Anaklia & Zugdidi but not the Rukhi Krepost

It's been just over a month since I arrived in Georgia. As I settle into new rhythms, my dependence on my American colleagues is lessening and I'm finding myself happy in the way my life is starting to flow again. This past Friday, I had the good fortune of going with a handful of folks (including my favorite contact at the embassy) over to Anaklia, which is a town in western Georgia along the Black Sea and quite close to the border with Abkhazia.

We arrived in the early evening just before dusk. A storm was blowing in and the palm trees dotting the hotel perimeter were bent over and fluttering about (much like I imagine the trees in The Lorax do). We dropped our bags in our rooms, all of which had views of the Black Sea, and met downstairs for dinner. The buffet-style spread was fairly simple: salads, fish, bread, cheese, rice, and a few other odds and ends. The food was excellent, though. Coupled with Georgian wine and talk of extraterrestrial phenomena, it made for a great way to wind down a day of travel and visits with Akaki Tsereteli State University in Kutaisi.  After a post-dinner, windy walk along the beach that included a stroll over an unlit, still-marginally-under-construction bridge, I had an early night to bed.

The night's wind brought in a rainy morning. I really wanted to spend more time in bed looking out my window at the weather and the sea, but we needed to be off early to head to Zugdidi, which was about 40-minutes inland. I had planned to do a bit of exploring around Zugdidi, but it was absolutely pouring and I had neither a water resistant jacket nor an umbrella. I borrowed an umbrella (and eventually had help in tracking down one to buy for myself), roamed around the city center, visited a few art galleries, and took some photos. When it was time for me to meet my group for lunch, I was pretty wet even though the umbrella had kept the bulk of the rain off of me.

Georgian food agrees with me. Every time I sit down to a meal, I'm delighted. Yesterday, after I finished observing my (all female) teachers, we sat down for coffee and some cake. As it does, talk eventually got around to my thoughts on Georgian food and it was all I could do from demanding cooking lessons from these women.  One of the things I really like about working with all women (and from what I understand, all of the English teachers are women except for one male who works in one of the villages) is that it's easier to forge relationships. I've never appreciated that before.

The rest of my stay in Zugdidi was quite pleasant. While the rest of the carload drove down to Batumi on a work-related visit, one of my colleagues and I opted to remain in town and have dinner with a lovely young woman on the Fulbright Program. The next morning after coffee and breakfast, we roamed around the city, stopping at the Dadiani Palace Museum where we saw one of Napoleon's death masks but somehow missed the shroud of Mary (how we managed that, I have no idea but the wallpaper in the museum rooms alone was worth the 2 lari/$1.25 entrance fee, as was seeing the cool ferris wheel-ish shot glass contraption on display).

At dinner the night before, we'd been told about an old fortress in Rukhi, a small village a 15-minute ride out of Zugdidi. After spending a bit of time tracking down the right marshrutka (#47 was the one we ended up taking), getting in it and waiting a bit more, we rode out to Rukhi (50 tetri/30 cents) and got out at the school. With no fortress-looking anything in site, my colleague started asking the few people on the road (which was wide and pretty empty save for a handful of people and a smattering of cows). Nobody seemed to know what he was talking about although the old woman he asked did point down the road and said, "Abkhazia."

We figured that some miscommunication along the way had tripped up our understanding of where the fortress was. Nevertheless, we continued walking until we saw what we thought was probably the approach to the border crossing. Unsure what quite to do, our decision was made for us when the marshrutka that dropped us off was coming back in the other direction. We hopped on and headed back to Zugdidi.

Now that I've been home and have had the benefit of Google, I can see that the fortress is on the river that separates Georgia from Abkhazia. We just didn't go far enough down the road. The next time I'm in Zugdidi, there are two things I need to see: Mary's shroud and the Rukhe krepost.

The rest of the day was taken up by travel back toward Tbilisi.