too, if we hadn’t been picked up from the airport by a local. He had strapped our bike boxes into the open boot of his car and set off at breakneck speed towards the city centre. Thankfully, he knew both what he was doing and where he was going and navigated us confidently through the unfamiliar city. Having turned off the main road, passing a horde of tourists, we followed the steep, winding streets up the hill from the river. Eventually, even our Georgian driver could take us no further and we climbed the final steps to our accommodation.
It was one of the sprawling kind of houses that was trying to defy gravity in order to maintain its superior position. The outdoor kitchen was squeezed into a corner of the terrace and commanded a spectacular view.
Our fellow guest was a Ukrainian-Russian sailor called Zhenya. ‘Why you have bikes?’ he said, watching us build them back together. ‘In Georgia – eat, drink. You know chacha? Like vodka.’
The next day, David was magnificently hungover.
‘And tomorrow – shashlik,’ Zhenya said. ‘I arrange with our host. He makes good shashlik. You know shashlik? Like barbecue.’
Our host was a shirtless man who clearly enjoyed food and drink more than words. When David asked if we could help, he shook his head and gestured to the table. His version, I assume, of ‘David sit, David eat, David drink’ (a mantra repeated often and proudly by another Georgian host in another Georgian city).
We drank wine, the others drank chacha (David refused to touch the stuff again). I lost count of the number of toasts we made and preferred not to count the number of shots they drank.
‘To our hosts!’ said Zhenya. ‘May they live long and may their house be blessed.’
‘To the fathers!’ (It was father’s day.) ‘To our families, our children. To our future children!’
‘To Georgia! This beautiful country and its hospitable people.’ Zhenya jumped to his feet, made a sweeping gesture. ‘I have been to many countries. To Africa, Asia, South America. But I have never felt so at home as in Georgia.’
‘ჰო,’ said our shirtless host. ‘Ho, ho.’ (This means ‘yes’ in Georgian.’)
The sailor looked at our host and burst out laughing. ‘Ты – красавчик!’ he said (this means ‘handsome man’ in Russian) and kissed him on the cheek. ‘I like you!’
We drank to the beautiful country of Georgia and to its hospitable people, and the toasts continued.
Later, we climbed the steps further, past a sand-coloured church and a wonderful stone terrace draped with vines – nearly tripping over cats reclining lazily on the warm ground – towards the Mother of Georgia. She stood proudly at the top of the hill, sword in one hand and bowl of hospitality in the other. From her vantage point, the city itself seemed to be shaped like a bowl too, nestled between the dusty hills. We joined her in surveying the landscape and watched as the sky turned its light out and the city turned its own on. The evening murmured with distant music, car horns, and a warm breeze.
The following day, we would take the train to Kutaisi, and from there we would set off on our bikes into the mountains.
